The Long Road To The FA Cup. Part 1.

[kushiro]

So we only had to wait 137 years to win it. The longest any team has ever waited before winning any competition. So many tales of woe over the years, so many near-misses and if-onlys. I'd like to post a few historical reflections on here, focusing on specific moments in time, looking at Leicester's ups and downs in the context of other events in football and society. Hope you enjoy it.

 

Part 1

 

It's November 1st 1884, and Leicester Fosse are playing their first ever game. They won 5-0 against Syston Fosse. That same day, FA Cup First Round matches are taking place.  Leicester Fosse wouldn't play their first game in the competition for another six years, but things were very different elsewhere in the East Midlands. There were four teams from Derby taking part in that First Round - Derby County, Derby Junction, Derby Midland and Derby St Luke's. And there were no fewer than five from Nottingham - Nottingham Forest, Notts County, Nottingham Olympic, Nottingham Rangers and Nottingham Wanderers. The Association game was slow to catch on in the town of Leicester, where rugby football and cricket were the popular sports.

 

Teams from Nottingham had already reached the FA Cup Semi-Finals four times, Forest and County twice each, though on all four occasions they had failed to reach the Final, three times falling to famous old amateur teams, and once (County) to the new power in the north, Blackburn Rovers, just a few months earlier (Rovers then came down to Kennington Oval for the final, their fans famously described in the London press as 'a northern horde of uncouth garb and strange oaths').   

 

That first Leicester Fosse game was played 'in a private field off the Fosse Road', but by the last game of that first season, they were paying on Victoria Park - the 'ground' no more than a patch of roped-off grass. That was on March 21st, a 1-0 win against a team called St. Mary's.  Again, the contrast with our East Midlands neighbours was stark.  Earlier that month, both Derby's Racecourse Ground and Nottingham's Trent Bridge were deemed sufficiently developed venues to stage FA Cup semi-finals. It would be another 43 years before a ground in Leicester was given that honour, even longer before a team from the City reached that stage of the competition.

 

So compared to Derby and Nottingham, things in Leicester were very quiet, at least in the world of Association Football.  But away from sport, the town was actually in a state of ferment. Two days after that first season ended on Victoria Park, a massive gathering took place that, it is no exaggeration to say, changed the course of British history

 

As the industrial revolution drew people from the countryside into the towns and cities, it provided fertile ground not just for the growth of team sports, but also for contagious diseases, spread easily among the densely packed streets. In the mid 1880s, the terror was small pox. To combat its spread, the government had introduced a compulsory vaccination programme. Many doubted the safety of the vaccine and refused to allow their children to receive it, but the penalties for refusal were heavy fines, and then imprisonment. There was huge resistance to this policy in some parts so the country, especially in Leicester, where there was not only suspicion of vaccination, but also a local health authority that had its own ideas about how to combat the disease. This became known as 'The Leicester Method'. In place of vaccination, it relied on 'sanitation and isolation':

 

As soon as small pox breaks out, the medical man and the householder are compelled under penalty to at once report the outbreak to the Corporation. Within a few hours the sufferer is safely in hospital. The family are placed in quarantine in comfortable quarters, and the house thoroughly disinfected. The result is that in every instance, the disease has been promptly and completely stamped out at a paltry expense. 

 

Despite the efforts of the local corporation, the police and the courts continued to carry out government policy. Thousands of people in Leicester were prosecuted in the early 1880s for refusing vaccines, many of them sent to prison. As opposition spread, the campaign reached its climax on March 23rd 1885 when people from all over the country converged on the town for a mass demonstration, climaxing in Market Square. The man who wrote the history of the campaign, JT Biggs, claimed that 100,000 took part. It was probably the largest ever political gathering in Leicester, perhaps the largest gathering of any kind prior to May 2016. 

 

Banners in the demonstration made people's feelings clear: 'The crusade against legalized compulsory medical quackery', 'Greetings and sympathy to the heroic martyrs of Leicester', 'Another victim of vaccination' (inscribed on a child's coffin), 'Better a felon's cell than a poisoned babe', 'Entire repeal and no compromise'. Biggs commented on the day's events as follows: 'The old stalwart town earned the gratitude of the age and the admiration of posterity'. In local elections that followed the demonstration, opponents of vaccination scored convincing victories, and the tide was turning. 

 

Four years later. April 5th 1889. It was the week that Preston North End paraded through their town with the FA Cup after becoming the second northern winners. They'd also just won the first ever Football League, though there was no trophy yet for them to show off. Leicester Fosse had just finished their fourth season but had yet to find a ground of their own, moving from Belgrave Road back to Viccy Park. Down in London in the House of Commons, James Picton MP was speaking on behalf of his constituents. The member for Leicester proposed that a Royal Commission be set up to examine the issue of compulsory small pox vaccination, and argued that the Leicester example showed that it wasn't necessary.  Thanks to Picton's efforts, a Royal Commission was indeed established, and it led to the introduction of new Acts in 1899 and 1907 that included conscience clauses, allowing parents to apply for a certificate of exemption.  

 

Ironic then that more than a century later, a vaccination programme allowed thousands of Leicester fans to be present as we lifted the FA Cup for the first time.

 

We may look back now and think that the campaigners of the 1880s were naive, but I feel a sense of civic pride knowing that the people of Leicester took on the authorities, prepared to go to prison for their beliefs. If you're interested, I'd recommend JT Biggs' book, which really should be on any 'history of Leicester' bookshelf alongside Of Fossils And Foxes. You might struggle find a copy, but you can read it online:

Leicester : sanitation versus vaccination : its vital statistics compared with those of other towns, the army, navy, Japan, and England and Wales (archive.org)

 

To be continued....

 

[HybridFox]

Honestly wouldn't bother me it we didn't win it again in my lifetime after that Tielemans winner!   

 

Incredible moment in our history

[kushiro]

9 hours ago, TK95 said:

Honestly wouldn't bother me it we didn't win it again in my lifetime after that Tielemans winner!   

 

Incredible moment in our history

Yeah - like in 2016. I'm sure I wasn't the only one who made a pact with the devil some time around April that year - just let us win the Premier League and I don't mind what happens from then on - relegation, whatever.

[kushiro]

I would love to know more about how these two things overlapped - Leicester's first season and the fight against small box. Many of those young men who formed the club would have had families of their own, and would have been agonizing over whether to get their young children vaccinated. In JT Biggs' book there is a list of the 64 Leicester people imprisoned in the years leading up to the mass demonstration. A man named John Burdett was imprisoned in August 1884, three months before 'F. Burdett' played in Leicester Fosse's first ever game. Were these men related?  'Jim Ashby' was imprisoned two years earlier. Any relation to the 'A.Ashby' who played in that first game?  

 

There's a story to be told there. I wish I had the archive resources to do it justice.

[davieG]

1 hour ago, kushiro said:

I would love to know more about how these two things overlapped - Leicester's first season and the fight against small box. Many of those young men who formed the club would have had families of their own, and would have been agonizing over whether to get their young children vaccinated. In JT Biggs' book there is a list of the 64 Leicester people imprisoned in the years leading up to the mass demonstration. A man named John Burdett was imprisoned in August 1884, three months before 'F. Burdett' played in Leicester Fosse's first ever game. Were these men related?  'Jim Ashby' was imprisoned two years earlier. Any relation to the 'A.Ashby' who played in that first game?  

 

There's a story to be told there. I wish I had the archive resources to do it justice.

You should put it all in a book along with the other stuff you post.

 

 

[kushiro]

It's December 19th 1914. No-one knows it but Leicester Fosse are about to play their last ever game in the FA Cup. After finishing in the re-election zone the previous season, Fosse were required to play in a Qualifying Round and were drawn away at Swansea Town. After an overnight thunder storm in South Wales, parts of the pitch were underwater, the rest so boggy that players were 'ankle-deep in mud'. Conditions can't have been too different to those at that famous game six days later when, somewhere in No Man's Land in Belgium, British and German troops declared a Christmas truce and staged a kick-about using anything they could find as a ball.

 

Yes, the war had started, but football at home continued. There was pressure on the sport to stop. 'How can they keep playing when men are dying in the trenches?' But the most authoritative sports paper of the day, Athletic News, wasn't in the mood to apologize:

 

The whole agitation is nothing less than an attempt by the ruling classes to stop the recreation of the masses. What do they care for the poor man's sport? The poor are giving their lives for this country in thousands. In many cases they have nothing else. These should, according to a small clique of virulent snobs, be deprived of the one distraction that they have had for over thirty years.

 

It's an attitude that would likely have received a loud 'hear, hear' in Leicester.  Not just because it was indeed exactly thirty years since the Fosse had formed, but also because Leicester was, at that time, a place famous (or notorious) for its defiance of authority.

 

Conscientious Objectors

 

It took a long time. From that historic demonstration (see above post), until 'conscientious objectors' were fully recognized in 1907, it had taken 22 years. But finally, parents were free from the threat of compulsory vaccination of their newborn children.

 

It must have been a source of great civic pride. The ordinary people of Leicester had been the driving force behind this change in national policy. The sacrifices of the 1880s, when thousands of Leicester people had been prosecuted, and dozens sent to prison, had all been worth it. (Unfortunately, Leicester Fosse hadn't been contributing much to this sense of pride - since their first entry into the FA Cup in 1890/91 they hadn't progressed beyond the Third Round, and since entering the Football League in 1894 they had been stuck in Division Two) .

 

In the years after the Act was passed, hundreds of thousands of people across the UK took advantage of the right to opt out, nowhere more than in Leicestershire. Looking at contemporary reports in the British Newspaper Archive, it seems that between a half and two thirds of people in the county applied for conscientious exemption in the years leading up to the war. In other regions it was typically a lot less than this, though still substantial. 

 

It's in these years that Leicester Fosse supporters at last had something to shout about. In 1908, they won promotion (though they came straight back down), and in 1910 they finally had a decent Cup run, before losing at Newcastle in the Quarter Final.

 

When war broke out, with German troop numbers massively higher than ours, talk of conscription (and another kind of conscientious objector) was in the air.  At first, however, signing up was voluntary. Here again there were regional differences. In many places, such as Manchester and Sheffield, about 7% of the population volunteered. Some places were much higher. In Nottingham, for example, it was 18.5%. And then there was Leicester, where the figure was 2.5%.  Yes - you read that right - not 25%, two point five.

 

This caused something of a scandal. You can imagine the hand wringing in Whitehall. 'Leicester? Again??' The War Office wrote to the Chief Recruitment Officer in the Leicester area demanding action, saying that the weekly average was 'quite inadequate'. Headlines in the press spoke of Leicester's 'feeble effort'. 

 

So what was going on? While reasons for not signing up would have been manifold (including religious beliefs), what was special about Leicester was the recent history of defiance.  They now had a political savvy too well-developed to swallow simple government propaganda appeals like Lord Kitchener's poster saying 'Your Country Needs You'. The gist of the reply would have been 'Give us all the vote and a decent country to live in and we might think about it'.  40% of men (and all women) didn't even have the right to vote. Only property owners and those paying above a certain level of rent had that right. Millions of working class men simply had no say in the running of the nation they were being asked to lay down their lives for. 

 

Those in Leicester who did have the vote had elected Ramsay MacDonald as their MP - he was Labour Party leader and a man with strong pacifist beliefs,. When war broke out, he told his constituents 'Never did we arm our people and ask them to give their lives for less good cause than this'. He was forced to stand down as leader because of his views, but his replacement Arthur Henderson, who became part of the war cabinet of Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, made sure that the views of the working class were heard by the government, and when conscription was introduced later in the war, it came alongside promises of a new Representation of the People's Act, in which all men, and women over 30, would finally be given the vote, almost tripling the electorate from 7.7 million to 21 million. 

 

When conscription was introduced in 1916, there was a conscientious objector clause. Author Andy Ward wrote a book about two brothers from Lutterworth, Leonard and Roland Payne, who tried to claim this status, but instead were thrown in jail. Ward's analysis of the motives of objectors was:

 

The majority did so on political grounds, men of a socialist leaning who refused to participate in what they saw as a capitalist war of workers killing workers at the behest of industrialists and profiteers, or saw conscription as the unjustifiable intrusion of the State into the lives of individual free citizens.

 

It's a perspective many footballers of the time would have had sympathy with. They had also been fighting for their rights. The FA had recently squashed an attempt by players to form their own union, so footballers were still earning no more than the maximum wage of four pounds a week, which had been set in 1901. What had really scared the FA was when the players union had vowed to align with the General Federation of Trades Unions and join forces with other members of the working class. 

 

In that mud in December 1914, Swansea beat Leicester Fosse 1-0 to qualify for the First Round Proper of the FA Cup. Leicester wouldn't lose to a non-league club again until Harlow in 1980. Without the money from a Cup run, Fosse fell further into debt at the bank, contributing to the winding up of the club at the end of the war, replaced by 'Leicester City'. Many players with Fosse connections lost their lives during the war. One of them, William Sharpley, made just a single appearance for the club before he died at the Somme, aged 24. His sister Kate, who also lost her father and lover during the war, was called to receive commemorative medals from Queen Mary in 1917. Kate took the medals, and then threw them back in the Queen's face.

 

A futile gesture, perhaps, but one that shouldn't be forgotten as we are asked this week to honour the memory of all those prepared to stand up and fight for the principles they believe in. Leicester has a proud history of that.

 

[kushiro]

A couple of recommendations to accompany the above post.

 

Here's a key book on Leicester history. 'Radical Leicester' was a term used frequently in the press towards the end of the 19th Century and up to World War 1. This book tells the story of the early stages of that development. It's still pretty easy to get hold of a copy, though it's not so cheap.

 

 

Another essential text is the one mentioned in the post above - Andy Ward's Conchies, about conscientious objectors in WW1. You can get a kindle version pretty cheaply.

Amazon.co.uk : conchies andy ward

 

[majaco]

20 hours ago, kushiro said:

It's December 19th 1914. No-one knows it but Leicester Fosse are about to play their last ever game in the FA Cup. After finishing in the re-election zone the previous season, Fosse were required to play in a Qualifying Round and were drawn away at Swansea Town. After an overnight thunder storm in South Wales, parts of the pitch were underwater, the rest so boggy that players were 'ankle-deep in mud'. Conditions can't have been too different to those at that famous game six days later when, somewhere in No Man's Land in Belgium, British and German troops declared a Christmas truce and staged a kick-about using anything they could find as a ball.

 

Yes, the war had started, but football at home continued. There was pressure on the sport to stop. 'How can they keep playing when men are dying in the trenches?' But the most authoritative sports paper of the day, Athletic News, wasn't in the mood to apologize:

 

The whole agitation is nothing less than an attempt by the ruling classes to stop the recreation of the masses. What do they care for the poor man's sport? The poor are giving their lives for this country in thousands. In many cases they have nothing else. These should, according to a small clique of virulent snobs, be deprived of the one distraction that they have had for over thirty years.

 

It's an attitude that would likely have received a loud 'hear, hear' in Leicester.  Not just because it was indeed exactly thirty years since the Fosse had formed, but also because Leicester was, at that time, a place famous (or notorious) for its defiance of authority.

 

Conscientious Objectors

 

It took a long time. From that historic demonstration (see above post), until 'conscientious objectors' were fully recognized in 1907, it had taken 22 years. But finally, parents were free from the threat of compulsory vaccination of their newborn children.

 

It must have been a source of great civic pride. The ordinary people of Leicester had been the driving force behind this change in national policy. The sacrifices of the 1880s, when thousands of Leicester people had been prosecuted, and dozens sent to prison, had all been worth it. (Unfortunately, Leicester Fosse hadn't been contributing much to this sense of pride - since their first entry into the FA Cup in 1890/91 they hadn't progressed beyond the Third Round, and since entering the Football League in 1894 they had been stuck in Division Two) .

 

In the years after the Act was passed, hundreds of thousands of people across the UK took advantage of the right to opt out, nowhere more than in Leicestershire. Looking at contemporary reports in the British Newspaper Archive, it seems that between a half and two thirds of people in the county applied for conscientious exemption in the years leading up to the war. In other regions it was typically a lot less than this, though still substantial. 

 

It's in these years that Leicester Fosse supporters at last had something to shout about. In 1908, they won promotion (though they came straight back down), and in 1910 they finally had a decent Cup run, before losing at Newcastle in the Quarter Final.

 

When war broke out, with German troop numbers massively higher than ours, talk of conscription (and another kind of conscientious objector) was in the air.  At first, however, signing up was voluntary. Here again there were regional differences. In many places, such as Manchester and Sheffield, about 7% of the population volunteered. Some places were much higher. In Nottingham, for example, it was 18.5%. And then there was Leicester, where the figure was 2.5%.  Yes - you read that right - not 25%, two point five.

 

This caused something of a scandal. You can imagine the hand wringing in Whitehall. 'Leicester? Again??' The War Office wrote to the Chief Recruitment Officer in the Leicester area demanding action, saying that the weekly average was 'quite inadequate'. Headlines in the press spoke of Leicester's 'feeble effort'. 

 

So what was going on? While reasons for not signing up would have been manifold (including religious beliefs), what was special about Leicester was the recent history of defiance.  They now had a political savvy too well-developed to swallow simple government propaganda appeals like Lord Kitchener's poster saying 'Your Country Needs You'. The gist of the reply would have been 'Give us all the vote and a decent country to live in and we might think about it'.  40% of men (and all women) didn't even have the right to vote. Only property owners and those paying above a certain level of rent had that right. Millions of working class men simply had no say in the running of the nation they were being asked to lay down their lives for. 

 

Those in Leicester who did have the vote had elected Ramsay MacDonald as their MP - he was Labour Party leader and a man with strong pacifist beliefs,. When war broke out, he told his constituents 'Never did we arm our people and ask them to give their lives for less good cause than this'. He was forced to stand down as leader because of his views, but his replacement Arthur Henderson, who became part of the war cabinet of Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, made sure that the views of the working class were heard by the government, and when conscription was introduced later in the war, it came alongside promises of a new Representation of the People's Act, in which all men, and women over 30, would finally be given the vote, almost tripling the electorate from 7.7 million to 21 million. 

 

When conscription was introduced in 1916, there was a conscientious objector clause. Author Andy Ward wrote a book about two brothers from Lutterworth, Leonard and Roland Payne, who tried to claim this status, but instead were thrown in jail. Ward's analysis of the motives of objectors was:

 

The majority did so on political grounds, men of a socialist leaning who refused to participate in what they saw as a capitalist war of workers killing workers at the behest of industrialists and profiteers, or saw conscription as the unjustifiable intrusion of the State into the lives of individual free citizens.

 

It's a perspective many footballers of the time would have had sympathy with. They had also been fighting for their rights. The FA had recently squashed an attempt by players to form their own union, so footballers were still earning no more than the maximum wage of four pounds a week, which had been set in 1901. What had really scared the FA was when the players union had vowed to align with the General Federation of Trades Unions and join forces with other members of the working class. 

 

In that mud in December 1914, Swansea beat Leicester Fosse 1-0 to qualify for the First Round Proper of the FA Cup. Leicester wouldn't lose to a non-league club again until Harlow in 1980. Without the money from a Cup run, Fosse fell further into debt at the bank, contributing to the winding up of the club at the end of the war, replaced by 'Leicester City'. Many players with Fosse connections lost their lives during the war. One of them, William Sharpley, made just a single appearance for the club before he died at the Somme, aged 24. His sister Kate, who also lost her father and lover during the war, was called to receive commemorative medals from Queen Mary in 1917. Kate took the medals, and then threw them back in the Queen's face.

 

A futile gesture, perhaps, but one that shouldn't be forgotten as we are asked this week to honour the memory of all those prepared to stand up and fight for the principles they believe in. Leicester has a proud history of that.

 

Really interesting.  Were there consequences to Kate's actions?

[kushiro]

2 hours ago, majaco said:

Really interesting.  Were there consequences to Kate's actions?

Yes. Read all about it here:

 

Kate Sharpley Library - Wikipedia

 

I'd love to find a contemporary press report on the incident but haven't located one yet.