Arsenal Anniversaries in October – a major update

If you are an occasional reader of this site you will know that we are slowly building a complete set of important anniversaries for Arsenal – the number of entries is currently around 4500.

Others have gone before us with this task of course, but mostly they have either included just three or four entries per day, or bulked the book out with listing all the club’s matches.

Both approaches are important of course, and we’ve certainly appreciated the work that has gone before.  But the Arsenal History Society has tried to go further with a much more detailed and more comprehensive index.

You can read the anniversaries for today (each day) on the home page of Untold Arsenal, but if you want to venture into other dates they are recorded on this site.

Each month has its own file and there is an index to the 12 months of the year on Arsenal on This Day

We’re working on the site month by month, and have just done a major update on the file for October.

It is not quite finished yet, and there will be a further update in a while to cover additional information for the end of the month – but it certainly is a major upgrade on what was there before.

If you find any errors please do let me know (Tony.Attwood@aisa.org) but please do note a couple of things in you do spot errors.

First, the dates of transfers are notoriously difficult to pin down, and it is not uncommon for four or even five different dates to be cited for a transfer taking place – these being the date the transfer becomes public, the date the player agrees, the date the contract is signed between the club, the date the player agrees terms with the new club…   So the chances are you will find lots of different dates, and we’ve decided we can’t print each part of the sequence.

Second, if you do have information on something that is wrong it can be very helpful to let us know where your information comes from.  For example, we might have a player being born on 16 October.  If you write to tell us it was 12 October we need to know where you picked that up from, so we can compare sources and try and work out which one is the most likely to be correct.

Of course absolute howlers don’t need this – if we’ve written the birth date as 1886 instead of 1986 then we can see that quickly, and be very grateful for your spotting it, but for finer points it is handy to know which reference source you are using.

The only thing not really appreciated is the cryptic comment – there’s enough work in trying to pull all this data together without trying to unravel further puzzles.

I do hope you find the anniversary files interesting and useful.  In the meantime we’re looking to expand the Arsenal in the Summer series, by incorporating not just Arsenal issues but one or two footballing stories of wider interest from the period in question.  The next episode in the series will appear shortly.

There is an index to some of our recent work on the home page.

Tony Attwood

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