The latest post from our series on Henry Norris at the Arsenal
The current series: Covering all aspects off the life and work of the man who rescued Arsenal from extinction, secured the club’s future by moving it to Highbury, and then brought in Herbert Chapman as manager, our current series of articles is on Henry Norris at the Arsenal. The series is being worked on daily, and the articles thus far are here.
“Woolwich Arsenal, the club that changed football” and “Making the Arsenal” are both available on Kindle, but orders for the printed copies cannot be processed at the moment as I am currently away travelling. Please see here for more details
The series
This site is based around series of articles on specific themes – and you can find links to many of these on this page and on the left column under the heading “Pages”.
Here are some of the more popular series that have been written recently or are actively being updated at the moment.
- Arsenal in the 30s
- Arsenal players in the 30s
- Arsenal in the summer – now over 50 articles.
- The First League Season, including a review of each player who played in that season
- Arsenal day by day – over 5000 anniversaries of the club
- Arsenal in the 70s
- Tom Whittaker, player, coach, manager
Here are the anniversaries. Our headline comes from 1934
28 April 1893. George Lawrence signed the contract on behalf the Woolwich Arsenal Company with W B Jackson of Royal Arsenal Football Club to transfer Royal Arsenal into The Woolwich Arsenal Football And Athletic Company Limited
28 April 1894: In the space of 32 days up to the final match of the season on this day, Arsenal played 10 friendlies and two league games, with a number of players playing in almost all of them.
28 April 1897: Arsenal 1 Man City 2. Last game for James Boyle. In 1895/6 he started as left half, moved back to the centre, and then for three games played in goal, becoming on 14 December 1895 the fourth goalkeeper in 15 matches for the club
28 April 1898: Arsenal 5 Tottenham 0. With the season over for Arsenal this was one of three friendlies in five days – the others being away to Thames Ironworks, and Millwall. Arsenal also played Tottenham twice in the United League this season.
28 April 1904: Millwall Athletic 2 Arsenal 1. Southern Pro Charity Cup. The competition ran from 1901 to 1908, and generally involved seven or eight teams from the London region.
28 April 1906: Arsenal 5 Tottenham 0 (again). Southern Pro Charity Cup semi-final. Arsenal reached the final of the competition for the first time and went on to win it, beating Reading.
28 April 1908: Rangers 1 Arsenal 1. This seems to have been the first ever match between the two clubs, and was part of a major Scottish tour by Arsenal of eight matches in nine days!
28 April 1910: With the season over Arsenal arranged a friendly away to Colchester (where they won 3-2) to try and raise income, as the depth of the club’s financial crisis became clearer.
28 April 1917: Arsenal beat Crystal Palace 4-0, their final home game of the season played in front of a crowd of 4500. After the match Henry Norris and William Hall took the Arsenal squad out to dinner, at the Holborn Restaurant.
28 April 1920: Bradford Park Avenue 0 Arsenal 0. Only 7000 turned up for the game. The result left Arsenal in 11th position and Bradford in ninth. It was Arsenal’s third draw in a row, with one more to come… at home to Bradford.
28 April 1923: Arsenal 2 Sheff U 0 completed a nine match unbeaten run to end the season in 11th position. This run showed promise and gave hope for Arsenal, but it was a false dawn, as the next two seasons showed.
28 April 1924: Burnley 4 Arsenal 1. Alexander Graham’s last senior game. He played 47 league matches for Brentford and became the club’s assistant manager in December 1925 and later briefly for Folkestone before leaving football.
28 April 1927: John “Jack” Lee played his 7th and last game for Arsenal – Blackburn 1 Arsenal 2. He stayed with the club one more year, but got no more first team experience, leaving this as Jack’s only experience of winning a match with the club.
28 April 1930: Having won the FA Cup for the first time ever Arsenal then proceeded to lose 0-1 at home to Sunderland leaving the club 12th with one game to go. Also here
28 April 1934: A 2-2 away draw with Chelsea in front of 65344 was enough to give Joe Shaw the championship and make it two titles in a row for Arsenal. Charlie Jones last game. More on Joe Shaw here
28 April 1956: Cardiff 1 Arsenal 2; Alex Forbes’ last game. He moved to Leyton Orient, then Fulham and finally Gravesend & Northfleet. After that he worked at Arsenal training the reserves and A team, before emigrating to South Africa when he coached school children.
28 April 1970 Fairs Cup Final; the club’s first Euro trophy and the first Arsenal trophy in 17 years. Arsenal 3 Anderlecht 0 (4-3 overall). Kelly, Radford and Sammels scored. Also here
28 April 1979: Arsenal 1 Norwich City 1. Arsenal had reached the cup final on 31 March, and the distraction was evident to everyone, as Arsenal won two of their last 13 games. After losing 5-1 to Villa three days earlier this was almost a decent result, leaving Arsenal sixth in the League.
28 April 1980: Arsenal 1 Liverpool 1. FA Cup Semi final 2nd replay. Once more the sides played at Villa Park and as in the previous replay Sunderland scored. The team was: Jennings, Rice, Devine, Talbot, O’Leary, Young, Brady, Sunderland, Stapleton, Price, Rix.
28 April 1982: George Wood’s final cap for Scotland. He was given a free transfer to Crystal Palace in May 1983, before moving on to Cardiff, Hereford, Merthyr and Inter Cardiff.
28 April 1984: Don Howe became permanent manager. Although his win ratio was only fractionally below George Allison, he failed to win any trophies and he left part way through the 1985/6 season.
28 April 2008 Having beaten Derby 5-0 the previous September Arsenal went to Derby and won 6-2. Adebayor got a hat trick while Walcott, Bendtner, and Van Persie supplied the others.
28 April 2014: Arsenal 3 Newcastle 0. The result meant that for the 18th successive season Arsenal were certain to end up above Tottenham in the league – after 36 out of 38 games played. The crowd as always sang, “It’s happened again, It’s happened again, Tottenham Hotspur, It’s happened again”.
