Historic Wrexham Racecourse Videos Released

We take another delve into the newly released British Pathé archive, this time looking at old matches played at the Racecourse!

British Pathé has released its entire collection to YouTube, making more than 85,000 rare 20th Century videos available to the public, many seen for the first time. The collection includes a small selection of cine videos shot at the Racecourse Ground in Wrexham.

The first video is a 1927 game between Wrexham and Cardiff. The video begins with a mayoral welcome, and photographs. A team ‘bus’ appears and is driven to the Racecourse, then the game is featured.

The second video is also from 1927, this time a Wales v England match. Amusingly the note includes ‘One of the captains looks very tall compared to the tiny referee.’

The most fascinating to us is the below 1929 cine film of Wales v Ireland, as it shows the old changing rooms being used at the Racecourse:

This video from 1935 is entitled “Personalities” of the time, so we would like to imagine this is the Aaron Ramsey or Ozil signing for Arsenal of the day! The film is taken at Highbury in London and has George Allison, manager of Arsenal football club, with two new signings. One of which is Ehud Rogers a Welsh International from Wrexham:

Two further match reports appear in the newly released archives, a Wales v Scotland that according to old records took place on 19th October 1946:

The final video shows Wales taking on Austria in a more modern 1955!

You can find the new Pathe Archive here on Youtube, and to do a ‘channel’ search use the second search icon , not the very top, or you will search the entire of Youtube!

Yesterday we took a look at the video of a future King visiting Caia Park – you can watch that video here.