In 1947 Peter Adolph took out a patent on a table football
game. He had wanted to call it ‘Hobby’ but having this rejected he coined a new
name, taken from the Latin for the bird the Eurasian Hobby, falco subbuteo.
The Subbuteo table football game would go from strength to strength but in fact
Adolph’s was not really an original idea. He adapted a game called Newfooty,
which had been invented nearly twenty years earlier by a Liverpool man, William
Lane Keeling.
Keeling supposedly invented Newfooty to amuse his
nephews. He patented his game in 1929 and it introduced the idea of flicking a
figure towards the ball. Seeing how popular the game was with his nephews and
their friends he set up the Newfooty Company to sell it commercially. This was
a very small operation, mostly done from his home, with sales only on a mail order
basis.
He continued to develop the game during the 1930s,
introducing sets in different coloured kits and enlarging the ‘players’. The
first figures were made from card, the plastic version came later, on a plastic
base which was lead-weighted. Newfooty proved a popular game and in 1934
the ‘Newfooty Players Association’ was founded to facilitate leagues and cup
competitions.
Peter Adolph thought that Newfooty had ceased
production before the war whereas it had, like many enterprises, had to suspend
operations ‘for the duration’. After the
war Keeling worked at the United Photographic Laboratory in Liverpool, a
business that noticeably slackened off during the winter. He was able to agree
with the company that during the winter he could use the staff and premises to
produce Newfooty , picking up the wage bill. This enabled to company to
grow and in 1951 Keeling secured his own premises at the ‘Old Post Office
Building’ in Rice Lane.
Keeling continued to vie with Subbuteo for market share
throughout the 1950s’ introducing other table sports games such as Net-a-ball
and New Crikit. However, by the beginning of the 1960’s the company
faced terminal financial problems and despite a relaunch and TV advertising it
ceased trading for good.
Tracking down biographical details was made all the more difficult
because there was another William Lane Keeling living in Liverpool at the time,
born 7 years before his namesake but dying in the same year, 1976. An old photo
shows William Keeling playing Newfooty with his son David and this
enabled me to verify that I had the right man.
He was born on 20th May 1900 at 163 Rice Lane L4
where his father Thomas ran a fruiterer’s shop. In 1923 he married Bertha Gent
and they lived firstly at 6 York Street L9, moving to 38 Barlows Lane L9 in the
late 1930’s, remaining there until the 1970s.
It does not appear that he made a great fortune out of his
invention and the game seems now largely forgotten. Nonetheless without his ingenuity
it is unlikely that Adolph would have conjured up the world-famous Subbuteo.
