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99 years of history in Teesside hangs in the balance of a Just Giving page, but worldwide fans of the enigmatic Billingham Synthonia, old and new, are fighting back.
After sponsorship pulled out of the club, the Synners main income has been lost, meaning the club needs to raise £10,000 to survive.
A club statement said that the sponsorship was lost ‘randomly’, and met players before posting five days ago.
They have currently raised £4,370 of their target at the time of writing, with contributions from Australia and the USA.
A brief history and why the name is so unique
During the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, Prost International investigated some of the best non-league team names.
Established in 1923, Billingham Synthonia was named after an agricultural fertiliser called ‘synthetic ammonia’. The name Synthonia was created as a combination of the two words and adopted by the town’s football and cricket clubs. It is also (at least to our knowledge), the only club name to be named after a fertiliser!
And whereas there are a few clubs nicknamed the Saints, they are the only one we can trace nicknamed the Synners.
Synthetic ammonia (ammonia that has been synthesized) was a product manufactured by ICI who, back in the day, were affiliated with the club. The industrial conglomerate ICI remained a key club partner for decades. The club in fact originally played at the Belasis Lane ground on the ICI complex.
The Belasis gained some footballing fame on 11 November 1952 as home to the first-ever floodlit game in northern England when Billingham defeated an Air Force team 8–4 in front of a crowd of 3,000.
The ability to inspire words took on an altogether more literary turn when author Aldous Huxley visited the town. Huxley worked and lived there for a short time as a young chemist before Brunner and Mond became ICI, but is said to have hailed Billingham as “an ordered universe in a world of planless incoherence” and as a “magnificent poem”.
The intended purpose for his visit was the newly opened and technologically advanced Brunner and Mond plant which predated ICI.
His time there inspired his greatest and one of the English language’s greatest modern works. In the introduction to the most recent print of Brave New World, it states that Huxley was inspired to write the novel by his time in Billingham.
Steve Clare, Prost International, 2020. – FULL ARTICLE
How can you help?
You can help save Synthonia by donating to this Just Giving page.
“Once funding is secured, we will be looking for long term sponsorship to keep our club, footballers, coaching staff and fans going into our Centenary year in 2023.”
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