Every football stadium should have a signature feature, whether that be a cockerel at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, brought over from the old White Hart Lane, the spiral staircases at the Etihad Stadium, or the famous Wembley arch just to name a few.
The term, 'soulless bowl' gets thrown around a lot in football nowadays when referring to more modern stadiums and Bristol Rovers will certainly look to avoid any association with such a phrase when it eventually becomes time to move into a new stadium.
However, their current home, the Memorial Stadium, is anything but and it now has it's own trademark feature that will hopefully be recognised nationwide in the Tote End clock.
Thanks to the work of John Kayes, the Tote End Old Boys and members of staff at the football club, supporters may have noticed the return of the famous clock when arriving at the Mem for last Saturday's 1-1 draw with Barnsley. Similar to a phoenix rising from the ashes.
For those who aren't familiar with the history behind the clock, it was hung up above the Tote End at Eastville Stadium, Rovers' home ground from 1897 to 1986, alongside other clocks that toted up the odds in the greyhound races that the stadium also hosted until its demolition in 1997. That’s were the name Tote End came from.
Saturday wasn't it's first venture into the Mem though, having been hung up above the Thatcher's End before. But then it stopped working.
Bristol Live spoke to Mr Kayes about the process of getting the clock restored and back up at the stadium as well as the excellent work they do within the fanbase and for the club, including raising £10,000 for former player Nick Anderton following his cancer diagnosis last year.
"The old clock from the Tote End at Eastville was in a right state," he said. "So then we got the maintenance man Jim Buckley at the Rovers ground. He was the one that wanted to get it mended but they said a full restoration would be over £1,000.
"Last year we raised £10,000 for Nick Anderton. We raised £11,000 for the Community Trust. We do things like that and we do things with the fans more than anything. We said yeah, if you get it made, we'll pay for it.
"The clock went up before at the Mem but it wasn't in a very good state. I think it just stopped working. Jim just decided that if we could, we'd get it up together. I think everyone was just happy that it was there because it was the old Tote End Clock, even though it wasn't working.
"It's not been that long actually. A couple of months. We just said yeah, get it done and they sent it off straight away and did it. It was done by the Antique Clock Repair Shop at Wrington.
"What we do is we run a Golden Goal game between us all on a Saturday and then we just put the money in the kitty. We've paid for the free kids' parties for the last three years, the Halloween party, the Christmas party and we'll do that again this year. All the people that use the wheelchairs at the Rovers ground, we paid for big ponchos for the Rovers badge and gave them away to all the wheelchair users. We just do things that are for the fans."
The Tote End Old Boys member also shared insight on some of the work the Tote End Old Boys did during the Covid-19 pandemic. He added: "In Covid, we noticed that some teams like West Ham and Aston Villa, they had these badges with the NHS thank you on them to the doctors and nurses, but they were charging fans £5. So we had 350 badges made and just gave them to all of the doctor's and nurses that were Rovers fans. All they did was send in and say, yeah I'm a Rovers fan and a doctor. We just do loads of things within the community.
"It's a group of us and everyone sort of knows one another. At Rovers, they know who we are and when we do big things, they get behind it and back it. The club are happy with the things we do because it's all within the ground.
"Last year we paid for blue and white goal nets because we thought it would be a good idea to have them. The club didn't ask us to."
Bristol Live also spoke to Jim Buckley, facilities manager at Bristol Rovers, who gave his insight on the process of repairing the clock, having been the man to get it underway.
"I've worked there for a while now and I would see the clock not working and I thought, that's quite sad really," said Mr. Buckley. "So when I had the opportunity to do something about it, I went to management and said that I wanted to get that clock repaired and they said, 'If you think you can do it.' So I took the clock down. The repair guy assessed it and said he could deal with it. He had it for quite a while, made sure he tested it and everything. It was a really good thing to get it back up there working ahead of Saturday.
"When the season ended, I thought it was time to do something as we had a bit of spare time and with no supporters coming in. So I got the clock down and then I found somebody to repair it and took it down to him. I didn't have any idea of a timescale on it until I spoke to the clock repairer and I told him I'd like it back for the first game of the season and he said, 'That's doable. We can manage that.' So I left it in his hands and we did it.
"That clock was the only timepiece [at Eastville] and when I spoke to the guy that repaired it he said he thought the clock was either late 1800s or early 1900s because there's a good bit of age on that clock. I think he'd said that it had been repaired before as well because the unit that had worked the clock was linked to a timing system in Germany.
"The receiver on top received a signal from Germany so they could put the time right. But that system's obsolete now so all we've got is that the clock mechanism works off of two-forty and it's plugged in. So if we want to reset the time, we have to plug it in and wait for the right time to come around.
"That was the main thing on Saturday because the timing of it to get it up, it had to be turned on at exactly seven minutes past 12 so the time was right when we switched it on. That turning on of the clock was quite crucial actually."
The facilities manager added: "You think of all the older supporters, they all recognise that clock on a Saturday. They'll be glad to see it going and they'll obviously tell the younger supporters about it aren't they? That's the history of the club.
"We agreed to it before we knew we could get the supporter's club to actually support it because I didn't think of that, all I was thinking about was the clock. We're really happy that the supporter's club paid for it."
Regardless of how much longer the Gas call the Mem home, with the current ambitions of the football club, supporters of all generations will hope that, having witnessed the club in it's genesis, it will watch on over some new memories that will go down in club folklore.
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