Prior to our retro matchday against Coventry City, Les Motherby (Hull City Kits), reviews the history of Hull City's kits from past to present.
There is a common misconception that the Tigers started their life in white shirts with black shorts (or knickerbockers as they were termed then), when in truth Hull City are one of the few clubs to still play in the colours worn when founded.
Derby County for example, played in the first season of the Football League, 1888/89, wearing chocolate brown, amber and blue shirts, and Wolves donned jerseys with red and white stripes. Though by the time Hull City were founded, in 1904, the game’s sartorial primordial soup had produced a form broadly recognisable today.
The nickname of ‘The Tigers’ was coined by a Hull Daily Mail scribe just seven months into the club’s first season, which consisted mostly of friendly games but also took in the first FA Cup fixtures. That nickname would have made no sense if white and black were the colours in that first year, and the Mail’s ‘Athleo’ asked readers in March 1905 (with a month of the 1904/05 season to play) “why should not the wearers of the yellow and black stripes be the ‘Tigers’?”
We’ll forgive him referring to amber as yellow, because he evidences our wearing amber and black from the outset. That’s not to say white shirts wouldn’t have been seen, and at ‘home’ at The Boulevard Ground too, since all teams were expected to have a white set of shirts for use in the event of a colour clash, and until 1921 it was the home side expected to change in deference to the ‘guests’. Indeed the Hull Daily Mail records City’s first use of change shirts against Bradford City on November 12th 1904, reassuringly calling us “the wearers of amber and black” and noting “City turned out in white shirts, the Bradford shirts being very similar to those of the home team.”
Although he gave no explanation of why amber and black was chosen as the club’s colours, Ernest Morison, one of the club’s founders explained who chose them: he did. The former Hull Daily News journalist and owner of the Morison’s Advertising Agency claimed credit for originating the Tigers colourway in a letter to the Tiger Mag publication in 1949.
The basic look of a Hull City primary kit remained the same from the club’s inception until the early 1920s, when the Tigers switched to white shorts. That style, though, was a mere variation on a theme compared to a more profound change made for the 1935/36 season, when City switched to distinctly non-tigerish blue jerseys, white shorts and blue socks with white hoops. It is perhaps no coincidence that the first embroidered badge on a City shirt was the civic coat of arms: three crowns arranged vertically within a blue shield. Relegation that campaign seemed to spook the superstitious and the familiar amber and black returned, at least until the Second World War halted competitive football.
When Harold Needler roused the club out of wartime hibernation, he planned to change the colours to orange, white and blue, but dye rationing by the Board of Trade ruled out that change. Blue dyes however, were in abundant supply, produced locally by Reckitts of Dansom Lane, so for the first post-war season, 1946/47, Hull City sported pale blue shirts, worn with white shorts and black socks.
Amber and black returned after just one season, but the Tigers had lost their stripes. Between 1947 and 1962, solid amber shirts with black trim became the preferred style, though as if to redress the balance, City had three distinct striped shirts in just two seasons, 1962/63 and 1963/64.
A trend for matching shirts and shorts colours led to Chelsea, Leeds and Liverpool adopting that style permanently, but when the Tigers went all-amber for 1964/65, the look proved unpopular and black shorts returned for 1965/66 when a ‘Waggy’ and ‘Chillo’ inspired City won the Third Division title.
Not only stripes returned in 1975, but City brought white shorts back too, on Europa branded kits that were the first to carry a visible maker’s mark. German firm adidas produced a classic striped shirt between 1980 and 1982 before the most revolutionary change to Tigers kits since they’d worn blue at home.
Don Robinson, the one-time wrestler and businessman with a theatrical flair, introduced red to the Tigers’ palette, claiming it represented “the blood players were willing to shed for the cause”. The sanguine tone was used on both home and away kits by Admiral and Matchwinner between 1982 and 1990, a period which saw the first replica shirts sold in the club shop. That time also saw the inescapable advent of shirt sponsorship with fitted kitchens, an airline and a turkey farmer among the first advertisements on player shirts.
By the time red disappeared from Hull City’s shirts, the sale of replica shirts had become a huge part of football finances, with the move towards changing kits every season, eye popping designs and third shirts well underway.
All-over prints of garish designs on shirts was mostly confined to away shirts across the leagues, until City seared themselves into the wider footballing consciousness with a tiger print home shirt in 1992/93, earning themselves a notoriety not normally associated with teams in the third tier. What’s more, they did it twice: when the Matchwinner brand declined to make any more tiger print shirts, citing late payments as a reason, the club switched manufacturer, tasking Pelada to supply similar yet non-copyright violating shirts. The end result wasn’t pretty, but it will earn you a small fortune if you list one on eBay.
Hull City were at the cutting edge of football fashion once again, when they released a kit in 1995 that was superficially similar to the one Raich Carter wore in the late 1940s, though of course it was made of polyester and not the heavy drill cotton used in the days of ‘The Maestro’. Perhaps unwittingly, this caught the zeitgeist of classic cotton shirts being reproduced as the ‘Football’s Coming Home’ song captured a yearning for a simpler, bygone age.
In the years that followed, Hull City have had a bevy of suppliers: Olympic, Avec, Patrick, Diadora, Umbro (twice), adidas (again) and Kappa. They’ve also cycled through trends: baggy shirts, form-fitting shirts, blackout shirts, footless socks, they’ve even revisited tiger stripes as what goes around comes around.
What has remained though, from 1904 until now, is the cultural copyright of amber and black being the principle visual identifier of Hull City Association Football Club.