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By Tony Attwood No transfer window, no internationals interrupting the week by week flow of the games, no European competitions, no “25″ registered players, no safety certificates for the grounds, no alcohol restrictions, no pub licensing procedures, no smoking bans…. It makes you wonder sometimes what there was 100 years ago. For Woolwich Arsenal there was a new season [...] 100 years ago… Woolwich Arsenal resume league football – 1 September 1910 By Tony Attwood In the 19th century league football started on the first saturday in September. Not exactly the start of autumn but away from the “summer month” of August, which was given over to cricket. In fact cricket had the four months of May to August exclusively [...] By Tony Attwood In 1913 there was a bit of a rumpus. If you are a regular on this site, or indeed if you know your footballing history, you’ll know what it was: Woolwich Arsenal, after two years under the ownership of Henry Norris, decided they had had enough of Kent, and started looking for a new [...] This article repeats a little of the article on Henry Norris and the Southern League. I have included the info about the start of the Southern League again, so you don’t have to keep zipping backwards and forwards. If you know about the Southern League bit, just skim down the page. . It all started in [...] This article continues from the one published yesterday – it explores the fact that by the summer of 1910 Henry Norris owned three clubs – Croydon Common in the Southern League, Fulham in Division 2 and Woolwich Arsenal in Division One. The first part of the article can be read here. ——- Today we think of [...] By the summer of 1910 Henry Norris owned three football clubs: Woolwich Arsenal (division 1), Fulham (division 2) and Croydon Common (Southern League). What was he doing? Well, it seems he thought of himself as the man who could build football in the south of England into something as powerful as the football league in the north [...] So on 18th May 1910 Woolwich Arsenal’s board met the Football League, at the Imperial Hotel in central London, with a view to explaining if the club could go forward for next season. The League were anxious to know because they wanted to settle down and draw up the fixtures for the [...] The days between 13th and 16th May, 1910 were a poker game as far as Woolwich Arsenal were concerned. The club had gone into administration. A new club (Arsenal Football and Athletic Club) had been formed and the shares had gone on sale, but the requisite number had not been sold. As with today, shares in a [...] Today’s Sponsor: Gooner Gifts – everything for the real Arsenal fan ——————- May 2010: some Arsenal supporters are expressing discontent. Equally many are very happy with the progress of the team, seeing the progress as reaching a moment of great excitement with so many of the youngsters who joined us six or seven years ago [...] With one more saturday of the season to go, but no game to play, Woolwich Arsenal could watch the rest of the world of football, and look at the shambles of their own finances, and wonder. In the league itself, Bolton Wanderers were already relegated, and Aston Villa had won the title. At the bottom several of the [...] Tottenham Hotspur: the dark history How an underhand strategy and a desire to rewrite history has transformed how people think about football in London. To begin, somewhere near the start… In 1882, the Hotspur Football Club was formed by a group of school boys attending a Bible class at All Hallows Church. Tottenham’s aim early on, like so many clubs [...] 28th March 1910. 100 years ago. On that day Woolwich Arsenal played Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. I don’t think anyone had invented the phrase “four pointer” at that time, but that is exactly what it was. Chelsea had had a good Easter programme and had pulled ahead of Woolwich Arsenal – whose dreadful run had left them [...] 100 years ago London had three Division I clubs – Woolwich Arsenal (who were actually in a small town in Kent), Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur. All three were having a tough time of it, and the only things that were keeping all three from being relegated were a) In those days, only two clubs went down b) Bad as [...] . On Thursday March 24th 1910, Woolwich Arsenal players travelled 285 miles to Newcastle on Tyne. On Friday March 25th 1910 (Good Friday), they played Newcastle and drew 1-1 That same day they took a train back to London – another 285 miles. On Saturday March 26th 1910, the self same players (with just one change to the [...] Dire and desperate times, playing against an up and coming Bradford City team, in front of a crowd of 14,000. And we won 1-0. I have no idea how we did it, as I have no newspaper report, but we did it. After six games in which we won none and scored just two goals, we got a [...] . One of the amusing sidelines that emerged in researching 1910 in Arsenal’s history was just how far Henry Norris (who bought Woolwich Arsenal) would go to get his view in print. He wrote the programme notes, he wrote in various papers – but that was not enough. In July 1908 Norris was part of a consortium [...] One of the themes in the book Making the Arsenal is that 100 years ago journalists could write and entertain, even with the most mundane subjects. In fact the first page of the story is football match report from 1910 in which the author thinks the game is so terrible, he wanders off into other subjects [...] February 12th 1910. Woolwich Arsenal 0, Blackburn Rovers 1. Attendance 7,500 It wasn’t just the defeat, it was the awfully low crowd. With the club heading for administration, and no one other than Henry Norris flitting around the scene, survival as a club looked even more unlikely than survival in the First Division. After this game, the table [...] Here is a letter that appeared on Untold Arsenal on 6th February 2010 at 1036, from a Norwegian supporter… I love Arsenal since 1976. The beste team ever was with Henry, Vieira, Bergkamp and Pires. There was a rather strange comment on our sister site Untold Arsenal this week in which an Aston Villa fan said that Arsenal supporters have no right to comment on Villa when in fact Arsenal had bribed their way into the first division in 1919. I must admit I thought that the old Tiny Totts propaganda on [...] I have a special feeling about 16th January 1910, as it is the day on which Making the Arsenal (the novel) starts its story. Jacko Jones has been sent off to wildest Plumstead (then part of Kent, not a part of London) to watch the FA Cup first round match, Woolwich Arsenal v Watford). Lacking much to [...] What happened in terms of reserve football 100 years ago? The notion of a club playing in several leagues at once was well established, but did the notion of having a reserve team playing football in their own league also exist in 1909? The edition of Arsenal A Complete Record which I have includes a record of Woolwich [...] Next up for Woolwich Arsenal 100 years ago, after the disaster of Christmas Day, was Liverpool at home. At that time everyone knew the background: Liverpool were formed by the left-overs of Everton. When Everton moved out of Anfield Road and trotted off to the Goodison Park, a bunch of malcontents stayed behind and formed Everton – which [...] Christmas Day at Woolwich Arsenal in 1909 – Arsenal play Newcastle. Nice and easy for Woolwich, being at home, but one hell of a long journey for the visitors. And remember this was not just a rail trip to London. 100 years ago Woolwich was a a small town in remote Kent, with only an occasional [...] It was the most unlikely result. There certainly was gambling on football 100 years ago, but I don’t know if anyone gambled on actual scores. If they did , they would never have picked this result in a million goes. Woolwich Arsenal went into the match just about crawling out of the relegation zone. Preston were slipping from [...] |
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