It all started for Daphne Weston on Boxing Day, 1957.
Having spent much of her childhood in Sri Lanka with her father, who worked for the Department of Trade, a family return to South London coincided with a first-ever invitation to Selhurst Park, when Palace hosted Brentford.
Nine-year-old Daphne’s response?: “It’s a bit cold, isn’t it?”
But give it a go she did, and she confesses that, immediately, she knew she was “absolutely hooked.” The habit of a lifetime had begun to form.
That first taste paved the way for Daphne to begin attending regularly with school friends, but her father’s work would transport her to New York City for eight years, where she admitted: “I was quite brave. I used to go out at about midnight in Manhattan to go and get the New York Times – I wanted to see whether the Palace had won!”
After an additional two years travelling and discovering the world for herself – “I was in Australia in 1976 when we played Southampton in the semi-final of the FA Cup and knew I’d have to come home if we beat them!” – the lure of Palace remained.
When a then-30-year-old Daphne returned to London in December 1976, she had lost track of the friends she used to attend matches with, so she went into the club shop and simply asked: ‘Have you got any jobs?’
She recalls: “They said: ‘You can be a programme seller.’ The rest is history – I’ve never stopped!”
A commemorative article in a January 2017 programme suggests Daphne’s first match as a seller to have been on 15th January 1977, a 2-1 win for Palace over Grimsby Town in Division Three, on a day when the programme was a mere 15p.
