Links With The Past: Post-First World War Programme
On 21 February, 1920, Second Division side Leicester City faced First Division outfit Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in the third round of the FA Cup in front of a crowd of nearly 43,000.
King George V was in attendance. The LCFC archive contains a silk VIP programme for the match, produced to mark the King’s visit, together with a 103-year-old photograph of the King being introduced to the Foxes team. What we didn’t have until comparatively recently was this ordinary programme for the match, produced for the non-VIP fans.
Called The Chelsea Chronicle, it is a single folded sheet containing four pages.
On the cover is a six-picture cartoon relating to Chelsea’s recent 3-2 home defeat by Bolton Wanderers. In each picture, there is a small figure representing a City fan who comments on each of the goals before thanking a Bolton player for showing him how to defeat Chelsea.
The back page shows the First Division League table and lists the teams selected for the game. The closely printed inside pages include several Chelsea-related articles together with a synopsis of the history of their Leicester City opponents.
One article explains how in the first-ever game between the two clubs, Chelsea arrived at Filbert Street with blue shirts and that the league’s rule about colour clashes like this was that the club that had been in the Football League the longest (in this case Leicester Fosse) had precedence over the choice of shirt colour, even if they were playing away. Chelsea had to wear Fosse’s reserve shirts, which were salmon pink. However, they couldn’t find a shirt big enough to fit Bill Foulke, Chelsea’s 24-stone goalkeeper, or small enough to fit their diminutive player, Martin Moran.