The referee’s whistle

Like the name Sam Weller Widdowson, the inventor of the shin guard, that of Joseph Hudson, of Birmingham, also deserves to be far better known than it is today. From a straw poll of my friends, that would not be difficult, because no-one had heard of him (they hadn’t heard of Widdowson either).  The reason Hudson should, in my opinion, have his name in lights is because he and his brother designed and manufactured the first Acme City whistle in the early 1870s and were later responsible for producing the most iconic of all whistles, the Acme Thunderer.

Whistles have been around for thousands of years, but the first time a whistle was used in a football match by a referee was in 1878, in an FA Cup game at Nottingham Forest. Prior to this, referees used to wave handkerchiefs to get the players’ attention (just imagine this in a derby today). We don’t know who had the idea of getting the ref to use a whistle, but it is believed that the brass whistle used in the Nottingham game was the “Acme City,” which suggests that Hudson, who, after becoming a major supplier to the police, may well have also been responsible for its introduction into the world of sport.

The Acme Thunderer was introduced in 1884 and was the first pea-whistle in the world. The difference between the earlier, pea-less whistles and the Thunderer was profound.  The latter were far, far louder than the former, but today technology has caught up and football and other sports use both pea and pea-less whistles.  Acme is still the principal supplier of the former and a company called Fox 40 is the leader in the latter. The Fox 40 was invented by a man called Ron Foxcroft, a professional basketball referee, who, along with an industrial designer called Chuck Shepherd, came up with the idea in 1987 because he believed that pea-whistles jammed too often. It is called the Fox 40 because Mr Foxcroft was that age when he invented it.

With no moving parts to jam or freeze, the Fox 40 was quickly very successful.  However, as a traditionalist, I’m glad to say that Acme whistles are still very popular as well and I believe that the Thunderer is still the most used sports whistle in the world.  Moreover, as I learned from Jim Fleming, the rugby referee, there are different kinds of Thunderer, each with different modulations of pitch, and rugby referees prefer one with a lower pitch rather than one that is shrill.  One thing that did surprise me though was the price of these things.  The screenshot below (October 2025) has whistles from less than a tenner to nearly £45.

The need for a whistle to be loud, especially when there is a big crowd, is obvious but it’s surprising just how much noise they can generate. A referee’s blog from Holland in 2012 suggested that the most popular whistles are very noisy indeed. The loudest was the Valkeen, at 127.6 dB (decibels), followed by the Fox Blast at 127.3 dB and the Acme T2000 at 126.8. When first tested in London in the nineteenth century, Hudson’s Metropolitan Police Whistle could be heard two miles away. The Dutch blog goes on to point out that a loud rock concert is only about 120 dB - although diehard metalheads will retort that this is the mere whispering of a gentle breeze compared to the really heavy bands, with Motorhead, AC/DC and Led Zeppelin all having been clocked at 130 dB.

One person who can vouch for the volume of the referee’s whistle is Cross Farm Park Celtic’s forward Lee Todd.  He was sent off in what I believe may be the world record time of two seconds into a match, when he was surprised by the ref blowing for the game to start.  “F**k me, that was loud,” he said, which led to the referee promptly giving him a red card. After the match, Lee protested on the not unreasonable grounds that he wasn’t swearing at the referee, claiming that “he nearly blew my ear off!”  His manager agreed, suggesting that the referee might have applied ‘Law 18’ and a bit of common sense.

Alastair Blair, The SFU

This is taken from our Operations Director's 2022 book, "Stop the Game, We're going to Arrest the Goalkeeper" - which contains a lot of very funny interviews with some of our greatest referees and also a lot of information on Scotland's very important impact on the development of the laws of the game.