I asked Gary about this on Twitter yesterday. He can come along and add to it if he's so inclined and has the time,. Another knowledgeable Blue claimed that there were two of them, one burned at the start of the War and the other which went into the possession of a "member of staff", to which Gary followed up:
A director threw it into his collection when he came back from Germany & forgot about
it. It wasn't rediscovered until decades later. I had it on display at mcfc museum for
an exhibition on the power/politics of using sport. Symbolism huge of course.
[It survived] because it had been completely forgotten about and hidden in a box of City stuff
By time it was rediscovered the director had died-it was found by his adult grandson
As for Doherty, my grandfather, who died in 1989 and was a lifelong Blue who first watched City at Hyde Road, maintained right to the end that Doherty was, without question, the greatest outfield player to play for the club. Bell was in second place, though he regretted only seeing Billy Meredith when the Welshman was nearing the very end of his career.He started watching City around the end of WW1 and reckoned the old timers used to talk about the young Meredith in awed tones.
Since I've started on this, a couple of other things he always used to say. Of the legendary 'keepers, he put Swift ahead of Trautmann but not by much. IIRC, he thought Swift had the stronger all-round game but did concede that Trautmann could make the odd miracle save that even Big Swifty wouldn't have stopped. He rated Corrigan highly once Big Joe really got his act together from approximately 1975 onwards, but thought the younger man a level below his two illustrious predecessors.
Another thing he banged on about - and this is a bit of a constant theme on BM (think Charlton 1985 and so on) - was that the 84K crowd against Stoke in 1934 was actually much bigger. The capacity then was 88K and he reckoned it was dangerously more than full, insisting the real gate must have been well over 90K. He reckoned that a lot of people got in free, going two at a time, and rumour had it that a couple of the exit gates were forced, allowing hundreds of people (if not more) to get in who didn't count towards the official figure.
