Rewriting history with Download Albion
History can be a contrary soul. It’s easy to think that because it’s already been written in the book, laid down on the tablets of stone, that history is an immovable object, unchanging through the years.
But while the facts will always remain the same – Download Albion’s budget doesn’t yet run to a time machine with which we can avoid relegation at Twerton Park – new information on the past is always being unearthed, changing the historical landscape as once we knew it.
We’ve barely begun work, but one small tale has already popped up that changes the way we look at the Club in the Great War and, on a wider point, the way we look at our player records as a whole. It doesn’t shake the foundations of what we take Albion to be or to represent but it suggests that, as we start scratching the surface, plenty of new information is going to come to light and the record books are going to need some revisiting.
, 1903, scored on his league debut in a 3-3 draw at home to Sheffield United three days later and then appeared in games at Blackburn Rovers and Stoke as the Throstles became embroiled in an eight game losing streak.thGeorge Elmore is one of those players who become footnotes in the great story. His entire Albion career was encompassed by the 1902/03 season, comprising four games. An inside-right, he made his debut at home to Tottenham in a 2-0 FA Cup defeat on February 11
Four games and one goal and he was off to Bristol Rovers and out of our footballing story. Yet we always need to tidy up these loose ends and existing records show that he died in 1952. Not so, as new information excavated by Albion supporter and historian Barry Marsh shows.
1917 tells us that Elmore was a native of Witton in Cheshire, not from Wednesbury as we had always understood. He moved from there to Burton and on to the Albion before embarking on a peripatetic career that took in Bristol Rovers, Altrincham, Partick Thistle and St Mirren.thA newspaper clipping from the Nantwich Guardian of March 16
He returned to his native Cheshire in 1914 and, on the outbreak of the Great War, “resolved to play the “greater game” and joined the Royal Scots”. It was to prove a tragic decision for he was reported missing in early July 1916, his death officially confirmed in March the following year.
So it is that Elmore’s name should be added to the roll of those with Albion playing connections who lost their life in the Great War.
History never sleeps, hidden snippets of fresh information recasting and reshaping it all the time. That’s the job of Download Albion, to ferret out the details and offer up the clearest picture of Albion yet seen. We will keep you posted.