Approaching a 100th anniversary at Arsenal of mega-importance.

By Tony Attwood

100 years since the arrival of Chapman

Next year Arsenal will experience a major anniversary.  An anniversary of such gigantic importance it deserves not just recognition but also significant celebrations.

It is the anniversary of an event that transformed Arsenal from a 1st division club which had not, and continued to have no chance of, winning a major trophy, and whose main objective (not always reached) was midtable survival.

And “not always reached” is right, for in 1924/5, the season before our story starts, Arsenal had missed relegation by just one place and a handful of points  and been knocked out of the FA Cup at the first hurdle (after two replays).

Yet seemingly over night, at the end of that season. Arsenal was transformed into runners’ up in the First Division for the first time as well as being quarter finalists in the FA Cup also for just the second time.

There is no easier way to see the transformation of the club than to look at the league table at the end of 1924/5, the final season of Leslie Knighton at Arsenal as manager.   For ease of readership here’s just the top four and bottom four for the end of that season.

So it is true that Arsenal missed relegation by seven points, but also as we can see, the club,escaped relegation (the bottom two going down) by just one place while also having one of the worst defences in the league and a negative goal difference.

The top three must have seemed to be on a different planet, for the top of the league Huddersfield had a positive goal difference of 43.  (Goal difference was not used in those days to separate clubs on identical points totals, but I mention this to illustrate the gap there was between the top clubs and Arsenal.)

At the end of the season (in which he bizarrely, the manager of the day claimed to have doped his own players (and yes that is not a misprint for dropped, but is actually “doped”) to try and secure a victory over West Ham in the FA Cup, that manager – Leslie Knighton –  was unceremoniously removed from the club. This was not particularly surprising since in his final four seasons at the club Arsenal had failed to get into the top ten positions in the League, which had been their aim.

Knighton then worked his way through a range of smaller clubs including  Bournemouth & Boscombe Athletic of the Third Division South, Birmingham, Chelsea, and finally non-league Shrewsbury Town before giving up on football, although it is possible that he simply wasn’t able to get another job after Shrewsbury bade him farewell.

He had not won any trophies of any kind at any one of the clubs he managed.

But then 20 years after leaving Arsenal, Knighton, having failed to find any further club that was willing to take him on, Knighton wrote his autobiography relating to his time as a manager, and the period at which he was at Arsenal was serialised in a national newspaper.  It was in that serialisation that he claimed to have been laying the foundations as to Arsenal’s subsequent success under the manager who replaced him: Herbert Chapman. 

He also made some unsubstantiated and as far as I can find out utterly unfounded allegations about the Arsenal owner, Sir Henry Norris, who by then had passed away and so couldn’t fight back through any libel claims.  Although these allegations and others that were subsequently invented (including Norris having bribed others to get Arsenal into the first division in 1919) have been seized on by some Tottenham supporters and the anti-Arsenal media in general, no evidence has ever been presented to support such accounts,.

Indeed given what we know about Norris, such allegations seem very unlikely and what we know of Norris, and Norris’ past as a progressive politician (supporting women’s rights and pensions for soldiers injured in the first world war etc, as well as rising to the rank of Lt Colonel and indeed a major player in the War Office during and after that war), it seems extremely unlikely.  

I think it remains fair to say that on this site we have done more to explore what sort of man Henry Norris was, and his extraordinary contribution to life in London and the service of the nation, than any other researchers, and you can read in detail the life of Henry Norris in the series Henry Norris at the Arsenal.   

However in this series of articles we move forward a number of years to the moment when Leslie Kighton finally having been given his marching orders, on 11 May 1925, an advertisement, appeared in “Atheltic News”.  

Now I should add that although there is an Athletic News published today, this is not the same publication although The Athetlic News of the 1920s was then as now the home of some serious news discussion of footballing matters.

It was based in Manchester (a reflection of the fact that football was very much a northern sport in those early days of the league), and had been started in 1875 or 1876 (there is some debate over the exact date) and it lasted in its original form until 1931, when it merged with the Sporting Chronicle.

To say the paper was pre-eminent in its field sounds a bit like a throwaway line, but in this case it was true.   For not only was its coverage unsurpassed, both its reporting and analysis of football, but more than that, it had a very real link with Arsenal, for it had been Athletic News that had launched the campaign for Arsenal to be elected to the first division upon the expansion of the football league in 1919.

But I think that fully to grasp what happened with Arsenal’s election to the top division of the League, which paved the way for the arrival of Chapman as manager it is necessary to get a slightly more fulsome grasp of the history of Arsenal leading up to Chapman’s arrival.   And this because it must have seemed then, as indeed it seems now, completely odd that Chapman who was having considerable, indeed remarkable, success as a manager at Huddersfield should move to a club with as little pedigree or heritage as Arsenal.

So I shall offer a look at Arsenal’s history up to the appointment of Chapman in a little more detail in the next instalment, in order to reveal the size of the task that Chapman was taking on in moving from a league-winning club to a club that was struggling against relegation.