Leicester, The Lord and The Mob - Chapter 2

Chapter 2

So, Mill Lane got to stage just one FA Cup game. But there must have been some people there that day in 1890 who remembered another footballing occasion at the same site, 43 years earlier, long before Leicester Fosse, or the Association game, came into being.

Towards the end of The English Game, Major Marindin is talking to Arthur Kinnaird about a picture on the wall at the FA. It was an image of the Ashbourne Football game, the traditional occasion held on Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday every year in which two teams wade through rivers, scramble across fields to try and get a ball into a goal - one at either end of the town. In the TV series, Marindin tells Kinnaird that a person actually died recently playing the game, and says that's what you can expect if you let the working class take over the game. (The scene is based on a real incident - 19 year old James Barker, drowned in the river at Ashbourne during the 1878 game).

Leicester people had their own Shrove Tuesday tradition called the 'Whipping Toms', in which people had to run a gauntlet of stick wielders, being belted around the shins as they made their way from one end to the other. The origins are uncertain - one theory is that it was originally a celebration of the Danes being forced out of the town. In the 1840s, the Leicester authorities wanted to stamp out this tradition, and they were helped by The Highways Act of 1835, which, as well as specifying that vehicles were to drive on the left, contained a clause banning 'football and other games' from taking place on the roads. People found guilty of such an offence could be fined up to 40 shillings, which was quite a deterrent, as the average worker at the time would need to slave away for over a month to earn that much. The act was used in many place to clamp down on football.

In Leicester, things came to a head in 1847. In the days leading up to Shrove Tuesday, notices were posted around the town aimed at prohibiting The Whipping Toms or any football game taking place. But the locals weren't having it. No-one was going to take away their traditional pastime.  

This is how the Leicester Chronicle reported events:

In the Newarke, a football was thrown up into the air, and on the police going to the place they found a number of people kicking at it, the most active of whom were taken into custody but immediately rescued by the mob.

A second football was thrown up at the green, and the people ran in that direction. The police followed and were immediately assaulted with stones, and on their retiring due to the weakness of their force, were followed up and pelted.

Additonal forces arrived and the people were forced out of the Newarke and into the Mill Lane.

The pavement and causeway were pulled up in several places to furnish stones for throwing.

PC J Chapman stated that he saw Burley drop a football from under his smock frock and kick it, and also saw Ratcliffe kick the ball. A witness apprehended Burley immediately. PC T Smith saw Burley and Ratcliffe kick the ball, and apprehended Ratcliffe.

By the end of the day, Burley, Ratcliffe and 15 others had been arrested and charged with rioting - and that was the end of it. No longer would the Whipping Toms, or football, or any other game be played in Leicester on Shrove Tuesday. A year later, the Leicester Journal simply reported that On Monday, placards were issued forbidding the assemblage of the "Whipping Toms", and no attempt was made (on Shrove Tuesday) to revive the ancient custom. (The precise relation between the Whipping Toms tradition and the football tradition is unclear - were they two entirely separate events on Shrove Tuesday, or somehow connected?) 

In Ashbourne, similar attempts were made to clamp down on Shrove Tuesday football, but the resistance was so strong that eventually the authorities gave up, and the event became so famous that in 1928 the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII) was a spectator, after which it was known as the Royal Shrovetide Football Match.

So, to summarize the story so far, Mill Lane was the site of two historic moments in Leicester's football history:

a) Our first FA Cup game - the tie being drawn at the same meeting at which Lord Kinnaird became FA President.

b) The riot on the occasion of the town's last ever Shrove Tuesday football game. This too was an important date in the Kinnaird life story, for it was on that very same Shrove Tuesday in 1847 that Arthur Kinnaird was born.  Quite a coincidence, and quite an irony, for just as one tradition was being killed off, into the world came the man who would later do so much to help the working man's version of the game to flourish.