The Wizard.

by ReadTheLeague | Mar 22, 2020 | The Big Feature

When Chelsea were first admitted into the Football League the marquee signing was, of course, the £50 purchase of Willie Foulke from Sheffield United. But he wasn’t even close to being the biggest purchase of a spending-spree which was almost Abramovich-like in its day. That honour belonged to Jimmy Windridge for whom the club paid Small Heath £190.

Windridge was born in Birmingham’s inner-city, in an area called Sparkfield one of five children to James and Harriet. After leaving school he followed his father in working for the Birmingham Small Arms company as a gun rifler.

After initially playing for local team Small Heath Alma he joined Small Heath in 1903 following in the footsteps of cousin Alex Leake who started at the club before moving on to Aston Villa and winning five England caps. Windridge played just 26 times for the then-first Division club, scoring seven before the Londoners came in with their offer.

That fee was conditional on Chelsea actually being elected to the league and he was one of three brought in within 24 hours from the Second-City club (who would soon become Birmingham City) alongside Bob McRoberts and James Robertson.

Of course Chelsea were elected and Windridge was a star from the outset.

He was in the line-up for the first-ever league match, a single-goal defeat at Lancashire Combination champions Stockport County on 2 September 1905.

Two days later the opening of Stamford Bridge was celebrated with the friendly visit of a Liverpool team which had won the 2nd Division the year before.

Reporting on the first match the West London Observer said of the new stadium: “The immense ground affords accommodation for over 60,000 already and still embankments are soaring skywards, while the gigantic stand on the eastern side rears itself along the whole length of the ground like a huge battleship”.

A crowd reported as somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 fans saw skipper ‘Fatty’ Foulke lead Chelsea onto the Stamford Bridge pitch for its first-ever match.

After a goalless first half the Blues went in front when McRoberts ‘dashed through the defence’ to score Stamford Bridge’s first-ever goal. Liverpool tried to fight back and hit a succession of low shots on the Chelsea goal but Foulke ‘in spite of his bulk got down to them as nimbly as a cat’.

The home team went back on the attack and McRoberts doubled the lead when scoring from a Windridge cross. Scottish right-winger Martin Moran got a third before, after the match had been halted due to a burst ball, Windridge made the score 4-0 with what was described as; ‘a really splendid goal’.

Next, Chelsea visited Bloomfield Road and recorded their first-ever league win with a long-range shot from player-manager John Tait Robertson proving enough to beat Blackpool.

Chelsea played their first home league match on Monday 11 September 1905 kicking off at 5pm against Hull City, another newly-elected club. Scot David Copeland scored twice in the first-half to put the Blues on their way. After the break Windridge scored twice inside four minutes to double the advantage and after Hull had pulled one back he completed the club’s first-ever hat trick to put the seal on a 5-1 win.

In October Windridge scored twice in his team’s first-ever FA Cup tie, a 6-1 preliminary round win over 1st Grenadiers but by early November he had been dropped from the team with David Copeland taking over at inside-left.

Chelsea performed well in his absence and Windridge had to wait until February before he got another chance with the first team. He scored two minutes into his return and, despite being out of the line-up for three months, still finished with 14 league and two cup goals.

George Hilsdon. Jimmy’s ally

For the 1906-07 season Windridge had a new ally up front in the quest for goals with George Hilsdon shrewdly brought in from West Ham. The pair combined for 46 of the team’s 80 (Hilsdon 28, Windridge 18) as the Blues won promotion at the second time of asking.

The pair’s goals had played a huge role in helping Chelsea get to the top flight and both scored in the first-ever game in the 1st Division. On 7 September 1907 Sheffield United visited and in front of over 25,000 at Stamford Bridge it was Hilsdon, set up by Windridge who got the club’s first goal in the division. But then things started to go wrong.

Before half time, full-back Joe Walton was carried off with a serious injury (one which forced him to miss the rest of the season) leaving the team with 10 men and the visitors soon equalised when Drake beat ‘Pom Pom’ Whiting. In the second half the depleted home team were unable to hold off the Blades who scored three more with Windridge managing a consolation with what ‘The Sporting Life’ called; ‘A delightful goal’.

Windridge was carried off during a November win over Bristol City but he returned in time to score in the 4-1 Christmas Day victory at Liverpool. He also got two in the 9-1 FA Cup win at Worksop in early 1908 where Hilsdon scored six and this form saw both players picked for the England team that travelled to the Solitude Ground in Belfast to play Ireland in February 1908.

Hilsdon scored twice in the game with future Chelsea star Vivian Woodward, then of Spurs, getting the other goal in a 3-1 win.

The same trio were picked to play against Wales at Wrexham a month later and all got on the scoresheet. Woodward grabbed a hat-trick, Hilsdon scored twice and Windridge got one as England romped to a 7-1 win with Billy Wedlock scoring the other goal.

Next up was a clash with the ‘Auld Enemy’ at Hampden Park and the selectors unsurprisingly made no changes to the front three with the Chelsea pair featuring just 72 hours after a Hilsdon hat-trick had seen the Blues record a 3-0 win at Everton.

Previewing the match, the wonderfully named newspaper ‘The Scottish Referee’ called Windridge; ‘The best backer-upper in the league’ and further praised him saying the inside-forward; ‘always makes for combination and sacrifices self to assist his partner. Most of Hilsdon’s goals come from the ‘Brum’s’ judicious passes’.

A new world record attendance of 121,452 were present and they saw Andrew Wilson of The Wednesday give the Scots a first-half lead. Even before this the visitors had suffered a blow when right-winger John Rutherford was injured making him a virtual passenger for the remainder of the match.

England drew level with 15 minutes remaining and it was Windridge who levelled. The man described as ‘Windridge the Wizard’ in the ‘Athletic News’ shot from distance and the ball hit the net just under the crossbar before rebounding back into play. The Scots tried to play on but referee Jim Mason signalled a goal and the game was, and finished, all square.

The Hungary and England teams in 1908

After Chelsea had ended their first season in the top flight in a respectable 13th, thanks in large part to Hilsdon and Windridge who scored 34 of the team’s 53 goals both were chosen for that summer’s national team continental tour. Four matches were played with England winning all comfortable by an aggregate of 28 goals to two. Windridge played, and scored, in every match including two in the 6-1 win over Austria in Vienna.

He played just one more match for his country, failing to score in the 4-0 win over Ireland at Bradford’s Horton Park Avenue ground in February 1909, the first since the tour, where the goals came from Hilsdon and Woodward who each bagged a brace. For that match a third Chelsea man, right-half Ben Warren, also made the line-up and Windridge, although not scoring, was brought down for the penalty that Hilsdon converted for his second goal. Even though he failed to get on the scoresheet, the ‘London Daily News’ called him the best of England’s three inside-forwards and indeed went further calling him ‘perhaps the greatest currently playing’.

However he (along with Hilsdon) was surprisingly dropped for the next match, against Wales, and his international career came to an abrupt end with eight caps and seven goals and having equalled the record of scoring in six consecutive matches.

Windridge made 34 starts for Chelsea in that 1908-09 season, scoring six times and his appearances tally gradually dropped over the next three campaigns, although he got the winner in the December 1909 victory over Spurs in the first-ever clash between the clubs. In November 1911 he was sold to Middlesbrough for a fee ‘exceeding three figures’. By the time he left the club he was the only survivor from the first league match and his Stamford Bridge career came to an end with 143 league starts and 54 goals.

Windridge spent three seasons on Teeside before going ‘home’ and signing for Birmingham in 1914. In 1915 he scored five times in one match against Glossop before his career was brought to an end by the outbreak of the Great War.

Also an accomplished cricketer, Windridge made seven first-class appearances for Warwickshire.

In later life Windridge made his home back in Birmingham and was mine-host first at The Woolpack and then at the Bull’s Head in Hall Green and it was here that he passed away in September 1939, leaving behind his wife Nellie.

Jimmy Windridge was undoubtedly overshadowed during his time at Stamford Bridge by bigger personalities such as Willie Foulke, George Hilsdon and Vivian Woodward. But ‘The Wizard’ clearly played a major role in taking the club to the top flight, and in helping to keep them there. Also the job as Hilsdon’s ‘backer-upper’ could not have been better performed.

 

Not sure if I have posted this article on here before. Apologies if so.

 

 

Woolwich Arsenal at The Bridge in Nov 1907. The first League match v them.
We won 2-1 in front of a crowd of 55,000. George Hilton scored both our goals.

Aston Villa at The Bridge in April 1923. A crowd of 30,000 saw a 1-1 draw.

Edited February 7, 20224 yr by erskblue

Sheff Utd at The Bridge. 1914.

 

 

 

December 1913:  Harold Halse scores against Sunderland at The Bridge. (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

 

Caption states the picture was taken in 1919. No match details.

 

 

 

 

 

Harold Abrahams wins the Men's 100 yards event at Amateur Athletics Association Championships at The Bridge in June 1924. He’d win the Mens Olympic Games 100m in Paris in July 1924.

 

28th May, 1932, British athlete Lord Burghley on his way to second place in the 120 yards hurdles race at The Bridge in the Kinnaird Trophy meeting .

Edited May 26, 20224 yr by erskblue

A.A.A. Championships Mens 100 Yards Final of 1922.

 

The Forgotten Story of … Alex Jackson, star of Scotland’s Wembley Wizards.

www.theguardian.com    Nov 2014. Simon Burnton

 

Alex Jackson was perhaps the greatest footballer of his era, a hero for Scotland, Huddersfield and Chelsea – until, aged only 26, it all went wrong.

 

He was the hat-trick-scoring hero of Scotland’s greatest ever victory over England, considered by some the finest player in the world and named “the most-discussed footballer of the century” by the Mirror (albeit after only a third of it). He revolutionised the role of the winger, was traded for enormous fees, won league titles and scored in cup finals, and he was handsome, charismatic and wildly popular with supporters. Alex Jackson, in short, ascended to the very pinnacle of the sport. And then he fell.

The man they called The Gay Cavalier (sporting nicknames were different then; the likes of Keano and Greavesie simply wouldn’t have cut the mustard) was only 26 when he played his last league game. By his 27th birthday he was turning out in the Cheshire County League, and though he generated plenty of headlines when his career was at its peak he earned little more than a footnote in the papers when he died, aged just 41.

His career first blossomed, unusually, in Pennsylvania. He was born in Renton, a small town 20 miles north-west of Glasgow, in 1905. “Typical of hundreds of Scottish villages, Renton has been football-mad for generations,” he wrote. “It is just a small agricultural district where every boy and every girl plays football all year round. That football madness may seem somewhat crude to the civilised south, but there’s no question that it bred footballers.” Two of them in his family alone: Jackson spent a single season playing for Dumbarton before, in 1923, he and an older brother, Walter, travelled to the US to visit another sibling, John, and both ended up signing for a works team in Bethlehem.

Alex was only 18 but he proved the star of the side, top-scoring with 14 (one more than Walter) as his team came second in the league. At the end of the season Bethlehem played Fall River in the Eastern final. “One performer who stood out exceptionally was Alec Jackson,” reported the New York Times, “Young Jackson showed the speed of a deer despite the condition of the field and his dexterous footwork enabled him to carry the ball to within striking distance of the Fall River goal several times

At the end of the season the brothers told the club that they were going home to see their family. “According to an executive of the steel works, the brothers are going to Scotland purely on a visit, and have given assurances that they will return,” reported the Bethlehem Globe. “The visit planned, it is understood, will cover a period of approximately three or four weeks and will be made to the home of the Jackson brothers at Renton, a town located about 20 miles from Glasgow.”

Such naivety: on the very day that report was published, with the brothers still to embark on their transatlantic voyage, the chairman of Aberdeen was boasting at the club’s AGM of the imminent arrival of “two outstanding men”. The Jacksons’ boat docked on Monday 18 August 1924, and they made their debuts on the Thursday. In high dudgeon, Bethlehem made the USFA write a letter of protest to the SFA about their departure, but to no avail.

“Alec revealed a fine burst of speed and beat his man very cleverly,” reported the Aberdeen Journal, after Walter scored the winner against Elgin City in their first game. “He also crossed accurately. In the second half he did not impress so much, but … considering the lads have been accustomed to different underfoot conditions in America, and that they had not completely recovered from a rough passage on the voyage home, their was a creditable debut and augurs well for their success at Pittodrie.”

Walter did reasonably well at Aberdeen, moved to Preston a couple of seasons later and then returned to Bethlehem and settled in the United States. Alex, meanwhile, became a phenomenon. “Scotland this year need not have her usual difficulty about the outside right position for in A Jackson, Aberdeen has a man fit already for honours,” trilled the Glasgow Evening Times, a couple of months into the season. “He is fast with good ball control and a sinuous swerve which is very perplexing.” By February 1925 he was in the Scotland team and undroppable.

His former fans back in America may have been angered by his departure, but they revelled in his subsequent success. “If he can go home after his year of experience in American soccer and set Scottish fans wild with his display the game must be pretty near perfect in this country,” beamed the Bethlehem Globe.

Following a single season in the Granite City Jackson was signed by Huddersfield Town, the English champions, who got their man – ahead of Bolton, Everton, Aston Villa, Sunderland and Liverpool – for a club record fee of £5,000 and one big bar tab. Before the deal went through the Huddersfield manager and future Arsenal legend, Herbert Chapman, travelled to Renton to get the blessing of the player’s father.

“When all the business had been done, Chapman and my father went to the only pub in town to seal the contract with a nice glass of Scotch,” Jackson told the French magazine Paris Match several years later.

“The entire population of the village, upon learning that such a famous man was in town, went down to the pub to see him. Mr Chapman, generous as always, made a sweeping gesture with his hand, inviting everyone for a drink. And, according to old Scottish custom, everyone ordered a whisky and a pint of beer. Mr Chapman might have drunk the finest Champagne in all the Ritz Hotels of the world, but I’m certain that he never bought a more expensive round of drinks.”

Chapman was to leave for London soon afterwards, but Jackson continued to shine. “He was ever on the ball and always doing something with it,” the Athletic News reported after one game. “He became an inside right, a centre-forward, in fact everything that was defensive and everything that was attack.”

A profile in the Sports Post in 1925 talked of a man “born with a genius for the game”. “He is tall, straight as a cane, but with the resiliency of a young willow tree,” they wrote. “When football breezes blow his way, Jackson bends to the work that is brought for him to do. One moment he is tall, straight, subdued; the next he is a thing of grace, of action, of fire, of … he’s just alive with every mortal picture which shows activity.

He’s light, too. As a player he lacks poundage. He doesn’t turn a beam at much over 10 stone, and he’s slender. But he is like a kitten on his toes. His judgement of position play is immense. He makes up his mind in a moment, and he acts almost as quickly as he thinks. And if you think the picture has been over-drawn – well, let his career down the next decade be the referee.”

Unlike most outside-rights, who never left their station on that flank, Jackson was happy to come inside either with the ball at his feet on in anticipation of a cross from the other flank, scoring well over a goal every third game across his career. “It was Jackson who first brought home fully to British football the fact that with the change of the offside law more goals could be scored by outside men, but it was not alone by running into goal with the ball from the wing that Jackson did it,” wrote the footballer-turned-journalist Ivan Sharpe, who in 1936 became the first ever FA Cup final commentator.

“He also took up the position in goal alongside his centre-forward for centres from the opposite wing, and it is this happy knack of being on the spot in this way for a chance centre that has made Jackson a menace in every match. ‘Jack in the box’ Jackson is a good description. He bobs up and scores so unexpectedly.”

Huddersfield won the league in his first season – their third in succession, and also their last – and in his five years there they also finished second twice and reached two FA Cup finals (in 1930 Jackson scored nine of their 11 Cup goals, all but dragging them to Wembley single-handed).

In 1928 he was also the outstanding member of the Scotland side that thrillingly beat England 5-1, becoming known as The Wembley Wizards. Jackson scored the stadium’s first ever hat-trick and, according to the Guardian, “stood out as the best man on the field”. At 5ft 10in he was by some margin the tallest member of a five-man attack that also featured the brilliant Arsenal inside-forward Alex James (who scored the other two) and the inspired if unconventional Newcastle striker Hughie Gallacher, who was playing his first game since returning from a two-month ban for pushing a referee into a bath.

On this occasion Chelsea were unable to buy success, but although they limped to 12th place in his first season (while Chapman led Arsenal to the title) Jackson was a hit, becoming the darling not just of the crowd but of the boardroom. “When he arrived he was fussed and petted to such an extent that he had the great privilege of being the only player allowed into the directors’ room after matches,” JG Orange reported in the Evening News. “I have seen him there and spoken to him there, and noted his remark that the other players did not like it.”

Leslie Knighton, who became manager of Chelsea in 1932, wrote that Jackson “was given privileges that no other player I have heard of ever had”, and that his life outside football was similarly unusual. “In all big football’s dramatic history there has never been a more intriguing figure than the Wandering Winger, who scored more goals than many centre-forwards and was certainly one of the biggest draw-cards the game has known,” Knighton continued. “Football gossip attached itself to him like barnacles to a ship. A genius – but with the temperament of a genius – rumours followed him anywhere.”

On the first day of his second season he was preparing to take the field when a director arrived, thrust the match ball into his hands and made him captain. But if Jackson was still the directors’ darling as the season began, he was distinctly out of favour by its conclusion.

With the team still some way from challenging for the title, morale in the dressing-room was collapsing, and then an incident occurred when the side travelled to Manchester City for their penultimate away game, with Jackson centrally involved.

In the team hotel on the night before the match Jackson ordered a round of drinks for the entire team to be sent to his room. The following day he played and scored in a 1-1 draw, but when the club’s directors got wind of his transgression he was suspended, transfer-listed and told he would never play for the club again.

It beggars belief that Chelsea would wash their hands of one of the great footballers of his time for such an apparently trivial offence, and the club refused to reveal any details – “We do not intend to state the reason for our decision and have nothing more to say on the matter,” insisted their assistant secretary – but that does indeed seem to be the case.

“I am relieved that the break has come for I was not happy at Chelsea, but the way in which it has come is not pleasant,” said Jackson. “I have seen it in all the newspapers, but not one word has been said to me by the club. Evidently they are taking the earliest opportunity of telling the world what a villain their captain is. As to the Manchester episode, which concerns more players than me.

I am alleged to have broken training regulations at Manchester by ordering drinks to be sent to my bedroom at the hotel. That is true. I admit the responsibility of ordering enough for one drink per man after we had already had one drink each.” The club’s sudden disciplinary crackdown amounted, said Jackson, to “the stable door being bolted after at least one horse is gone”.

At the time several Chelsea players were being linked with moves to France, where footballers could earn considerably more than the £8 maximum weekly wage enforced at the time in the English league. Indeed, the Guardian carried a report about it on the morning of that match in Manchester.

In due course Cheyne was to join Nîmes (he regretted it, and came back two years later), while Gallacher and Tommy Law would have gone too had their ambitious financial demands – £2,000 in advance and £20 a week – been accepted.

“Jackson was not the only player to be dissatisfied with his portion at Stamford Bridge,” wrote the Evening News. “Think of the men who would have gone to France had the money they wanted been placed in their banks. If they had been members of a happy family no lures from France, involving as they did being shut out of English football for ever, would have been considered.”

Perhaps Jackson was also agitating for a transfer, as several modern histories suggest, but whatever caused the falling-out it was very bad news. His contract expired in the summer of 1932 but the club still held his registration, and without their blessing Jackson could not play league football for anyone, anywhere. But non-league clubs were not covered, so in September 1932 the greatest player in the world signed for Ashton National in the Cheshire League. They paid him £15 a week, nearly double the wage of any other player in the country.

“I am going to Ashton for a month as an experiment,” Jackson announced. “I shall play in four home matches for a sum far greater than any League club would pay. The club approached me, and I put it to them that I was invited to play for them because of the ‘gate appeal’. They agreed. Then I suggested my payment should be on the basis of the ‘gate appeal’. Cricketers in Lancashire are paid that way – why not footballers?

‘A typically Scottish idea,’ it will be said. It is not Scottish: it is common sense. I am in football because I like the game, but also to make my living, and, like all men, I want the most I can get from my job. I tell you frankly that with the prospect of £8 as a maximum wage in the League, and unlimited possibilities when playing outside the league – well, what would you do?”

Six weeks later the directors at Ashton informed Jackson that his salary was driving the club to bankruptcy. “The only thing I could do was relieve them of financial responsibility affecting myself, and this I did immediately. I could not allow them to be out of pocket over me.” The Ashton manager, AH Jackson, lambasted the Ashton public for their failure “to repay us for our enterprise in signing such a famous player”.

In February 1933 Jackson joined Margate in the Kent League, who paid him £10 a week for the remainder of the season. At its end it was suggested that if he showed sufficient contrition there could be a way back into the fold at Stamford Bridge, but he was unwilling to plead for mercy. “I made a special journey to meet Jackson one day during that summer before my first season with Chelsea, and after a long talk I came to the view that nothing could be done – nothing at all,” wrote Knighton. “Alas there are some tasks that are beyond mere enthusiasm.”

 

Jackson could still trade on his fame. He advertised cigarettes - “Clubs is a small smoke with a big kick and certainly not penalties – in fact the best at its price I have ever smoked, and I know good cigarettes” - and then, even less advisably, a bookmaker.
 

The league took a very dim view of such activities, and would have banned him had he only been playing. “Am I any further outside the pale than I was before? I’m certainly no worse off,” he insisted. “I have always held that I did not get a fair deal in league football. After my experience in this country I would not be sorry to put finish to my playing career.”

In September 1933 he got married – an interesting-sounding affair to which Jock Bell, a popular comedian of his day, arrived with Sandy, the bride’s spaniel. The following morning the happy couple departed “on a motoring honeymoon”, heading for Paris. Chelsea were still demanding £4,000 for his registration and no one seemed ready to pay it, so he stayed in France and played for Nice and Le Touquet before giving up on football altogether at the age of only 28. Photographs suggest that by this time Jackson was no longer “a player who lacks poundage”.

If Jackson is remembered now it is largely because of the Wembley Wizards, 11 men who played together only once but produced a performance that will never be forgotten. It was a team of unique talent but also touched by tragedy: James won four league titles and two FA Cups with Arsenal but died of cancer at 51; Gallacher was 54, a bankrupt alcoholic, when he threw himself in front of a train in 1957.

Both outlived the Gay Cavalier. During the second world war Jackson fought in the Eighth Army in north Africa, and after being injured in Libya joined the Pioneer Corps. In 1940 he laced up his boots once again, for a game between the Army and the Air Force. “Lieutenant Jackson may not be quite so slim as in his playing days,” one soldier said, “but he made us all rub our eyes with his uncanny control of the ball.”

At the end of the war he extended his stay in Africa, and was assigned to the Suez Zone. In November 1946 he was driving a truck near his base when he lost control and overturned, suffering serious head injuries. He was dead before he reached hospital. The greatest player in the world, or Major AS Jackson as he was by then known, is one of 1,205 soldiers buried in Fay*d war cemetery, Egypt, his grave as unremarkable as its occupant was outstanding.

Jackson and his wife Grace had twins, called – with a startling lack of originality – Alex and Grace (there is a very touching family video on YouTube showing the family all together). The twins were nine when their father died. One day last week I called Grace and asked about her father. “My mother told us he had a fabulous personality, very kind,” she said. “He liked all the things she liked. He was a family man at heart, he loved dogs, he was a warm man. And I don’t know, having been a footballer and then in the army, how he would have settled down to an ordinary, everyday life. For many years people used to talk to me about him. They’d say he had a huge personality, and that people really loved him. And that was always really nice for me to hear, as a daughter who never really knew him at all.”

 

Chelsea and Scotland outside right Alex Jackson.

 

 

Some Tennis at The Bridge in the 1860s!

Edited June 15, 20224 yr by erskblue

1927, The International Inter-University Match at Stamford Bridge, Picture shows the first hurdle in the 220 yards low hurdles event, won by Lord Burghley, (2nd from right) in 24 and 7/10 seconds.

Some of the FA Cup Semi Final crowd of 1908 at The Bridge.

 

 

Edited June 15, 20224 yr by erskblue

July 1922, HM, King George V,3rd left, with among others Lord Birkenhead and Lord Desboro' at the AAA,Sports at Stamford Bridge, London (Photo by Popperfoto via Getty Images)

An athletics meeting is taking place at Stamford Bridge during the Spring of 1905. In the background, the newly constructed East Stand is nearing completion.   Great picture.        #CFCHeritage.  BygoneChelsea Twitter.

Interesting, well to me anyway. The athletes are running the ‘opposite way round the track’ from what became accepted for competition!

 

 

 

 

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Douglas Lowe breaks the tape to win the half-mile at the AAA Championships.

 

 Women's Amateur Athletics Championships

 

British Games of 1931. The parade of the athletes.

 

 

 

Edited January 16, 20233 yr by erskblue

An image from Chelsea’s 3-1 home defeat to Bolton Wanderers on 12th October 1907. Life was hard for them upon reaching Division 1 but the crowds were coming to Stamford Bridge, 35,000 attending this particular game.
Bygone Chelsea on Twitter.

 

Happy Birthday dear Chelsea!

On March 10th 1905, Chelsea Football Club was founded in The Rising Sun pub on Fulham Road. Just a year before that, businessman Gus Mears had purchased the Stamford Bridge athletics complex and was looking to turn it in to a football ground. Mears offered the ground to Fulham FC, which was founded in 1879, but the club refused his offer. Undeterred, Mears decided to form his own club and debated calling it Stamford Bridge FC, London FC, or Kensington FC but eventually decided on Chelsea FC, naming the club after the borough adjacent to Fulham.

Our very first team pictured at the start of our  inaugural season. September 1905.

Edited March 10, 20233 yr by erskblue

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited March 10, 20233 yr by erskblue

Oxford v Cambridge Varsity Match at The Bridge in 1929. Decent, if only brief footage.

The 1931 Oxford v Cambridge Varsity match at the Bridge. Some brief footage.

Edited March 12, 20233 yr by erskblue