TownEnders.com is an unofficial website that aims to be a complete online encyclopedia of Swindon Town Football Club. Always a work in progress, at the time of writing (June 2024) the site consists of the following sections:
To achieve this, I have used many sources of information – books, magazines, programmes, fanzines, websites, TV programmes etc – I do not hold the copyright for any of the resources used. In posting this information, it is not my intention to infringe anyone else’s copyright – the information is provided as a service to STFC’s and other football fans – if you find something on the site that you would prefer was removed, please contact me and I will remove as soon as possible. Please note that I do not, nor will ever, make any financial gain out of this website – in fact it costs me hundreds of pounds every year to run and maintain.
There are many people to thank that have helped make this happen:
About a year later, I bought the domain name http://www.swindon-town-fc.co.uk. Yes, yes.... I know.... I know.... not exactly the best choice – my dull selection even got a mention in the superb Grimsby website Cod Almighty (see, that’s how you do it). In my defence, I purchased it way back when there was very little STFC content on the web, and before there was an official STFC site – just before I launched with the domain name, the club announced their new site at http://www.swindonfc.co.uk. I toyed with changing the name of the site for many years afterwards, possibly to www.theidesofmarch.co.uk as a tribute to the most successful day in the club’s history, and I first considered www.townenders.com just weeks before the TEF was launched.
After a bit of a make-over, the new Swindon-Town-FC.co.uk site was launched over the summer in 2000 – with a bit more historical information, and the introduction of my own “editorial” section. At this point, the site was getting an update around once a month, and after another minor revamp early in 2001, more and more historical data was being added – but with the site still running off static HTML pages, it was getting a bit big for its boots. Then, over the close-season in 2002, after gathering together all of the Town’s league and cup results, all of the content was moved over to an SQL database with ASP webpages, which enabled the gradual addition of more and more data. By the end of the 2002/03 season, there were around 700 ex-Town players and staff in the database, all of the final league tables, and almost every Town result (though the pre-1920 dates and goalscorers were mostly missing). I’d also started capturing the match lineups, though at this point only for the current season.
Over the course of the next few years, and after many visits to Swindon Library, the missing dates and goalscorers were added, and I started to add some of the older match lineups, again from my Rothmans books. It was about this time that I had a conversation with my wife:
“You’re not going to enter all of those match lineups, are you?”
“No way, it would take ages.”
But.... after managing to get hold of Paul Plowman’s excellent publications from the 1980’s on eBay, with his permission I quickly added all STFC lineups back to 1920 – and by 2006, pretty much every STFC lineup was recorded. Over that summer, the site took on another revamp, and Stat Attack was launched, allowing easier access to some of the data, all built from the match lineups. Another eBay purchase - this time of a series of old videos -brought the introduction of the video library in 2008, and though 2009 was a slow year for updates on the site, behind the scenes loads of work was taking place, this time to add the opposition lineups. This was a major undertaking – finding out and entering the lineups, then painstakingly cross-referencing the players – this cross-referencing alone took almost a year to complete, containing over 14,500 opposition players. This was finally launched in time for the start of the 2009/10 season, along with another new look - over time, the opposition lineups were expanded to include all Southern League matches pre-1920, bringing the number of opposition players in the database up to over 19,000.
Soon afterwards, the "Pink Project" started - incredibly, Paul Plowman managed to acquire an almost complete set of Football Pinks from 1929 through to its demise in 1978… many years of scanning later, the match reports from the Pinks were made available on the site in 2016 - though I had to acquire www.stfcnewspapers.co.uk for enough webspace to upload them to! In the meantime, data from the Pinks was utilized to start adding reserve and youth matches, and lineups for STFC Women.
Incredible work from Dan Cole saw the introduction of programme scans - over the summer of 2018, 3800 programme front covers were added - a year later, and every full programme from 1956 to 1984 was made available for download, and this was extended to the 2000/01 season by the end of 2020, and now stands complete to the current day (though more recent programmes are not made available on the site).
Meanwhile, the addition of the Football Pinks enabled me to live tweet the 1968/69 season as it happened, fifty years on - around 3000 tweets over the year - including virtual minute-by-minute coverage of the League Cup Final win over Arsenal. The anniversary of the League Cup triumph was commemorated at the TrustSTFC AGM - and having helped to compile some information for the evening, I was surprised, honoured and humbled to receive a "Trust Hero" award from the supporters' trust for my work on the site, presented by chairman Steve Mytton and Town legend Don Rogers. Imagine that, THE Don Rogers giving ME an award. Bonkers.
2020 also brought an update to the YouTube library, bringing the total number of videos on the channel up to 2300, filling the gap to the point where the club's official channel started posting match highlights, and with only a handful of games missing since 1990. Work is constantly ongoing to retrieve current TV footage, and full match footage is recorded for virtually every match since the start of the 2017/18 season.
By now though, the site was already far too big for its boots - and being built in a piecemeal fashion on 20-year old technology, it was long since starting to show its age. Database design decisions I made very early on were coming back to haunt me, and I eventually made the decision that it was time to start again. The only problem was that I was well out of the loop on how to do it - I hadn't programmed anything for at least 15 years, and I wasn't even very good at it back then - I had to learn a new language, new skills, and rebuild both the database and the site from the ground up.
I had grand intentions for what I was going to add to the site as I rebuilt it - the vast majority of them fell by the wayside (and onto the to-do list!) as I realised everything I had to do - but, having spent almost five years of my spare time on it, I am extremely pleased with and proud of the new site. For the last few months of the build, I've often found myself down a little STFC rabbit warren, distracting me from whatever work I was supposed to be doing on the site - and that is probably my favourite thing about it! The new site brings lots of new features: it's mobile-enabled for the first time (welcome to 2010!), hopefully easier to use, there are updated photos and images throughout, and profiles are now available for as many reserve, development and youth team players as it has been possible to uncover. Most significantly, though there are still huge gaps in the data, STFC Women are now fully incorporated into the site, which I believe is probably the most comprehensive history of any women's football team. The new site will also enable me to do so much more in the future that just wouldn't have been possible in its former incarnation - more to follow!
Final word to the site name - as the site approached its 25th anniversary, and after listening to Shaun Hodgetts having to fumble over swindonhyphentownhyphenfcdotcodotuk one too many times, I finally decided it was time to make the switch… and without any better ideas, I decided that enough water had passed under the bridge since the TEF was launched for TownEnders.com to work... reasoning being that it's short and easy to remember... the soap opera that is Swindon Town FC.
As always, if you do have any ideas or suggestions for improvement, if you would like to contribute to the site in some way, or just if you would like to get in touch, please contact me on .
Thanks for visiting, and come on you reds!
Richard Banyard
July 2024