When one simple football question about Arsenal fooled the Sun completely

Why are Arsenal nicknamed the Gunners?

And they answered that with by saying, “The name Arsenal, and hence the nickname ‘Gunners’, goes back to the club’s original home, south of the Thames, in Woolwich.”

A very simple bit of investigative journalism one might think, and wrong on every point.  But in fact that error was just the start.

Arsenal and the clubs from which it emerged, never played in Woolwich.  There was no stadium in Woolwich.  There wasn’t even a ground in Woolwich.  They played in Plumstead.

Then, just to show they know nothing at all, the newspaper continued…

“The club was formed in 1886 as Woolwich Arsenal by workers from the Dial Square munitions factory.

“In 1913 they dropped ‘Woolwich’ from their name and moved to Highbury, but kept both the name ‘Arsenal’ and nickname ‘The Gunners’.”

Well, no, actually they didn’t.  In fact, they didn’t and they didn’t.

In fact if the ever-active research department of the Sun had bothered to look these things up they would have seen that the Arsenal History Society had in fact answered the question for the Sun.  All they had to do was look it up on the website.

In October 2011 Mark Andrews writing on the Society’s website revealed that the original references to the Gunners were from regional newspapers in the opponents’ towns. There is one home reference we found in the Woolwich Gazette but none in the Kentish Independent.   Originally the papers had a canon figure representing Arsenal is called “redshirt”, and in the main Woolwich newspaper references are made to the “Reds” during the whole period. Woolwich Arsenal were usually called “Reds”, Londoners, Cockneys or Woolwichites by other regional papers.

The original references to the Gunners was not to the players or the club but to the fans, as in the Yorkshire Sports newspaper which on 13 February 1904 noted that “early Saturday morning saw Bradford invaded by a big army of Gunners” clearly referring to fans.

The use of the name was repeated on 17 December 1904 in the Nottingham Football News which again clearly was talking of the fans, this time noting their habit of letting off fireworks (which was perhaps not surprising since a lot of the fans worked in the torpedo factory on the Thames).

The commentary ran…

“Gunners at home and gunners away, these terrible Arsenal people! They carry canon, crackers and other violent explosives about with them and gave us the liveliest display at Trent Bridge this afternoon I think I’ve ever seen….and what a fine thing this enthusiasm, this noise and exuberance of spirits is!.”

The theme continued with the Manchester Evening News of 9 March 1906 noting, “The famous “Gunners” are assured of a large following, notwithstanding that the excursion fares are not what may be termed cheap, and that means a journey of very little short of 400 miles inside 24 hours”.

By 1910 the Woolwich Gazette had a cartoon character representing a fan called Gunner and the Arsenal programme had a correspondent (George Allison who later became the manager) called “Gunner’s Mate” writing a column.

As you might expect the Sun got nowhere near any of this, so when they then asked “Why are Arsenal nicknamed the Gunners?” they answered by saying “The name Arsenal, and hence the nickname ‘Gunners’, goes back to the club’s original home, south of the Thames, in Woolwich.  The club was formed in 1886 as Woolwich Arsenal by workers from the Dial Square munitions factory.”

And of course they are wrong in every respect.   The club, as noted, in 1886 was called Dial Square, named after the one factory that generated the football team. It played one game – on the Isle of Dogs, north of the Thames.  The football team of Dial Square never played another game.

For in January 1887 after that one game, the club was opened up to all employees of the armaments factories on the Thames and called Royal Arsenal.   In 1893 when the club joined the League it had to drop the Royal name since it then became a limited company, and called itself Woolwich Arsenal, but it still played in Plumstead – which was the town in which many of its supporters lived.