The Arsenal Anniversary Files
Note about today: I don’t normally do lots of crowing about our ability to predict who will be a great player for Arsenal, mostly because most of the time we are wrong.
Latest article published by the Arsenal History Society
Below are the Arsenal (and occasionally one or two non-Arsenal) anniversaries for today taken from the complete files of over 6000 Arsenal anniversaries which appear on the Arsenal History Society website. An index to the monthly Anniversary files can be found in the right column of this site under “Pages”
The current historical series on this site is Henry Norris at the Arsenal. An index of all our series can be found on the home page.
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Today’s headline come from 1923
8 August 1917: it was formally announced that Captain Sir Henry Norris (chairman of Arsenal) had been promoted to Lt Colonel in the British Army, and had been made a Deputy Director of Recruiting. This promotion reveals the level of service he delivered to his country as he had risen from no rank to Lt Colonel in four years.
8 August 1919: The third (and final) Anglo-Afghan war ended and Britain prepared to grant independence.
8 August 1923: The wonderful Jimmy Brain was signed. Having had an unsuccessful trial with Cardiff, he became a miner playing part time for Ton Pentre. The signing suggests that the manager’s network of scouts had not been wound up by Sir Henry Norris as Knighton later suggested. Brain was kept on by Chapman, playing 204 league games for the club.
8 August 1962: Bristol Select v Arsenal – Joe Baker’s first game having signed for £70,000 from Torino. He stayed for four years and for three of these was Arsenal’s top scorer.
8 August 1977: Jimmy Rimmer played his last game v Aldershot in pre-season friendly having played 124 leagues, before moving on to Aston Villa with whom he won the European Cup, for the second time (having won it with Man U)
8 August 1978: Returning to the UK after an overseas tour Arsenal played Celtic in Glasgow and won 3-0, Stapleton getting one goal, and the other two being own goals.
8 August 2001: Death of Paul Vaessen. He had been a drug addict for several years and had a significant amount of drugs in his bloodstream at the time of his death. His passing went unrecorded in the local paper.
8 August 2004: Arsenal 3 Man U 1 Charity Shield. Gilberto Silva, Reyes, and Silvestre scored, and Reyes was awarded the “man of the match accolade”
8 August 2006: Tomas Rosicky first game v Dinamo Zagreb. He transferred from Borussia Dortmund for whom he had played 149 league games.
8 August 2009. At the AISA AGM, held in Highbury House, the Arsenal History Society was established as a body in its own right within AISA. It quickly launched a series of books which transformed Arsenal’s history.
8 August 2011: Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain signed from Southampton for £12m. He had played 36 games for Southampton in the 2010/11 season.
8 August 2012: Park Chu Young given squad number 30. In three years at Arsenal he only played one league game.
8 August 2013: Gervinho sold to AS Roma after merciless barracking by the anti-Wengerians – descendents of the detested boo-boys. He played 46 league games with Arsenal in two seasons.
8 August 2016: Mesut Özil, Laurent Koscielny and Olivier Giroud return to Arsenal long after the rest of the team having played through to the final of Euro 2016. It is announced that all three would be missing from the squad for the opening match of the season as would be Mertersacker who had been injured in the summer and would be out for “months”. He did however return to play brilliantly in the cup final in May.
