Leicester, The Lord and The Mob

[kushiro]

If you watched the TV series 'The English Game' you'll know all about the central role of Arthur Kinnaird in the development of the game. One story that hasn't been told before is the remarkable way Kinnaird's story ties in with the history of Leicester City and the FA Cup. It's a story in three chapters, and I hope I can post the three parts here in time for our Cup tie at the weekend.

 

Chapter 1

 

It's July 31st 1890, and as the FA Council meet at their new HQ in Chancery Lane, there are several items on the agenda. First they have to approve applications from several teams that wish to join the Association, one from a team called 'Leicester Fosse'. Their application is accepted, along with 12 others. In the following day's newspapers, people across the country would have read about our club for the first time, although depending on where they lived, the impression would have been very different. In the Nottingham Evening Post the club was referred to as 'Fosse (Leicester), in the Birmingham Daily Post we were called 'Lester Fosse', while readers of the Sheffield Evening Telegraph were told there were two different teams, 'Leicester' and 'Fosse'. 

 

These 12 new teams were also entered into the FA Cup for the first time. The draw for the qualifying round was due to take place six weeks later, by which time the FA Council would have a very different character, for another item on the agenda that day was the resignation of the president, Major Marindin (the bad guy in the TV series who plots to get Blackburn Rovers thrown out of the Cup). Who would replace Marindin? There was one obvious candidate - the current treasurer, Lord Kinnaird, the man who played in nine Cup Finals and whose progressive outlook helped prevent a ruinous split between amateurs and professionals.  The vote, like the FA Cup draw, would have to wait for the next meeting.

 

September 1st.  Back at Chancery Lane, the draw for the qualifying round of the FA Cup takes place. In 'Number Four Division' of qualifying (the East Midlands section), Leicester Fosse are drawn at home to Burton Wanderers. So there will be an FA Cup tie in the town for the first time, at the Mill Lane ground to which the Fosse had moved just a year earlier.  When the draw is over, the meeting moves on to the election of the new president, and as expected, Lord Kinnaird is the man chosen. He would hold the post until the day he died, 33 years later.

 

An historic day, then, for the Lord and the Fosse. 

 

October 4th.    FA Cup Qualifying First Round. The current holders are Blackburn Rovers, who'd beaten The Wednesday 6-0 in April to take the trophy for the fourth time. If they win it again this season, Jimmy Forrest will equal Lord Kinnaird's record of five winners' medals.  Rovers have just moved to Ewood Park, a ground that a few weeks later would be smashed to pieces in a riot far worse than the minor scuffle at their previous ground that was depicted in The English Game (the one used as a pretext for Marindin to throw them out of the Cup).

 

At Mill Lane, Leicester's hopes of progress are dashed. Burton Wanderers win 2-0, and Leicester supporters feel that crushing sense of disappointment that would be repeated more than 100 times before we finally won the trophy. Three weeks later, Leicester fans would have been wondering how on earth this lot managed to win at Mill Lane. Burton Wanderers' game in the next round was at Loughborough, where they lost 8-0. Reporters in those days didn't mince words - the Burton keeper 'was not to be relied upon in the least' , while 'a palpable weakness in the Burton team was their inability to shoot correctly'.

 

But you want to know about the Ewood Park riot, right?

 

On Christmas Day, Rovers were due to play a friendly against local rivals Darwen (yes, the same fixture that led to the scuffles a decade earlier). There was an icy pitch, and Rovers decided not to risk their first team players with crucial games coming up (they'd been drawn away to Middlesbrough Ironopolis in the First Round Proper of the FA Cup). Darwen walked out and saw they'd be facing a second XI. They decided to walk straight back to the dressing room and send out their own reserves too. The crowd didn't like it one bit, and asked for their money back. When this was refused, a full scale riot ensued. As the players and officials cowered inside the club offices:

 

Stones from the partly finished cycling track were used to break windows, any moveable articles in the grandstand were taken and smashed, the goalposts broken and the club flag torn up.

 

Merry Christmas!

 

 There were no real repercussions for Rovers, and after winning at Middlesbrough, they went all the way to the Final where they beat Notts County 4-1 to give Jimmy Forrest that fifth medal. The man whose record he equaled, Lord Kinnaird, presented it to him.

 

Leicester Fosse invited beaten finalists Notts County to Mill Lane for a friendly a month later, when 'far and away the largest crowd seen on the ground' saw a 2-2 draw. Fosse's days at Mill Lane were numbered, however. The ground would never host another FA Cup game. The radical Leicester Corporation, in its drive to provide sanitary conditions for all its residents, had the land earmaked for new housing. The following season, after a few games at Grace Road, Fosse themselves found a new home, close to Walnut Street. Unlike Ewood Park, the first season at this new ground would not be witness to mass rioting. But don't think for a moment that in 19th century Leicester there there was no reason for the authorities to worry about mass urban unrest related to football. Far from it - as we will see in Chapter 2 of Leicester, the Lord and the Mob.

[filthyfox]

The English game on Netflix is good

[Aus Fox]

I’m looking forward to the Netflix series of this!

[ozleicester]

27 minutes ago, kushiro said:

The ground would never host another FA Cup game. The radical Leicester Corporation, in its drive to provide sanitary conditions for all its residents, had the land earmaked for new housing.

fvcking do-gooders

[kushiro]

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.

[kushiro]

Chapter 3

 

Lord Kinnaird passed away on January 30th, 1923. His funeral took place on Friday February 1st, and the following day. black armbands were worn by players at all football games. Leicester City lost 1-0 at home to Cardiff City. That it was an FA Cup tie is very appropriate for this story, but to provide a more satisfactory climax to this sequence of remarkable coincidences, we need something a bit more spectacular - and that's exactly what historical events provided us with.

 

February 16th  1997. Exactly 150 years on from Arthur Kinnaird's birth and the last Leicester Shrove Tuesday game. Leicester are playing in the 5th Round of the FA Cup at home to Chelsea. It ends 2-2 so there has to be a replay at Stamford Bridge, and there has to be one more contribution from our Lord...

 

When Arthur died in 1923, the title 'Lord Kinnaird' passed on to his son, and then later to his grandson. But that was the end of the line. Graham Kinnaird was the father of four daughters, but his only son died aged just 4, so when Graham died on February 27th 1997, the title 'Lord Kinnaird' was no more. There was very little mention in the media of the event. The papers that day were full of another story. On every back page, and several inside pages too, was the fury of Martin O'Neill, whose dream of bringing a first ever major trophy to Leicester had been taken away in scandalous circumstances by referee Mike Reed's penalty decision at Chelsea the previous night.

 

Mike Reed himself was giving his side of the story that day, and telling the press about his ordeal after the match:

 

 

Here's the detail:

 

 

Mike Reed got off lightly. There's a powerful echo of 1847 in the events he describes, but had the spirit of 150 years earlier truly reawakened that night, Leicester fans would have gathered en masse and headed for his house (Danny Baker was actually fired by the BBC the next day for suggesting something similar on Radio 5). 

 

Just in case you need a reminder:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llE0jnSrL4o

 

 

 

 

 

[davieG]

All very reminiscent of the 'real' Peaky Blinders story and era. Lots of violent type street games between different districts and streets of Birmingham. 

[kushiro]

I thought that to fully complete the story and bring it right up to that winning goal at Wembley last May, there might be some connection between Youri Tielemans' mother, who is of Congolese descent, and Lord Kinnaird's philanthropic work for organizations in Africa. If this story were fictionalized along the lines of The English Game, there would be a scene in which his mother discovers that her ancestors were influenced in some beneficial way by Kinnaird's campaigning. 

 

Just in case, I checked. And what do you know, I discovered he was invoIved with an organization called the Congo Reform Association. Then I found this article from 1907 (the last few lines are the key part):

 

 

One thing that was confirmed while looking at his story was just how unreliable wikipedia can be. The English Game had numerous fictional elements, but don't imagine that wikipedia can be used as some kind of fact checker. If you want the true story of Lord Kinnaird, I really recommend Andy Mitchell's biography - one of the best researched books I've ever read. In fact, I'd recommend anything written by that guy.  This is his website:

Home (scottishsporthistory.com)

 

[Spudulike]

Thanks @kushiro for that story. Brilliant read. 

[Spudulike]

Just did a quick Google search about Whipping Tom and found This

 

Slightly different to the Leicester Whipping Tom's 

[Phil Bowman]

Disappointed to find this wasn’t a little-known bible story.

[Phil Bowman]

Seriously though, fascinating stuff. Thanks for this.

[Vardinio'sCat]

Brilliant stuff, thank you.

[kushiro]

If I can I'd like to publish all these FA Cup history pieces together in book form some time. There are so many great stories waiting to be told, and I hope I can do them justice. For the time being here's the other parts posted so far on the Long Road To The FA Cup thread. I don't think you can post links to other pages within the forum so I'll do a bit of copy and paste for anyone who's not seen these earlier bits. 

 

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)

 

 

Part 2

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

[Spudulike]

Fascinating stuff. Thanks for posting that and, yes, it needs to go into a book that would certainly go onto my Christmas list 

 

Were we really the club that had the longest wait to win the FA Cup! I didn't know that. 

 

I also didn't know about the Leicester anti-vax campaign. Perhaps we have learnt from history that making a vaccine compulsory is most likely to provoke a population and distract from the ultimate target. The smallpox vaccination proved to be the winner in the end and, as you say, some of the Leicester public were very naive. Wonder how history will view the attitudes to the current pandemic. 

 

The old stalwart town. Yes, that's us. Semper eadem.