By Tony Attwood
I concluded the last episode of this series saying, “We don’t know when Henry Norris first hit on the idea of taking Arsenal to a location both close to Tottenham’s ground, and immediately served by the newly constructed but already hugely popular underground railway system, but it may well have been after the 0-5 away defeat to Tottenham Hotspur on Christmas Day 1911.”
That idea comes just from putting two and two together, as the saying goes, and I doubt that anyone other than perhaps one or at most two of Norris’ closest associates heard of the idea before that. And I suspect that, as the 1911/12 season progressed in a seemingly normal and effectively most satisfactory way in terms of the team, which for the second season running ended up 10th in the top division. And indeed rather curiously, Arsenal concluded with exactly the same number of points as the year before, although with 14 more goals scored.
And Norris and his fellow directors showed themselves to be very much in touch with the public mood when after the Titanic sank on 15April 1912, the league’s two London clubs quickly got themselves together to play a friendly at White City Stadium to raise money for the Titanic Relief Fund.
Certainly Norris did not change any of this plans immediately, if that was indeed when he first hit on the idea of moving Arsenal north of the river, but after the Titanic sinking and the end of the season, Arsenal went on a continental tour – as indeed they had done in the summer of 1911. And as with the earlier tour they remained unbeaten against their continental opposition through nine games in three weeks. Unfortunately there was one defeat however, and that was to Tottenham Hotspur 4-0 (who had finished the domestic season one point and two places below Arsenal), in Vienna. Maybe Arsenal were just getting tired!
Now we don’t have details of this game beyond the score and date, but I do believe if was a moment of significance – although as I say, I lack the documentary evidence to prove it.
The first point is that soon after Tottenham and Arsenal returned from Europe, Andy Ducat, the star of the Arsenal team who had played in 33 league games in the season, was sold to Aston Villa. It was a devastating decision that completely weakened the Arsenal team, and was bound to frustrate the crowd – at a time when the crowd numbers needed boosting not shrinking.
Next, the story of Arsenal’s plan to move then became public on Saturday 22 February 1913 – a date on which Arsenal did not have a game but on which Tottenham were at home to Sheffield United. My guess (and of course we have no absolute evidence of this) was that Henry Norris asked the directors of Tottenham if he might join them for the match and then during that afternoon they were told of Woolwich Arsenal’s plans to move.
Now Norris would have done that for one simple reason. The common belief at the time was that if Arsenal were to move to near White Hart Lane, Arsenal and Tottenham would have each been trying to persuade the same men to come to their games. And I suspect Norris would have made the point that the commonplace thought that the fans would only go to one of the two grounds, was false. His view, as expressed later, was clearly that having two first division teams near each other would actually enhance excitement, and ensure that football was the dominant story in the sports pages of the London papers (of which there were half a dozen at the time) every day.
Now of course there was nothing Tottenham could do to stop Arsenal buying the land of the religious college that became Highbury Stadium, although they protested most vigorously against the scheme. I am sure they would have quickly realised that they had no case, and thus eventually seen that co-operation with Arsenal over the move gave them more chance of having some influence in relation to the issue, than they would if they had simply opposed the move.
In fact Norris was certainly not planning to reveal the site of the new ground on 22 February – and it only came about when two local journalists found him at the religious College in Gillespie Road which currently owned the land some time later. Given the rumours circulating about Arsenal’s need to move because of declining crowds in Plumstead, and the fact that there was only one site in the area which could possibly have been turned into a football ground the obvious conclusion was reached. Woolwich Arsenal were planning on moving to Highbury.
But that is not to say that Norris was planning to buy the land, because it was clear the College wouldn’t sell, but he knew the College was in financial trouble, and so needed some extra income. And indeed this is what Woolwich Arsenal needed: they wanted a site that could be rented. Their crowds in Plumstead were too low to make the club viable and they had just lost some of their most enthusiastic supporters who had moved north with the opening of the new munitions factories.
Maybe if there had been another suitable site in London, with good public transport connections, Norris might have opted for that. But he had not found one. Higbury was the only viable location.
This series follows the journey of Wolwich Arsenal from Plumstead to Highbury . The series starts with the article “Just what have been Arsenal’s greatest achievements” and continues from there on this site. The most recent articles are….
