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This month marks the centenary of the first FA Cup final to be held at Wembley between West Ham Utd and Bolton Wanderers, a day that nearly ended in disaster.
Has the FA Cup final been devalued by its semi-finals being played at Wembley? It’s not a question with a completely black-and-white answer. On the one hand, there seems little question that playing there no longer holds quite so much mystique. But that could be a result of the over-saturation of the game in the media as anything else. The major leagues of Europe are all available at the touch of a button, beamed live into our living rooms in high definition; a marching band on a grey Saturday afternoon in north-west London just cannot compete.
And priorities have changed. The Champions League is the be-all and end-all of the football calendar in the 21st century, and the FA Cup final has become an end-of-season afterthought, battling it out with the EFL Cup for the position of England’s third (or perhaps fourth, if we consider the financial riches that come with promotion from the Championship) most-coveted silverware.
But it wasn’t ever thus. For decades, the FA Cup final was one of the showpiece events of the entire sporting calendar. One of the tiny number of domestic matches shown live on the television every year, audiences could reach dizzying numbers, holding an iron grip over people’s attention.
In 1970, while chasing a treble of the European Cup, League Championship and FA Cup, it’s been said that Don Revie sacrificed both the League and European Cup in pursuit of the FA Cup, only to lose the final after a replay and end the season with nothing. That would, of course, be unthinkable now.
So there was a time when the FA Cup mattered more than it does today, and there was a time when a trip to Wembley was perhaps a little too coveted. When the nation’s new football stadium opened 100 years ago, rudimentary safety considerations and a complete swamping by a general public who were eager to experience it almost led to a major loss of life.
In the 1901 census, the population of Wembley was just 4,159. It was an outpost, only connected to the Metropolitan Line since 1893. But with that station opening came the start of a grander project. Sir Edwin Watkin was an MP and railway entrepreneur, and his plan was to combine Wembley Park, which had been designed by Humphry Repton a century earlier, with a tower inspired by the Eiffel Tower in Paris which would dominate the city’s skyline from the north.
But as things turned out, this project didn’t get far enough off the ground. At 150ft high, the foundations underneath the base feet were found to be unstable after the first stage was complete and it had to be abandoned. Watkin died in 1901. The site, which came to be known as Watkin’s Folly, was demolished between 1904 and 1907. But in 1920, new life was breathed into the area when it was selected as the venue for the British Empire Exhibition, and when it was confirmed in 1921 that the centrepiece of this exhibition would be a brand new sports stadium, money started to be poured in.
Work began on the new stadium in January 1922 and was completed in just 300 working days, finishing in April the following year, costing £750,000 to complete, or £47m adjusted for inflation to 2023. Part of the reason for a relatively low cost was the use of new ferro-concrete technology, which allowed sections to be built on-site, and its centre-piece was a pair of 126ft high towers at its main entrance, painted in white. With a capacity of 126,500, it was also the largest in the world.
It was tight whether they’d be able to get the new stadium completed in time for the 1923 FA Cup final between Bolton Wanderers and West Ham United, but remarkably the stadium was completed with just enough room to spare. And no-one quite knew what to expect. Attendances for league matches had continued their upward trend after football returned in 1919, but the previous year’s final between Huddersfield Town and Preston North End had been played at a half-empty Stamford Bridge, with only just over 50,000 in attendance.
On the day of the match, gates opened at 11am for a 3pm kick-off, but gates had to be closed at 1.45pm with the stadium already at capacity and more people still trying to get in. The reasons for the sheer volume of people were manifold. Appearances by London clubs in the Cup Final were something of a rarity. Only Spurs, with their 1901 and 1921 wins, and Chelsea in 1915 had reached this stage of the competition before, and West Ham had just secured promotion to the First Division for the first time.
But there was more to it. Not that many people – an estimated 5,000 – were expected to travel down from Bolton and, with attendances for previous finals having been a little underwhelming, the match had been heavily publicised by the FA in the weeks building up to it and there was a considerable amount of casual interest in visiting this vast new stadium.
It’s impossible to say how many people turned out at Wembley that day, but most estimates put the numbers at around 300,000. It is known that 241,000 underground tickets to Wembley Park were sold that day, but this number doesn’t take into account the number who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for one. The bus service was completely overwhelmed, and it is also known that thousands – possibly more than 10,000 – of West Ham fans walked the 10 or 15 miles from the East End to this gleaming new citadel.
When the gates were closed, fans both with and without tickets sought other ways of getting inside the stadium, scaling walls and fences and turnstiles. Kick-off had to be delayed until 3.45pm, and the police had to get involved to try and keep fans off the pitch, a task that became practically impossible after a gate was broken down at 2.15pm and fans started to pour in, forcing those who’d got there early onto the track surrounding the pitch.
The Bolton players had to abandon their coach, such was the volume of traffic around the stadium, and walk the last mile to get there. As one supporter who was there at the time noted, “To put it mildly, the whole thing was a bloody shambles.”
Order was eventually restored, more or less. Kick-off was delayed to 3.45pm, and mounted police were called in, including one grey horse called Billie, who became the emblem of the match itself, which became known as the ‘White Horse Final’, even though the horse itself was grey and only appeared white in photographs and newsreel footage because of the high contrast levels of the film. The match eventually got underway with supporters crowded right against the touchline.
Players were almost unable to take corner-kicks, and frequently the ball was kicked back into play rather than going out into touch. Bolton took the lead in two minutes, the first goal scored at the stadium by David Jack, but the game had to be stopped ten minutes later to clear the pitch.
The teams stayed on the pitch for a five-minute half-time break – getting back to their changing rooms was impossible – and eight minutes into the second Bolton doubled their lead in controversial circumstances when Jack Smith’s shot went into the goal and bounced straight back out again. West Ham’s players claimed that the ball had hit the post and hadn’t gone in, but the referee believed that it had been kicked out of the goal by someone in the crowd and awarded it. Bolton held on comfortably to win 2-0. Thankfully, the crowd started to disperse a little after the second goal.
Bolton won the game comfortably in the end, but the far greater victory came with the understanding that, miraculously, only a few minor injuries had been reported and no-one had been killed. The first match played at this new stadium might easily have ended in English football’s first major disaster.
It wasn’t that there hadn’t been any disasters before. During the Scotland vs England match at Ibrox Park in Glasgow in 1902, a temporary wooden terrace collapsed, killing 25 and injuring more than 500. It was later established that the stand had been hopelessly ill-equipped to support the weight needed, based on calculations from out-of-date textbooks. But crowd management was a very different matter a century ago. When Wembley dissolved into chaos prior to the Euro 2020 final, that was an entirely predictable state of affairs which was met by an underbaked response from both the police and security which should have been identified by organisations with decades of experience at crowd control.
It seems that in 1923 everybody was caught similarly off-guard. One of the semi-finals, between Bolton Wanderers and Sheffield United at Old Trafford, was described as “dangerously overcrowded” after a larger than expected crowd of 72,000 turned out to watch the match, but despite this warning the FA Cup final was aggressively marketed during the build-up.
The subsequent report recommended dividing terraces into smaller ‘pens’ for ease of movement, an idea that was not fully implemented until 1974, that attendees should be channelled toward specific turnstiles ahead of arriving at them, and the staggering of crush barriers on terraces, again an idea that would not be implemented for half a century.
There have been painful lessons learned since then, but there have been lessons not learned too. In 1946, 33 people were crushed to death when a wall collapsed during an FA Cup match between Bolton Wanderers and Stoke City. In 1971, 66 were killed in a crush at Ibrox, at the end of a Rangers vs Celtic match. In 1985, 56 were killed when the main stand at Bradford City’s Valley Parade and 39 at Heysel. In 1989, a crush at Hillsborough would lead to the deaths of 97.
The events of the Euro 2020 final and of the 2022 Champions League final in Paris have demonstrated that there remain supporters who don’t know how to behave and police who don’t know how to police crowds. As the centenary of the first FA Cup final to be held at Wembley approaches, we might reflect that it’s a good thing in many respects that this year’s FA Cup final will be nothing like that first one.
