The Other Directors
of [Woolwich] Arsenal FC in Henry Norris’ time
Last
updated: January 2011
GEORGE LEAVEY was the man who, in desperation, asked the directors of
Fulham FC to help save Woolwich Arsenal FC from ceasing to exist.
He was the chairman of the club in 1910, and its biggest
creditor. I’ve written elsewhere about how William Hall and Henry
Norris became the dominant forces at [Woolwich] Arsenal FC. Here
I’ll just give some other details about Leavey.
George Hiram Leavey was born around 1858 in rural Hampshire, the son of
a man who combined farming with running the local pub. George had
an elder brother and so didn’t take on the family business; by 1881 he
had moved to Maidstone where he was working as an assistant in a
clothes shop. He had married Rosina Parker in 1879.
By 1891, George Leavey had started his own business in High Street
Chatham, selling men’s and boys’ suiting and coats. He, Rosina
and their six children lived above the shop, with the six young men who
worked in the shop living with them as boarders. Four young women lived
at the address too, one a school-teacher and three who described
themselves to the census taker as domestic servants so they could have
worked in the shop, or for the family, or both. Rosina really had
her work cut out, managing such a large household.
According to Inside-Left, writing in the Woolwich-based Kentish
Independent in 1910, Leavey opened his shop in Hare Street Woolwich in
1896. Within a few years the business also had a shop at 2 The
Broadway Stratford, a relatively new northern suburb. Both George
Leavey’s sons were old enough to work for him by this time and business
was prospering, it seems: the family’s income was now sufficient for
them not to need to live above any of the shops any longer. It’s
one of those strange coincidences that football does tend to throw up,
that in 1901 George Leavey, Rosina and their children were living at 49
Highbury New Park, a short walk from where [Woolwich] Arsenal were to
move to in 1912. The Leaveys were gone from there before Woolwich
Arsenal arrived, however; to other addresses in north-west London, even
further from Woolwich.
It was opening the shop in Woolwich, of course, which led George Leavey
to become involved with Woolwich Arsenal FC. I suggest his
investment of time and - more importantly - cash and credit, came about
as part of his efforts to get his name known in the district.
Unfortunately, he became the man looked to by other investors in the
club to hand over money when times got rough. Inside-Left said,
for example, that Leavey had paid the players’ wages several times
during the close season of 1909. He lent the club money by taking
out a mortgage on its stadium at the Manor Ground, and also lent money
without security. This was what directors of a football club were
expected to do at that time - Norris did it - but early in 1910 Leavey
decided he couldn’t continue to support Woolwich Arsenal in this way
any longer, and guided Woolwich Arsenal FC into liquidation. His
intention was to retrieve some at least of the money he was owed; to
sort out the club’s financial situation; and re-launch it, run by a new
company and free of its debt. But he found he couldn’t do that
with money from Woolwich, so rather than let the club die and lose all
the money he had lent it, he invited into it men from elsewhere.
He was the first chairman of Woolwich Arsenal Football and Athletic
Company Limited, the limited company created by William Hall and Henry
Norris in 1910.
I have said that George Leavey was not born in Woolwich; and I’m not
sure that he ever lived there. Despite this, when directors from
Fulham FC got involved in rescuing Woolwich Arsenal FC, he was at first
adamant that he wouldn’t countenance any solution to the club’s
problems which involved it moving out of the district. However, over
the next two seasons he seems to have come to acknowledge that
professional football in Woolwich simply couldn’t make ends meet.
He resigned as director in April 1912, in full knowledge of what it was
likely to mean. He kept his business in Woolwich, however.
It was still at the same address in Hare Street in 1931, the year
Arsenal FC won its first Football League championship. I thought
I could remember Leavey being invited to the festivities on that
occasion but when I looked through my notes (January 2009) I couldn’t
find any evidence. I hope the club did include him in its
celebrations; Leavey did quite as much as William Hall and Henry Norris
to keep the club alive.
JOHN HUMBLE was born in 1863 in Stockton-on-Tees. In 1881 he was
working as an engine fitter in Stockton but must have lost his job
because within a few years he’d left the industrial north-east and come
south in search of work. By 1891 he was working as a machine
maker at the Royal Ordnance Factory and had married Amelia Starling, a
local woman. In 1886, he was one of the group of workers who
founded Woolwich Arsenal FC as an amateur work’s team. He played
in the team for a short while, and while most of the other founders
moved on and dropped out, Humble stayed involved with the club’s
management for much of the rest of his life. He had a gift for
seeing where the club should be going: it was Humble who first
suggested that it needed to turn professional to keep up with the best
northern teams.
In 1901 John and Amelia and their family were living at 72 Piedmont
Road Woolwich. The information Humble gave the census taker
indicated that he had been promoted to a supervisory role as examiner
of guns and steel in the factory. His move off the factory floor
probably saved him from having to take part in the programme of
redundancies that had such a damaging effect on the economy of Woolwich
and Plumstead, including Woolwich Arsenal FC, in the years after the
end of the Boer War.
In 1905 John Humble was chairman of Woolwich Arsenal FC. At that
year’s AGM, he had to make a speech explaining why the club was going
to refurbish its current grandstand rather than continue with the
project to build a new one, on which a lot of money had already been
spent. Humble survived as chairman that year, but several new
directors were elected to the club’s board who instigated a policy he
deeply opposed, and he resigned from the board at the AGM of
1906. Writing about the resignation in Athletic News, its London
correspondent Grasshopper said that Woolwich Arsenal FC would miss
Humble’s “keen business capabilities” but for a year or so the new
directors’ policy of selling good players seemed to be working: the
deficits of Humble’s chairmanship were turned into a profit in a season
or two. However, Humble’s criticism that such a policy was
“absolutely ruinous” was proved correct in the longer term: I’ve
indicated above that George Leavey was having to subsidise the club’s
wages bill in mid-1909 and by early 1910 Leavey had realised that the
recent liquidity problems weren’t going to go away.
John Humble held himself aloof from Leavey’s first attempts to form a
new limited company to take over the club’s current one. Even if
he’d felt that Leavey would succeed in finding new investment, Humble
was not a wealthy man and couldn’t offer Leavey the promise of money
soon which Leavey most needed. As late as 1901 the Humbles were
having to sub-let one room of their house to help with the family
finances. So Humble wasn’t mentioned in the Kentish Independent’s
coverage of the crisis until April 1910, when he attended a dinner held
to celebrate the finding of money enough to keep the club going.
That initiative collapsed, though, and the directors of Fulham FC
stepped in.
Humble was not mentioned in the Kentish Independent’s account of the
fractious meeting which formally set up Woolwich Arsenal Football and
Athletic Company Limited on 25 July 1910. I presume he didn’t
attend it. However, between that meeting and November 1910, he
had bought shares in the company. The 26 shares he had bought
made him eligible to serve on the company’s board and he had been
elected a director. This couldn’t have happened without the
consent of the directors who were already in-post: Henry Norris,
William Hall and George Leavey. I suggest that it was George
Leavey who pursued and persuaded Humble. They had known each
other through Woolwich Arsenal FC since the mid-1890s. Leavey
will have thought of Humble as a bridge between the club’s old limited
company, now defunct, and the new one: someone involved with the club
from the start and the only director who lived near its ground.
In addition, Humble’s involvement in the new limited company might
persuade other local residents to buy shares (a nice idea, but it
didn’t work, the locals weren’t persuaded). In 1911 John Humble
acted as go-between in the ongoing dispute between the new limited
company and a committee set up in Rotherhithe to raise funds for the
old one. Henry Norris and William Hall considered the money
raised by that committee as belonging to the club; the committee
members were not so sure and had refused Norris and Hall’s outright
request for the money. After several months of diplomacy, Humble
did persuade the fund-raisers in Rotherhithe to hand over the money
they had raised.
John Humble attended his first AGM as a director of Woolwich Football
and Athletic Company Limited on 17 June 1911. During season
1911/12 it became clear to Norris and Hall that the club was not
getting any nearer financial viability; and that local interest in
investing in the club was not going to come forward. George
Leavey resigned from the board in the spring of 1912 and shortly
afterwards Humble was obliged to agree to what he had opposed a few
years before: the sale of a good player to help the club pay its way
through the summer. If he opposed the idea now as he had before,
he didn’t make any public statement questioning the wisdom of it.
At the club’s AGM on 26 July 1912 he made the only speech I can find in
all his time as a director, supporting the idea that the club should
move away from Plumstead in search of what the Kentish Independent
described (quoting Humble’s actual words, I think) as “the red hot
enthusiasm” of its early days - he now being the only director able to
remember them. It seems that Humble had decided that if the club
had to move to stay alive, then so be it; to move it elsewhere was
better than watching it go out of existence. What he thought
about the relegation of season 1912/13 - which fully justified his
belief in 1906 that selling the club’s best players would cost the club
in the long-term - he kept to himself.
The site Henry Norris finally found for Woolwich Arsenal FC was not an
easy journey from Humble’s home and work. During the war, as a
senior worker in an arms factory, he naturally had no time to spare for
going to football matches, and it took a while after the fighting had
ended for Humble to return to being a regular at Arsenal’s home
games. He may still have been too busy with the aftermath of war
at the Royal Arsenal to attend a dinner given for Arsenal at the House
of Commons in October 1920 by Baldwin Raper MP, in whose constituency
Highbury was.
By the early 1920s Humble was back watching Arsenal fairly often.
The period 1922-23 was the one in which Humble was mentioned most by
Arthur Bourke, who wrote on football in the Islington Daily
Gazette. This was a time when Henry Norris and William Hall were
often busy elsewhere and the other directors had to carry out duties
normally undertaken by those two. For example, in the absence of
Norris (abroad) and Hall (ill with flu) Humble helped Charles Crisp and
George Peachey welcome and entertain the Duke of York at a game at
Highbury on 4 February 1922. This may have been the occasion on
which (according to Leslie Knighton) the best champagne was bought to
entertain HRH royally but when he arrived all he wanted was a cup of
tea! Humble was at White Hart Lane for the derby game on 23
September 1922 which ended in a fight and Spurs 1 Arsenal 2; so he was
called as a witness on 5 October 1922 when the FA held an enquiry on
the incidents that occurred immediately after Spurs’ late goal.
Again with Peachey, Humble accompanied an Arsenal squad on their tour
of Scandinavia in May 1923. Of course he attended the dinner
given in August 1923 to mark the retirement of Jock Rutherford after
his long career at Arsenal. And in October 1923 he went at the
invitation of the management of the Alhambra Theatre in Charing Cross
Road to see a film of an Arsenal game; the directors all sat in one of
the boxes while the players sat in the stalls. This period when
Humble was most in the eye of the Arsenal public ended on 12 January
1924 when he helped welcome the Lord Mayor of London and the Mayor of
Luton to the FA Cup tie Arsenal 4 Luton Town 1. After that point
he did not figure quite so much in Bourke’s coverage of Arsenal’s
entertaining; though he did still go to the matches.
Did Humble attend many board meetings, after they had switched location
to Avenell Road? I’ve haven’t been allowed access to Arsenal’s
Minute Books so I haven’t got any direct information. It might
have been difficult for him to get to north London after work; and if
the meetings were held during working hours he could not possibly have
attended them. In any case, according to Henry Norris in 1927 and
1929, all financial matters at the club were in the hands of a
sub-committee consisting of himself and William Hall; so Humble might
have thought that - unless there was something out of the ordinary on
the agenda - it didn’t matter much if he missed most meetings. All
other directors were elected on the understanding that Hall and Norris
did the money work. And it was those two men, with the club’s
secretary-manager, who signed off the annual report. There’s no
evidence that Humble objected to this state of affairs. And if he
had objected, it would have been a tough and determined man who took on
Henry Norris in particular to challenge it. Humble was one of
many who didn’t challenge it, and in 1927 came the reckoning.
1927 began for Humble with him, George Peachey and Samuel Hill-Wood
accompanying the squad to their FA Cup 3rd Round tie at Sheffield
United; a game which they won, to the surprise of all who knew what a
hoodoo Bramall Lane was for Arsenal teams. Norris and John James
Edwards didn’t go: Edwards had flu, Norris’ wife was also ill.
Humble may not have been able to attend the FA Cup replay during which
William Hall and Samuel Hill-Wood were called to mediate an argument
between Herbert Chapman and George Hardy; because the match was played
on a Wednesday afternoon when I suppose he was at work. The row
between Norris and Hall which led to Hall’s resignation from the board
was between the two men; no other directors were present and they may
not have known anything about it until the next board
meeting. At that board meeting, Humble - if he was
there - was no doubt amongst those who tried to persuade Hall to stay
on. In vain. In the next few weeks, nothing was allowed to
disturb the team’s Cup run, which took them to their first final.
However, if Norris is to be believed (I’m not sure he is) board
meetings were a scene of open warfare between him and Henry
Chapman. Perhaps Humble was better off at work.
There’s no record of whether John Humble was at Arsenal when two
members of the Football League management committee arrived in early
April to follow up rumours that Henry Norris had forged a signature on
a cheque due to the club and put the money into his own bank
account. On Cup Final day, Henry Norris led the team out onto the
Wembley pitch, but he had no intention of speaking to the press about
the match in case they asked him about the cheque; so after the match
was over it was Samuel Hill-Wood and John Humble who spoke to the press
about their defeat. A few weeks of deceptive calm followed,
before William Hall asked the FA to investigate Arsenal FC’s finances
to examine whether Henry Norris had been taking the club’s money for
himself. Henry Norris immediately resigned from the board of
directors.
Apart from Norris, everyone at Arsenal cooperated fully with the FA’s
enquiries. Humble attended both the ‘in person’ hearings that the
FA held; but doesn’t seem to have been interviewed personally about any
of the events that were coming to light. But it actually counted
against Humble that he was not sufficiently involved in the events that
Hall wanted investigated to be required to give further
information. The FA’s Report on its investigations found Humble
and George Peachey guilty of having failed in their duty to the club
and its shareholders. They were judged to have not kept a close
enough eye on what Henry Norris and William Hall were doing with the
club’s money. On the last weekend of August, all the directors of
Arsenal should have received a copy of the Report (Henry Norris said he
didn’t get his in time). They were all required to go to the FA’s
headquarters on Monday 29 August 1927 to hear the FA hand out the
punishments (Norris refused do go). The FA ordered Humble and
Peachey to cease being directors of Arsenal FC.
George Peachey took the FA to court and established that the FA had
exceeded its powers: only a limited company’s shareholders could
dismiss a director from its board. But Peachey was a man
comfortably off and familiar with the processes of the law.
Humble was neither. He didn’t argue about the FA’s decree that he
should go. He resigned from the board of Arsenal Football and
Athletic Company Limited on 2 September 1927. His last act for
the club was to help its new chairman, Samuel Hill-Wood, to prepare its
annual report. At that stage Humble still had his 26 shares; but
a list of shareholders dated October 1928 indicates he may have sold
them by then.
John Humble died in December 1931 after what the Kentish Independent
described as a “long illness...patiently borne” which I take to be code
for cancer. I hope he had been well enough to enjoy the latest
two seasons of the club he had been associated with for so long: FA Cup
in 1929/30, first league championship with a record number of points
and some brilliant displays in season 1930/31. The KI’s report on
his death was very short and didn’t include more than the barest
details of his life. Most of the mourners were family, of course:
his three sons and their wives, his three grand-children. His
daughter couldn’t attend but sent a wreath from Borneo where she and
her husband were living (wouldn’t you love to know what they were doing
in Borneo?!) The current directors, staff and players of Arsenal FC
sent a wreath. Apparently Henry Norris did not; perhaps he didn’t
know Humble had died. Humble was buried in Plumstead
Cemetery. His widow was still living in the house they’d occupied
in 1901.
George Leavey and John Humble were the last two directors of [Woolwich]
Arsenal to have anything to do with Woolwich or Plumstead. All
the subsequent directors of Norris and Hall’s Woolwich Arsenal Football
and Athletic Company Limited had no connection with the area; several
of them seem to have had no other connection with
football.
GEORGE DAVIS bought shares and joined the board of the newly-formed
Woolwich Arsenal Football and Athletic Company Limited between July and
November 1910, at the same time as John Humble. He may have
enjoyed a football match but I doubt very much if he had been a regular
on the terraces at the Manor Ground in Plumstead. It’s clear that
he had his arm twisted to get involved with Woolwich Arsenal: he was
William Hall’s brother-in-law.
William Hall married Kate Elizabeth Davis in 1899. The family was
from Cambridge, where the father worked for one of the university
colleges (probably Queen’s) and lived in a house that went with the
job. The Davis family was a typically Victorian one, with six
boys and girls, George Ernest being several years older than Kate
Elizabeth. George Ernest described himself as a ‘chemist’ to the
1881 census taker; he meant that he worked as an assistant in a
pharmacist’s shop. I suppose he did an apprenticeship.
George Ernest married Alice XXXX in XXXX. By 1901 they had
moved to Leyton, on the northern outskirts of London, probably in
search of a better-paid job. Typically, they moved around quite
frequently but seem to have come to rest by 1911 in Costillani
Mansions, a block of flats in Maida Vale.
George Davis attended his first AGM of Woolwich Arsenal FC as a
director on 23 June 1911. He had bought 25 shares, the minimum
you could own to be eligible for election to the company’s board.
There’s no evidence that he ever put any more money into the club; I
would suppose that was not the purpose of his getting involved.
He was there to increase the number of directors, so the company looked
less like a two-horse race, while not voting against anything that
William Hall, Henry Norris and (until 1912) George Leavey decided to do.
In coverage of Arsenal matches, George Ernest Davis wasn’t mentioned
much by the Kentish Independent. Like John Humble, he was a
working man and not self-employed; and unless his work was near
Plumstead he won’t have been able to get even to home games very
often. Arthur Bourke of the Islington Daily Gazette occasionally
mentioned seeing George Ernest Davis at matches in the years after the
club had moved to Highbury, much nearer where he lived but not
necessarily more convenient for where he worked. Bourke saw Davis
together with William Hall on Saturday 17 February 1917 which, he said,
was “a rare thing nowadays” with the war continuing endlessly on.
They were both at the first game of season 1917/18 as well. I
presume that Davis wasn’t in the military (he was too old anyway); but
perhaps he was doing war work. He stood down as a director at the
AGM of 1919. Arthur Bourke never mentioned seeing him at a match
after that. A rather shadowy figure.
[ROGER THE NEXT IN
THIS SEQUENCE IS SLCRISP]
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Copyright Sally Davis January 2011
***