Guest Tales – North Bank Ned on 1919 And All That
Jul 17th, 2015 by 'holic
Another Ned classic, for which I am enormously grateful. The one reason why I wish I was around, and a Gooner, three years prior to the arrival of ‘holicdad. My Pop must have been spitting feathers. Thanks Ned, you are a star.
Regular sufferers of these histories may remember that I said at the tail end of the previous one that an account of how Arsenal got promoted to the First Division in 1919 was a story for another day. The Guv’nor’s holidays have brought that day to pass.
The piquancy of this tale for all good folk from the Elysian end of the Seven Sisters Road is that it was those who dwell at the swampy end who got shafted.
As 1918 turned into 1919, football was already looking forward to an August resumption of regular league competition after its World War One hiatus. There was much talk of mergers and expansions as the various professional leagues vied for the best clubs. Expanding the Football League to 44 clubs from 40 with two equally sized divisions was just one of several proposals.
In the League’s expansions of 1898 and 1905, the clubs otherwise relegated from the First Division simply stayed up and were joined by those promoted from DivisionTwo.
But 1919 would prove to be different — to Arsenal’s great advantage.
For the circumstances, cast your mind back to the pre-suspension 1914-15 season. That ended, as it should, with Tottenham bottom of Division One and Chelsea occupying the other relegation place. Derby County pipped Preston North End for the Division Two title.
However, a match-rigging scandal had blighted the season. Manchester United and Liverpool players colluded to fix their Good Friday game at Old Trafford. United won 2-0 with a suspiciously lethargic Liverpool also fluffing a penalty. A ‘Holic pound of that vintage could have found 7/1 odds on that scoreline. Seven players across both teams and their friends pocketed some hefty winnings.
A subsequent FA investigation imposed lifetime bans from English football for all seven players, including Liverpool’s splendidly named half-back Tom Fairfoul.
However, neither club was penalised. Come the end of the season, United would escape relegation by a point. Chelsea cried foul, even though United had won 3-1 at Stamford Bridge late in the season. (Chavs and Mancs in a relegation four-pointer, as it would have been then, in the penultimate week of the season; we can only dream). Nonetheless, as matters stood at the end of 1914-15, Chelsea and Tottenham were going down.
Fast-forward four years. Arsenal (and Fulham’s) chairman, the newly knighted and recently elected MP, Henry Norris, was well placed to see that the Football League would most likely expand in some form for the 1919-20 season, promote Derby and Preston to its First Division and re-elect Chelsea to right the wrong done in 1914-15.
He would also have had good reason to suspect that Tottenham weren’t a shoe-in for re-election to the First Division in the event the League decided to expand it to 22 clubs. Even in those days, there were misgivings about the parvenu Lilywhites.
Tottenham’s chairman, Charles Roberts, was sufficiently concerned about his club’s re-election prospects to write to all his fellow chairmen exhorting them to adhere to precedent and maintain Tottenham’s First Division status. He also played the patriotic card, claiming that the club had finished bottom in 1914-15 because voluntary enlistments had weakened its playing strength.
The letter, not surprisingly, found its way into the public prints, which had started to play up the ‘election’ campaign.
Norris was canvassing hard, too. He had taken over insolvent Woolwich Arsenal in 1910 and moved it to Highbury in 1913 at great risk to his fortune. A property developer, politician, and Freemason, he knew how to work behind the scenes to accumulate votes and public support.
Like Roberts, Norris petitioned his fellow chairmen. But he also had other friends in the right places. Jimmy Catton, the short, tubby but hugely influential editor of the sports weekly, Athletic News, was a critical one.
Catton’s publication had a circulation of 170,000 in 1919 and was considered ‘the voice of football’. It threw its weight behind Arsenal’s candidacy for the top flight on “the sentimental grounds” that we were the pioneer First Division club from the south — we’d first gained promotion in 1903-04 — and had shown loyalty to the northern-dominated Football League in its rivalry with the Southern League.
“The Arsenal have a case for consideration as the oldest League club in London, and one of the most enterprising in the face of difficulties which would have appalled most directors,” Catton wrote under his pen name, Tityrus.
He brushed aside Tottenham’s plea for following precedent: “Fortunately for League Football there has never been such a situation as now obtains.” Roberts’ enlistment nonsense got short shrift, too. Just one Tottenham player had joined up during the 1914-15 season, Tityrus reported. Meanwhile, the club had bought four newcomers in what proved to be a futile effort to strengthen the side (nothing new there, then).
In this febrile atmosphere, the Football League convened a special general meeting on the afternoon of Monday, March 10th, 1919 in the Grand Hotel, Manchester to consider expansion. Norris was there, even though it was the day before he was due to make his maiden speech in the House of Commons. His fellow Arsenal director, William Hall, a quiet but influential figure who sat on the Football League’s committee, was also present.
After dismissing various alternatives, the League agreed to expand to two divisions of 22 clubs. It confirmed the promotion of Derby and Preston. Chelsea was re-elected unanimously in recognition of the consequences of the 1915 match-fixing.
The vote for the final place in Division One — yes, it’s always about fourth place — would be first past the post, but it was no two-horse race.
Seven clubs had put themselves forward for election: Tottenham; the five clubs that had finished in positions three to seven in Division Two in 1914-15 separated by just four points — Barnsley, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Birmingham, Hull City and us; and Nottingham Forest, who had finished three from bottom (cheeky buggers more than half a century before Brian Clough got there.)
Contemporaneous reports of the debate that preceded the vote are scant. It is not known if anyone asked the League (and Liverpool’s) long-serving chairman, ‘Honest’ John McKenna what he thought of Tottenham, but, by repute, McKenna did advocate Arsenal’s cause on the basis of our 15 years longer League membership than Tottenham.
The minutes of the meeting record only the hard facts of the vote:
Arsenal 18, Tottenham Hotspur 8, Barnsley 5, Wolverhampton Wanderers 4, Nottingham Forest 3, Birmingham 2, Hull City 1.
We were up, and Tottenham were down.
Tottenham fans still maintain that Norris bought the vote. There were no such allegations at the time, however, and no evidence emerged that he did — at least none that has survived to this day. And if it did ever exist, Norris took its secrets with him to his grave in 1934.
The probable truth is that Norris and Hall simply ran rings round Roberts and Tottenham, collaring the committee, a plurality of chairman and, most importantly, the Athletic News.
Afterward, Norris sent Catton a hand-written note of thanks for his support. We have no way now to measure how influential that had been, especially among the northern clubs as the paper was published in Manchester, but one gauge is that future Arsenal manager Herbert Chapman would call Catton “the man who got Arsenal into the First Division”.
Tottenham slunk off to Division Two, if only for a season. A new blot on the game would soon eclipse the re-election excitement, the Leeds City Scandal of 1919 — the one that would lead to a lifetime ban from football being imposed on Herbert Chapman.
But that is a story for another ‘Holic holiday.
48 Responses to “Guest Tales – North Bank Ned on 1919 And All That”
fuck me
that was great
loved it
.
cheers ‘hol and ned
champion stuff
I haven’t read it yet though…
Cheers Ned. That is a cracking read and right up there with my favourite history pieces. Thanks for putting that together- I can’t wait for the next one.
Holic, it says a lot about this place that you have so many regulars capable of banging out posts of this quality. How you yourself manage to do it twice weekly for nine months a year is beyond me…
8ball from last drinks. I think that may have been your century. I was being chased across the green by stewards when your lay-up hit me on the head and rolled into the hole. Who knew St. Andrew’s were so strict on chucking dinosaurs out?
cba. You know what you did.
Excellent stuff Ned. An extra flagon of mead for all your monks.
Dino
yer not far wrong
constantly amazed at the level of genius
on offer here
from the top down
think i said before
i know people too scared to contribute
cos of it
.
top site
top boss
top drinkers
.
i for one am grateful
for the release valve here provides
from time to time
.
time
being quite poignant at the minute
as i apparently ‘aggressively intimidated”
two dealin wankers
.
anyhoo
god bless here
and all who sail in her
a red and white and yellow and blue haven
.
.
UP THE ARSENAL
An excellent piece that discards all of the hyperbole and liwllies that were written about the events more than 50 years later by people who weren’t even born in 1919.
One minor detail, Norris’ partner was William Hall, not Wall.
Thanks Andy 🙂
Great read NBN. And since then not relegated for even once …
GSD from previous rounds about Bellerin’s post: heh. 🙂 You got to wonder how many extra hours little Santi had spent way into the evenings, after everyone went home from the playground, perfecting all these little technical skills. There was another last season where him and Monreal was playing “foot-tennis” and his precision and control was remarkable. 🙂
Thanks, all, and especially Andy Kelly, who does God’s work on the history of the club, (and spots typos).
And what GSD@3 said about the Guv’nor.
Anything that winds up generations of Spuds fans, and gives them a seething sense of injustice, not to say eternal chip on the shoulder is Good For Football and quite simply The Right Thing To Do. Those gentlemen in that smoke-filled room who followed their consciences and elected the Arsenal into the top flight should all be posthumously knighted.
With the Home of football closed I went to the Home if Cricket today for the Test Match. The Friday of the Lord’s Ashes Test is a wonderful day even if we have stuffed up in this test.
Anyway Ned, this is one of your best pieces and brings real enlightenment to a time which is highly controversial . Thankyou you are a marvellous and very readable Arsenal historian
On the way to the game I got a cab to Lords as I was loaded up. Got talking to the Spurs cabbie . Yet again he told me that any Arsenal fan who wants Wenger out is an idiot- ‘he is the greatest manager in the world’
Out of the mouth of babes and LWCs!
Excellent, Ned,
Certainly meat on bones for me.
Lovely stuff, Ned, a barrel of WWI mild on the bar for the monks.
Öskar
Superb Ned. Many thanks for that.
And more power to yer elbow cba!
Marvellous Ned – you evoked the atmosphere of the period superbly.
This is a link to an Arsene interview just before the Cup final this year. I missed it in the build-up. It would have been a better link after TTG’s recent post but I only just found it. I thought it was so good that I had to post a link. Highlights include his assessment of his best period at Arsenal and what he plans to do when he does retire. Apologies to any for whom this is old news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHlPQRWvIME
Top stuff Ned. Cheers.
Just in case anyone missed it our final against Everton is on TV on Sky Sports in just under an hour.
COYG
At the Singapore stadium waiting for game to begin. First time ever seeing the boys. Wow! Hey GST I just saw you dancing here.
Good Man Dennis! Enjoy!
Nice work Ned.
And Arsenal looking not too shabby either, even if their opponents couldnt play for toffee.
Agreed Zico. We looked very good at this stage of preparations.
And the blues certainly fudged that up.
It was great watching the team play, the stadium is just a ten minute walk from our place. The orcs were playing the first match, just went for the second had to support the local team. Then the boys came out, must say put quite a decent display. Theo worked quite hard, scored the first goal, ozil was very good and scored one as well. Cech made a couple of decent saves. Cazorla scored a super goal after being all over the pitch despite playing quite deep. Of course it should have been 6-1 but a win is a win to start the season with. Now I’ve seen arsenal play, yay! Must catch them at the Emirates.
Btw, the team got as much support as they would at home, which was nice.
Dennis, in truth they probably got more support than they would have at home! 🙂
I didn’t hear the usual groans at a misplaced pass.
Wind. The Open. No longer a love affair?
I doubt I can improve on what Dina Spillards said, but it is worth repeating what Ned — and Andy before him on the Arsenal History Society page — pointed out: That no accusation of Arsenal “bribing their way into the First Division” were made at the time.
I understand there is a reward for anyone who can find contemporary evidence of the offense (or “offence,” as it might be “spelt” over there), but no STB has ever claimed it.
That’s “Sad Tottnum B@$+@rd.”
If the LWCs use our stadium for two years,there are two big questions.
1) what effect will it have on the pitch? I would have thought it should be in good condition with all that shit on it
2)How quickly could we fumigate the stadium after their matches?
TTG, it cannot be permitted. They trashed the away end when they made their first visit to the Emirates. Those envious vermin will systematically wreck it over two seasons. A ridiculous suggestion.
If Wet Spam can simply decline to share the Olympic Stadium then we can do likewise. We neither need the rental income nor the aggravation of accommodating them. Fuck ’em.
Where has this come from? What is going on?
ttg, not only would Arsenal never allow it, I can’t see Islington Council ever agreeing to it either. They are already difficult enough when it comes to permits for arranging concerts at the Emirates so there is no way they would agree to having twice as many football events. I don’t really think Totnum have any option but to play all their games at Milton Keynes.
Well, assuming they ever actually start building that new stadium of theirs, that is.
What an amazing football club we love when watching today ,how lucky are we !
Very professional performance by what could be the first team (minus Alexis), with a real striker’s finish from Theo. Sign da ting!
Uncle Mike@27: There is a report that after the Manchester meeting in 1919 where we were elected to the First Division the Tottenham representative said they would accept their defeat “like sportsmen”. Not the words of someone who thought his club had been beaten by unfair means.
Okay, that’s the first trophy of the new season safely shelved. Next the Communist Shield, and then the ones that matter…
It’s already looking a whole lot better than this time last year, and the year before, and the year before etc etc etc…
Öskar
Anyone know the code for the Europey League fantasy game?
Öskar
…and the Goonerholic fantasy?
Öskar
Have at last emerged from my tennis bubble, just about got over RThought we looked lean and back in the grove yesterday! With the lovely Hector signing a new long-term contract must have his shirt next Sunday!
Sorry don’t know what happened at 39, put it down to my age.
COYRs
bath@25: there were gasps of incredulity instead of moans:) I don’t know whose idea it was to bring the Orcs (or choke city as I call them after the Neanderthals “tackle” on Alexis) to the game, maybe it was to demonstrate the two polar opposited of the game. Funny thing was the empty Orcs’ souvenir shop, hyuk hyuk. Possibly for the first time I saw Wenger not struggling with his jacket zipper, on account of him wearing a half-sleeved tee shirt.
[I know this is a digression from the topic being discussed so I’ll leave you guys to it].
The TV makes an unbelievable deal of Arsene’s struggles with his jacket. Some days they seem to be more interested in that than in actual football.
Of course the problem is with the coat zip not with Arsene. Otherwise how would he ever take a piss?
Logic, innit?
Scandalous bollocks in the cricket.
True, Cynic. It takes something to play that badly for four days straight.
GSD and others
Please understand the idea of allowing the Scum to use our hallowed ground is anathema to me. But Scudamore forbade them from having a split home ground next season because it is unfair ( correct) and asked them to consider the idea of ground sharing with Arsenal.
It is a very bad idea but they are running out of options especially with Chelsea renovating Stamford Bridge as well. Presumably the aggravation with West Ham rules them out, Wembley and MK can’t give them a commitment for a full season and they might end up moving to Upton Park for two years and paying the new owners a king’s ransom. That will be a fun negotiation with Levy, the beady-eyed little git.
I agree that it would never be allowed normally but it might be that the Premier League put pressure on us. I think it might lead to an even worse atmosphere between the clubs( if that is possible)
Whatever , let them understand how difficult it is to maintain your position unless you have a great manager and fans who understand the situation and pressures.
As for the cricket it was utterly shameful. We batted pathetically twice.
Cheers for the bit about Scudamore, TTG. I had no idea where this idea had come from (it did not sound like one of your own!).
I cannot see this happening. If Spurs can’t sort it out themselves then they will just have to stay in their current stadium, won’t they? It is not our problem. Having ‘climbed the wall’ that is building a new stadium in the middle of London there is no pressure that will be sufficient to get us to reach down and give the scum a hand up…
Bath@30 nailed it.
Spurs Reserves play at Brisbane Road, so why don’t Spurs use that? Orient could no doubt use the rent money. If I was Levy, I’d want Wembley or the Olympic Stadium because they have the biggest capacity of any football ground in London. The Ems is third. But as GSD said, Bath@30 nailed it.
Anyone want tickets for Saturday? >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>