George Frederick Allison (24 October 1883 – 13 March 1957) was a journalist who had a mega impact on Arsenal through his writings, the BBC’s first sports commentator, and the man who managed the club after Chapman. Indeed just as with Chapman, he achieved two league titles and one FA Cup win during his time in charge of the club.
George Allison came from Hurworth on Tees, a village south of Darlington where having become interested in football as an amateur player he started writing about his team for the local paper.
Being a better writer than footballer he took up the former and dropped the latter, except he never lost his interest in the game, and at some stage before 1906 became assistant to the manager of Middlesbrough FC.
It then seems that he decided to expand his journalistic career and he moved to London, working for Edward Hulton who ultimately started the Daily Sketch, a Conservative-leaning rival daily paper to the Daily Mirror.
It appears that Allison initially worked as a freelance and established himself as a football writer by being willing to go out to the wilderness of north Kent to report on Woolwich Arsenal FC. This was the era when the club was on the edge of becoming something special for both in 1906 and 1907 Woolwich Arsenal got to the semi-final of the FA Cup and indeed in 1907 they had their best league finish – 7th in the first division. Indeed it appears that Allison wrote reports on the matches at Plumstead for several different papers using different journalistic “voices” and different writing noms-de-plume.
In 1910 he became the greyhound racing correspondent of Sporting Life, and at the same time under Henry Norris’ ownership of Woolwich Arsenal, started to write Gunners’ Mate – the leading article in the Arsenal match day programme.
It is also reported that at the coronation of King George V (an event which failed to set the working classes of London alight with royal enthusiasm), he met Lord Kitchener, and wrote up the story for the New York Post which led to a regular weekly column in that paper. In 1912 he joined the staff of William Randolph Hearst, the American politician and newspaper magnate.
The following year George Allison edited the first club handbook in which appeared the first official history of Arsenal FC. Unfortunately, the part that related to Arsenal’s move into professionalism and the resultant action of the London FA and Kent FA in allegedly kicking Arsenal out of the associations, was highly inaccurate. In fact what happened was that Arsenal, on turning professional, offered to resign from these associations in which every other club was an amateur club, but the other clubs rejected the offer, being keen to keep playing the biggest attraction in footballing and financial terms, in the area.
Now Randolph Hearst who employed Allison, is described in the book Unreliable Sources as a man who “routinely invented sensational stories, faked interviews, ran phony pictures and distorted real events.” A similar charge is laid in the book “The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism” by Upton Sinclair. I would not suggest George Allison was in this league, but rather that taking verbatim reports and not checking the facts was the general approach of journalism in this era, and it would appear that this approach was the one that Allison used as a journalist.
Following this experience in what we might call “inventive journalism,” during the first world war Allison worked with the War Office and the Admiralty writing propaganda. Then after the war he joined both Arsenal and the BBC. For the BBC he was the first person to do radio commentaries on major sports events such as the Derby, the Grand National, the football international England v Scotland (then an annual match) and, most notably, the 1927 Cup final of Cardiff v Arsenal.
Indeed George Allison was the main football commentator of the BBC which by 1931 was broadcasting over 100 games per season on the radio. However, the Football League was apparently unhappy with the effect it believed the coverage was having on attendance at games, and so banned the BBC from continuing the activity – and the ban stayed in place until 1945 (although the FA Cup Final continued to be broadcast).
Because of his prominence in football at a time when few people in the game beyond the players were in the public eye, and because his support of Arsenal was universally acknowledged, Allison became Secretary of Arsenal, and then managing director – although he seemingly did not always get on with Chapman, who at one stage effectively banned Allison from doing matchday commentaries from Arsenal.
However, when Herbert Chapman died in January 1934, the club appointed Joe Shaw as temporary manager for the rest of the season while waiting for George Allison to clear himself of other commitments. He thus became Arsenal’s manager in August 1934 and subsequently won the league twice and the FA Cup; exactly the same achievement as Chapman.
Allison also appeared in the film “The Arsenal Stadium Mystery” in 1939 where unlike most of the rest of the club, he had a proper acting role as himself, saying part-way through the game that is the heart of the story, “It’s one-nil to the Arsenal. That’s the way we like it.”
As manager, George Allison retained the services of Joe Shaw (who had led the club to the title after Chapman’s death) and Tom Whittaker (who followed him as manager). Those two trained the players, while George Allison focussed on transfers and the media, using his connections to ensure that Arsenal were always in the headlines, and always for positive reasons.
Bernard Joy, who wrote “Forward Arsenal!” and who reprinted the false story from the handbook about the boycott of Woolwich Arsenal by clubs after Arsenal turned professional, said of George Allison that he was “tactful, friendly and good-hearted” but “lacked the professional’s deep knowledge of the game”.
Bob Wall (Herbert Chapman’s assistant), said in his autobiography “Arsenal from the Heart”, “Allison was a complete contrast to Chapman… He never claimed to possess a deep theoretical knowledge of the game but he listened closely to what people like Tom Whittaker and Alex James had to say. Like Chapman before him, Allison always insisted that, no matter how good a prospective signing might be, he would secure him only if his character was beyond reproach.”
This did not stop him making big signings, however. In 1938 he bought Bryn Jones from Wolverhampton for £14,000 – a world record, a signing which led to a debate in the House of Commons in which the club and its manager were roundly criticised.
Allison kept Arsenal running from a single room during the war, and although then wanting to retire, he was persuaded to manage the club for the 1946-7 season, as the club waited for the demobilisation of Tom Whittaker who was ear-marked to be the next manager. George Allison then retired, and he died ten years later on 13 March 1957. There’s a video of George Allison talking here and there’s a picture of him in the National Portrait Gallery
But there is one more thing I must add. At the same time as Allison’s autobiography of his time at Arsenal was published in 1947, so was the autobiography of Leslie Knighton who had managed Arsenal after the first world war, prior to Chapman’s appointment. The two books were utterly different: Knighton’s volume makes a series of wild allegations about the by-then deceased Sir Henry Norris’ miserliness, incompetence and criminality and no mention at all of the vital role he played in the first world war in the War Office, in terms of recruitment, demobilisation, propaganda and administration, for which he gained his knighthood and his rise from private citizen to Lieutenant Colonel.
Allison on the other hand does nothing but speak very highly of Sir Henry Norris and all he did to save the club from liquidation in 1910 and take it to the top of the league under Chapman. But it was Knighton’s slim volume that was serialised in a Sunday newspaper, thus giving credence to the long-running notion that Norris was the crooked club owner, rather than it being Knighton who was the incompetent manager re-writing history.
Sadly, Allison’s autobiography is now long forgotten, but Knighton’s fairy-tale lives on in some parts of the public and journalistic memory and his false claims about Norris can be found being recycled even today.