Long before the bright lights of the modern Premier League and global television broadcasts, AFC Bournemouth were a humble local side named Boscombe Football Club.
As they looked to break new ground in the early twentieth century, the club were in desperate need of a home to match their budding aspirations.
Crowd in the stands at Boscombe FC v Bournemouth football match on April 13, 1914 (Image: Archoves)
In 1910, local philanthropist JE Cooper-Dean came to the club's aid, granting them a long-term lease on a patch of land that would go on to define their history.
The newly constructed ground, aptly named Dean Court in his honour, became their home for more than a century, but it also gave the team a nickname that they carry to this day.
The Cooper-Dean family's land gift wasn't in the middle of some inner-city concrete wilderness, but adjoined the family's vast and pleasant rural estate.
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At the heart of this landscape sat huge cherry orchards which sprawled across the area opposite the new football ground.
Preceding those early afternoon kick-offs, fans making their way to Dean Court would have trooped past endless rows of blossom and fruit, making the trees a potent and unavoidable emblem of a matchday in Boscombe.
It was an organic and very obvious local landmark which anchored the football club firmly to the agricultural past of the wider Dorset area.
Dean Court in 1928 (Image: Archoves)
The influence from nature was soon translated in the club’s choice of strip.
When the players first took to the newly-laid turf at Dean Court, they did so in eye-catching cherry-red and white-striped shirts.
The visual cue was irresistible. In the minds of local press and diehard supporters there was no distinction.
Between the bright tops chasing around the pitch's grass and the heavily laden boughs in the surrounding orchards, they lovingly dubbed the team "The Cherries."
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More than a hundred years later, and the old orchards of the Cooper-Dean estate are long gone, having been swept away by the relentless tide of 20th-century residential and commercial expansion.
Even when the club carried out a significant image revamp in the 1970s — adopting their now-iconic AC Milan-colored red and black stripes in a bid for greater intimidation effect — the old nickname proved utterly immovable.
From 1971, they adopted the name AFC Bournemouth in the hope that the club would appear first in alphabetical lists while also keeping the AFC acronym.
From the badge on their chest to the chants that continue to billow down from stands at the Vitality Stadium today, the traditions of those early twentieth-century fruit trees are still bearing fruit for the pride of Bournemouth football.