A football that was dribbled through no man’s land by British soldiers now resides in Camberwell, over 100 years after brave infantrymen tried to score a goal in enemy trenches.
After lying forgotten in a dusty box for years, the Loos Football from World War One was restored in March 2011 and has been on display at the Regimental Museum at Camberwell’s Connaught House ever since. The News took a look back at its incredible story.
It starts on Saturday, September 25, 1915; when the British advance into France, known as The Great Push, began.
As the first light of dawn struggled to break through the mist that hung over the war-torn fields of northern France, hundreds of thousands of British men huddled in the cold, damp trenches of Loos. Quietly, they waited in the drizzling rain for ‘zero hour’ and the call to fix bayonets and go over the top.
Among the troops that day were some familiar names. Four men would be awarded the Victoria Cross for their brave actions, though only two would survive the Battle of Loos.
A young war poet named Robert Graves would later recount the battle in his book Goodbye to All That.
Also sitting in the gloom of the trenches, swathed in bandoliers and laden with knapsacks, were a lesser-known band of brothers: the boys of the London Irish Rifles football team, whose headquarters stand today in Connaught House.
Led by their captain, Private Frank Edwards, the boys were hatching a plan to undertake a feat never seen before – to score a goal in the German trenches.
Perhaps knowing their likely fate out on the killing fields of no man’s land, the team’s first scheme had been to boot their entire stock of six footballs over from the safety of the trenches the night before, but they were thwarted by an over-zealous subaltern, who punctured one football with a bullet from his revolver and ordered that the others be deflated.
The Irishmen were not so easily defeated, however, and as captain of the team, Edwards felt the reputation of his team was at stake. He intended to make sure at least one football would score a goal in enemy lines.
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Under cover of his comrades and with an hour to go, he surreptitiously produced from under his tunic one of the deflated footballs, and began to blow it up.
At 5.50am, the Engineers turned on the gas and smoke projectors. Forty minutes later the order was given to fix bayonets; ladders and hurdles were placed on the fire steps and at last the whistles blew, giving the signal to attack.
World War One images of Bermondsey family and child dressed up in her father’s uniform unearthed
The heavily laden Irishmen scrambled up the ladders and over the top, with Private Edwards clinging tightly to the ball. Together they tumbled into a sickly green mist, tainted with chlorine gas that the British were testing for the first time.
They were a strange sight with their gas helmets rolled up on their heads like turbans. Almost immediately the German machine guns began to take their toll but, at first, the men of the football team pressed on.
They charged towards the enemy gunfire with a united battle cry. Frank Edwards kicked the ball to Micky Mileham, who dribbled it on and passed to Bill Taylor, who kicked ahead to Jimmy Dalby.
But before the football was finally kicked into the German first line, team captain Edwards was down, wounded in the thigh. Micky dropped beside him to tie a tourniquet that saved his friend’s life.
Meanwhile, his comrades had stormed their way through the first line of trenches crammed with enemy infantry, many of whom fell to the grenades and bayonets of the Irishmen.
But the Irishmen also paid a heavy price for winning the first line. 20,000 men that fell that day, and still lie in unmarked graves. The football was found punctured on enemy barbed wire.
The next day, Divisional Commander Major General Barter told the surviving men of the London Irish regiment: “Not only am I proud to have the honour of being in command of such a regiment as yours, lads, but the whole Empire will be proud whenever in after years the story of the Battle of Loos comes to be written.”
“For I can tell you that it was the London Irish who helped to save a whole British Army Corps. You have done one of the greatest acts of the war.”
Remembering the Battle of Loos in his poem, The Dead Fox Hunter, Robert Graves wrote: ‘We found the little captain at the head;
His men lay well aligned.
We touched his hand— stone cold— and he was dead,
And they, all dead behind,
Had never reached their goal, but they died well;
They charged in line, and in the same line fell.’
- There will be a Remembrance Service at Connaught House on Flodden Road at 10am on Sunday, November 12.
