Season by Season: 1921/22

Players come and go, managers move on, directors, and even the very bricks and mortar of a football club, change eventually. Less transient are the crowds that are the lifeblood of the place, and through them the folk memory is passed on down the years.

And it’s a club’s reputation, its character, that once established is the only real constant.

Chelsea Football Club epitomises this.

Even now, established as we are among the elite of the Premiership, we are constantly reminded of the club's enduring “inconsistency,” the perennial struggle to see of supposedly inferior opposition, the underachieving glamour, the, well, unusualness.

Such personality traits were already apparent after 15 years of football at Stamford Bridge. By this time Chelsea had been promoted twice and relegated once, and had recently finished 3rd and then 18th in consecutive First Division seasons.

The club the Mearses built had earned a reputation for failing to follow up well-earned victories with further wins.

A poor 1950s joke might equally have applied back then: Two men are looking at newspapers at King’s Cross Station. “I see Chelsea won yesterday,” says one. “They can’t have,” frowns his pal, “they won last week.”

So how sweet April 1922 must have been for supporters when the club enjoyed one of its best ever sequences, winning seven on the spin. All of them, except a 4-1 thrashing of Aston Villa in Birmingham, were against teams lower the First Division.

The team boasted the necessary glamour, too, in Great Dane Nils Middelboe, the dashing Jack Cock, trainee medic and able right-winger Dr John Bell and the colourful, unorthodox keeper Ben Howard Baker (pictured above, right), a former high-jump champion whose party trick was to kick light bulbs out of chandeliers.

Baker, known as ‘HB’, became (and remains) the only goalie to have scored for Chelsea, when he converted the last-minute winning penalty against Bradford City in November 1921.

Two months later, against Arsenal, another of his spot-kicks bounced back into play and he raced the length of the pitch in vain to stop them scoring. He never appeared on scoresheet again.

“Just to make the poor fellow taking the spot-kick a bit more nervous” Keeper Ben Howard Baker on the reason for his antics before facing a penalty taker

Much like Chelsea sticksman Petar Borota six decades later, HB seemed disdainful of the 18-yard box, often rushing out into midfield in pursuit of the ball. He would play basketball around the box, flicking the ball over an opponent, while the coach was barking through a loud hailer for him to "get in with it!" And, like a Bruce Grobbelaar or Fabien Barthez, he would spend ages joshing around before facing a penalty kick himself.

He was an absolute hero, the epitome of the old Chelsea, and stayed in contact with the club well into the 1980s. HB died in 1987, perhaps the club’s longest-lived player at 94.

Chelsea finished ninth in 1922, but what an entertaining place the Bridge must have been.

In 1921/22...
Facts & figures: HB conceded an average of just 1.082 goals in his 93 games
Cup run: First Round, losing to West Bromwich Albion
All the rage: the luxurious Orient Express now travels all the way to mystical Istanbul

Season by Season: 1920/21

Progress on the field and the official patronage now bestowed on our inter-national class stadium by visiting royalty and the staging of FA Cup pointed to a very bright future. The 72,805 who attended the 1920 final tie at the Bridge brought in record receipts of £13,414. Football, and its place in society, was also changing.

The advent of a Third Division, almost exclusively made up of members of the old Southern League, extended the heartland of the game. Newspapers’ sports pages suddenly expanded to provide sufficient coverage and new dedicated magazines sprang up.

Crowds were returning to the terraces. Attendances of 45-50,000 were the norm. Chelsea had become a very big club with a reputation for regularly fielding top internationals.

“The best centre forward exhibition ever” Football writer on Jack Cock’s performance for England v Scotland, 1920

In October 1920 an enormous 76,000 crowd turned up to watch Chelsea seek revenge over newly-promoted Spurs, who had decimated their London rivals 5-0 at White Hart Lane the week before. (Sadly, the Lilywhites merely resumed where they had left off, and the Pensioners lost 0-4.)

Still the Corinthian spirit survived at the club, despite Vivian Woodward’s retirement from playing. Danish international Nils Middelboe would often skipper the side, and over the next few years more famous amateurs would join him, including goalkeeper Ben Howard Baker.

The war was still a strong memory – players were listed in the “Chelsea Chronicle” with the relevant service rank appended to their names. And, of course, the red-coated Pensioners sat proudly in the grandstand, as they do to this day.In truth, this was a disappointing period in our history after the promise of 1919. Veteran star winger Harry Ford (pictured, top left) was starting to miss more games, the over-reliance on Jack Cock’s goals was proving problematic, and a half-decent defensive record suffered accordingly.

On the back of the FA Cup finals success, the Chelsea board’s ambitious strategy for the Stamford Bridge stadium included an increase of capacity to 80,000 with steep, terraced banking at the north and south ends, improved conditions for dignitaries and no less than 61 turnstiles to handle those with their paste-board tickets or cash to hand over on the day.

There were even plans to build walkways from local train and tube stations. Not for the first or last time in the ground's history they amounted to nothing, and notions of the Fulham Road becoming the permanent host for national events would soon be scuppered by the building of Wembley Stadium.

Such thoughts of renovations at Chelsea did not extend anywhere near deep enough into the playing staff, however, and an ageing squad struggled to live up to the glamorous setting.

Come May 1921, we were back in the then familiar territory of 18th in the 22-strong First Division, and too close to relegation for comfort.

In 1920/21...
Facts & figures: a benefit match against the British Army in Sept 1920 was won 2-0
Cup run: Fourth round, versus Cardiff City
All the rage: Shaving fanatic Jacob Schick invents the Magazine Repeating Razor, based on a gun design

Season by Season: 1913/14

The ninth season of professional football at Stamford Bridge began under the shadow of imminent war. By August 1914 the whole of Europe would be at war and British troops tramping around France. Football would soon become a meaningless sideshow, but for the time being people still flocked to the Fulham Road every other Saturday full of sporting optimism.

And before the military dispatches, a brigade of new footering favourites emerged on the Stamford Bridge terraces.

Only fourteen goalies have played more than 100 games for the Blues. Our second centurion, following the precedent set by our first great goalkeeping servant Jack Whitley, was the popular Merseysider James “Molly” Molyneux.

Whitley would stay at Chelsea as a trainer until the 1939, but the new man exceeded him in every respect, playing more games, keeping more clean sheets ... and letting in more goals. Soon, he would also become the first Chelsea keeper to appear in a Cup Final. Molly’s playing career spanned the War and he made more than 230 appearances.

Upfront, the experienced Harold Halse, a lithe England international who had twice won the Cup, had begun to share goalscoring responsibilities with the dependable Viv Woodward. There were two bit-part players who fleetingly lit up the Bridge too: Max Woosnam, an all-round athlete who would win an Olympic medal at tennis in 1920, was an amateur sportsman in the Woodward vein, but his career at Chelsea was curtailed by his business interests.

Lanky, skilful half-back Nils Middelboe, our first glamorous overseas recruit, began a ten-year love affair with the Blues that comprised mostly of one-night stands as he was so often unavailable because of his salaried work as a banker.

The “Great Dane” as he was inevitably called, is a legend in his native land. And in an era when there is overblown talk of “foreign mercenaries”, it’s refreshing to recall that the Danish amateur international would not even put in the expense claim top-ups that his English colleagues would. Middelboe was a star from the off. It was well-known he had scored the first ever goal in Olympic football in 1908, and on his debut for the Pensioners he was handed the honour of captaincy by his friend, Woodward.

"At Stamford Bridge, we have been told
Are seen obstructions; far too bold,
With Plume, and Hat, so very tall
'Not Half' the game is seen at all
Apart from that, a Gallant Dane
Is seen; and long may he remain
With Chelsea; so, please just to show
Respect; 'Hats off,' to Middelboe"
E. A. Goddard (Oxford Street)

Less fortunate was the great Ben Warren, whose descent into mental ill-health and death from tuberculosis deeply affected the football world - a benefit match was held at Stamford Bridge for his wife and children at the end of the season.

The Bridge also staged a display of hands across the water in February 1914, as George V attended a baseball match between two top US teams, New York Giants and Chicago White Sox.

As far as the football was concerned, though, this season was all about consolidation. Chelsea never really excelled, but rarely looked out of their depth in the top tier – despite a 1-6 humiliation at the hands of Burnley. David Calderhead's team finished the season in a promising eighth place.

Gratifyingly, they were also the top-placed London club at a moment when the capital’s clubs were competing feverishly for audiences. It would be two seasons – but six years – before that feat was achieved again.

In 1913/14... Facts & figures: Chelsea finished just five points short of the runners-up position in Division One
Cup run: First round, losing to Millwall
All the rage: The world’s first full-length colour feature film: 'The Word, the Flesh and the Devil,' a British production