Bury F.C.

Formation and early years: 1885–1895

Bury Football Club was founded on 24 April 1885 after Aiden Arrowsmith, a local enthusiast, had brokered two meetings between church teams Bury Wesleyans and Bury Unitarians at the Waggon & Horses Hotel and the Old White Horse Hotel. It was agreed from the outset that the team should be professional. The FA had recently legitimised professionalism but it was still a controversial topic. Ahead of the 1885–86 season, the club leased a plot of land on Gigg Lane from the Earl of Derby's estate. On 12 September 1885, the first match played there was a friendly against a team from Wigan and Bury won 4–3. The club first entered the FA Cup in 1887–88 and were drawn to play Blackburn Rovers away from home in the first round. They travelled to Ewood Park but scratched before the game. The two teams played a friendly match instead, which Bury lost heavily by 10–0. Some sources, including the Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation (RSSSF), have recorded the friendly as a first-round FA Cup tie. The Football Association, however, lists the result as a walkover by Blackburn, recognising that Bury withdrew from the competition. This is confirmed by the Lancashire Evening Post's evening edition of the same day, which reported that "Bury scratched before the match, and played an ordinary game". Bury FC do not include the tie in their complete FA Cup record.

Bury were founder members of the Lancashire League in 1889, finishing as runners-up in the…

The club was founded in 1885 but there is no record of anyone managing the team until Tom Hargreaves, who was a committee member, in 1890. One or more committee members took team responsibility until the appointment of erstwhile goalkeeper Archie Montgomery in 1907 as the first specialist team manager. Montgomery was dismissed during World War One for financial reasons but the first manager to be sacked for poor results was James Hunter-Thompson in February 1927, even though his team had achieved the club's highest-ever league position, finishing fourth in 1925–26. Norman Bullock, who was the club's then-record goalscorer, took over in December 1935 but went to Chesterfield in June 1938. After the Second World War, Bullock returned to Bury until November 1949 when he went to Leicester City. The club's longest-serving manager has been Dave Russell for eight years from December 1953 to December 1961. The highlight of his career was winning the Third Division championship in 1960–61. Bob Stokoe was team manager twice between 1961 and 1978. In the early 1970s, Allan Brown held the post for eighteen months before moving to Nottingham Forest where, until 3 January 1975, he was Brian Clough's predecessor. With Bury consigned to the lower leagues from the 1970s onwards, there have been several sackings as successive managers were unable to regain Second Division status. A measure of success was finally achieved in the late 1990s when Stan Ternent inspired the team to successive…

League

Second Division (level 2) Champions: 1894–95 Runners-up: 1923–24 Third Division / Second Division (level 3) Champions: 1960–61, 1996–97 Runners-up: 1967–68 Fourth Division / Third Division / League Two (level 4) Runners-up: 2010–11, 2018–19 Promoted: 1973–74, 1984–85, 1995–96, 2014–15 Northern Premier League Division One West (level 8) Champions: 2025–26 North West Counties Football League Premier Division (level 9) Champions: 2024–25 North West Counties Football League Division One North (level 10) Champions: 2021–22 Cup

FA Cup Winners: 1899–1900, 1902–03 Football World Championship: Winners: 1904 (Anglo-Scottish competition, 1876–1904) Wartime tournaments

Winners: North West League, 1939–40 Other tournaments

Lancashire League Winners: 1890–91, 1891–92 Lancashire Cup Winners (11): 1892, 1899, 1903, 1906, 1926, 1958, 1983, 1987, 2014, 2015, 2018 Lancashire Junior Cup Winners: 1890 Manchester Cup Winners (12): 1894, 1896, 1897, 1900, 1903, 1905, 1925, 1935, 1951, 1952, 1962, 1968 U-23 Lancashire cup Winners