Now the clue here was the footballer, R. or Richard McFadden.
Read the statistics on the above card and then stop. For he may have been in the prime of life, scoring 17 goals in 1913-14, but in October 1916 he was dead, of wounds, aged just twenty-seven. In the short intervening time he had served with the 17th Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment, risen to Company Sergeant Major, and won the Military Medal, for which I have not been able to find a single note
I did find out that heroism ran in his blood, for he had previously saved one or two young boy(s) from drowning in the River Lea, for which he was given an award from the Mayor of Hackney, and he had also saved a man and a child from two separate house fires.
The 17th Battalion had another name, the Footballers Battalion, and it was specially formed in 1914 to only include footballers, staff, and supporters from right across the leagues. And Richard McFadden`s team, Clapton Orient, was one of the most successful at recruiting, supplying the largest contingent of men of any of the football clubs.
A spot of Cartophilic confusion here for in our reference works there are two Churchman sets called "Footballers", and both were issued in 1914.
The first set appeared in early 1914, and they showed portraits of footballers, but there was no set title on the cards; one had to be found so they could be recorded, so they went down as “Footballers” (A), the (A) standing for adopted title.
Then in November 1914 along comes this set, titled “Footballers”. Luckily the fronts on these were not just portraits, so we were able to tack on an extra bit and say this set is either “incidents in play with inset of player” or “coloured action portraits with black and white portrait inset”.
And how we know that this set came second is quite simply that we would have straight away called the untitled set something else other than “Footballers” all over again.
Some dealers do this already, using "Portraits" and "Incidents in Play".
More curious facts. Our “action” set is definitely recorded to have been printed by Mardon, Son and Hall, yet there is no record of the printer of the “portrait” set. Also, though most of the sets listed in our original RB.10 Churchman Reference Book do have months of issue, these being actually supplied by Churchman themselves from their own records, the "portrait" set is one of the few that does not. The telling thing is that these records were a combination, of Churchman`s own, and from Mardon, Son and Hall - which proves that the “portrait” set was almost certainly not printed by Mardon, Son and Hall. But who it was printed by remains a complete mystery.