By Ann Rhodes

An old friend told me recently that he still has the ticket stub for the 1976 FA Cup Final we attended together at Wembley. I have no idea where my ticket went but thought I still had the programme somewhere.

The conversation took me back to the excitement of that season’s cup run. Both Manchester United fans living in London, we regularly travelled to Old Trafford with the local branch of the supporters’ club. The coveted tickets were earned by cutting out and saving tokens from league match programmes throughout the season.

This generally meant that the fans who had stamped their feet to keep warm on the terraces during the inevitable dull nil a piece draws were guaranteed a ticket for the big matches.
There were, of course, ticket touts mooching around on big match days but they melted away at the sound of a policeman’s distinctive footsteps. No tickets were needed at Milltown where I watched Shamrock Rovers, you just paid your money at the Boys’ Gate and pushed the turnstile around.

I searched for that long-forgotten programme and found it in a dusty box. In there too was my United scarf that had kept me warm on those long ago Saturday afternoons, programmes from that Cup run, one for the 1957 Cup Final that a friend of Da’s had given me when I was young and a ticket stub for Ireland v England at Lansdowne Road on 24 May 1971.
This bears the scrawled signature of Steve Heighway but it does look suspiciously like my own teenaged writing.

These discoveries coincided with the recent furore over the escalating cost of rock concert tickets and it set me thinking about tickets generally.
Back in the day the only way to acquire tickets for big events was by queuing at the box office when they went on sale. I was working in London when it was announced that Rudolph Nureyev would dance at Covent Garden.

Nureyev and Best, both fleet of foot in their respective worlds, were my teenage heroes. Although at the end of his career, tickets for the performance were beyond my secretary’s salary but standing tickets went on sale one Monday morning.

I will forever be grateful to my boss who gave me the nod to take a few hours off to join the long queue at Covent Garden. It took a few hours, shuffling ever closer to the theatre but I returned to the office victorious. The precious ticket was stored, as my Cup Final ticket had been too, under my pillow in our flat in West Hampstead.

I went to the cinema regularly, from Saturday afternoons at the Stella in Rathmines to the sophistication of a ‘date’ in town to see the ever so slightly risqué films shown at the Curzon.
Tickets were dispensed from behind the smoky box office window, small generic paper ones from a seemingly never-ending roll on the counter. Once presented to the usher they were ceremoniously torn almost in half so there was never any possibility of using them to sneak into another film. When the lights went up the floor was usually littered with them like confetti amongst the cigarette packets and sweet wrappers.

Heading home over O’Connell Bridge you might have your photograph snapped by the man who wandered the streets capturing images of revellers. And here, more tickets came into play as he handed them out, urging folk to take them to the studio to buy the photographs creating a memory of the evening.

I found one of his tickets in the box too although the only photo I ever claimed was the one he snapped as I asked Bobby Charlton for his autograph.
When we were old enough three of us went to the cinema in town most Sunday nights and on one occasion we found that Tom Jones was performing at the Carlton Cinema. Confident that there would be no tickets left I agreed to go. To me, then, Tom was old fashioned – my friend’s mother always eloquently rendered ‘Delilah’ when the ‘noble call’ reached her.

There were only two tickets left and I failed to keep the grin from my face when I magnanimously ushered my two friends inside.

There were bus tickets, train tickets and flimsy airline tickets that had to be kept for the return flight. A friend even has a ticket for the Dublin Tram tucked away somewhere.Nowadays we often go to a local venue, a former courthouse, a hub of music and theatre. Tickets must be booked on line, strict instructions issued to bring the printed version to the performance.

We are always greeted by a lady who waves the printout away with her pencil and ticks our names off on a list. Who needs technology! ÷

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own