Henry Norris and
Woolwich Arsenal’s Move to Highbury: Parts One and Two
Last
updated: 16 September 2008
In 1912, if you
believe his own account (of 1927), Henry Norris spent several months searching
London for a site suitable for a professional football club to set up home
in. Why did he pick a rather small site
in the centre of a middle-class housing estate in the London Borough of
Islington? The answer below is
three-fold: transport and crowds; evangelicals and education in the Church of
England; and Did he get it right?
TRANSPORT AND CROWDS
Crowds were the reason
why Henry Norris and William Hall felt Woolwich Arsenal had to move. In 1912, at least, you needed crowds to make
football pay. (In 2008 they look more
like an optional extra.) And in order to
get crowds to your football ground in 1912, you had to have cheap, reliable
public transport and/or be in the middle of an area where the football-going
public lived, so that they could walk.
London had many districts that fulfilled those criteria; Woolwich and
Plumstead weren’t one of them.
There’s virtually no
evidence of how Henry Norris conducted his search. In 1927 he described himself as making many
journeys by car, over several months, looking out for Woolwich Arsenal’s new
home. However, Norris had been in the
property development business for 15 years by that time. I’d be very surprised if he was just driven
about aimlessly until his driver went past the right spot by accident. I would imagine he spent quite as much time
poring over maps and plans of London as he did on the road. In 1927 he made no mention of having gone to
anyone, either in football or out of it, for any help. However, in his book on Archibald Leitch,
Simon Inglis suggests that Leitch, at least, knew of the viability of the site
Woolwich Arsenal eventually chose, sometime during 1911-12: Inglis writes of
Leitch collecting Ordnance Survey maps of areas which could be turned into
football grounds, and gives the impression he was touting his information
around in football amongst those who might be interested. Several other people whom Norris knew might
have thought of the site if they had been prompted: Charles Crisp, E G Easton,
even Lord Kinnaird. But Norris never
mentioned approaching any of them.
A rumour in the autumn
of 1912 suggested that Norris began his search by considering Battersea, which
he knew well and in which William Hall had his lead manufacturing
business. It was densely populated, with
good transport links - but perhaps he couldn’t find a suitable site there,
because by the end of the year he was actively rummaging around in north London
instead.
When Henry Norris
compared public transport in north London with the options in the Woolwich and
Plumstead area he must have laughed - or cried.
In an interview just before the start of season 1913/14 he described public
transport to Plumstead as a throwback to the 1890s. Transport links in north London, on the other
hand, were up-to-date and expanding. ‘In
in the morning, out in the evening’ fares were cheap, a requirement of the
Cheap Trains Act of 1883; in October 1911 105,000 workers used those cheap
tickets every working day (six each week - virtually everyone worked Saturday
mornings). Finsbury Park was a focus of
both the rail and tram systems in north London.
It had opened in February 1904 as the northern terminus of the Great
Northern and City Railway to Moorgate via Highbury and Islington and Drayton
Park. Since December 1906 it had also
been the northern end of the Great Northern Piccadilly and Brompton Railway
(now the central section of the Piccadilly tube line) via Holloway Road and
Gillespie Road, now Arsenal tube station.
80 trains an hour came up those two railway lines from the West End and
the City; and in September 1913 the editor of the Evening News’ football
edition made the trip to a match at Highbury from his office in Carmelite
Street EC4 in 25 minutes (wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could guarantee to do
that today!).
Good access by rail
was certainly Henry Norris’ preferred option, but the Finsbury Park area had
good tram links too: from the City via Highbury and Islington along Holloway
Road, and separately along Green Lanes; and west/east between Camden and on as
far as Edmonton.
80 trains an hour and
regular trams as well! At some time
during the autumn of 1912, Henry Norris and William Hall may have had a site on
the London and North Eastern Railway, at Harringay Park, under serious
consideration, but it didn’t have 80 trains an hour, very few places even in
London had so many. How delighted and
relieved Norris must have been when he discovered there was a site available -
though not exactly on the market - in Highbury within five minutes’ walk of
Finsbury Park. As he said later, to a
reporter from the Islington Gazette, “If we had had the planning of the
lines of communication ourselves, we couldn’t have devised a better
service”. And what in particular was the
service supposed to deliver to a football ground near Finsbury Park? Oscar Drew, writing as Merula in West
London and Fulham Times in March 1913, described what was required as,
“Central London workers released from toil on the Saturday afternoon” and
taking in a football match before they went home or to the music hall in the
evening. In a word - clerks.
Woolwich Arsenal
Football Club had been founded as a works team; its first players and its first
supporters earned their wages working on factory assembly lines. The club’s financial troubles since the Boer
War had resulted from the decline of the government factories in Woolwich - a
decline which had been the result of Government policy. In terms of London employment, however, the
Royal Arsenal at Woolwich was unusual: London had never had a great deal of the
kind of industry that is most efficiently done in factories with a production
line. If any kind of work could be said
to dominate employment in London in 1912/13 it was work in offices, which had
expanded hugely in the last few decades as a result of the growth in empire, in
world trade, and in local and central bureaucracy. Clerks - especially at the outset of their
working lives - might not earn as much per week as the best-qualified and most
highly-skilled workers in manufacturing industry. On the other hand they were less likely to be
laid off by economic downturns, or by industrial action in their own or other
industries. A young man working as a
clerk, perhaps paying for lodgings or a bedsit room, but just as often living
at home, not yet committed to the expenses of marriage and family, had
disposable income enough to afford the 6d (to stand) or 1 shilling (to sit and
keep dry) for a football match each Saturday.
He was exactly what Oscar Drew had in mind to be the bedrock of Woolwich
Arsenal’s new supporters. He was the
sort of person Henry Norris had actually been, in the 1880s and early 1890s.
80 trains an hour full
of clerks with money to spend on football - you would think the director of an
impoverished football club could ask for nothing more. But I think the property developer in Henry
Norris was looking at the maps and plans and thinking ahead. In the growth northwards of the suburbs of
London, the area south of Finsbury Park station had been filled with housing
already, a large area from which football crowds could come. Building to the north of the station had begun
in the 1890s and was moving outwards through Holloway and Hornsey towards
Crouch End and Alexandra Palace and towards what’s now known as the Haringay
Ladder and Wood Green. There was still
plenty of green land undeveloped, though - in fact, acquaintances of Henry
Norris in the estate agents’ industry helped develop it in the 1920s -
Finchley, Hendon and Barnet and further out into Hertfordshire: an even larger
area from which football crowds could come.
It’s clear from his public statements in 1913 that Norris was
exasperated when Spurs and Clapton Orient made such a fuss about Woolwich
Arsenal wanting to move to north London.
Norris clearly thought - and the Football League management committee
agreed with him, probably persuaded by William Hall - that there would be more
than enough football-goers to go round.
If they were not quite correct in their view, I hope to show further
down this file that it wasn’t because of a lack of potential supporters.
Spurs’ ground at White
Hart Lane was not quite so well-connected, by railway, as Finsbury Park. However, it did have a railway station
nearby, on the Great Eastern line out of Liverpool Street. And trams ran along
Tottenham High Road, again from the City; and up from Finsbury Park station
along Seven Sisters Road. House-building
had followed the Great Eastern and Eastern Counties lines from Stoke Newington,
through Stamford Hill to Tottenham; and was continuing outwards towards Enfield
(though that had better transport connections with Finsbury Park), Edmonton and
Ponders End. Spurs could attract those
City clerks.
Of the two clubs
already established in north London, Clapton Orient was the more isolated. They
played in Homerton, in between Clapton and Hackney Marshes. Railway lines ran along the southern, western
and northern edges of the district to the City of London - two branches of the
same line which went to Tottenham, and the North London Line which curved round
from Broad Street west towards Willesden.
When Woolwich Arsenal FC were drawn away at Clapton Orient in the FA
Cup, in January 1911, the football correspondent of the Kentish Independent
warned his readers that Orient’s ground, Millfields, was “somewhat difficult of
access”. He told them that the nearest
railway station was Victoria Park on the North London Line; or they could go by
tram to Clapton. They would have to walk
the last half-mile or so, however, through an area with a lot of old housing
which Oscar Drew of West London and Fulham Times described in 1913 as
“quite slummy”. His comments suggest
that the football club might be surrounded by residents too poor to go to
matches regularly.
At some stage in late
1912, Henry Norris discovered a site for Woolwich Arsenal FC, possibly rather
smaller than was ideal, but very near Gillespie Road and Drayton Park stations
(both being the last station before Finsbury Park on their respective railway
lines) and aready used as playing fields.
He did have two acquaintances who might have pointed him in the right
direction by mentioning that the land’s owners might consider an offer to buy. One was Lord Kinnaird, the President of the
FA, who had a link with the owners going back to the 1870s; and the other was
George Easton, a fellow freemason at Fulham Lodge number 2512 and football-goer
at Fulham FC. Easton was one of Fulham’s
representatives on the London County Council, where he was a member of its
Asylums Standing Committee. In 1909 the
LCC had been looking for a place to build what became the Maudsley
Hospital. The LCC agreed a deal to buy
some land in Highbury only for its owners to back out at the last
minute... However, Norris always spoke of
what he did as if he had taken action without consulting anybody - not even the
other directors of Woolwich Arsenal - when he approached the land-owners
offering to buy their freehold. Given
how reluctant he was to admit what was going on, even when the newspapers found
out in February 1913, his version is probably the true version of what
happened. The bid may have come as a
surprise to the land’s owners, possibly even a shock, and they didn’t acccept
it as originally put foward by Norris.
But as both Lord Kinnaird and George Easton already knew, they were
facing an uncertain future. They were a
small, privately-funded theological college; and for several years they had
been seriously short of cash.
EVANGELICALS AND
EDUCATION IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
St John’s College,
also known in Henry Norris’ time as the London College of Divinity, had been
founded in 1863 by Rev Alfred Peache and Rev Thomas Parnall Boultbee to prepare
for ordination in the Church of England young men who were fervent supporters
of its evangelical wing but who hadn’t had the public school classical
education and/or weren’t wealthy enough to go to Oxford or Cambridge
universities, the only places at that time where you could study theology.
Evangelical - what
does it mean in practice? The Oxford
English Dictionary’s definition holds good for today’s Evangelicals
too. An evangelical man or woman
believes that only your faith in the Christian god can save your soul; nothing
else you do will make any difference on the Day of Judgement. An evangelical man or woman believes that the
Bible is the sole authority on all matters of Christian doctine; all
commentaries and explanations by writers since, such as St Augustine of Hippo
or Erasmus, are completely unnecessary and irrelevant. It therefore follows that the evangelical man
or woman takes the view that the Christian church and its priests do not have
any particular role in the interpretation of the Bible. I wonder, in that case, why an evangelical
college should be set up at all - but this isn’t an essay on the weirdnesses of
Christian belief. I shall confine myself
to saying that what exactly it is that evangelicals believe illustrates why the
students at St John’s College were noted for their religious fervour, but not
for their learning; and also why it is a taste that the majority of Christians
couldn’t cultivate, even in the 19th century when so many more
people attended church regularly.
From its foundation
until after their deaths, St John’s College had very generous supporters in Rev
Alfred and his sister Kezia Peache, inheritors of a fortune in ship-building
and property made by their father in Southwark - where, I would suppose, the
firm’s name was well-known to Henry Norris.
They gave £50,000 in 1863 to set the college up and obtain its first
buildings. In 1865 the Rev Alfred bought
the freehold of a plot of land in Highbury, previously used as a teacher
training college, and presented it to St John’s, with no strings attached (an
important lack of restriction in 1913), as the college’s permanent home. The Peaches subsidised the college’s running
costs in the 1870s to the tune of £400 per year, to keep its fees down (they
were still high). In 1884 they paid
£5200 to build the college chapel. And
the Rev Alfred undertook a programme of buying advowsons - that is, the right
to appoint a vicar to a parish - with the intention of giving guaranteed work
to some at least of the men the college trained. The trust he set up to oversee this work
still exists. But in 1899 and 1900 first
Kezia and then Alfred Peache died.
Although it isn’t stated in the college’s official History, it seems
their donations died with them; immediately, St John’s began to struggle
financially.
A new college
principal, Professor Rev Albert Greenup, began work in 1900. It was his misfortune to preside over a
process of cost-cutting, which caused resignations from the college’s governing
Council, and resentment amongst the staff and students (wages went down, fees
went up). His best efforts to keep
college expenditure down kept being undermined unexpectedly because of
emergency building work. Although
impressive to look at (they were modelled on St John’s College Cambridge) the
college buildings on Avenell Road were clearly of poor quality: general
maintenance costs were about £400 a year; walls fell down suddenly; and in 1906
the college was shut for several months while the drains were dug out and
replaced, with the loss of £700 income. You
never stop paying for bad building work!
However, the official
History of St John’s actually sees changing times within the Church of England
as having been more of a threat to the college’s existence in the early 20th
century than its lack of secure finances.
The College was approaching its fiftieth anniversary in very different
times from those in which it had been founded.
As education in general had expanded in the second half of the 19th
century several theological colleges had been set up including two others
specifically for evangelicals. St John’s
now had serious rivals in the search for students, and the rivals charged less
in fees. A greater challenge, though,
was the steady rise in the educational standards expected from men seeking
ordination. At this stage candidates for
ordination did not have to have a degree to be ordained; but the Church of
England was steadily moving towards its current position where a degree is the
minimum requirement. In 1896 it decided
that all non-graduate students wanting to enter theological college to prepare
for ordination had to take an entrance exam; the exam would include Latin and
Greek. St John’s College had been
founded specifically to cater for students who did not have any knowledge of
either language. Its representatives
argued long and hard against the entrance exam, but although the then
Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Temple, was a long-time supporter of the college
and frequent visitor, as the head of the Church of England he wouldn’t
budge. The entrance exam was introduced
as planned, and had exactly the result the college had anticipated: fewer men
applied to St John’s to be students. In
1908 the Lambeth Council took the inevitable next step by saying that by 1917
all candidates for ordination would have to have a degree. St John’s had to consider whether it should
shut down altogether; or face up to the modern world by allying itself more
closely with a university theology department in London or elsewhere and
raising the standards required of its students.
In 1908 the college’s
governing Council set up a committee to secure its future in these changing
times. Naturally, as a banker and the
college’s Treasurer since the 1880s, Lord Kinnaird was on that committee. Professor Greenup was called upon to produce
a plan of action. His recommendations,
however, threw both the committee and the governing Council into indecision and
argument: his main suggestion was that the land at Highbury should be sold. Greenup’s idea was to use most of the sale
price to set up a main campus for the college at the University of Durham,
where those college students who were up to it could sit the degree exams. Only a small base would be kept in London,
and it would be set up in a cheaper part of the city. St John’s couldn’t make up its mind about
Greenup’s plan. A faction on the
Council, led by the Rev John Watts-Ditchfield,
were very reluctant to sell; they were sure there were other ways to
balance the books. (It would be
interesting to know if Lord Kinnaird agreed with them.) As one of the college’s most energetic and
successful ex-students (he eventually became a bishop) Watts-Ditchfield’s
opinion carried weight with other Council members. Eventually the governing Council did pass
Greenup’s plan by the chairman’s casting vote, but even after that the
agonising continued. For example, they
never publically put the land up for sale.
Approached by the London County Council in 1909 with an offer of £41,000
they agreed to sell only to find - with negotiations at an advanced stage -
that they couldn’t bring themselves to go through with it. Even when Henry Norris on Woolwich Arsenal’s
behalf gave St John’s a second chance, offering to buy the freehold of the site
for £10,000 (note how much less he was prepared to give than the LCC had
been!), the governing Council still couldn’t go the full distance. Instead it offered to lease to Woolwich
Arsenal FC 6½acres of its site for 21 years, the first three at £700 per year,
the remaining 18 at £1000 per year. The
college would allow the football club to build a grandstand with offices and
dressing-rooms underneath, on the east side of the site, and to bank up the
other three sides as open-air terraces for standing. If the football club agreed to the lease, the
Rev Watts-Ditchfield’s argument would be vindicated, and the college would be
left for 21 years at least, with only its educational difficulties to contend
with.
In all this, St John’s
- which had never taken much part in the social life of Highbury - had
considered only its own problems, not the wider issues. Woolwich Arsenal FC accepted the offer of the
lease, the legal documents were drawn up and the consent of the Board of
Education obtained, and still the college had not considered what the locals
might think. When the news leaked out,
it was then taken aback by the resulting, very noisy, outbreak of NIMBY-ness
amongst its middle-class neighbours against the noise, litter, transport
disruptions and moral depravity of professional football.
In early March Henry
Norris tried to stem the tide of comment and criticism by assuring the football
world that the contract had been signed by all parties and it was no good
protesting. He also made a public
statement on playing football on the sabbath day, saying he had always been against
it. I haven’t found any evidence that he
had ever thought the subject of any importance before! He seems to have spoken about it in an
attempt to reassure, not the football club’s future neighbours but the members
of St John’s governing Council, who were dithering again - final agreement on
the contract was delayed by a month.
Lord Kinnaird’s view as a lifelong temperance activist, that afternoons
at football matches were better than afternoons in the pub, no doubt weighed
with the governing Council members. But
still the vote to agree the deal with Woolwich Arsenal despite the protests was
only 4:3 in favour; and the college felt obliged to add to the contract
covenants banning football matches at Highbury on Sundays, Good Friday and
Christmas Day.
For their part, Henry
Norris and the other directors of Woolwich Arsenal hadn’t obtained the freehold
site they had wanted; but they were so anxious to take the college’s site that
they agreed to take a lease instead and to abide by its covenants. The college drove a hard bargain, not so much
over the rent but over the financial guarantees it required from the
lessees. Henry Norris and William Hall,
personally, were made liable for payment of the rent and - at the lease’s end -
for paying to have the leased land restored to its former state before the
freeholders took it back (this never happened, of course, but in 1913 Norris
and Hall didn’t know it wouldn’t). In
due course, the same kind of guarantees in person were required from Norris and
Hall by the specialist iron-frame building firm, Humphreys Ltd, which Woolwich
Arsenal FC hired to build Archibald Leitch’s grandstand at Highbury. Henry Norris did what he could to lessen the
heavy costs of the move to north London.
He got the Allen and Norris Partnership’s legal department to do the
work of preparing the contract and indenture, without charge. He used Allen and Norris to buy the materials
and hire the construction equipment at trade prices. And as football season 1913/14 approached he
borrowed some of Allen and Norris’ labourers to dig out and prepare the earthen
banks. Even so, the move still resulted
in Norris and William Allen being personally liable for £50,000* if Woolwich
Arsenal didn’t pay its way in Highbury, a burden that hung over both of them
until the early 1920s.
*I gather from social
history books that it’s very difficult to calculate what past prices would be
if you paid them today! But one that
I’ve read suggests multiplying early 20th century prices by 200 to get
some idea: £50,000 then becomes £10 million in today’s money. Ouch!! Might even give Abramovich pause.
I would suppose that,
in fact, the burden was felt more acutely by William Hall than by Henry Norris,
because he was not so wealthy a man. And
of course - as it turned out - neither of them was called upon to pay any part
of the £50,000. But Henry Norris did
feel all the anxiety of being liable for so much debt if he hadn’t got it right
about moving the club to north London; and it affected his judgement. Some of the steps he took to ensure that he
never had to pay out that £50,000 ended with him being investigated, and
banned, by the FA.
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW
MORE ABOUT THE SOURCES OF ALL THIS INFORMATION, SEND ME AN EMAIL AND I’LL SEND
YOU THE SOURCES FILE.
Copyright Sally Davis January 2008
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