The players who began the season 100 years ago: David Greenaway

After our little diversion into some English members of the Woolwich Arsenal team of September 1910, we’re back to the Scots with David Greenaway.

He was an outside right who between 1908 and 1920 played 161 league games and scored 13 goals – so he was another of the 1910 squad who carried on and played in north London.

He came in as the number 7 for the second game of the 1908-9 season (Notts county away, lost 1-2, crowd 13,000) and then became a fixture, playing 36 league games four FA Cup games and scoring three goals all in the league.  (The web site Perfect People has David playing in the first game of the season – that’s not right.  The first match was September 2, three days earlier, against Everton.  We lost 0-4 – which is quite possibly a reason why Greenaway came into the team immediately after.)

He was born in Coatdyke, Lanarkshire in 1889, and played junior football with Shettleston.  Shettleston, from the East End of Glasgow are still playing at Greenfield Park in the West Region of the Scottish Junior Football Assn.

So at the age of 19 he came south after just playing junior football – which suggests he actually came south in order to find work at the armaments factory, and then managed to get into the Arsenal team.   He obviously was a decent player because he really do go straight into the first team – although we had used three different number 7s during the previous season and the stats show that none of them (W Garbutt, HG Lee, J Mordue) had the manager’s full confidence.

We can also notice that in the summer that he joined, Arsenal changed managers, with Phil Kelso going and George Morrell coming in.  By then the financials were in decline, so at 19 Greenaway might not just have been better than last season’s players, he might well have been cheaper.

However although he made the move to Highburty after Jock Rutherford signed in November 1913 from Newcastle, Greenaway was dropped.  He played eight times in 1913/14 and six the following season.

He was still young enough to fight in the war and served with the Royal Field Artillery.  He returned to Highbury for the first post-war season (1919-20) but only played three games that year.  He didn’t play at all the following year, and left the club.

There’s no details of where David Greenaway went after that, nor even when he died.  He seems to be one of those players we have simply lost in the mists of time.

Woolwich Arsenal

Making the Arsenal

Untold Arsenal

3 Replies to “The players who began the season 100 years ago: David Greenaway”

  1. I HAVE SEEN A TEAM PHOTO OF MARGATE F.C.
    FROM 1921-22 INCLUDING JACK PEART AND
    DAVID GREENAWAY ON A MARGATE WEBSITE
    COULD THIS BE THE ARSENAL PLAYER ?

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