While the first round proper of the FA Cup is still six weeks away for us, the second qualifying round takes place today with the road to Wembley well and truly underway, with locally Penrith away to Scarborough Athletic and Barrow and Workington Reds at home to Ramsbottom United and Burscough respectively. It wasn’t always the road to Wembley though, with the competition enjoying finals in various different lesser known venues before Wembley Stadium hosted its first final in 1923, as Bolton beat West Ham 2-0 in a game more famous for Billy the white horse.
From the first actual final in 1872, when Wanderers beat Royal Engineers 1-0, 20 of the opening 21 finals, and two of three replay matches were played at the Kennington Oval, the home of course of Surrey County Cricket Club. The exceptions to the rule though were the 1872-73 final, in which Wanderers beat Oxford University 2-0, which took place at Lillie Bridge, no I’ve never heard of it either, and the replay of the 1885-86 final between Blackburn Rovers and West Bromwich Albion which was hosted at the Racecourse Ground, Wrexham.
As for Lillie Bridge itself, well this was a sports ground which was opened in 1867 and was near to the present day Stamford Bridge. The ground holding amateur boxing matches under the new Queensbury Rules as well as being used for athletics, cricket and county fairs. When Stamford Bridge opened in 1877 though as the home of the London Athletics Club who moved there from Lillie Bridge, the ground began to fall into disrepair and after a riot in September 1887 destroyed the track and grandstand it finally closed a year later.
Judging by the report in the Times it sounds like a cracker of a riot though with the cause being an alleged betting racket which the bookmakers got hold of as two athletes had apparently rigged a race prior to its running. ‘A gang of roughs’ was engaged by one bookmaker to threaten the athletes off running the race, which the owners of the ground got wind of as the bookies began offering odds of 1 to 10 that the race wouldn’t even take place.
With the race then in doubt and 6-7,000 people in attendance paying a shilling a head, or even four or five shillings for reserved seats, the owners were therefore very keen to get the gate money away as soon as possible. They did that too, and when news spread that the athletes had disappeared while the bookmakers made off with their booty, a mad rush by the punters to get their money back only resulted in them finding closed pay boxes.
Windows then began to get smashed in fury with the full scale riot then said to be started by ‘decently dressed people from the North, such as are to be seen in the Pomona Gardens at Manchester and in the sporting places of Sheffield, with a wonderful amount of time and money to devote to pedestrian and horse racing’. With half the crowd having cut their losses and gone home the remainder then began to chase the bookmakers down the road as they made their escape in horse drawn taxis, and cause even greater destruction to the ground.
Hoardings were torn down, the refreshment bar was ransacked and then buildings all around the ground, and even behind it, were set on fire. Police reinforcements eventually turning up to deal with ‘three or four thousand of the roughest classes’, as they protected the Fire Brigade’s attempts to put out the numerous fires now raging, amongst a constant shower of bottles and palings from the rioters.
The rioters though weren’t successful in their efforts to destroy the Lillie Bridge Concert Hall next to the ground, with the Police able to disperse the crowd before the boxes placed around the hall were set on fire, although they did bombard a reporter watching on the roof with bottles, torn off gas pipes and parts of chairs. These days meanwhile the former area of the Lillie Bridge Grounds houses a London Underground maintenance depot, the Earls Court Two annexe of the Earls Court Exhibition Centre and the Empress State Building.