Tales from Grandad's Tool Shed
Liverpool – January 1914
Published by Eccles on December 17, 2007
It was Remembrance Sunday, and as he had done for nearly eighty years, Grandad attended the service at the War Memorial at the bottom of Gillingham High Street. He was in need of a hot cup of tea and a tot of rum when he returned, and as I brewed up for him he started spreading out on the table his photographs from the Great War, and his New Brompton/Gillingham team photos from those times. “So many men, SunBoy” he whispered sadly “So many, many good men.”
The photos of the 1912/13 and 1913/14 teams were different to the others in several ways. The Mayor Of Gillingham, resplendent in chain and top hat, sat front row centre. For the first time ever, the shirts had a coat of arms on the left breast, that of the new Borough Of Gillingham. And the shirts themselves were a dark colour, rather than New Brompton black and white stripes. “For those two seasons, and 1914/15 we played in red, white and blue, the blue shirts being the Borough’s colours. Typical of the Directors really, after resisting any changes for a decade, they then went and gave the Council body and soul.
“Mind you, we did OK in 1913/14. The average gate was up by over a thousand to 6,400, and in 19 home games we only lost three of them. As so often it was our away performances which let us down, we only won three and lost thirteen, but we finished in a respectable mid-table position. Our real excitement, once again, was in the FA Cup. In the Fourth Qualifying Round we were drawn at home the Nunhead, and we beat them 2-0. Then we were drawn at home to Watford and beat them 1-0. In the First Round Proper we had another home game, a tough one against Second Division Blackpool. A crowd of 10,581 packed in to see it. Blackpool didn’t settle and we rattled them from the off, and got a penalty. Left back Tom Leslie crashed it home and we clung on for a 1-0 win. It was pretty hairy at times, and late on with the gloom gathering we cleared one off the line which they claimed went in. Fortunately I don’t think the referee saw it – it certainly looked in to me. But we were through, and in the next round we were away to Liverpool.
“Liverpool v Gillingham is a bit surreal, isn’t it – the only time we’ve ever played them. But it didn’t seem that odd at the time, they were the fifth Football League First Division club we’d played in seven years. The match was due to be played on Saturday 31st January 1914 and we were all keen to go. Liverpool was a huge journey on the train, so we decided to travel up the day before and stay the Friday night in Liverpool. A fellow foreman in the Dockyard gave me some addresses of places near the docks which offered bed, breakfast and hot towels, and I made the arrangements. Bert fixed up the rail warrants. When we arrived, it was a bit of a culture shock, I can tell you. The East End of London was bad enough, and when we played Manchester City Moss Side was worse, but walking from Lime Street Station towards the Docks was something else again. We expected to get chivvied on every corner. The little hotel was surprisingly clean and comfortable though, and we spent the evening having a good meal and drinking with the landlord. He was a rabid Everton fan, and was desperate for us to beat them.
“The journey to Anfield Road was another walk on the wild side. The ground was the biggest we’d ever played at, and a crowd to match – 42,045, the biggest that has ever watched the Gills other than Wembley. About 15,000 of ‘em were packed into this huge hump-backed terrace at one end, which they called The Spion Kop after a battle in the Boer War. The noise that came off of it was awesome. Our team was:-
Alan Bailey; Arthur Moseley; Tom Leslie; Jack Mahon; Abraham Lee; Arthur Johnson; Ernie Pinkney; Sam Gilligan; Phil Glen; Charlie Hafekost; John Tatton.
“We gave a good account of ourselves in the first half, and Charlie Hafekost had their keeper sprawling on several occasions. For well into the second half we were hanging on quite comfortably for a replay but the huge noise from their crowd was slowly wearing us down. They scored two goals in the last ten minutes and that was it – 2-0. It was a really long journey home, but from the financial side we’d done all right, netting £619 from the gate receipts. Charlie Hafekost had a good game too, and Liverpool signed him at the end of the season for £500. Liverpool went on to make the Final, losing 1-0 to Burnley.
“The Directors were now suddenly a bit flush, and they decided to make some ground improvements to accommodate the bigger crowds we were getting. The 1893 pavilion and the little wooden stand on the railway side were to be replaced by a new grandstand, with dressing rooms and offices underneath. They got a loan of £1,570 from the bank to cover it. Work began on the stand in June 1914, almost exactly the same day that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Habsburg Empire, got assassinated in Sarajevo.
“I don’t think many people gave it much thought at the time, there’d been trouble in the Balkans for years, so how we got into a war, and one which cost millions of lives on all sides, is still a mystery. Basically, all these powers, with their Emperors and Kaisers and Tsars, were spoiling for a fight, and all of them were obsessed with getting their retaliation in first. Austria-Hungary wasn’t having a member of some Serbian Secret Society shoot the next emperor in their own province of Bosnia, so they declared war on Serbia, Russia declared war on Austria, so Germany backed up their ally and declared war on Russia. Problem was that to get your troops and their equipment into the field you had move practically everything by train, and Germany hadn’t got any railway timetables and plans to do that against Russia alone. Their plans meant that they had to mobilise against France as well, and that’s what they did. So on 1st August France and Germany found themselves at war.
“It was August Bank Holiday weekend, and the weather was sweltering. On Bank Holiday Monday we all went to Herne Bay for the day. I took my two small children, that was your dad and your aunt Georgie of course, to watch the Punch and Judy Show by the pier, and suddenly someone rushed off a boat and shouted that war had been declared. Basically, what had happened was that to get at France the Germans had moved troops through Belgium, we’d dusted off some treaty which Palmerston had signed in 1830 which guaranteed Belgian neutrality, and used it to declare war on the Germans. Ridiculously simple, and that was to cost us over two million casualties.
“Going home on the train, you’ve never heard such jingoistic and ill-informed claptrap. No-one could understand the reasons why we were going to war over Belgium, but half the train claimed they knew someone who’d just been there and they’d seen ‘The Beastly Hun’ raping every woman that moved and then eating children. They had to be taught a lesson. Everyone reckoned it would all be over by Christmas, and every Hun still alive would be paraded through London and then hanged on Tower Hill, starting with Kaiser Bill. I couldn’t resist pointing out that King George Saxe-Coberg-Gotha was probably more of a German than Kaiser Bill was, so perhaps they should start by practicing on the occupants of Buckingham Palace. Needless to say, I was not popular, but I thought it put the whole thing into perspective for the nonsense that it was.”
“But I thought you hated Germans” I said “What about the Blitz? And I’ve never seen you so angry as when they put us out of the 1970 World Cup” “Ah, that’s different, SunBoy. In the Second World War we were fighting Nazis, and if Hitler had won the whole of our way of life would have been crushed. In 1914, they were just the same as us really, s u c k e d into a maelstrom and slaughtered trying to prop up a European imperial structure that was in its death-throes. But as for Beckenbauer, Seeler and Muller in 1970…you’re right, I do hate ‘em!
“Football continued through the 1914/15 season but clubs were finding it more and more difficult to get a team together. Players were volunteering to join the army, and in our case, having strong army and navy connections locally, it was a bigger problem than for a lot of clubs. We played 61 different players in our 38 league fixtures. When we could get a strong side out, like when we beat West Ham and Swindon both 4-0, or Crystal Palace 3-0 we were fine, but other times we took some beatings – 5-0 at home to Reading for example. We got just one point from our away games, a 1-1 draw at Southend, and lost the other 18. Travelling to games became increasingly difficult as the train services were slowly turned over to troop and supply movements, so it didn’t help when we were drawn away to Rochdale in the FA Cup. We lost 2-0. Not surprisingly we finished bottom of the League with 20 points, 7 points behind Croydon Common.
“Like a lot of others, I missed plenty of games that season. We were working round the clock in the Dockyard, and I was often out on the boats. When I went to the game against Brighton on New Year Saturday I found the new grandstand in ruins. It had only been completed for two months! I thought it had been bombed in a Zeppelin raid – a few weeks earlier a Zeppelin had dropped a bomb near the Jezreels, hit the bakery and killed the baker’s horse – but this had been caused by a storm and gale-force winds. I’d been out in the North Sea on that night in HMS Hampshire, and we’d hardly felt a thing. Gillingham Directors doing things on the cheap of course. They should have got the Dockyard Mateys to build it, the storm didn’t blow the Gordon Road Stand down did it?
“At the end of the season it was obvious that organised football couldn’t go on. The war hadn’t finished by Christmas as everyone thought, and it was becoming more and more difficult for the Government to keep the lid on how badly things were going. There had been enormous casualties in the first few weeks as these vast armies clashed, and then it settled down into the horrible attrition of trench warfare, and set-piece slaughterings every few months. Since Napoleonic times the British Army had been a small force. Now it was swollen to several million men, and initially all of them were volunteers. The Field Marshals and Generals were basically used to colonial stuff, fighting in the Empire, turning machine guns and cannons on masses of natives coming at them with spears. Faced with a properly disciplined and mechanised army they did not have a clue. All people like Kitchener, Haig and Robertson could do was just demand more and more men for ‘the final push’, get them all killed or maimed, and then demand some more. They didn’t know how to stop it, and they didn’t know how to win it.
“Lloyd George, my great political hero, had it right. The first thing he wanted to do when he became Prime Minister was to sack Haig and Robertson for incompetence, but the King wouldn’t hear of it. Fate had already got rid of Kitchener. HMS Hampshire protected me from the storm that wrecked the new grandstand, but it didn’t protect Lord Kitchener from a German mine off the Scottish Coast. Lloyd George had seen it all for himself of course – the appalling conditions in the trenches, the mud, the shortages, the disease – and he knew every family in the land had got someone, or knew someone, who had died.” He fell silent. Grandad rarely talked about his own memories on the Western Front. He had been 35 at the start of the War, and age and his Dockyard work kept him at home. But after the horrendous slaughter on The Somme in 1916, anyone up to age 47 was then likely to be conscripted. He spent two years on the front at Ypres, and would never ever speak about the dreadful things he had seen there, or his experiences in 1917 when he fought at Passchendaele, generally acknowledged to have been the worst hell-hole of them all.
He was looking at his photographs. “A lot of these didn’t make it through. There’s Slogger and Alf. They were fighting at a place called Loos in 1915. The first time the British Army used gas. In a typical balls-up, the officers didn’t take account of the wind direction, the gas blew back on the trenches, and Slogger, Alf and a few hundred others died. A lot of them were from around here. The Generals had the bright idea of keeping local volunteers or relatives together in the trenches, where of course one whizz-bang or gas attack could wipe them all out. Every War Memorial, in every town and village, has the names of two or three men from the same family on it. They rarely add the dates they died, which is so often the same day.”
He looked sadly at the photographs of the New Brompton and Gillingham teams. “The club lost members of their family too.” He started pointing to individual players. “Him, him, those two, him and him – on the Somme. Those two there were with me at Ypres and Passchendaele. He was at Gallipoli, that one died in Mesopotamia, and those three on the U-boat convoys in 1917. And those are only the ones I know about. How many more were there SunBoy, how many more?”
There was little I could say. A terrible price had been paid in the War To End Wars, even by those lucky enough to survive it.
(Next – Kent’s Only Football League Club)
Eccles
Tales from Grandad's Tool Shed
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