Bury My Heart At Fratton Park: Supporting Portsmouth 1947-2008

by Geoffrey K. Fry

Bury My Heart At Fratton Park is a book about Portsmouth Football Club, who were the Kings of English football when they won back to back titles in the 1948-49 and 1949-50 seasons. The second title was won on the last day of the season, and afterwards the Portsmouth fans marched away in triumph down Frogmore Road, belting out the Pompey Chimes. If somebody had said that to the Portsmouth supporters that day that Pompey would win nothing that mattered for nearly sixty more years, they would have laughed long and hard. Yet, it was not until 2008 that Portsmouth won another major honour, when they repeated their achievement of 1939, and won the F.A. Cup for a second time. Geoffrey Fry was there in May 2008 just as he was in May 1950 to see Portsmouth win major honours. Indeed, he is one of the few people left who has supported Pompey in every season since the Second World War. This is his book about that experience. Only great teams win back to back titles, and Geoffrey Fry was at every home game in the Fratton End to salute the Portsmouth team that dominated English football immediately after the War. His eye witness account is second to none. There then followed a handful of seasons when Pompey still ranked as a major club, before Portsmouth sank into mediocrity from which the Club only escaped in the early years of the present century, coming to win the F.A. Cup again. Geoffrey Fry lived it all as a Portsmouth supporter, and Bury My Heart at Fratton Park is an incisive, analytical study of the most successful of the Ordinary Joe clubs, the ones commonly fated only to make the numbers up, and the author pulls no punches in telling what has to be an emotional story.

203 pages, Paperback

First published December 8, 2012

About the author

Geoffrey Kingdon Fry has been Professor of British Government and Administration at the University of Leeds since 1993.