Our first clue was a tricky one, but it was the name of the player, Sands, as in sands on the shore of the desert island.
Our subject, Percy R. Sands, played for Woolwich Arsenal. Cohen Weenen “Football Captains”. which covers the 1907-8 League division 1, has him as P.R. Sands, and has a descriptive back which tells us he was a Centre half-back but could also play full back.
He first played with Woolwich Arsenal as an amateur, and he seems quite a valuable player, probably why he was the Captain.
Now this is card is one of a massive set, of over 1400 cards, split into two main groups.
The first group is branded with either “Grapnel” Mixture or “Imperial” Tobacco backs, being further split by whether they have straight or decorative framelines on the reverse, and further still by whether or not below those are three lines of text relating to “Myrtle Grove”. These were issued from 1907 to 1909. However, until at least 1948 his card had only been found with a back design for “Grapnel" Mixture, which was described as "A delightfully cool pipe tobacco, combining the sweetness and fragrance of the better class Virginia Tobaccos with the rich flavour of Latakia....” ( Latakia was, and still is, a Syrian tobacco). However some time after that, his card was discovered with a back design for “Imperial Tobacco, A ripe, full flavoured pipe tobacco, fine cut...” -
The second group, ours, are all “London Mixture”, and they were issued from 1913 to 1914. The intention is believed to have been to issue a squad of fifteen players for each of the clubs, as had happened in the first groupings, but this was unfortunately halted by the First World War.
Our original Taddy reference book (RB.12, published in 1948, and originally costing 7/6d.) covers this set over eighteen pages, over half the volume size, and it also includes lists of all player and club cards known at that time. The original was a limited edition of four hundred books, and it is long out of print, but we do sell a reprint in our bookshop, which ought to be up and running again really soon. So watch this space! And an even more updated list of names appears in our British Tobacco Issues Handbook (RB.135, published in 2003).
Obviously reprinting all this in our original World Tobacco Issues Index was not practicable, so it is condensed into just over a page, listing the clubs alone. The number of cards known has also increased, to 1330 (I worked that out, do not rely on it). And by the time of our updated World Tobacco Issues Index, in the year 2000, the total had reached 1375.