6 April 1927
Newcastle United 6 Arsenal 1
Regular fans at Highbury1926/7 must have started as a season as stupendous promise. Having never won a single thing of consequence (not the second division, not the first division, not the FA cup) Arsenal had hired the man who had delivered unto Huddersfield Town two league titles. The repayment of Norris’ belief in the man who had once been banned from football for life was the highest ever position of Arsenal – second in the first division achieved in his first season. It was even more notable because the previous season Arsenal had been very close to being relegated.
Surely 1926/27 would be Arsenal’s year. Huddersfield didn’t have Chapman, Arsenal did. Arsenal had clearly sorted out the new offside rule, with the second best defence in the league. Most importantly they had moved from one place from relegation to one place for the championship in one season. Was this man a genius or what?
Well, what?
Mr Chapman, having taken us to second in the league used the same players as were available to him at the end of the last season. He had created his team, and he was happy with it, that must be the general view.
And yet in league terms the season did not deliver. After two initial victories Arsenal won only two out of the next 14, and the season, in terms of building on that wonderful second place was gone.
Arsenal did recover in the league, and ended 11th, thanks not least to a run of five consecutive wins in April. But it was in the cup that matters progressed:
- Round 3 Sheffield United
- Round 4 Port Vale (division 2) (after a 2-2 draw)
- Round 5: Liverpool
- Round 6: Wolverhampton (division 2)
- SF: Southampton (division 2)
- Final: Cardiff
Arsenal’s progress was helped by having to play three out of the eighth matches against lower league teams and never having to play a top seven club from the first division. But we lost the final 0-1, and so the first trophy was not to be.
In the league if we look at our goal scoring it was 77 for, 86 against.
77 goals that season was an average figure. Derby a place below us got 86, but Huddersfield in second place in the league got 76. But 86 against was poor, the fifth worse in the league. Leeds and West Bromwich were relegated with 88 and 86 goals against. Arsenal avoided relegation by 13 points, which shows how important the six wins in the last seven games were. Without that run we would have been in real trouble.
But it is worth noting just some of those defeats:
March 7th: West Ham United 7 Arsenal 0
April 6th: Newcastle United 6 Arsenal 1
April 9th: Sunderland 5 Arsenal 1
These three results were part of a series of six consecutive defeats, starting with the West Ham match and ending in the Sunderland game. So what caused the problem.
What, I wonder, would the blogger of the 1920s have made of all this? Certainly there would have been cries for the removal of Mr Chapman, and demands for new blood. Two seasons, and one new regular player – and he at the very end of his career. No trophies, and a defence that was among the worst in the league. Yes a cup final, but an easy run to the final by any standard and only one of the cup run games was won by more than one goal (2-0 against Liverpool).
Really, he had to deliver next season, or else surely Mr Norris would put up with no more. The crowds were right down (only 22,000 for the last home game), and they would fall further if something were not done. If only there had been the fanatically anti-manager blogs then. What a field day they would have had. How much we would have learned!
5 April 1987
These days winning the League Cup is not considered that much of a trophy, largely because only three clubs have won the cup in the last seven years, and of those three Manchester City have won it five times. It is of course what can be achieved with a squad purchased with more money than is available to most other clubs.
But win it they have, seven times, a figure only beaten by Liverpool who have won it eight times.
Arsenal, you may know have only won it twice, including on this day in 1987, and two things stick in the memory of that win.
The first is that during part of the 1986/7 season Arsenal could not score. Overall we got 58 goals in 42 games, and the reason we came fourth was through having the second meanest defence in the league.
This was also the season we won our first trophy since 1979, on this day, and by that time Arsenal had signed Alan Smith to reform the goalscoring situation. But he had then immediately been loaned back to Leicester for the remainder of the season. Questions were asked about the legality of such a move which had not been seen before but the league agreed there was nothing amiss with the manoeuvre.
Just how vital this signing was, had been rammed home on 28 March 1987 as Arsenal 0 Everton 1 was the sixth consecutive league match in which Arsenal failed to score – the longest run in the club’s league history.
Then came the league cup victory on 5 April 1987. Until this moment every commentator would say boringly, endlessly, constantly and without fail, “Liverpool never lose if Rush scores…” every time he scored. He scored, and out it came. Viewers on TV were pretty much encouraged to turn off, because at that moment it was all over. If you weren’t following football in the media at that time it is hard to express how stunningly boring the coverage was. “Liverpool never win if Rush scores,” over and over and over and over and over again.
Except this time. Two goals from Charlie Nicholas gave Arsenal the League Cup for the first time.
But despite the cup triumph the awful league run continued. On 8 April 1987 WHU 3 Arsenal 1 made it 10 without a victory. Eventually on 4 May the run ended with QPR 1 Arsenal 4. Martin Hayes scored his 19th goal in 31 starts to make him far and away the top scorer for the season. Second highest was Quinn with eight.
As the end of George Graham’s first season came, so did the transfers, but perhaps not as many as we might have expected.
4 April 1913
When Islington Council voted that Arsenal should not be in the borough
On April 4th 1913 the “Highbury Defence Committee” persuaded Islington Council to discuss the proposed move of Woolwich Arsenal FC from Plumstead to Highbury. The council agreed to do all it could to stop Arsenal coming to Islington.
Meanwhile, countering the Defence Committee’s petition to the religious college which was leasing its playing fields to Woolwich Arsenal FC upon which Highbury Stadium was to be built, local shop keepers retaliated with their own petition welcoming the move as a way of boosting trade.
The League’s management committee had already turned down the demand for a vote on Arsenal’s move from Plumstead to Highbury, proposed by Tottenham Hotspur, Tottenham’s response was to by-pass the management committee and appeal directly to the League as a whole.
However although entry into the Football League might be a matter for voting by clubs already in the Football League, where the clubs played was quite clearly established through a vote of the committee in 1910 as being a matter for the clubs alone. This had occurred when Henry Norris had initially explored the idea of Woolwich Arsenal ground sharing with Fulham FC. The League had already confirmed this view that where clubs played was not a matter over which they had jurisdiction on 1st March 1913..
Henry Norris had made his public statement on 4th March confirming the location and the timing of the move of Woolwich Arsenal to a new ground. It is perhaps a day that really ought to be commemorated each year by Arsenal, for without that decision being announced on that day, the club would most certainly have died, given that its crowds at Plumstead had sunk to a financially unsustainable level.
Tottenham however would still not let go and continued to argue that there should be an emergency general meeting of the League to discuss the issue. There is no doubt that they also encouraged either the setting up of, or the development of, the Highbury Defence Committee which was formed by local residents to oppose the move.
The Committee launched a petition, and did manage to persuade a majority of members on Islington Council to oppose the development. But Islington Council itself had limited powers in the affair, and there was never any chance that they could have an effect on developments, no matter how much noise local councillors made.
Tottenham also failed in their attempt to get an EGM of the Football League called – undoubtedly because the overwhelming majority of clubs were in the Midlands and Northwest, and for them a journey to a ground with an easy connection from Kings Cross station was infinitely preferable to the journey that they had previously had to undertake to Plumstead.
There was also a desire to see League football established in London, in order to limit the aspirations of the Southern League whose player contracts were much more favourable to players than those of the Football League.
The story of Arsenal’s move remained the main talking point in football for a couple of weeks but was then taken off the main sports pages by none other than Henry Norris who wrote a newspaper article suggesting that a match between Liverpool and Chelsea had been fixed to help Chelsea avoid relegation.
Meanwhile in the Islington of 1913 emotions were starting to get heated. Residents began to fret considerably about the thought of football ne’er-do-wells and thugs rampaging through their area, and accused football supporters of the most outrageous crimes and behaviour as part of their natural everyday demeanour.
Indeed so strong, and indeed appalling, were the claims that football fans from across the country began to respond to the accusations, and for some time Athletic News, the leading football weekly, was full of denouncements of the residents of Islington.
As we all know, the activities of the Highbury Defence Committee, Tottenham Hotspur FC and the council had no effect, and Arsenal came to Islington.
3 April 1926
The start of a 172 consecutive game run
Tom Parker was born in a suburb of Southampton, and he joined his local club playing his first season in the war leagues that carried on until 1919, before one season with the Saints in the Southern League. In this third season (1920/21) Southampton moved into the Football League with the newly created third division.
In 1925 Tom played in the cup semi-final with Southampton (who had quite a tradition in the FA Cup, having reached the final in 1902), and Tom Parker won a cap for England playing against France. During his time at Southampton, Parker also won a solitary cap for England, against France on 21 May 1925.
In March 1926 Tom signed for Arsenal, having made 275 appearances for Southampton, and played for the first time for Arsenal on April 3 against Blackburn in front of 31,000 at Highbury.
And having taken over the number 2 shirt, Tom Parker wouldn’t give it back, keeping it for the all time record of 172 consecutive games. Mackie held on in the reserves for two seasons before retrieving his career at Portsmouth who had just reached the 1st Division for the first time.
Tom Parker was captain of Arsenal in the first cup final (against Cardiff) and again in 1930, when he was the first ever Arsenal player to lift the FA Cup.
He was captain again as Arsenal won the league in 1931, and in the 1932 cup final. Amazingly he missed only six league games in seven seasons.
By the start of the 1932/3 season Tom was 34 and he was initially replaced by Leslie Compton who was just starting out on his career but Tom regained his place after four games. But after five more games Tom was George Male.
His final game was the last of that run of five games – a 3-3 draw with Derby on October 8 and after seeing out the rest of 1932/3 in the reserves he became player manager of Norwich City. Norwich came third in 1933/4, so were clearly a decent third division team – but Tom took them to the championship in 1933/4 – seven points clear of second placed Coventry.
In March 1937 he returned to Southampton as manager and helped the club avoid relegation by four points. He then used Chapman techniques to buy in good players – most notably Bill Dodgin and Ted Bates. However by the time war broke out Southampton were still resolutely stuck in the lower reaches of the second division.
When football was abandoned in 1939 Tom worked for the Ministry of Transport, managing Southampton part-time, until June 1943, when he resigned. After the war he worked as a ship’s surveyor for Lloyd’s in Southampton Docks.
In 1955 he returned to Norwich for a second spell. The club were back in the Third Division (South) by then, and the return finished badly with Norwich ending 1956/7 bottom of the league and having to seek re-election.
Tom then retired but was then asked by Ted Bates (whom Tom had signed for Southampton but who was now Southampton’s manager) to become a scout. He eventually became chief scout, and finally retired from football in 1975. He died aged 89 in 1987 with a record that I am sure will never be beaten.
2 April 1915
English Football’s greatest match fixing scandal of all time
On 2 April 1915 Arsenal lost to Hull City 2-1 in a second division match.
Which might seem rather an odd event to highlight in our day by day series on Arsenal’s history, but this day had a major impact on Arsenal’s history – an impact which continues to reverberate to this day. For on this day Manchester United beat Liverpool 2-0 in what became the most notorious match of all time in English league football.
The result itself was a bit of surprise because Liverpool were solidly mid-table at the time and Manchester United were heading for division 2. But there was more, as Liverpool missed a penalty, reported in the press as the worst miss of all time, the ball slowly being rolled wide of the goal. A number of players on the Manchester United side were reported as clearly not trying at all. And above all as a result of all of this Manchester Utd did not go down to division 2.
So the bookies refused to pay up and offered a reward for anyone who could unmask the conspirators. The Chronicle in particular took up the challenge and eventually blamed corrupt players on both sides of fixing the match both to get some money and to get Manchester out of relegation.
This was far from the first match fixing event and indeed the matter had been brought to the fore. Most notable was the case in 1913, when Henry Norris, the Chairman of Arsenal, went to watch a Liverpool match, and found the spectacle so outrageous that he alleged match fixing in a subsequent newspaper article. The League did not take kindly to this sort of reporting and rather than investigate the game, they instead warned Norris that if he ever repeated the allegations in terms of any match he would be banned from football for life.
But in the 1915 case, it was suggested that a lot of bets had been placed at 7 to 1 on a 2-0 win by Manchester United, and the word spread that three players from Manchester United, plus four players from Liverpool were involved. It was also said that Jackie Sheldon who had previously played for Man U used his contacts with the opposition to fix up the arrangement.
Further it was subsequently stated that two players, Fred Pagnam of Liverpool and George Anderson of Manchester United, had refused to take part. Fred Pagnam indeed testified against his teammates at the hearing.
On 27 December 1915 the FA concluded that there had indeed been a conspiracy by the players, but not by the club or its officials. As a result it was felt unreasonable to fine or deduct points from either club! There was no suggestion made that the officials and directors of the club ought to have been aware what was going on or moved quickly to deal with their own players, although clearly if they didn’t know and didn’t suspect, there was a clear dereliction of duty among the directors.
The players involved were banned for life from playing League football in England, but could play in Scotland, and since four of the players were Scottish, and with the Scottish League 1st Division still running that gave them an opening to continue their career. Enoch West was the one player who completely protested his innocence, and subsequently sued the FA for libel.
Some subsequent reports suggest that this victory saved Manchester United from relegation – this is untrue. However, the victory certainly helped but just winning that game did not make them safe.
Given how he was censured in 1913 Henry Norris had remained quiet on match fixing commentaries but the 1915 match now gave Norris the chance to say that if the League had taken heed of his earlier comments, they could have stopped this and indeed the earlier Manchester United v Burnley match on 11 October 1913 where there were also allegations of a betting scam. In this case one of the Man U players who was cleared in 1915 was finally jailed in 1918 for being part of a large scale match fixing for betting purposes syndicate – suggesting many more matches were fixed.
Quite clearly, in ignoring Norris’ complaints about the match he witnessed in 1913, and in initially ignoring the allegations concerning the Burnley match, the FA were supremely negligent, and they were only forced to act because of the refusal by betting companies to pay up in 1915.
There the matter rested until the summer of 1919 when the authorities prepared to start up football again. They were of course aware of the continuing rumbles of discontent – Enoch West was still fighting them and running a libel case against the authorities, while Chelsea and Tottenham (both relegated in 1915) were claiming that Manchester United should be thrown out of the League, and that Liverpool should be demoted.
It was in part to get out of this mess that the League announced that the First Division was going to be enlarged by two clubs and that therefore Chelsea and Tottenham could apply for re-election to Division I.
But they had reckoned without Henry Norris at Arsenal.Norris, it appears, said that if this were allowed to pass then the message would go out that match fixing at a club level was acceptable, and that no club would ever be punished.
Norris also announced that he was ready to start a Midland and Southern Football League which would be untainted with the whiff of match fixing. What’s more he would make public the serious deficiencies in the League’s case.
Eventually the League agreed to talk with Norris, and out of this came the notion that the League could be expanded and that clubs could vote on who should go into the first division.
But the feeling that Arsenal did something wrong, rather than doing the right thing by highlighting the match fixing continues to this day, as we can see when on 29 March 2020 the Daily Mirror newspaper ran the headline “Inside England’s match-fixing scandal that involved Man Utd, Liverpool and Arsenal” above a story by Simon Mullock, Chief Football Writer of the Sunday Mirror. So not a tale by a junior reporter, but by the chief football writer.
That story relates to events noted above and in the text that follows there is actually no mention of Arsenal at all. So we are left with the headline suggesting Arsenal were engaged in match fixing, whereas in fact it was Arsenal that was the club and Henry Norris who was the man who protested the most and stopped the matter being brushed under the carpet for ever more. He showed the League that when it came to corruption he could not be silenced.
Indeed it was this battle that eventually led to the final fight of Norris’ time at Arsenal when the League, FA and the Hill-Wood family who controlled Arsenal, finally force Sir Henry Norris out of Arsenal and out of football forever.
1 April 1935
This was the day of Bernard Joy’s first match in front of just 10,485 at home to Bolton. He was Arsenal’s most famous amateur player of the era and his book “Forward Arsenal!” became a central source of information for what life within Arsenal was like in the 30s.
Unfortunately Mr Joy appears to have written the book totally from memory and heresay. And yet despite its multiplicity of errors it remained an unchallenged source of information on Arsenal, into the 21st century
Bernard Joy played 86 games for Arsenal between 1935 and 1947 under the management of George Allison. He is also responsible for publishing a letter which has for years acted as one of only two sources of information about Arsenal’s first ever game.
I’ll come back to this in a moment. But first Bernard Joy himself.
He played football for the University of London in the era when university football was of some significance in the country, and then went on to play for the amateur side Casuals and won the prestigious FA Amateur Cup in 1936, plus ten caps for England amateurs. He was captain of the 1936 GB Olympics teams in Berlin – and this fact was celebrated in the 5 November 1956 match at Highbury when Arsenal played the British Olympic team (and won 3-2).
In May 1935 he came to Arsenal, playing as a reserve at first, only playing two games in his first season – he didn’t make his debut on 1 April 1936 against Bolton, at centre half, in front of an amazingly small crowd of 10,485. (The size of the crowd was due to this game being played in the rain on a Wednesday afternoon). Arsenal only finished sixth that season having won the league the year before.
Just one month later Bernard played for England against Belgium, and is said to be the last amateur ever to play for the national team.
Bernard moved on from his two appearances in 1935/6 to six the following season, but then in the 1937/8 season when Herbie Roberts broke his leg, Joy took over and played 26 games as the club re-gained the 1st division title.
During the war Bernard was a physical training instructor with the RAF, and he returned to Arsenal after the war, but retired half way through the first season, by which time he was in his mid-30s.
He then moved into journalism working for the Evening Standard and Sunday Express, and retired in 1976.
But to return to Joy’s letter about Arsenal’s first match…
The letter is from Robert Thompson and it was sent to Bernard Joy after his book “Forward, Arsenal!” was published in 1952. It is a tantalising affair for it relates to the earliest moment’s in Arsenal’s history, although here the author doesn’t actually state the name of the opponents of the match he refers to.
Unfortunately the value of the letter was later diminished when it became clear that venerated though Joy’s book was as the prime source of Arsenal’s history, it actually contains a vast number of factual errors and assumptions, which subsequently misled fans for years. Indeed many of the errors were subsequently reproduced in Arsenal’s annual handbook which for many years included a history section, which was based on Joy’s book – and may well have been written by him.
31 March 1919
After the end of the 1914/15 season the Football League and the Southern League in England were suspended (although league football continued in Scotland) until the end of the war with Germany.
Arsenal appealed against Fulham’s victory in the London Victory Cup
On 11 November 1918 the ceasefire that ended the war was declared, and on 6 December 1918 there was a meeting of the London Combination – the league founded in 1915 as a regional wartime league for London clubs during the war – to decide on what to do next.
There was at the time some talk of the London clubs breaking away from the Football League, and of the League dividing into regional leagues, given the disruption to the coal industry (which of course powered the trains and industry) caused by four years of war and the pre-war and post-war industrial unrest.
Despite these broader issues the 6 December meeting confined itself to football over the next few months – as no one was quite ready for the big step into a new organisation of football.
During the war the payment of players’ salaries had been ruled illegal by the league (a matter that caused the life time ban on Herbert Chapman, which fortunately for Arsenal was subsequently rescinded), and the (not rescinded) demise of Leeds City FC.
This was the main issue of the day, and the first step taken was to agree that players could be paid from 7 December 1918 – albeit with a maximum wage installed once again (something Arsenal chairman Henry Norris was against). The first match for Arsenal at which this could happen was the first match at Highbury since the end of the 1914/15 season: it ended Arsenal 0 Tottenham 1 on that day.
The match was notable in passing for the attendance of the Mayor of Islington – George Elliot. Notable not just because it was his first ever football match of any type, but because of the energetic way in which the borough had attempted to stop Arsenal coming to Highbury by supporting the reactionary Highbury Defence Committee. But now there were elections in the offering, and no one had a clue which way these would go, not least because of the new electoral rules about who could vote. So the Mayor probably thought showing an interest in the people’s game in general and the club in his constituency was not a bad idea.
On 1 January 1919 (a Wednesday, and not a public holiday) the London Combination’s Victory Cup (sometimes known since as the London Victory Cup) kicked off with one of the opening round matches ending Millwall 0 Arsenal 1. By chance these clubs also played a London Combination league game (that is the wartime league not the reserve league) the following Saturday, again at Highbury (4 January 1919) this one endingArsenal 4 Millwall 1. The crowd was 8000 – which was not bad considering most of the military personnel were still either overseas or in their English military camps.
Thus the route to the resumption of football seemed to be moving ahead peacefully but there were still many, many issues to be resolved.
We’ve dealt at some length with the most famous of these – the election of Arsenal to the First Division which happened on 10 March 1919. But there was another issue which although of less long-term consequence was nevertheless of considerable interest at the time.
On Monday 31 March 1919 the second round of the London Combination Victory Cup was held. The match to be placed at Highbury was between Arsenal and Fulham – which was of interest because Henry Norris was a director of both clubs and Fulham’s manager was the ex-Arsenal man Phil Kelso.
Naturally Henry Norris was at the game only to see Fulham beat Arsenal 4-1. But Arsenal appealed, on the grounds that Fulham had knowingly played not one, but half a team’s worth of ineligible players.
(During the war eligibility to play had been withdrawn as an issue and guest players were everywhere. Now the rules of eligibility were re-introduced, and Fulham just ignored them).
There doesn’t seem to have been any sympathy for Fulham in the media, and on 4 April 1919 the complaint against Fulham was heard by the Committee of the London Combination, with Henry Norris at the meeting speaking on behalf of Arsenal and asking for Arsenal to be awarded the tie and Fulham disqualified. But the Committee ordered the game to be replayed at Highbury on 10 April 1919
However before the replay could happen Fulham quite amazingly appealed against the appeal – even though there appears to have been no process allowing this laid down in the rules of the London Combination.
Even more incredibly the London Combination allowed the appeal not only to go ahead, but they awarded the appeal on the appeal to Fulham. It looks as if Norris didn’t know about this appeal from Fulham, and he was not invited to the London Combination meeting – as he should have been given that he launched the original appeal.
Thus the replay of the game was cancelled, and Fulham went into the semi-finals of the Victory Cup.
On 11 April 1919 Norris wrote an open letter complaining about Fulham’s selection (which is interesting considering he was a director of Fulham at the time).
This letter was published in Athletic News (whose man had interviewed Norris at the game) on 14 April 1919. Norris then resigned from Fulham FC’s board of directors.
But that was not the end of the affair. On 19 April 1919, the semi final of the London Victory Cup took place and the selected venue was Highbury. The result was Chelsea 4 Crystal Palace 0. The other semi was played at Stamford Bridge and the result was Fulham 2 Tottenham 0. For this game Fulham avoided all controversy and played none of their loan players but their regular team.
The committee of the London Combination then decided, perhaps as a sop to Norris, to play the final on 26 April 1919 at Highbury, and to have another committee meeting on the eve of the event.
At this committee meeting on 25 April 1919 the Combination prepared to vote itself out of existence, as per the mandate it had given itself in 1915 – being a regional league for the duration of the war. However, such were the tensions that existed in football and such were the power plays that were going on, the members decided to keep the Combination not least to protect the interests of London clubs against what they perceived as the pro-northern bias of the Football League.
The next day the final went ahead and Chelsea beat Fulham 3-0 in front of 36,000.
Naturally many in the crowd were Arsenal regulars and they spent the game letting Fulham know what they thought of them. This anti-Fulham feeling was encouraged by the fact that Arsenal used the rules that the committee has reviewed to allow Fulham to continue, and loaned Jack Rutherford to Chelsea for the match and in true Rutherford style he scored two of the goals for Chelsea.
Henry Norris and his wife were at the game and Edith presented the trophy to Chelsea.
Subsequently the Combination continued and became the reserve league for London clubs and later for clubs from other areas. It lasted until May 2012, just three years short of its 100th anniversary.
30 March 1915
On this day Henry Norris, chairman of Arsenal FC, went to a joint meeting of the FA and the Football League.
This meeting was called because the Colonel of the recently established Footballers’ Battalion had complained that some football clubs were actively working to stop their players joining the army.
At the time there was no conscription, and the British Empire prided itself on having a volunteer army of paid recruits, while other nations conscripted young men to fight, often against their will.
Charlie Buchan, not yet an Arsenal player, had himself reported the action of clubs in not letting their players sign up, with his club saying that they would sue for breach of contract if he did indeed leave to serve in the army.
Henry Norris had a particular interest in, and knowledge of, what was happening, because it was he who had proposed the Footballers’ Battalion in the first place.
His idea was simple. If some players did volunteer, then supporters of the team that the footballers played for could join the same battalion and work alongside the men they had been watching on the pitch week by week.
It was a remarkably simple but very effective plan and resulted in a significant number of volunteers being signed up. The only problem was that there were no weapons for the men to be trained to use, nor were there funds set aside to run the battalion.
As a result Henry Norris funded the training arrangements of three footballers’ battalions himself, and in response to the complaint about clubs not being co-operative, Norris was naturally able to assure the meeting that the two clubs of which he was a director (Arsenal and Fulham) were going out of their way to encourage players. What’s more (and this is, I think an important revelation) both clubs were still paying the wages of the players who had signed up.
Given the debts Norris had incurred in moving Arsenal to Highbury, with the complete building of the ground from scratch, and with a huge decline in crowds since the outbreak of war in 1914, Norris’ support for the battalion was particularly generous.
However, there was a huge amount of antagonism against the clubs in the press at the time, the media almost unanimously claiming that continuing to have football being played at a time of war, was a grave distraction. The media were in favour of horse racing continuing (a sport favoured by a number of newspaper owners) but very much against football.
Indeed, the Times even went so far as to send one of its junior reporters to watch an Arsenal match, and his report was included in the paper. Unfortunately, the cub didn’t realise he had gone to Highbury on a day when Arsenal were away, and what he actually witnessed was a reserve game.
On a more positive side it appears that Henry Norris and George Allison, (who later became club manager but pre-war acted as Arsenal’s press officer and programme editor), stayed in touch at this time. Within a year both were employed in the War Office – Norris eventually being in charge of conscription, with Allison working in the propaganda division.
Allison received no formal recognition of his work, but Norris was first knighted for his work in raising the football battalions, and then promoted through the officer classes from having no rank in 1914, rising to become a Lieutenant Colonel by 1917, in recognition of his total reorganisation of recruitment and overseeing conscription and later demobilisation.
Lt Col Sir Henry Norris, to give him his full title by the end of the war, later warned the government strongly against introducing conscription in Ireland, and he was right in this regard. The moment it was introduced, the Catholic church’s bishops denounced the move, told their flock to stand firm against the notion, and thus effectively started the Irish war of Independence which lasted until 1921.
29 March 1973
Happy birthday Marc Overmars
Marc Overmars is one of those Arsenal players who played for Arsenal for just three years before being sold on to Barcelona for a massive profit, in order to help pay for the forthcoming new stadium.
His first main club was Go Ahead Eagles which he joined aged 14, before moving on to Willem II and then Ajax where under Louis van Gaal he won the European Cup in 1995. Arsène Wenger’ signed him in the summer transfer window in 1997 for £5.5 million – despite the fact that he had had a serious knee injury the year before.
But he won the Double in his (and Mr Wenger’s) first full season playing on the left wing using his great speed alongside Dennis Bergkamp’s power and insightfulness.
And then there was Old Trafford in March 1998 – scoring a goal that was often repeated on TV as Man U were beaten 1-0. In the film, Overmars scores and then looks around as if to say “where are the rest of you?”
The game that won the league championship was no different. Overmars ran the show in the first half giving us what I (sitting in the North Bank with my much more nervous mate) took to be an unassailable lead. Roger was not so sure, but Overmars and the rest did not let us down.
After the Double the injuries returned and yet despite this Mr Wenger pulled off the amazing trick in 2000 of selling a clearly injury prone player to Barcelona for something like five times what we paid for him. He had made 91 starts for us in those three seasons.
At €40.6 million he was the most expensive Dutch player of all time and yes Barce did get almost 100 games out of him, but few were of the style and quality that he had shown for Arsenal. Including wages he cost Barcelona around £4,000,000 a game.
Not only was it an expensive deal for Barcelona it was also a trophy-less journey for Overmars. On 26 July 2004 he retired from football and became technical director of Go Ahead Eagles.
Then on 26 July 2008, during the Jaap Stam testimonial Overmars showed he still had his talent and on 10 August 2008 he came out of retirement to play one more season. He later moved on to be director of football at Ajax.
Then on February 28 2013 the London Evening Standard reported that Marc Overmars would be happy to return to Arsenal as part of the club’s backroom staff. He is reported as saying, “The way I work with Ajax, I do the transfers, the contracts and organise the scouting, so it suits me. It wouldn’t surprise me if I work in the future at Arsenal — it could be a possibility.
“I’ve never discussed it with Arsene Wenger. But if the board think about the future and make a list of people to work at the club, it wouldn’t surprise me if I am on the list of people.”
He also said, “I went back to Highbury to look around that area and still felt such a power there. When we were playing at home, we were unbeatable. That’s how we felt. But that’s the problem with a bigger stadium, often you lose that aura.
“It used to be intimidating at Highbury — that is the difference between the new stadium and the old one. When you build a new stadium, you must try to get the people as close as possible to the pitch.
“I was playing with Ajax in the old stadium and then the new stadium and we had the same problem. All the opponents wanted to play in this nice stadium so you lose that home advantage. They should have used more things from the old stadium in the new one.”
It is reported that with his father Ben and brother Edwin, Marc Overmars now runs a car restoration service named Overmars Classic Cars. In 2002, Overmars appeared in the Quote 500 richest Dutch people list for the first time, at number 441.
28 March 1896
The 18th local derby
On this day Arsenal played their local rivals, Millwall. The score was Millwall 1 Arsenal 3. This was the 18th game between the two great rivals either side of the Thames since February 1888, and Arsenal had not lost a single game.
Arsenal’s first game, as we know was on the Isle of Dogs, north of the Thames, at, or very close to, the original ground used by Millwall.
By the time Arsenal started playing Millwall they were playing in their second ground in East Ferry Road, but they moved twice more before then making the six mile journey across the Thames to Cold Blow Lane in 1910. (The distance Millwall moved is far less if you are a crow, or indeed if you have your own boat and landing stages, but the actual route by road is more or less six miles).
Curiously the journey from Millwall’s grounds on the Isle of Dogs, and from the Den to Plumstead, was much the same distance – about 7 miles, so throughout the whole of Arsenal’s existence in Plumstead, Millwall was the big local rival.
And while Arsenal moved from being Royal Arsenal to Woolwich Arsenal, during this south London period, Millwall too changed their name. In April 1889 they changed from Millwall Rovers to Millwall Athletic. Later they became Millwall – but I am not sure when. Opinions seem to vary.
Arsenal moved into the Football League in 1893, and around the same era Millwall were founder members and champions of the Southern League in 1894/5, winning it again in 1985/6 and being second in the third season of the league. However thereafter they became more of a mid-table club, only once reaching third in the league. However they did reach the semi-finals of the FA Cup in both 1900 and 1903, but did not enter the Football League until 1920, by which time Arsenal were packing in the crowds at Highbury in the First Division.
Most of the games played between the two clubs while Arsenal were based in Plumstead were friendlies, but over time competitive games crept in. The most notable were of course the FA Cup matches.
The first match against Millwall Rovers was an away fixture on 5 February 1887, in front of 600 spectators. The score was 0-4 to Arsenal.
In 1891 Royal Arsenal became a professional club, and that, combined with the great interest that the FA Cup held at this time, explains the sudden explosion of interest on 19 November 1992. But even this was nothing compared with the game one season later, again in the FA Cup when 20000 turned up.
That the friendlies of the mid 1890s could get 10,000 crowds was perhaps not surprising with Millwall at the top of the Southern League and Arsenal in the Football League. The first giant crowd was 25 November 1893 when Arsenal played Millwall in the FA Cup and 20,000 turned up. On 6 November 1909, 32,000 turned up to watch the 1-1 draw in the Cup between the two clubs, played in Plumstead.
But by this time it was the Chelsea v Arsenal game that was getting the crowds as on 2 November 1907 65,000 were at Stamford Bridge to see Chelsea beat Arsenal 2-1 in the League.
