by Tony Attwood
A wonderful story has appeared on an academic blog, about two young members of the Royal Engineers who went on leave and then were too tired to walk back to their barracks at the Woolwich Arsenal, so simply handed themselves in to a police station to get a free ride back to base.
The story is that they went on leave, had a good time in London, and then having run out of money, handed themselves in. The police had no choice but to hand them over to the magistrate, who had no choice but to hand them over to the military authorities where they could be checked to see if they were deserters.
Which they clearly were not.
The story has been researched by Dr Drew Grey, head of history at the University of Northampton, himself a season ticket holder at the Arsenal, and the gent with whom I pass a pleasant hour or two before the games.
We have no information to the effect that the two soldiers whose story Drew tells were football fans, but one might still wonder if they ever played for Royal Arsenal?
You can read the whole story here…
Meanwhile elsewhere on this site half of the new listing of details on our player biographies is complete – the index now runs from A to K. You can find it here
So I am now moving on at full speed to create a second file taking us from L to Z. Work starts on that later today.
After that I am hoping to return to the story of Arsenal in the 1930s.
There is a index of the various series that have been run on this site on the home page.
