Links With The Past: 1949 FA Cup Final 'Pocket Cinema'

When Leicester City’s first-ever FA Cup Final ended in a 3-1 defeat by Wolverhampton Wanderers, media coverage in those pre-digital times was mainly provided by newspapers and radio. 

Film highlights were provided by Pathé News for cinema audiences, but the television audience was tiny. There were only 20,000 TV sets in the UK and only one transmitter, which was in the London region.

A Dunstable-based company called ‘Film Stips’ helped fill this gap. It provided, in its own words, 'actual real film cuttings called 'stips' from big football matches.   

The company hoped that 'just as millions collect sets of stamps and cigarette cards, so will millions collect sets of Film Stips'. 

The film cuttings, which were non-flammable, came with a small pink plastic film viewer, which was bizarrely called a 'Film Vuwer'. This was described as 'an unbreakable Pocket Cinema'. 

This pink ‘Vuwer' came with two sets of six film cuttings. The first set, entitled ‘Cup Tie Thrills’ featured City’s defeat of league champions Portsmouth in the semi-final. 

The second set, labelled ‘FA Cup Final: Wolves v Leicester City,’ contained images from the final itself. The ‘vuwer’ and the film cuttings cost sixpence (2½ p).

A confident prediction by the manufacturers that 'a happy band of millions of ‘stippers’ will collect sets of Film Stips' proved to be optimistic, although the one illustrated here has survived and is in the Club’s memorabilia collection.