Cod Almighty | Diary

In place of ignorance

20 May 2025

The thoughtless, the blinkered, the philistine, are apt to blandly assumed that everything is on the internet now, and that the internet itself is as free from effort as sunshine, a benign gift from Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. In fact, everything worth looking at is someone's hard-earned labour, whether for money or for love. Even football fanzine diaries have authors.

Civilisation is more than 30 years old. For millennia, people created, in the real world and on its analogues in paper, canvas and stone. Most was lost in a lifetime, and a tiny fraction is now made available digitally, but a bulk remains, exiled to us unless we take the trouble to find it, in our archives and our libraries.

Town fans are in a pretty good age for capturing our history. With apologies if I've missed anyone out, Dave Wherry, Rob Briggs, Rob McIlveen, Tim Bell, Bruce Fenwick, Gordon Wilson, Rob Cavallini are all working away, our efforts encouraged by Kris Green and Grimsby Heritage. But if we relied on the internet, we'd be reduced to recycling the same set of statistics. Instead, we make our way to basement, under the benign eye of staff members with no interest in football but keen to facilitate us in any case. We surface for air bearing treasure, the stories behind the stats.

A goalie with only one thumb. The outside forward comfortable on either foot because as a schoolboy he had the use only of a left football boot. The fatherly concern which set a promising centre forward along the path to becoming one of the greatest goalkeepers of the 1930s. If you find those stories on the internet, it'll only because someone has mined for and shared them. And they were able to retrieve them only because we have a well-resourced library.

You may not use it directly, but if you have read and enjoyed anything about the Mariners' history, you have benefited from its existence. NE Lincolnshire Council is carrying out a consultation on the future of its library provision. A petition addresses concerns that it could lead to the closure of Cleethorpes Library and the loss of resources in Grimsby. Please take the time to read up on the issues and respond.