The story of how Crystal Palace F.C. turned professional – 120 years ago today

Part One of historian Peter Manning's story set the scene for the development, explaining why the Crystal Palace Company began fielding its own amateur team.

In Part Two, Peter delves into the precise events which led to us turning professional in 1905...

In the first part of this story, we saw how the Crystal Palace Company had taken a high-risk gamble in 1895, filling in their two massive, but dilapidated fountains and basins to build the largest football stadium in Europe. Their aim was to host the FA Cup Final which had been booted out of Surrey Cricket Club’s ground at The Oval because it had increasingly damaged the first-class cricket pitch.

The gamble turned out to be a massive success as the FA accepted the Palace as it its new home for the Cup Final. It was a great success from the start, and the Palace went on to host 20 FA Cup Finals, which generated the largest crowds in world football, and were so popular they would become recognised as an unofficial English bank holiday.

On the back of the successful hosting of a large Cup Final crowd, the Crystal Palace Company wanted to use its state-of-the-art stadium to tap further into the growing number of supporters that football was generating. As mentioned in Part One, the Company tried fielding its amateur Crystal Palace team against a leading side, Cup holders Aston Villa in November 1895, but it did not attract the crowds that the Crystal Palace Company hoped for.

A second Cup Final was held in April 1896, between Sheffield Wednesday and Wolves, and again the crowds flocked to see it, with an estimated near 60,000 fans creating another world record for attendance. By contrast, the Crystal Palace company continued to try out its own amateur team – with further matches in 1896 and 1897 – but without any great success.

In April 1897, the FA added a further welcome match to the Palace calendar, with the first England v Scotland international to be held there, which drew a very healthy 35,000 fans.

By early 1898 the Crystal Palace had become the recognised venue for all the major football matches, including the London Junior final; The Sheriff of London’s Charity Shield in front of 20,000 people; the replay of both the Charity Shield and the F.A. Cup semi-final between Nottingham Forest and Southampton; as well as the FA Cup Final.

Then came a turning point. The suburban areas of London had expanded rapidly in the 19th century and, in 1899, a new County of London was carved out of their existing counties.

The entrepreneurial Crystal Palace Company saw yet another opportunity and announced it would create a London County Cricket Club. It would lay a new, first-class cricket pitch and hire the most renowned cricketer of the 19th century, Dr. W. G. Grace, to be its manager and director of sport for the company.

The FA Cup Final continued to go from success to success and the 1899 Final, between Derby County and Sheffield United drew 73,833 spectators ‘thus creating a new “record” for any football match, Cup tie, League, or International, Rugby or Association.’ But the Crystal Palace Company still hadn’t come up with a formula that would draw the crowds to watch its own Crystal Palace F.C. What could be done?

The Football Association had approved the introduction of professional football in 1885, and the Football League had been founded in 1888, consisting of 12 of the leading clubs in the Midlands and the North, and it was these professional clubs which had dominated recent Cup Finals, generating huge attendances.

A second Division was added in 1892. This was expanded in 1893/94 and included the first Southern club, Woolwich Arsenal, who were based at the Manor Ground in Plumstead, South London. At the time, they were the only Football League club south of Birmingham, and gave Londoners their one chance of regularly seeing the top professional clubs from the Midlands and the North.

Woolwich Arsenal proved that a professional football club in London could be a success, and the Crystal Palace Company’s directors looked enviously across South London at their rivals, who were pulling in average crowds of 25,000. This was what the company wanted – and the answer was clear: the company would have to turn its Crystal Palace Football Club professional.

In fact, a professional football club at the Crystal Palace had first been mooted by the energetic General Manager of the Palace, Henry Gillman. It was Gillman who, as Entertainments Manager, had come up with the radical idea of filling in the dilapidated ornamental fountains and building the football stadium in 1895, and was then responsible for the highly successful management of the Cup Finals at the Palace.

Gillman informally approached the Football Association in late 1901 or 1902 to discuss the possibility of turning the Palace’s own club professional, but unfortunately discussions came to an end as Gillman died, unexpectedly, after a short illness at the end of 1902.

The first Crystal Palace chairman, Sydney Bourne, would later recall: ‘When the late Mr. Gillman was general manager of the Crystal Palace he was very anxious to start and run a professional football team as a Palace enterprise, and approached the Football Association with a view to this end.'

'Since a disastrous experiment at New Brighton Tower [a short-lived club which had folded in 1901], however, the F.A. had always set their face against football as a mere adjunct to a sideshow in a popular place of entertainment, and therefore declined to entertain Mr. Gillman’s proposal.

'The matter was dropped, and might have remained in abeyance for ever but for the fact that Mr. Goodman, an official at the Palace, was an enthusiastic footballer, and, despite the rebuff from the F.A., continued to cherish the idea of a Palace team. The new general manager of the Palace Mr. J.H. Cozens, also entered heartily into the idea, and from then until the present moment has lent the whole weight of his influence in furthering the game.’

The people who held the key to the project were the directors of the Crystal Palace Company – and they needed to be convinced.

The Athletic News reported: ‘Balance-sheets have long been carefully studied, and the project is to come before the directors of the Crystal Palace at an early date. These gentlemen have to be convinced of its practicability.

'The difficulty seems to be the sixpenny gate, [which admitted members of the public to the Palace as a whole] but surely the Palace turnstiles could admit the public at this price for a certain time before the kick-off, and, perhaps, a little while after the advertised hour. It should not be impossible to allow the Crystal Palace Company a percentage on these admissions. The matter needs some calculation and careful adjustment. The details of a feasible plan are not beyond human ingenuity’.

The Crystal Palace Company not only had the feasibility of trying to establish its own professional club to worry about, but it became more urgent as a new threat appeared on the horizon.

The Southern League had been established in 1894, as a semi-professional, southern rival to the Football League, which was dominated by Northern and Midlands clubs, and one of its main aims was to host the Cup Final on the ground of a Southern League team – and this looked like this might materialise.

In 1904, the venue of the London Athletics Company was Stamford Bridge in Chelsea, which had a capacity of 100,000 and had been purchased by the brothers, Gus and Joe Mears, with the intention of staging first-class professional football there, including luring the FA Cup Final away from the Crystal Palace – but Palace weren’t going to concede the occasion that easily.

For their football ambitions, the Crystal Palace Company was fortunate in already having the experienced Edmund Goodman working for them, most likely hired by Gillman, as here was a man with tailor-made involvement in managing in a major Football League club.

‘In Mr. Goodman we already had an ideal secretary, as apart from other qualities, he had at one time been assistant-secretary to the famous Aston Villa F.C. and “knew the ropes” of the official side of football.’ As a young Aston Villa player, he had suffered a bad knee injury at the age of 19, which turned gangrenous and the knee had to be amputated, which left him on crutches for the rest of his life.

Preparations to launch a professional club at the Palace continued under Cozens, Goodman and W.G. Grace and in November 1904, the Bournemouth Daily Echo was reporting: ‘Dr. W. G. Grace, as sports director at the Crystal Palace, has been going the round of the various public football grounds in the neighbourhood of London with a view to gaining ideas for incorporation in the scheme for the promotion of a first-class team to play matches at Sydenham.

'The success of Woolwich Arsenal, especially this season – for, up to date, the average attendance has been 25,000 – has stimulated the directors of the Crystal Palace Company, and there is little doubt that really attractive football, played on the sports enclosure during the season, would be the means of providing amusement for many thousands of pleasure-seekers, who might otherwise not be tempted to visit the Crystal Palace during the winter.'

Unfortunately, none of the business plans have survived, but what is certain is that the directors of the Crystal Palace Company would only have been interested in plans which predicted football crowds in their many thousands. Their primary aim, in all their new business plans, was to increase the footfall through the Palace, not in their hundreds or low thousands, but in the tens of thousands. We know that they saw Woolwich Arsenal, with their average crowds of 25,000, as a good example of what could be achieved with a professional football team.

Amateur matches would not generate the size of crowd they needed to justify the project and large football crowds would also help defray the costs of the expensive new stands that were having to be being built as part of the deal with the FA to keep the Cup Final at the Palace for the next five years. In March, the Crystal Palace Company announced that its new professional club would be applying to the Football Association for affiliation.

There are many myths surrounding the founding of the current professional Crystal Palace club, including that they applied to both the Football Association and the Football League and were rejected.

An examination of the archive of the minutes of the Football League do not record any application by Crystal Palace in 1905. At the 1905 Football League AGM, there were eight applicants for the three vacant positions in Division 2, including two from London – Chelsea and Clapton Orient (who had both applied to join the Southern League as well). Chelsea were accepted into the Football League on the first ballot and Clapton Orient on the second, when it was decided to increase the League from 36 to 40 clubs. There is no record of Crystal Palace being an applicant at any stage. The intention from the outset was for the professional Crystal Palace team to apply for membership of the Southern League alone.

Both Crystal Palace and Chelsea applied to the Football Association for affiliation at the same time. Applications for affiliation were dealt with by the FA’s Emergency Committee and an examination of that committee’s minutes for the period 11th April to 24th May 1905 shows that the Memorandum and Articles (the governing documents of each club’s limited company) were approved, not rejected, for both companies during that period – and both clubs became affiliated to the F.A.

The Sporting Life reported that both Chelsea and Crystal Palace were approved for affiliation by the F.A., on the same day, April 14th, 1905 – 120 years ago today.

The professional Crystal Palace Football Club had arrived.

With continued thanks to Peter Manning.

Next month, Peter will delve into another 120th anniversary with the monumental battle that Crystal Palace had, to be elected to the Southern League in May 1905...