So here we have a quite unbelievable footballing fact, and that is that in July 1900, there was only one London club, Woolwich Arsenal, in the Football League. And, at that time, this man was their goalkeeper.
Even odder, they are not the oldest club in London, that honour falls to Fulham, founded in 1879 - though I am told that there is actually an older club, called Cray Wanderers, which was, in 1900, in Kent, but has now, with all the boundary changes, found itself uprooted, and replanted into the London Borough of Bromley.
The club we now know as Arsenal was founded seven years later, in 1886. They were then called Dial Square, which was the name of the workshops in the centre of where they worked, presumably there was a bit of grass or concrete beside these where they used to play. However, just a fortnight later they were renamed, to Royal Arsenal. The first half of this was named after the Royal Oak Public House, where they frequently met, whilst the second was for their workplace, Woolwich Munitions Factory, otherwise known as The Arsenal.
In 1891 they turned professional, which really annoyed the amateur London Football Association, who promptly ejected them from membership. Perhaps this is the truth of why, in 1893, they applied to join the Football League, under yet another name, Woolwich Arsenal. And they were accepted. This almost immediately led to other London clubs doing the same, Millwall becoming the second London club, very shortly after, and still in 1893. Tottenham Hotspur came along in 1895, then Fulham in 1898.
Then, in 1913, Arsenal moved north to Highbury, and dropped the "Woolwich", simply because they were no longer sited there.
As for our man, James Ashcroft, he was born on the 12th of September 1878, in Liverpool. He played with a few teams in the immediate area, then moved down south and joined Gravesend United in 1899. One day, not long after, he was seen, and admired, by someone from Woolwich Arsenal, and they signed him up in June 1900. However, his first match with them was not until that September, against Burton Swifts. After that he was a regular in the squad, for eight seasons, then he was a casualty of a financial crisis for Arsenal, and sold to Blackburn Rovers in 1908. It appears that he played on, with several teams, until the outbreak of the First World War, and when the games resumed he did not return to the field. But he did not die until 1943, aged sixty-four, so he must have done something, somewhere.....
This set is from a curious little group, just six sets, all prefixed by "Series 1" to "Series 6". Our set, Series No.2, appears in our original World Tobacco Issues Index, as :
- SERIES No.2 - OWNERS, JOCKEYS, FOOTBALLERS, CRICKETERS. Sm. Unnd. (50). See H.98 ... C102-32
Even stranger is the fact that "Series No.3" has the same title, and declares itself to be a set of fifty, but only twenty cards were ever issued (H99).
This text remains the same in our updated version of this book, but the card code is now C633-340.