Life at Number 10

It has been almost ten years since I began to gather sources and interview players for this book. I must extend an enormous thank you to the following men who once wore the red-and-white shirt with pride: George Eastham, Bobby Gould, Ian Ure, Terry Neill, Alan Hudson, Malcolm Macdonald, Charlie Nicholas, Stewart Robson, Willie Young, Steve Williams, Brian McDermott, Alan Smith, Anders Limpar, Paul Davis and Perry Groves. Grateful thanks also to Charlie George, who, although unable to grant me a formal interview, was happy to field my and the audience’s questions at Sportspages in late 2002. Sadly, Tommy Lawton, Paul Vaessen, Ted Drake and Stoke City’s ex-striker Harry Davies died before they had a chance to read their contribution to the text. Thanks also to the two members of recent Arsenal sides, and a current Arsenal star, who were willing to be interviewed but prefer to remain anonymous, and to Claude Anelka, for being so candid during the ‘Anelka-gate’ saga.

I am also indebted to the following people who helped steer me in the right direction, and offered encouragement along the way: Dilwyn Porter at University College, Worcester, for his assistance on Arsenal’s match against the Moscow Dynamos; the understanding staff at the Fulham and Leeds archives for information on Sir Henry Norris and Wilf Copping; Dave at the Newspaper Library branch of the British Library; David Bissmire and Kevin Whitcher from the fanzine stall; Richard Lewis at Sportspages and Ian Trevett from Highbury High. Plus, David Scripps at Action Images and Marina Palmer at Professional Sport, for their trawling of the archives for photographs. To the staff at The Bookcentre, Hoddesdon, for allowing me to pretend I’m a big-shot author for a couple of hours, to Meuryn Hughes at Aureus, for giving me my big writing break and to Linda Durkin for typing the book. Thanks also to the patient folk at Mainstream Publishing. Special thanks to Tina Hudson for the cover design, Deborah Kilpatrick for her careful editing of the text and Graeme Blaikie for his incredibly understanding attitude towards deadlines. And to Bill Campbell for showing faith in the project.

To the Webber boys (Tim and Nick), Brendon, and Stuart (‘The Neph’) for their company, and opinions, at Arsenal matches, and John Booker for lifts to the games. To my friends, who continue to glaze over whenever I mention the ‘A’ word – Barry, Phil and Tatiana, Seb and Marnie, Jo and Gareth, Louise, Adam and Nicky, Brummie and Ruth, Ian and Anita, Tim and Lucy, Steve (the best best man) and Lucy, Sarah, Si Williams, Steve Davies, Andrew, Si Barrick, Charlie and Natalie, Louise and Iain, Sam and Simon, and Paul and Vicky.

And finally, thanks to my mum and dad and to my wife – Helen – who were all as encouraging as ever (‘Not another bloody book on Arsenal!’).

Also by Jon Spurling

ONE

Freaks from the Factory

One of the Derby chaps was heard to mutter that: ‘A journey to the molten interior of the earth’s core would be rather more pleasant and comfortable an experience than our forthcoming visit to the Royal Arsenal.’

Derby Post, 15 January 1891

The Derby Post’s is a typical view of the time on the Gunners’ distant forefathers – and that was in an era when any team south of Watford was invariably dubbed one of the ‘southern softies’. Not so Royal Arsenal, the roughest, toughest crew of their time, apparently. After 90 minutes of mortal combat against the likes of Morris Bates, John Julian and Jimmy Charteris, the battered opposition would limp home, recounting tales of carnage in Kentish fields. Ten years later, perceptions of the newly titled Woolwich Arsenal had barely changed. The entire Second Division winced at having to venture south, such was the dread engendered by a trip to the Manor Ground in Plumstead. To many, it seemed entirely appropriate that the only footballing fatality of 1896 happened to be Woolwich Arsenal’s own Joe Powell, whose broken arm became infected after a clash with Kettering Town. The Woolwich boys became everyone’s least favourite second team. It was a situation to which those connected with the club quickly became accustomed. Throughout the late 1880s and into the 1890s, the team’s infamy grew fast.

The fact that the club was distinctly mediocre and very dirty was some consolation for their rivals. Years of plugging away in Kent meant that the club missed out on the gravy train of talent which flowed north to the likes of Wolves and Sunderland. Even when the Royals had attempted to play decent football at their first ground, the crater-ridden surface at Plumstead Common scuppered their efforts. The Highbury mud-flats, which almost derailed the 1989 title challenge, were like a billiard table compared to the Common’s pock-marked surface. Army manoeuvres meant it was littered with holes, ruts and hoof and wheel marks. There were no crossbars – tape was used instead. It was the latest comical instalment in a long-running saga. The official story goes that Dial Square had played their first match against the Eastern Wanderers on the Isle of Dogs. Resplendent in a variety of multi-coloured knickerbockers, the boys won 6–0, but were hardly enamoured when the ball kept landing in the open sewer which ran behind the goal. Club secretary Elijah Watkins reported that players had to scrape off the ‘mud’ – as he tactfully put it – before the game could restart. Little wonder that the local sanitary inspector, the aptly named Mr Fowler, deemed the pitch ‘an obvious health hazard’. Heading the old-style football was one thing, being splattered with human excrement was quite another. Ironically, the club’s sewer-related problems didn’t end there. All this contributed to the fact that, despite their regal name, Royal Arsenal were a rough and ready outfit.

It was hoped, by club officials and opposition alike, that the move to the Manor Ground in 1893 would benefit everyone. In time, the team gained from the improved facilities, the existence of stands and terraces, and cheaper rent. Visiting teams looked forward to parading their skills on a croquet lawn surface and in a generally more pleasant atmosphere. But after a couple of months, the Manor Ground became every inch as inhospitable as Plumstead Common had been. There were several advantages to being regarded, in the words of the Liverpool Tribune, as the ‘team who played at the end of the earth’. Teams such as Newcastle and Rotherham dreaded the trek south, especially as rail travel was so slow and unreliable at the time. On top of a seemingly endless journey into London, there was an uncomfortable 40-minute trek from Cannon Street Station to Plumstead in an overcrowded steam train, often filled with heckling home fans. Overnight accommodation was also a real pain, particularly as no self-respecting hotelier wanted a bunch of working-class oiks wrecking the joint. So when teams arrived in Woolwich, they were usually knackered, hungry, bad-tempered and in no fit state to play football. Little wonder that during the club’s 13-year stay in Division Two, home form was excellent.

The Manor Ground also acquired its own unique notoriety thanks to the tactical deployment of the huge engineering works nearby and the proximity of the southern outfall sewer, the main liquid waste disposal for the whole of south London. The grotesque vision of the factory, belching out noxious compounds, meant that a thick mist and rancid smell hung in the air. The sewer pipe provided opportunists with a chance to watch the team for free, though occasional leaks of raw effluent meant that Arsenal games often stank, literally and metaphorically.

Of course, some of what happened in those early years is open to conjecture. The Arsenal History Project, operating under the auspices of the Arsenal Independent Supporters’ Association (AISA), has undertaken a review of the club’s formative history. The research is especially prescient given that Arsenal celebrated their 125th anniversary in December 2011. The club has always been proactive in acknowledging its past, but, as with all forms of history, there needs to be rigorous scrutiny. One of the main drivers of the Arsenal History Project, Tony Attwood, commented on his blog:

In the early days of writing histories of the club, people relied on their memories, or occasional comments from others. This built up a range of documentation all based on the flimsiest of evidence . . . later writers reprinted the story, and so it went on and on.

The woolwicharsenal blog has already highlighted and questioned several elements of the story of the club that had previously been taken as ‘gospel’.

Given the sporadic nature of newspaper reports, and the absence of any surviving eyewitnesses or visual evidence, it’s hardly surprising that there is debate about what really happened 125 years ago. The historical waters are murky. Official histories have mentioned that there were other Woolwich Arsenal armament factory clubs which pre-dated Dial Square, but as no written evidence exists of their playing records, it seems to have been taken as read that Dial Square were the distant forefathers of Arsenal FC. The fact that Dial Square also travelled to the Isle of Dogs (an arduous journey and a venue with precious little available municipal land) seems curious given that there must have been some football pitches in nearby Woolwich. There is no record anywhere of the Eastern Wanderers in 1886. Crucially, the evidence that exists of that first match hinges on the testimony of just one onlooker – Elijah Watkins, whose tale was published in Association Football and the Men Who Made It in 1906 – some 20 years or so after the event. The suggestion is that the dates, the venues and even the teams may well have become muddled over time.

The team also had a plan B when it came to strategy and weren’t solely reliant on long-ball tactics. A match report from an FA Cup clash with Crusaders in 1889 read: ‘From the outset it was seen that there was no child’s play . . . The Reds were as smart as ever in pursuing, turning, passing and propelling the ball . . .’ The team, when the occasion suited, could play a fast, short-passing game due to the number of Scottish players that were on the books.

Horrified southern rivals watched in disgust as this bunch of nomads – the bastard offspring of a munitions factory side – rose to become the south’s most powerful footballing outfit. Northern opposition, who’d originally invited Woolwich Arsenal to join Division Two on the premise that they could give these Kentish bumpkins a good kicking twice a year, began to regret their decision. The intense dislike aimed at the club wasn’t simply due to the occasionally loutish behaviour of the home crowds or the motley crew of ‘soccer mercenaries’ within Woolwich Arsenal’s side, though of course these factors added to the team’s notoriety. The hostility that greeted the team had rather more to do with the actions of Jack Humble and David Danskin. Throughout the latter years of the nineteenth century, the club’s bloody-minded founding fathers saw fit to slaughter every sacred cow and destroy virtually all the existing codes of conduct in Victorian football. Humble and Danskin were ruthlessly professional at a time when bumbling amateurism appeared to be the order of the day in southern football. That Dial Square had even got as far as playing their first organised match was down to their rebellious streak and a dash of sheer good fortune. Even in the embryonic stage of AFC’s development, those two crucial factors were indelibly imprinted upon the club’s DNA. No one liked us and we didn’t care; it was a mantra that would ring true throughout the twentieth century, and beyond.

In the mid-1880s, David Danskin came south from Scotland to take up a post at the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich. Brought up in the rough end of Kirkcaldy, a town in Fife, he’d taken the brave decision not to work at the Ravenscraig shipyard with his mates and went into the munitions business instead. According to Mrs R.H. Wyatt, one of Danskin’s descendants, he was actually forced out of the family home by his parents because they needed the room for his four sisters. He couldn’t have timed his move to Kent any better. Europe was already in the grip of a frantic arms race. The in-bred mutants that passed for European royalty flexed their muscles by building gargantuan armies and navies, requiring for both branches of their armed forces powerful guns and a bottomless pit of ammunition. Europe was already well down the road to war, but ironically the French were considered the real enemy at that time, with the Napoleonic wars fresh in the memory.

For Danskin and thousands of other immigrant Scots, the flourishing Woolwich Arsenal offered them jobs, with as much overtime as they wanted. It also gave them the chance to socialise with others who shared their interest in playing football. Jack Humble arrived in Plumstead in 1881. Humble, whose poverty-stricken upbringing in Durham had prompted him to move south in order to find work, had experienced massive hardship as a child. His mother died and his father committed suicide within just a few months of each other. Known for his stubbornness and unwillingness to accept defeat, Humble, along with his brother Arthur, walked the 400-odd miles to Woolwich and on the way had plenty of time to ponder life in southern England. Like Danskin, he did not suffer fools gladly, and looked forward to getting involved in organising football matches with his new workmates.

Danskin and Humble remain original working-class heroes. Association Football, traditionally the preserve of public schools, was gradually becoming the working man’s game. At the turn of the century, southern football was still mired in the game’s equivalent of the Jurassic age. Thousands of amateur work teams jostled frantically for position, desperately trying to attract the best local talent. In the future, they could maybe even dream of emulating northern clubs like Blackburn Olympic who’d already turned professional. Roughly 90 per cent of clubs south of Birmingham died out in this atmosphere of social Darwinism, mainly due to a lack of cash and an unfortunate geographical position. Kentish teams appeared to have little going for them. The Factory Acts gave Danskin and his ilk Saturday afternoons off, and they’d just been given the vote. In these pre-Labour Party and trade union days, workers who campaigned for better housing, health care and leisure activities (including football) were considered gobby upstarts. Unsurprisingly, Humble quickly joined a left-wing political group – the Radicals – and later became a fully fledged member of the emerging Socialist Party. The pair passionately believed that every man should have the right to play Association Football. When Danskin and Humble found that others in their workplace shared their enthusiasm, the boys had a whip-round to pay for a ball, which they kicked about at lunchtimes. After all, there weren’t many other appealing distractions during their lunch breaks. The skin and hair of the girls in the nearby TNT section was dyed a sickly yellow by the corrosive chemicals they used, hence the ‘Woolwich Canaries’ nickname.

Getting beyond a lunchtime kick-about was considered a virtually impossible task. For a start, there were widespread reports across south-east England that migrating Scots were actually being mistaken for French spies on a regular basis, leading to some serious beatings in city alleyways. Victorians weren’t too clued up on accents, these being the days when a day-trip to Bognor was the equivalent of travelling across the Australian outback. Not only did Danskin encounter xenophobic attitudes towards Scots, he also ran into class snobbery. Rugby and cricket, he was told, were true Kentish sports, not soccer. Joseph Smith, another worker at the factory, had earlier tried to set up a football team that, he hoped, could share a pitch with the cricketers. Smith had been told to bugger off and his dream had died, but Danskin was more determined, and after a second whip-round, some ‘kit’ was hastily arranged. The Scot was gaining a deserved reputation among fellow workers for sheer doggedness.

Danskin took the bold step of signing two ex-Nottingham Forest players in order to add some experience to this rawest of teams. Morris Bates and Fred Beardsley (a goalkeeper of some repute) taught the lads the tactics of the day and helpfully blagged a full set of red shirts from Forest into the bargain. Bates, a pugnacious full-back, led by example. Nicknamed the ‘iron-headed man’, he was capable of heading the ball, which in those days was almost the weight of a cannonball, half the length of the pitch. Given the Victorians’ obsession for freaks and the bizarre, he could probably have made a fortune in the circus. It’s a wonder that he actually had the brain-power left to instil ‘tactics’ into his teammates. At Forest, both men had become used to exhausting training regimes, which put a special emphasis on building up leg muscles. Little wonder that Bates’s and Beardsley’s new charges had, in the Kentish Mercury’s words, ‘. . . thighs like oak trees’.

Even in those days, the players had a fine reputation for quaffing ale. Pubs and the history of Arsenal Football Club are intertwined. After a riotous post-match session at a pub in Erith, the boys decided on the ‘Royal’ Arsenal title, which was a bit of a cheek. There were plenty of other teams from other workshops inside the factory, but Danskin and his Dial Square boys, full of boozy bluster, reckoned they now represented the whole factory. Still, where would the club be today without that special blend of nous and arrogance?

The Royals’ early sides, moulded in Danskin’s own image, were stuffed with burly, mustachioed Scots, which only increased the team’s notoriety and unpopularity. Not for the last time, a Gunners team was accused of being loaded with foreign mercenaries. In such frugal times, the players wore factory boots with strips of wrought iron fixed onto the bottom, making it all the easier to maim the opposition. It was the football equivalent of bare-knuckle boxing. Royals strikers, fully bevvied up after a liquid lunch, hunted in packs and practically assaulted any hapless goalie who was stupid enough to block their path. Opposition defenders, whenever they believed they had control of the ball, would be splattered, with teeth and blood everywhere. Foaming at the mouth, gangs of red-shirted strikers bore down on the opposition’s penalty area like rabid extras from Braveheart. Bear in mind that the Royals were given further incentive to play well by being taunted for hailing from ‘the sinister factory’, with its 20-foot-high walls, where workers weren’t allowed to discuss with ‘outsiders’ the nature of their work.

It should be added that the Royals weren’t entirely to blame for the on-pitch maiming. Football was a good deal tougher back then and other assorted psychopaths from teams such as Clapton and Thorpe weren’t exactly averse to ‘mixing it’. If the other side did try to ‘play a bit’, one of two things could happen. John Julian, an innocent-looking Royals midfielder, would saunter over to the offender and boot him up towards Mars. Almost always undergoing treatment for blows to his ankles or knees, Julian reckoned the majority of his injuries resulted from his own fouls. Canny Royals defenders were under strict instructions to steer the opposition towards the craters on Plumstead Common. There, the ball would veer off at crazy angles and often the other players would disappear down the nearest hole, spraining their ankles and ripping ligaments in the process. If all else failed, Jimmy Charteris, who appears to have been a Grant Mitchell-like midfielder, would constantly harangue the referee and try to ensure that decisions went the home side’s way.

Of all the Royals players, Charteris was the most notorious. His troubled background could be the key to understanding why he played at such a furious tempo. As a child, he’d seen his bigamist father jailed, and the young Jimmy, who’d originally been born illegitimate, was palmed off to various members of the extended family. For opting to move to Royal Arsenal, he was virtually ostracised by his local community. In October 1887, the Motherwell Times noted: ‘He will find out that he has made a sad mistake. There is little honour playing for some of these English clubs.’ To say that Charteris arrived in Kent with fire in his belly is an understatement. This was certainly no haven for southern ponces. Unsurprisingly, the Royals’ home record was excellent. At the end of 1886–87 – the first official season – the overall playing record was pretty good, too: Played 10, Won 7, Drawn 1, Lost 2.

But Danskin and Humble were still not satisfied. Any method going was used to recruit better players. Already they had in operation a spy network that would have been the envy of MI5. The spies, who often worked in other munitions factories, would watch games all over the country and if the report on a player was a positive one, the young lad would be ‘found a job’ in the Woolwich Arsenal (50 shillings a week was the normal going rate) and thrust into the first team. Danskin would stop at nothing to improve the team. Rivals complained about Danskin’s and Humble’s questionable recruitment methods, but more than that, regarded the boys as cocky young upstarts from south of the river. Just who did the Royals think they were, adopting grand-sounding nomenclature while not even having a permanent ground? Despite the opposition, by 1891 this band of desperados were the best team in the south-east. They’d already secured the Kent Senior and, crucially, the London Senior Cup after defeating St Bartholomew’s Hospital 6–0. Though these titles may sound little better than nineteenth-century versions of the Sherpa Van trophy, the club’s cult following grew. The disapproving Kentish Independent reported that pubs in Woolwich did a roaring trade when the team returned with their rabble-rousing supporters and the silverware: ‘. . . there was shouting and singing everywhere all evening and, we fear, a good deal of drinking was mingled with the rejoicing and exaltations.’

The Royals’ success had also been noted by future rivals north of the Thames. Established London clubs like Tottenham were haemorrhaging support to these upstarts, especially once the Royals secured a ‘lucky’ (according to the Weekly Herald) victory over them in 1887. Keen fans from the capital would frantically ‘penny-farthing’ it down to see the boys play, rather than watch the Totts. The Royals considered themselves so superior, in fact, that as early as 1891 they labelled themselves ‘Champions of the South’, and there were even whispers that the club was about to turn professional, which appalled high-minded thinkers at the time. After all, to lose the true Corinthian spirit – guts, high tackles and weekly hacking competitions – was as unthinkable as, say, losing the Empire.

Danskin and Humble finally had their minds made up for them after the events of 1890 and 1891. The FA Cup was the only chance the Royals had to pit their wits against the might of the northern professional sides. In 1891, Derby visited the Invicta Ground, and narrowly won 2–1 before a then-record crowd of 8,000. The previously accepted version of events claimed that Danskin was alarmed that Derby representatives immediately offered professional terms to Connolly and Buist, the Royals’ two best players, after the match. It didn’t quite happen like that. In the 1914–15 handbook, editor and future Gunners boss George Allison made the claim that Connolly and Buist were approached by the East Midlands’ club boss John Goodall with a view to offering them terms. The handbook piece was based on an article Allison wrote for the Athletic News some years before and has been repeated numerous times since. The truth is that Buist didn’t actually play in the game, joining Arsenal some months later. The Scot realised that in the grand scheme of things, his team was merely a bit player. An even more alarming game came a year before when Swifts arrived for a fourth-round qualifying game. Despite 15,000 Royals’ fanatics sweeping the snow off the pitch, and the team’s Herculean efforts, the legendary E.C. Bambridge inspired his team to a 5–1 victory. Hack-fests were all well and good, but when it came down to it, the Royals couldn’t cut it against the very best from the north.

No one at the club, or the factory, wanted to see the team pootle along in the wilderness, so in 1891 the board – badgered by William Jackson – unanimously voted to turn Royal Arsenal professional. The club was by far the most forward-thinking and revolutionary in the south-east, but the conventional story goes that within just four years of being formed they were also the most hated. Retribution, as expected, was swift and decisive. Woolwich Arsenal, as they were now renamed, were made outcasts, branded with the name of ‘traitor’, for the next two years. The decision to cast the team into the wilderness was taken at an extraordinary general meeting of the London FA, held in Fleet Street’s Anderson’s Hotel. The truth was that the club never were turned into outcasts.

The oft-reported ostracism by Royal Arsenal’s Southern rivals (hinted at by Allison and repeated down the years) never happened. The club resigned from the London and Kent FAs, which outlawed professionalism. They were not expelled at all, as has often been suggested. Another myth was that the Royals’ Southern rivals from the amateur London and Kent leagues and cup competitions, including Clapton and Chatham, refused to play the newly professional outfit. Of the 35 Southern opponents who faced the Royals in friendlies during the 1891–92 campaign, many of those had also done so in the previous seasons when the Royals were an amateur side. Southern clubs were happy to play Arsenal, as they were big crowd-pullers. So, although there may well have been a lingering suspicion and mistrust of the club from rivals, there was no boycott on the pitch, despite what a raft of Arsenal historians – me included in the 2003 version of Rebels for the Cause – have claimed down the years. Time for a spot of revisionism on all our parts, perhaps.

Within a year, a Woolwich Arsenal committee put forward yet another revolutionary idea. Why not form a southern league, which, in time, could grow to be as powerful as the northern-dominated First Division? Staggeringly, Woolwich’s southern rivals (most of whom wanted to turn professional but didn’t dare do so) actually backed the idea, aware it could lead to their coffers being rapidly filled. A selection committee elected Royal Arsenal, along with the mighty Chatham, Marlow and West Herts, to the ten-team strong league, ahead of London’s most established club, Tottenham, who received only one vote. Known as the ‘Marsh-dwellers’, the Totts were mightily annoyed, but their fans’ habit of throwing mud at their own players was held against them.

Due to a lack of cash, the southern league never took off and by 1893, Woolwich Arsenal had once again alienated themselves from their neighbours. But the club then applied to join the Second Division. Danskin and Humble realised the enormity of the decision and what could happen if Woolwich Arsenal struggled. There would certainly be no way back. This truly was the point of no return. Danskin and Humble went ahead.

Then, as now, the Second Division was tough and brutal – about as welcoming as a wet weekend in Skegness. The Manor Ground did little to add to the ambience. Woolwich Arsenal’s crowds, consisting mainly of squaddies and factory workers, were regarded with unmitigated fear by visiting northern teams. The fans had a reputation for hurling ale-fuelled foul-mouthed insults and the opposition would dread having to take throw-ins or corners, as they were likely to be on the end of some fairly rough treatment. A letter of complaint in the Kentish Independent noted ‘the conduct of fans who spouted foul language and coarse abuse’. On one occasion, the referee actually abandoned a match due to crowd swearing and, in a game against Burton, a Burton fan beat up the referee, who, incidentally, was a former Wolves player. No wonder the Newcastle Echo described the Geordies’ trip to the Manor Ground as ‘an annual visit to hell’. The Kentish Independent also reported that the hooligan element wasn’t simply confined to the squaddies who attended en masse: ‘These were not weedy uneducated hooligans but well-dressed middle-aged gentlemen,’ one journalist wrote. A glance at the Woolwich Arsenal team group from the late-nineteenth century, ten years after that first match on the Isle of Dogs, suggests that the boys remained an intimidating crowd. With their handle-bar moustaches and unsmiling faces, they resembled a group of desperados from a silent movie – the type who’d tie hapless maidens to railway lines and be shot out of a cannon in their spare time.

If the crowd’s belligerence continued to bring the club unwanted headlines, the club’s officials were also regarded with trepidation by rival clubs and within the local community. That Woolwich Arsenal remained a viable concern for so long was largely due to the brilliant juggling and spivvy methods employed by these men. Shimmying and swerving around innumerable obstacles, with sometimes questionable legality, they dragged the sickly football club behind them. Star players were sold in the hope that local talent could be nurtured, and novel money-spinning schemes became legendary in Woolwich. Archery competitions, raffles, open days – anything went, as long as it brought much-needed cash flooding into the coffers. On one memorable occasion, with the accounts suffering from scarlet fever and the bailiffs poised to break down the door, Jack Humble was dispatched to Woolwich High Street to see if anyone wished to become a club director. One G.H. Leavey, a prominent outfitter, agreed. In a jiffy, Humble yanked £60 from Leavey’s till and ran back to the ground. This covered the boys’ wages for the next week and the long train journey to the forthcoming away match. Though Leavey was granted his place on the board, he never saw his cash again. Leavey was one of the Arsenal’s first benefactors, and ploughed money into the club for nearly ten years.

Jack Humble, in particular, grew to love the club, seeing his mission as more than just a job. He spotted early on that the growth of professionalism – though a necessary ‘evil’ – threatened to divide players from fans. So players were encouraged to collect gate money prior to games and mix with supporters in various Woolwich hostelries. It was all a far cry from www.icons.com, through which modern players ‘communicate’ with fans.

To other clubs, Woolwich Arsenal’s officials were a militant lot. Southern rivals didn’t care much for Danskin’s and Humble’s ‘foreign’ accents, much less the heinous practice of professionalism in their midst. Directors of northern clubs simply believed the two had ‘sold out’ by emigrating south. They remained very much ‘hands on’ at away games, cajoling the troops and urging the travelling support to ‘sing up’. But it was the board’s continued discussion of subversive ideas that made them pariahs in the football world. In 1893, a committee formed a limited liability company and pressed on with a share issue scheme in order to make the club a more financially viable outfit and to purchase the freehold of the Manor Field. Humble protested: ‘It is my intention to see it [the club] carried on by working men.’ A letter to the Kentish Independent questioned the wisdom of mixing football with business: ‘The funding of a soccer club should be left to the working men and those who know the game. Surely allowing clerks or accountants to control a football club through buying shares is a retrograde step.’ For some it was, and Humble especially would feel uncomfortable with the unwanted interference from shareholders. Even as early as 1893 – a century before David Dein pressed ahead with the Bond Scheme – Humble realised that, strictly speaking, football never was the working man’s game.

Danskin was far less comfortable with the emergence of commercialism at the club. He left Woolwich Arsenal in the 1890s, to open a bicycle business. Stories differ as to how his venture fared. Danskin’s descendant Mrs R.H. Wyatt claims that his family were regular visitors to the pawnbrokers, in a desperate attempt to make ends meet. According to Alan Roper, author of Making the Arsenal, the bicycle business was a success, and Danskin apparently sold it in 1907 for £550 (about £30,000 in today’s money). Whatever the truth, and despite the tragic death of his son from pneumonia, the Scot lived to see the successes of Chapman’s Arsenal sides in the 1930s.

Humble stayed on as a director, and remained a dab hand at dealing with the local press and getting involved in their ‘exclusive’ stories. Humble and other club officials were canny enough to realise that a couple of crowd pleasers in the side would add 1,000 to the gate. Woolwich fans enjoyed the phenomenal shooting power of 16-stone Charlie Satterthwaite, whose ferocious shots actually smashed the stanchion on one occasion, and goalkeeper Jimmy Ashcroft, who could punch a ball half the length of the pitch. Welsh international Caesar Llewlyn Jenkyns stayed for a season and his mere presence could double the crowd. With his reputation as a boozer during his days at Birmingham, combined with his fearsome wrestling physique, he’d have been a superstar in the modern era, plastered all over young Gooners’ walls. So too would Bobby Templeton, a mercurial Scottish left-back. A hairdresser by trade, he had the ability to swerve the ball in a virtual semi-circle. Then there was the prolific Bill Gooing – the Ian Wright of his day – whose thirst for goals almost matched that of his love for brown ale. The local press was fascinated by these star players, particularly as they were high-profile characters who enjoyed the local hostelries and willingly attended Woolwich functions. Normally Templeton and Gooing led the drunken singing, whilst performing the obligatory jig on the bar tables. The Kentish Independent reported that on one memorable occasion – to the astonishment of the onlookers and his wife – the ‘gruesome twosome’ got Woolwich’s mayor to join them in their close-harmony hollering. Templeton, considered the bad boy in the team, revelled in his role as small-town anti-hero. Moody, inconsistent and prone to missing training, a journalist wrote of him: ‘When he’s good, he’s very good. When he’s bad, he’s horrid’ – just like Woolwich Arsenal, who began to turn themselves into the meanest of mean machines under the tutelage of gruff, bowler-hatted managers like Phil Kelso and Harry Bradshaw.

By 1904, Jimmy Jackson (half Aussie, half Scot), appointed himself leader for team affairs/tactics. Jackson had trained as an Aussie-rules player, which served him well in the kick-and-rush environs of English football. Jackson introduced zonal marking to the club and was ruthless in his pursuit of points. When the going got tough in a league game, he told a teammate: ‘We’re not here to show fancy play. We’re here to get points. When we can’t get two, we can at least make sure of one.’ (Was Jackson George Graham’s maternal grandfather, perhaps?) In the 18 years since that first match on the Isle of Dogs, the team from ‘the factory’ had become southern heavyweights. Yet there was always a flip side, which threatened to destroy the club: transfer requests piled up quicker than club debts. Star players, fed up with ‘WOOLWICH ARSENAL IN FINANCIAL STRIFE’ stories, rarely stayed around for longer than a year and were tempted by the promises of filthy lucre up north. They were fully aware of the tragic ends met by several of the club’s earliest stars. Ironically, the two ‘hard men’ were struck down first. Morris Bates died from tuberculosis at the age of 41. Jimmy Charteris died in poverty from a suspected heart attack at just 28 years of age.

The onset of the Boer War was as damaging for Woolwich Arsenal as it was for the British Government. The club haemorrhaged both players and fans at alarming speed. As the most unfit army in British history travelled to South Africa, the all-consuming need to preserve Britain’s empire impacted massively upon the munitions industry. Saturday afternoons at the football were no longer an option for most supporters, as they were forced to do compulsory overtime in the factory. Crowds slumped to a measly average of around 2,000, and only 900 watched the club’s record 12–0 win over Loughborough in March 1900. Worse, Tottenham won the FA Cup in 1901, becoming the first non-league club to do so. It was estimated that a jubilant crowd of 20,000 lined the streets to welcome back the Spurs players. Inwardly, Woolwich Arsenal directors seethed, fully aware that in the long term, their bunch of unglamorous Kentish urchins could not compete financially with London poseurs like Spurs or Chelsea. It was a clear sign that Woolwich’s title as the south’s most cutting edge and progressive club was in danger of being wrestled away. For all their best efforts, the club was sliding towards oblivion. Like Second Division rivals Darwen and Burton Swifts, Woolwich Arsenal could have vanished, if an archetypal Edwardian bounder hadn’t injected his unique brand of villainy and panache into the club.

TWO

Sleaze and the Tory MP

My dad knew Henry Norris from the building trade. Dad was a strictly no-nonsense man, who’d fought in the Great War and survived the trenches for four years. But I’ll tell you this. He was terrified of Norris. After his meetings with him he’d come home shaking and down a double whisky.

Leslie Anderson – Arsenal fan from the 1920s

Although Sir Henry Norris died nearly 80 years ago, his name continues to provoke controversy. Searching for his full title on the Internet throws up some useful information on him. No less than 20 Spurs-related sites cite him as the prime reason to hate Arsenal and the reasons for his lifelong ban from football in 1928 are graphically recounted. More bizarrely, a sixteenth-century diplomat of precisely the same name was also a Falstaffian rogue of the highest order. Granted unprecedented access to Henry VIII, he was later executed for ‘intriguing’ with the King’s young wife, Anne Boleyn. He was noted for his ‘raffish charm’ and revelled in his reputation as the ‘playboy diplomat’ of his era. It seems apt, therefore, that his distant relative was also such a notorious character. As it turned out, both men were destroyed by the Icarus factor: they flew too close to the sun.

The second Sir Henry Norris, after buying Woolwich Arsenal in 1910, controlled his club like a medieval fiefdom. In an era when directors and chairmen tended to sit on boards in order to heighten their exposure in the local community, Norris broke the mould. He sprung a variety of ‘questionable’ fiscal tricks and used bully-boy tactics that made him powerful enemies within the game. Norris has spawned several imitators, but ‘Deadly’ Doug Ellis, Ken Bates and the late Robert Maxwell have nothing on him. In transforming Arsenal Football Club forever, Norris remains the original and best, or worst, depending upon your point of view. The game’s first ‘Soccer Tsar’ has become a creature of myth and more stories circulate about him than any other official in Arsenal’s history. The amazing thing is, most of them are true.

Born in 1865, Fulham-based Sir Henry (or just plain old Henry, as he was in 1910), was a self-made man who had accumulated his fortune through the property market. His company, Allen & Norris, was responsible for transforming Fulham from a semi-rural area into an urban jungle. In the process of constructing, renovating and selling houses, he’d built up a formidable network of contacts in the building and banking professions, many of whom owed him ‘favours’. This proved invaluable in future years, particularly when the time came to build a new football stadium. Norris loved to mingle with the hoi polloi, and his ‘networking’ skills were legion. Who’s Who from 1910 lists his interests as ‘wine societies’, ‘dining clubs’ and ‘vintage car rallies’. As a member of the Junior Carlton Club, Mayor of Fulham, leading light in the local Conservative Party and eminent Freemason, his name was well known throughout the capital. Being a God-fearing Tory, he believed it his duty to perform philanthropic acts in the local community. For several years, he worked closely with the Battersea vestry and the local orphanage. Yet political opponents believed him to be a self-serving fraud who’d used his position simply to befriend, amongst others, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Norris, who had a reputation for banging out libel writs faster than Ken Bates, always refuted these allegations, but the Archbishop certainly proved to be a useful ally for him in 1913. Returning ‘favours’ was the preserve of this particular social circle, after all.

Photographs and written accounts prove that Norris was a terrifying man, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Dr Crippen, notorious wife murderer of the day. Standing at well over six feet tall, invariably with a pipe stuffed into his mouth, he dwarfed his rivals both literally and metaphorically. Immaculately turned out in a trench-coat, crisply starched white shirt and bowler hat, he would glare demoniacally at them through his pince-nez. The lenses of the pince-nez were so strong that his gaze was totally distorted. This proved to be useful in board meetings, where he could make his directors uncomfortable by bawling at one while apparently looking at another.

Norris’s accent, upper-class wannabe with a cockney twang, betrayed his working-class roots. His parents had sent him to a minor public school, but on his own admission, ‘school was not for me’. Aged just 14, he was articled to a solicitor’s firm and made rapid strides. A year later he left, tempted by the cut-throat world of building. He had several chips on his shoulders, admitting that he disliked ‘authority figures’ and ‘time-wasters’. Norris was a man in a hurry and he wanted to run things his way. One of his chief gripes was that northern sides had always dominated professional football. He firmly believed that a London team should be in command.

Scaring the shit out of his rivals was all very well, but Norris was also a master at charming potential opponents and getting them onside with sheer enthusiasm and gusto. As a successful estate agent, he knew only too well how to smarm when appropriate. When he branched into the building trade, he honed his skills further. If he liked you, a quick word with the local council would bypass the official channels one had to go through in order to extend a house. If it came to constructing houses in a ‘tricky’ area of London (for example, Wimbledon was notorious for having a fearsome NIMBY regiment even then) he could chat to ‘buddies’ in the local community and, in a jiffy, a new housing complex would go up. One of his rivals in the building trade dared to suggest that Norris ran a protection racket in order to preserve the status of his construction company. He retracted the accusation when Norris threatened to let loose his lawyer on him. So even before he became connected with Woolwich Arsenal, Norris was well versed in sharp practice. Where better than the world of football to become a grand-master of such chicanery?

In the early years of last century, with Norris already a director of Fulham, he decided to expand his business interests in the sport. He wanted to buy a football club and surveyed the leading teams in southern England: Chelsea, Spurs, Orient and Woolwich Arsenal. The first three clubs were fairly secure financially at that time. The boys from Woolwich, on the other hand, remained in an awful mess. Even in Division One, Manor Ground crowds averaged out at around 10,000, four times less than those at Chelsea or Spurs. In addition, a touch of the farcical always surrounded the club. Woolwich Arsenal reached the 1905 FA Cup semi-final, but lost 1–3 to Sheffield Wednesday. The match, played on a mound-like pitch, was memorable because neither goalkeeper could see each other and, bizarrely, neither could the linesmen. As with all dictators, Norris made his move when matters were at their lowest ebb. Woolwich Arsenal’s misfortunes turned out to be his gain and in the manner of other twentieth-century autocrats, he injected new life into the club, stopping at nothing to enforce his beliefs.

The board welcomed him with open arms, having heard of his political ‘skills’, when he negotiated Fulham’s frankly unbelievable rise through the southern league up to Division Two. That this meteoric rise took place in just four years led furious directors from other clubs to suggest that substantial amounts of cash had been handed over to the Football League, but no firm evidence of backhanders was ever found. Norris was already the undisputed master of covering his tracks. On buying his majority stake in Woolwich Arsenal, he proposed a merger with Fulham in order to create a London ‘super-club’, and a permanent move to Craven Cottage. This was possibly the first proven case of a member of the Conservative Party being involved in ‘cottaging’ activities. The merger plan bore an uncanny resemblance to Robert Maxwell’s attempt to unify Reading and Oxford in the mid-1980s. Fortunately, the fat crook failed in his attempt, as did Norris with his proposal. He was blocked by the Football League (the only time they stopped him getting his way), but they couldn’t prevent him staying as director of Fulham, whilst also serving as Arsenal chairman. From that, you can guess that the Monopolies and Mergers Commission did not yet exist.

Foiled in his plan to merge the two clubs, Norris set about rejuvenating the ailing Woolwich Arsenal. Together with his business partner, William Hall, Norris controlled 57 per cent of the club shares, and he spent the rest of the decade buying a greater stake in the club. In 1912, he realised that the club had to move elsewhere after an embarrassing catalogue of disasters at the Manor Ground, which, like many of the club’s old haunts, flooded regularly. A match with Spurs, which Arsenal won 3–1, was described as a ‘mud revel’ by The Sportsman. Another local newspaper described the ground as: ‘a perfect quagmire, as water lay in a pool along the touchline’. On that day, the weather was so appalling that factions of the crowd refused to pay the shilling entrance fee, preferring instead to stand on the sewer pipe and watch the game. At least they got wet for free. The press claimed there had been a near riot between the law-abiding fans and the refuseniks. That wasn’t quite true, but it was a fact that opposition teams often failed to reach the ground on time, due to heavy traffic and poor accessibility. These embarrassments reflected poorly on Norris, and he wasn’t one to suffer fools gladly. The club was relegated in 1913 with the (at that time) worst-ever record in Division One: P38 W3 D12 L23. For Norris, there was only one option.

In early 1913, Kentish Independent readers were gobsmacked to read the following front-page headline: ‘ARSENAL TO MOVE TO THE OTHER SIDE OF LONDON’. In an official statement, Norris pointed out the benefits to the club of moving to a district that had a population of 500,000. The relocated club could tap into the huge reservoir of supporters in Finsbury, Hackney, Islington and Holborn. Through his contacts in the church, he found that six acres of land at St John’s College of Divinity at Highbury were available. Where better to move than a spot that was only ten minutes away by Tube from London’s West End? Norris required all his arrogance and political skill to negotiate the minefield of red tape, pressure groups and NIMBYs blocking his path.

REBELS FOR THE CAUSE

The Alternative History of Arsenal Football Club

Jon Spurling

Acknowledgements

Also by Jon Spurling

ONE

Freaks from the Factory

TWO

Sleaze and the Tory MP