By Tony Attwood
In previous episodes in this series on Herbert Chapman and Arsenal FC (of which there is a full list at the end of this article,) I’ve tried to make clear what a huge change and challenge it was for Chapman to move from Huddersfield to Arsenal. With Huddersfield Town FC he had, in his final four seasons, won the FA Cup (the club’s first major trophy) followed by third place in the league and then the utterly unprecedented (for Huddersfield) consecutive league titles.
Thus clearly this was the best period of football Huddersfield Town FC had ever experienced, and at the time would have been hardly imaginable for a club that had, prior to Chapman, won nothing at all. And indeed so solid were Chapman’s foundations that even after he left Huddersfield in 1925 to move to Arsenal, his old club still went on and won the league once again, thus making it three wins in a row.
Indeed it is worth looking at the league table for 1924/5, Chapman’s final season at Huddersfield Town before moving to Arsenal, to compare the position of the two clubs. In the table below we can see the top three and bottom three for that season.
**1**
**Huddersfield Town**
**42**
**21**
**16**
**5**
**69**
**28**
**58**
2
West Bromwich Albion
42
23
10
9
58
34
56
3
Bolton Wanderers
42
22
11
9
76
34
55
**20**
**Arsenal**
**42**
**14**
**5**
**23**
**46**
**58**
**33**
21
Preston North End
42
10
6
26
37
74
26
22
Nottingham Forest
42
6
12
24
29
65
24
This shows in the clearest way possible, that the move of Chapman from Huddersfield to Arsenal was an utterly extraordinary decision in footballing terms. For he was moving not just from the League Champions of last season, but the League Chapmions elect of the current season to an almost-relegated club, and that it seems ludicrous.
The obvious question is “why would Chapman do that?” And indeed as a supplementary question, we might ask, “Why would he go and work under someone as notorious as Sir Henry Norris?”
We can deal with that last point easily, for although Sir Henry was made out to be a notorious and difficult man after his death, there is little evidence that he was seen as a notorious or difficult director of a football club during his time at Arsenal. Indeed quite the opposite. He was recognised as the man who had rescued Woolwich Arsenal FC from oblivion (something the league welcomed as the club had opted to be part of the Football League from the start, rather than – as Tottenham Hotspur had done – chosen to be part of the Southern League. Further it was Sir Henry who had persuaded clubs to vote Arsenal into the expanded first division in 1919 (and here we must remember that there were no suggestions of wrong-doing at this time; those suggestions arose later, seemingly following the publication of Leslie Knighton’s autobiography “Behind the Scenes in Big Football” published in 1948 at which time Knighton had no access to any documentary materials from held by Arsenal.
Sir Henry Norris subsequently came under strong attack from Leslie Knighton (who was Manager at Arsenal before Chapman), but that attack did not occur until 1948 with the publication of Knighton’s autobiography, “Behind the Scenes in Big Football”. Herbert Chapman and Sir Henry Norris both died in 1934 Chapmn January 6, 1934, Sir Henry seven and a half months later on 30 July. Neither left a written account of their lives and work.
Thus Knighton waited until 14 years after the deaths of Norris and Chapman and 23 years after his departure from the club to write his account of what happened while he wsa in charge of Arsenal. By the time of its publication (1948) Arsenal were once more big news, winning the league in 1948 with a number of league victories which in the history of the 1st Division had only ever been exceeded by one club – that again being Arsenal!
Thus the book arrived on the bookshop and newsagent’s shelves at the moment when Arsenal were once more the centre of football news, and both Chapman and Norris had been deceased for 14 years, while recounting (from memory, since Knighton was given no access to Arsenal’s files for the writing of the book) tales from a club that he had left in disgrace 23 years before.
Certainly, at the time of Knighton’s departure and Chapman’s appointment, Arsenal were a club looking very likely to be returning the the 2nd division, from which they had been promoted in 1919. finishing 20th out of 22 in the 1924/5 season, while Huddersfield finished top of the league.
But while Knighton faded from view as he flitted from club to club never coming close to a trophy, Sir Henry Norris became very famous indeed both for his work in re-organising recruitment and conscription in 1917 and for subsequently taking control of demobilisation after the war ended. Indeed Sir Henry was widely recognised for his personal alignment with the conscripted troops through his constant fight for injured servicemen to be given pensions after the war. He lost that battle, but his unflinching position made him friends among the regular soldiers, and enemies among the powerful and wealthy.
So here we have a coming together of Sir Henry Norris, famous wartime politician and promoter of both the rights of injured servicemen, and the rights of women, and on the other hand Herbert Chapman, currently the most successful club manager in English football, and a man known for his conservative and traditional view of the world.
And one might ask, what could bring these two together? Chapman after all was managing a thriving and extraordinarily successful club in Huddersfield Town, while Sir Henry had moved his club across the Thames, only to find they were not getting the crowds he wanted, as the club sank closer and closer to Division II.
But the fact is that although we have not delved much into Chapman’s personal position on issues of politics, sex equality, the war against Germany and the like, we can clearly say that from all the evidence available, Chapman was a conservative on virtually all issues ranging from religion to women’s rights, from clothing to politics.
Indeed the one and only arena in which Chapman indulged in any form of radical thinking was football, where he did take a completely new view on how the game should be played and how it could be organised on the pitch. Perhaps more than any other man, he was the one who replaced the traditional kick it up the field and push forward approach (kick and rush as it became known) with what we would today call tactics.
The story continues….
Previously….