Club History
Freshford United Football Club (FUFC) was formed in 1957 by the late Henry Brown. It was started as a church youth club team to give young men the chance to enjoy playing football and he worked for the rest of his life to continue these ideals. At first the team played by St Marys Church and then in 1965 Henry did a deal which enabled the club to buy the ground in Abbey Lane, now known as Browns Park. The Football club are one of the few clubs of our size to own their own ground, we own the whole of Browns Park leasing part of the area to the Tennis club and formerly to the Scouts.
FUFC play in the 1 st Division of the Trowbridge & District League, which is recognised as probably the strongest league in Wiltshire. Fortunes come & go but we have been in the top division since 1977/78 season. We joined the Trowbridge & District League in the season of 1970/71 and prior to that played in the Bath & District League.
Originally the players were all local, these days the number of players from the village is a lot less but a number of them came up through the youth team which was run by Mary Beer and Sam New for a number of years during which they achieved some considerable success. Particularly with youth teams a club always relies on volunteers to coach and run the teams and when Mary Beer felt she did not have the time to spare, the youth set up in Freshford folded but the club is always hoping a suitable volunteer will come forward as we still have the facilities and set up.
FUFC has been managed for the past 25 years by Hugh Fulton (son in law of Henry Brown) and his wife Ruth (Henry’s daughter) is the secretary of the club. The running of Browns Park is an expensive and time consuming enterprise dependent once again upon volunteers, at present we are fund raising in the hope of building a purpose built changing facility and club house suitable for use not only by the football club but also for the tennis club and any youth club, Scouts etc.. which may or may not be reformed in the future. Browns Park is sometimes used for village events, every year the school have their Firework party in November and it was used by St Peters when fund raising for the bakery and again for the mystery plays.
