100 seasons in the top division. 1: The Election
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By Tony Attwood; AISA Arsenal History Society
As we noted in the previous article (The election), upon the expansion of the First Division at the resumption of football after the First World War, Arsenal applied for one of those two new places in the top league, and got by far the biggest number of votes from the other clubs.
The voting was Arsenal 18 votes, Tottenham 8, Barnsley 5, and the four other clubs that put themselves up for election got between one and four votes each. Thus 41 votes were cast.
However, there were only 40 clubs in the League, but I suspect the President of the League also had a vote, which he cast. But of course given that Arsenal ended up ten votes above Tottenham, that issue of the one vote would make no difference either way.
One particular attraction for voting for Arsenal was that the League was still wishing to establish itself more firmly in London, and also wanted to recognise the support Arsenal had given the League by staying in the Football League, rather than the rival Southern League, since 1893/4 – while other clubs in the region had opted for the Southern League – with its obviously much lower travel costs.
We must also remember that this was not Arsenal’s first appearance in the top division – they had won promotion in 1904, and had stayed in the top league until relegation in 1912/13. In the two seasons before the League was abandoned due to the First World War, Arsenal came 3rd and 5th. Then, after the war came the decision to expand the two divisions, and Arsenal’s successful application to have one of the two extra spots.
In April 1914, the club’s official name was changed to The Arsenal and then in November 1919 it was changed again to Arsenal. The first change was for obvious reasons – calling a club based at Highbury “Woolwich Arsenal” made no sense. But the explanation for the second change (dropping the definite article) is less certain. As I will be pointing out several times in the coming articles, all of the board meeting minutes for the period are missing from the Arsenal files, so we can’t see what decisions were taken, and why the name “The Arsenal” came and went – maybe it was down to supporters calling the club “The Arsenal”, maybe the second change was simply to get Arsenal at the top of the fixture and results list in the newspapers…. Without the board meeting minutes, we will never know for sure.
Of course, bringing a team back together after the First World War was no simple task. Tragically, many players would have died or been injured in the carnage of that war, while many aged 30 or younger when football was ceased in 1915 and who survived the war, fit and healthy, would almost certainly have found it difficult to get the sort of match fitness needed to start playing the professional game again.
The League table for the final season (which itself was played during wartime, ending as it did in the spring of 1915) had seen Arsenal finish fifth in the second division. In the final game, the club beat Nottingham Forest 7-0. Henry King got four goals, Bob Benson two and Jackie Rutherford the other.
The team lineup was
Lievesley
Shaw Benon
Graham Buckley Sands
Rutherford, King, Lewis, Blyth, Bradshaw
For the opening game of the first post-war season the team was
Williamson
Shaw Bradshaw
Graham Voysey McKinnon
Rutherford Groves White Blyth Baker
Now the most obvious point here is immediately apparent – the majority of the team from the final season before the league was ceased due to the continuity of the war, were no longer in the squad. Age and the ravages of war had taken their inevitable toll.
But of course, the same problems affected all clubs, and each had to make their own arrangements – Arsenal’s including, as we have seen, a move up back to the top division.
Attendance figures for the period are of course, not as accurate as those today, and all the numbers were rounded into thousands, rather than the actual number of people in the ground. Thus the figure for the crowd on this opening game on 30 August 1919 was 40,000. Arsenal’s declared record crowd for the season came on 6 December against Chelsea, where it was reported as being 50,000. The return away game played one week later at Stamford Bridge, had a crowd total quoted at 60,000
But not every team did well out of the campaign – Bradford only got 7,000 in the crowd for a mid-week match against Arsenal near the end of the season.
So Arsenal finished tenth in the first division – below is the table published on 2 May 1920 – and having been elected to the first division at the start of the campaign, I suspect everyone at the club was very happy with this eighth place finish. (It was of course, two points for a win in those days).
What’s more, we can see the first division now included only two London teams, which meant that the Southern League was still seen as a major challenge to the Football League in the south of the country. Some are of course, no longer with us in the top division – indeed Bradford PA are now in the Northern Premier League, but I am sure all the names here will be familiar to you. And that is a tribute to the longevity of professional football and its clubs. Here is the table.
So yes, WBA are in the Championship now, and Notts County in Football League Division 2 (the fourth tier) but I do find it worthy of thought that despite all the upheavals of football, and all the talk of doom and gloom, when we look at the league table from 1919/20 we find names that we are still familiar with over 100 years later.
And just as a reminder – this was the first seaon back in the top division for Arsenal – and the first season in a run that led up to the season that is about to start (as I write this) which is the 100th consecutibve season for Arsenal in the top league – soemthing no other club is anywhere near achieving.
I’ll continue this series shortly with a look at 1920/21 – the second of Arsenal’s 100 seasons in the top division.
Footnote: Details of some of our earlier series on Arsenal’s history are given here and you might particularly like to take a look at
Henry Norris at the Arsenal: There is a full index to the series here correcting 100 years of rumour and false allegations.
Arsenal in the 1930s: The most comprehensive series on the decade ever
Arsenal in the 1970s: Every match and every intrigue reviewed in detail.
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100 seasons in the top division. 1: The Election
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