Stories From The Sky - Part Two

[kushiro]

This is a sequel to the story of the Filbert Street aerial photo.

 

You might recall that the game in progress in that picture was Leicester City v Fulham in the FA Cup in January 1923.

 

The question is - was it just by chance there was a game on when the plane flew over the ground? Or was the timing deliberate?  I think the latter is more likely, and if so, when we look at other places in the Historic England archive, we should find similar photos.

 

Well, there's only one way to find out. Time for a tour round the grounds of England - with more surprises in store.

 

The first place I tried was Anfield.

 

There's an old black and white aerial shot in the archive - from April 28th, 1973. It looked promising - something seems to be happening:

 

 

The car park is full, there is a group of people on the pitch, and it looks like the Kop is packed. 

 

Liverpool were indeed playing at home that day - it was a Saturday, and they needed a point to clinch the title. Their opponents? Leicester City.

 

If you zoom in you can see a group of people in white in the shadow of the main stand, standing out against the background like the Fulham players in the 1923 shot:

 

 

Who would that be? Not Liverpool players, obviously. And not Leicester players, surely? We usually wear our home strip at Anfield. 

 

But this was 1972/73.

 

For one season only, Jimmy Bloomfield had changed the strip from blue to all white:

 

 

So those guys in the shadow are almost certainly Bloomfield's boys.

 

The game finished 0-0, so Liverpool did clinch the title, though match reports said City were the team that looked like champions, with praise especially for Weller and Worthington.

 

Liverpool received the trophy after the game, and it's surely the presentation ceremony, or the preparation for it, that we can see in the picture.

 

This is how the scene was described:

 

There was only one man the screaming fans wanted. - manager Bill Shankly. He strode on to the pitch, taking off his jacket to reveal the red shirt he wears on match days. He raised his arms to the Kop, hugged his players and shook hands a hundred times. 

 

If you zoom in even closer on that picture, there is one man in the centre circle who does seem to be making a salute to the crowd:

 

 

Could it be that historic moment is really captured in the photo?  

 

For one man in that group of Leicester players, it must have been quite an emotional moment. To understand why, we need a bit of background:

 

The very last game of the previous season, 1971/72, was an England Under-23 match in Kiev, in what was then the USSR. Frank Worthington of Huddersfield Town was in the team that drew 0-0 with the Soviets. It was his second cap, in a team that also included Peter Shilton and Kevin Keegan. When they arrived home at Heathrow, there was a man waiting to meet Frank off the plane. It was Bill Shankly. 

 

Shankly told him he'd spoken to Huddersfield, and that Liverpool were going to sign him. He drove him straight up the motorway to Anfield for a medical, a journey made possible by the opening of the final stretch of the M6 at Spaghetti Junction just two weeks earlier.

 

Frank's medical didn't go as planned. He had high blood pressure. Shankly told him to take a break in Spain, where he could relax and get his blood pressure down. But that didn't happen. Frank had his own way of relaxing -  'seven days of carousing, which involved two Swedish blondes, a night with Miss Great Britain, a casual encounter at the airport with a woman whose name he didn’t catch and a night with a young Belgian beauty'. When he returned, his blood pressure was even higher. The deal was off.

 

Two months later, he signed for Leicester - too late to appear in that team group above, but here he is in action in the white strip during that Liverpool match:

 

 

 

So, that was Anfield.

 

It got me thinking I might find similar photos all over the place - but after that I drew blanks at Everton, Man City, Man U, Birmingham City, Aston Villa, Leeds, Newcastle and Sunderland. Lots of aerial shots of the grounds, but no matches in progress. So far just two out of ten grounds - both featuring Leicester City games.

 

How about the capital?

 

This was more promising. In the archive there are great aerial photos of Highbury and White Hart Lane - and the amazing thing is, the matches featured are both from January 1923 - the very same month as the Leicester v Fulham shot. 

 

Here's White Hart Lane:

 

 

It looks quite similar to the Filbert Street shot - taken from the same angle above the Main Stand, with the open bank on the opposite side. Here, though, unlike with Burnmoor Street, the view from the upper floors of the terraced houses has been blocked off by adverts for Bovril.

 

So which game is it? Just as with the Leicester photo, there were three possibilities in January 1923 - a Cup tie and two League games. It's almost certainly the Cup game that is featured. And it was quite a story. 

 

Spurs were drawn at home to a team of miners from Worksop in Derbyshire who had fought their way through the qualifying rounds to reach the First Round proper (the equivalent of the modern Round Three). In the week leading up to the tie, nine of the Worksop Town players worked from Monday to Thursday down the pit, then traveled to London the day before the game. Surely Spurs, Cup winners two years earlier, would sail through?

 

That's not what happened. Spurs couldn't break through the Worksop defence, as shown in this cartoon from the Daily News:

 

 

It finished 0-0. 

 

The sad thing is, the directors of Worksop took the decision to deprive home fans of the greatest day in the club's history, allowing Spurs to stage the replay - so that they could make a few more quid from the experience. Who knows what the Worksop players thought. Two days later in the replay, things were different. Spurs won 9-0. 

 

But is the photo of the original tie, or the replay? That becomes clearer if we look at the Highbury photo.

 

 

As Spurs were struggling to break down Worksop, Arsenal were also drawing 0-0 - but that was at Anfield, against the reigning champions. Their replay was four days later, and it is very likely that's the game we can see in this shot of Highbury:

 

 

Another magnificent ground photo - of a place that had opened ten years earlier with Leicester Fosse the first ever visitors. In the game we see here, Liverpool won 4-1. 

 

So what can we conclude from these 1923 pictures? 

 

Is it possible that the photos of Filbert Street, White Hart Lane, and Highbury were part of the same project? It seems likely, as there appear to be no similar shots from any other matches in the years after the war. Perhaps it was a promotional feature about the FA Cup, with Wembley waiting to stage the final for the first time. It's even possible the three shots were all taken from the same plane, by the same man. If so, that would mean the Spurs photo is from the replay, with a timeline like this:

 

Saturday:          Leicester City v Fulham

 

Monday:           Tottenham v Worksop (replay)

 

Wednesday:     Arsenal v Liverpool (replay)

 

 

There's one other Cup game that took place in London that week that deserves a mention. 

 

Third Division QPR started their run to the quarter-finals with a 1-0 home win v Crystal Palace. The star of that run was a man called Arthur Chandler. You can see him in this picture taken before the QF:

 

 

Later that year he joined Leicester, and the rest was history. 

 

Edited 23 April 2022 by kushiro

[kushiro]

The Andy Ducat biography is published today. He's the player who was in the Fulham team v Leicester and the Surrey team v Leicestershire in those 1920s aerial shots.

 

 

 I mention this as it's related to the topic, not, as someone thought on the Fulham forum below, because I am Jonathan in disguise! I've had to shell out for my copy and I hope you enjoy it too.

The remarkable story behind an aerial photo of Fulham from 1923 (friendsoffulham.com)

Edited 25 April 2022 by kushiro