Episode 2 : West Ham United is Born (1900 - 1919)

West Ham United FC is officially incorporated on 5 July 1900. This episode covers the early years of the new club: how they came to wear claret and blue, the move to the Boleyn Ground in Upton Park in 1904, and the long managerial reign of Syd King, who built the club from the ground up. It ends with the First World War and the West Ham Pals — the battalion of supporters and players who left Green Street for the Western Front, and did not all come back.

Research Sources

West Ham United Official History — whufc.com/club/history/club-history/1900s — excellent primary source on the early club years.

Elliot Taylor, 'Up The Hammers!' — the definitive history of the West Ham Pals and the 13th Essex Regiment. Essential reading before recording the war section.

John Spurling, 'Syd King: The Man Who Built West Ham' — if available, excellent background on King's management years.

Aston Villa official history / flashscore.com article on claret and blue origins — useful for the kit story context.

West Ham United club archive — contemporary records on the Memorial Grounds and move to Upton Park.

Daily Mirror, 2 September 1904 — original match report on the first game at Upton Park vs Millwall.

westhampals.blogspot.com — Elliot Taylor's research blog on the Pals battalion, with individual stories.

Key Dates

5 July 1900 — West Ham United FC officially incorporated.

First match as West Ham United: 7-0 win over Gravesend in the Southern League.

Summer 1899 — William Dove wins the sprint race; claret and blue shirts acquired.

1903 — Claret and blue permanently adopted as home colours.

1 September 1904 — First match at the Boleyn Ground (Upton Park): West Ham 3-0 Millwall, 10,000 crowd.

1904 — Iconic claret body / sky blue sleeves kit combination first worn.

1902 — Syd King appointed manager (age 29); serves until 1932.

1907 — West Ham win the Western League championship.

1912-13 — Best ever Southern League finish: third place.

August 1914 — First World War begins; Football League suspended from 1915.

December 1914 — Mayor of West Ham raises the 13th Essex Regiment (West Ham Pals).

December 1915 — West Ham Pals land in France.

Late 1917 — Last stand at Battle

All book references across the series:

John Powles — Iron in the Blood: Thames Ironworks FC, the Club That Became West Ham United (Soccerdata, 2005) — amazon.com/dp/1899468226 — Out of print; second-hand copies available.

Charles Korr — West Ham United: The Making of a Football Club (Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1986) — amazon.co.uk/dp/0715621262 — Out of print; second-hand copies available.

Elliott Taylor — Up The Hammers!: The West Ham Battalion in the Great War 1914–1918 (2012; Third Edition 2015) — amazon.co.uk/dp/1479279463

John Spurling — Syd King: The Man Who Built West Ham — Referenced in Episode 2 for King's management years.

Charles Booth — Life and Labour of the People of London (1889–1903) — Referenced in Episode 1. Searchable free via LSE Digital Library.

John Lovell — Stevedores and Dockers — Referenced in Episode 1. Background on dock labour conditions in Victorian East London.

Jonathan Schneer — Ben Tillett: Portrait of a Labour Leader — Referenced in Episode 1. Context on the 1889 Great Dock Strike.

Jeff Powell — Bobby Moore: The Life and Times of a Sporting Hero (Queen Anne Press, 2002) — amazon.co.uk/dp/1861055110

Matt Dickinson — Bobby Moore: The Man in Full (2014) — amazon.co.uk/dp/0224091727 — Supplementary to Powell.

Josh Chetwynd & ...

Transcript

[speaker1]: Welcome back to Irons Through the Ages.

[speaker1]: Last week, we started at the very beginning. We walked through the streets and shipyards of Victorian East London. We met Arnold Hills — the privileged idealist who believed sport could make better men. We met Dave Taylor — the practical foreman who actually made it happen. And we watched as Thames Ironworks Football Club took its first, uncertain steps onto the rough pitches of Canning Town.

[speaker1]: We also introduced a rivalry. One that was born not just on a football pitch, but in the competitive fury of the docklands economy. Millwall. The club from the other side of the river. A name that, for any West Ham supporter, carries a weight unlike any other in football.

[speaker1]: Today, we pick up the story in the summer of 1900. Thames Ironworks FC is gone. A new club has risen in its place. And the first thing it needs — apart from a name, a ground, and some decent players — is something to wear.

[speaker1]: This is Episode Two: West Ham United is Born.

[speaker1]: On the 5th of July, 1900, West Ham United Football Club was officially incorporated. The date matters. This wasn't a quiet administrative change — it was a deliberate, formal rebirth. Thames Ironworks FC had been wound up. Its successor was an independent professional football club, answerable not to a shipyard owner but to its own board and, increasingly, to its supporters.

[speaker1]: The choice of name had been carefully considered. Canning Town was discussed. Borough of West Ham was floated. But West Ham United was the name that won out — and it was the right choice. 'West Ham' anchored the club to a specific community, a specific place, a specific identity. 'United' declared its ambition: this club belonged to everyone in that community, not just the workers of one employer.

[speaker1]: The new club's first competitive match was a Southern League First Division fixture against Gravesend — and West Ham United announced themselves emphatically. They won 7–0. Seven goals. In their very first match as West Ham United. It was, you might say, a statement of intent.

[speaker1]: That first season under the new name went well. They finished sixth out of fifteen in the Southern League, won ten of their fourteen home games, and even made it to the intermediate rounds of the FA Cup, where they were drawn against Liverpool — at that point the champions of the Football League. Six thousand people packed into the Memorial Grounds to watch. West Ham lost, but they had shown they could compete at a higher level, and the crowd showed there was a genuine appetite for the club in East London.

[speaker1]: But there was a problem. And it wasn't on the pitch. It was on their backs.

[speaker1]: Before we get to the claret and blue — and we will get there, I promise — we need to briefly address what the club had been wearing before 1899, because it tells you something about the curious journey to the iconic colours we know today.

[speaker1]: In the very earliest days of Thames Ironworks FC, the team played in dark blue. Arnold Hills, their founder, had been educated at Oxford University, and Oxford's sporting colour is dark blue. It was his club, and they wore his colour. Simple as that.

[speaker1]: But as the club became more independent, more professional, and more its own entity, the dark blue gave way to something different. For a period, they played in sky blue shirts and white shorts — a cleaner, lighter look that moved the club away from Hills' personal association. And there were also pale blue shirts worn alongside claret socks in the very early days — colours that, interestingly, echoed what a local predecessor club called Old Castle Swifts had been wearing as far back as 1892.

[speaker1]: So claret and blue were already, in some form, flirting with this club's identity. But they hadn't yet arrived in their full, permanent, iconic form. For that, we need to go to a fairground in Birmingham. In the summer of 1899. And we need to tell one of the most wonderfully unlikely stories in English football history.

[speaker1]: William Dove was a man of some renown in late Victorian sporting circles. Not as a footballer — though his son Charlie, whom we met in Episode One, was a key player for Thames Ironworks. No, William Dove was famous as a sprinter. A professional sprinter of national repute, one of the fastest men in England over a short distance.

[speaker1]: He was also involved with Thames Ironworks as an athletic coach — helping players with their fitness and speed training. In the summer of 1899, William Dove found himself visiting a fair near Villa Park in Birmingham. Aston Villa's ground. And at this fair, he crossed paths with a group of Aston Villa footballers.

[speaker1]: Now, Aston Villa in 1899 were the dominant force in English football. They had won the First Division championship five times in the previous seven years. They were the Manchester City of their era — rich, powerful, successful, and very sure of themselves. So when one of their players looked at this London sprinter and suggested a race, the Villa men were confident enough to put money on it.

[speaker1]: Four Villa players wagered that one of them could beat Dove in a sprint race. They were wrong.

[speaker1]: William Dove won. Comfortably, by all accounts. The Villa players had lost their bet — but here's where the story takes a turn that's pure East End. They didn't have the money to pay up. They were, in the parlance of the time, skint.

[speaker1]: Among the group was a player who happened to be responsible for washing the team's kit. And in a moment of improvised generosity — or perhaps desperation — he offered Dove something in lieu of the cash debt: a complete set of Aston Villa football shirts.

[speaker1]: Claret and blue. The colours of the most successful club in England.

[speaker1]: Dove accepted. He brought the shirts back to London. His son Charlie, the Thames Ironworks right-half, took delivery of them. And in the summer of 1899, Thames Ironworks FC — soon to become West Ham United — pulled on those claret and blue shirts for the first time.

[speaker1]: As for the Villa player who handed over the kit? He reportedly told his club that the shirts had simply gone missing. Which is, it must be said, a very specific kind of missing.

[speaker1]: Now, I should be honest with you, because this podcast is about history, not mythology — and those two things aren't always the same.

[speaker1]: The story of the wager at the fair is wonderful. It has everything: sporting drama, a bet, a debt, an improvised payment, and a mildly dishonest cover story involving missing laundry. It is, frankly, the kind of story you'd invent if you were trying to invent a good story.

[speaker1]: And some historians do question it. Because there's an alternative explanation that's considerably less cinematic. Old Castle Swifts — the predecessor club to Thames Ironworks — were wearing pale blue shirts and claret socks as early as 1892. Aston Villa were wearing their claret and blue from the mid-1880s. It's entirely possible that Thames Ironworks, and later West Ham United, simply adopted the colours because they were already familiar, already associated with the club's lineage, already part of the fabric of what the team wore.

[speaker1]: Both things may even be true simultaneously — the colours were already drifting into the club's identity, and the wager at the fair simply confirmed and formalised them.

[speaker1]: But here's why the story matters, disputed or not: it captures something true about the spirit of this football club. West Ham didn't get their colours through careful corporate planning or a board meeting or a deliberate attempt to associate themselves with success. They got them through a bet, a sprint race, and a slightly questionable piece of kit management. That's very West Ham. And it's very East London. And the claret and blue, however they arrived, have been with us ever since.

[speaker1]: It's worth pausing here to explain why Aston Villa's colours were so distinctive — and why other clubs ended up wearing them too. Villa had first adopted their now-iconic combination in 1887, and the origins were themselves somewhat accidental. The original plan was for chocolate and sky blue shirts. But when the shirts came back from the textile factory, the chocolate colour had turned out darker than expected — more of a burgundy red. A claret. Villa looked at the shirts, shrugged, and accepted them.

[speaker1]: The result was one of the most distinctive colour combinations in world football. And because Aston Villa were so dominant in the 1890s — winning league title after league title, the hallmark of quality — other clubs wanted a piece of that association. By 1910, Burnley had adopted claret and blue. Scunthorpe United followed. Trabzonspor in Turkey adopted the colours decades later specifically in honour of Villa's heritage. The colours spread because they meant something — they meant the best team in England.

[speaker1]: West Ham, through whatever route the colours actually arrived, had inadvertently aligned themselves with a tradition of excellence. It would take some time for the excellence to follow. But the colours were there, ready and waiting.

[speaker1]: Permanently adopted from 1903, with the iconic claret body and sky blue sleeves combination first emerging in 1904, the kit has remained fundamentally the same ever since. Over a hundred and twenty years of claret and blue. All of it, if the legend is to be believed, because a man from East London could run faster than four Aston Villa footballers at a summer fair.

[speaker1]: By 1903 and 1904, West Ham United had a new kit. What they needed now was a new home. The Memorial Grounds in Plaistow had served them since 1897, but it was never ideal. The athletics track that circled the pitch kept supporters too far from the action. The rent was steep. And financially, the club was in trouble — serious trouble. In the 1903-04 season, the directors reported losses of £900 over two years, a large overdraft, and total assets of less than £200. The situation was perilous.

[speaker1]: Manager Syd King — of whom we'll hear more shortly — responded by rebuilding the squad from scratch. He sold players, released others, and started again. It was the kind of brutal, necessary reset that struggling clubs have always had to endure. It was painful. But it worked.

[speaker1]: And in the summer of 1904, West Ham United made the move that would define the club's geography for the next 112 years. They took a lease on a ground in the Upton Park area of East Ham. A piece of land that had previously been used as a market garden, enclosed by a low wall, with a small green-painted wooden stand on one side. It was called the Boleyn Ground, after a local legend that connected the site to the memory of Anne Boleyn — the doomed second wife of Henry VIII, who had been executed at the Tower of London back in 1536. Whether there was any genuine historical connection is debatable. But the name had been attached to a castle-like building on the site for generations, and it stuck.

[speaker1]: To the supporters — and very quickly, to the whole of English football — it became simply known as Upton Park.

[speaker1]: The first match at the new ground was played on the 1st of September, 1904. The opponents? Millwall.

[speaker1]: Ten thousand people turned out. That was a significant crowd for a Southern League match in 1904 — a genuine statement of the appetite that existed for West Ham United in East London. And the home side delivered on the occasion, winning 3–0. The Daily Mirror reported the next day, with evident satisfaction: "Favoured by the weather turning fine after heavy rains of the morning, West Ham United began their season most auspiciously yesterday evening."

[speaker1]: Most auspiciously. In a 3-0 win over Millwall. In front of ten thousand people. In a new home. You couldn't have written a better opening chapter for Upton Park.

[speaker1]: In the years that followed, Upton Park grew and developed. More terracing was added. The capacity increased. The relationship between the ground and the surrounding streets — the terraced houses, the pubs, the corner shops — deepened into something that went far beyond sport.

[speaker1]: For the people of East Ham, West Ham and the surrounding boroughs, the Boleyn Ground became a fixed point in the landscape of their lives. Saturday afternoons at Upton Park weren't just about football — they were a ritual, a gathering, a weekly reaffirmation of community identity. You went with your father, and his father had gone before him. You stood in the same spot every week. You knew the names of the men around you. You shared the highs and the lows with strangers who felt like family.

[speaker1]: That relationship between the club and its ground, and between the ground and its community, would last until 2016. We'll come back to that farewell in Episode Nine. But it begins here, in the autumn of 1904, with ten thousand people cheering West Ham's first goal at Upton Park against their oldest rivals. Some beginnings are perfect. That one was.

[speaker1]: If Arnold Hills was the visionary who created the conditions for a football club to exist, and Dave Taylor was the practical man who made it happen, then Syd King was the man who turned West Ham United into a genuine football institution.

[speaker1]: King had been a player first — a full back who joined Thames Ironworks in 1899, regarded at the time as one of the best defenders in the Southern League. Several Football League clubs had tried to sign him before the Ironworks got their man. When the club reformed as West Ham United in 1900, he transitioned into a secretary-manager role, combining administrative duties with his playing career, before taking sole charge in 1902 at just 29 years old.

[speaker1]: He would remain in charge until 1932. Thirty years. Through two world wars, through the club's move to Upton Park, through promotion to the Football League, through that famous 1923 FA Cup final. Nobody shaped West Ham United more comprehensively than Syd King, and yet his name is not as well known today as it deserves to be.

[speaker1]: King was methodical. He believed in organisation and discipline. He understood that a football club needed to be run like a proper business — not merely a passion project — if it was going to survive and grow. And he had an eye for a player. One of his earliest acts as manager was to sign three players from Tottenham Hotspur — including Tom Bradshaw, who had played for England. It was a statement. West Ham United were building something. They were competing in the transfer market. They were thinking big.

[speaker1]: And there was something else King recognised, something that would become a defining feature of the club's identity for generations to come. He valued local talent. He understood that East London was, as one contemporary publication put it, "a hot-bed of football" — that the marshlands and open spaces and back streets of the area were producing players of genuine quality, and that a club rooted in its community should be developing and playing those players.

[speaker1]: As early as 1905, a football annual was praising West Ham for turning out "more local players than any other team in the South." The raw material, it noted, was found on the marshlands round about. It was a philosophy that pre-dated Ron Greenwood's famous Academy of Football by fifty years. The DNA was always there.

[speaker1]: Under King, West Ham made steady if unspectacular progress through the Southern League years. They were runners-up in the Southern League in the 1904-05 and 1907-08 seasons — good enough to challenge for the title, not quite good enough to win it. In 1907, they won the Western League championship, defeating Fulham in a playoff for the overall title. Trophies were starting to arrive.

[speaker1]: But the real goal — the goal that King and the club had been building toward since 1900 — was election to the Football League. In those days, there was no promotion and relegation between the Football League and the Southern League. To join the Football League, you had to be voted in by the existing member clubs. It was a gentlemen's club, and it was not easily opened to newcomers.

[speaker1]: West Ham applied. They were rejected. They applied again. They were rejected again. It was a frustrating process for a club that had clearly demonstrated it could compete at the highest level. By 1912-13, West Ham finished third in the Southern League — their best ever finish. The case for Football League membership was undeniable. And then, just as the door seemed to be opening, the world intervened.

[speaker1]: Through all of this period, the rivalry with Millwall continued to burn. The two clubs met regularly in the Southern League and Western League — sixty competitive matches between 1899 and the outbreak of the First World War, as we noted last episode. Sixty matches in fifteen years. That's an average of four meetings a season. These clubs knew each other intimately — their players, their styles, their weaknesses. And their supporters knew each other even more intimately, in ways that weren't always comfortable.

[speaker1]: In 1903, Millwall inflicted the heaviest defeat in the history of the rivalry — a 7-1 win in the Southern Professional Charity Cup. But West Ham, to their credit, had ended Millwall's lengthy unbeaten run in the fixture the following year, winning 3-0 in a match that showed the balance of power between these two clubs was shifting.

[speaker1]: And there was a particular poignancy to Charlie Dove's departure at the end of the 1900-01 season. Charlie — the man whose father had brought the claret and blue shirts from Birmingham, the man who had been there from the very beginning — left West Ham United to join Millwall. His former teammates must have had complicated feelings about that. It was a reminder that football, even then, was a business, and loyalties could be bought and sold.

[speaker1]: The 1906 match at Upton Park that we touched on in Episode One — the one that ended in crowd violence and widespread fighting on the terraces — set a template for how these fixtures would be remembered: competitive, ferocious, and frequently spilling over the boundary between sport and something harder to name.

[speaker1]: On the 4th of August, 1914, Britain declared war on Germany. The First World War had begun.

[speaker1]: For West Ham United and its supporters, the consequences were immediate and devastating. Football continued for a season — the 1914-15 campaign was played to completion, amid considerable controversy, as many felt it was inappropriate to play sport while men were dying in France. From 1915, the Football League was suspended entirely for the duration of the war.

[speaker1]: For the men of East London, the war was not a distant event. It arrived on their doorstep almost immediately.

[speaker1]: In December 1914, the Mayor of West Ham applied to the War Office for permission to raise a local battalion of volunteers. The request was granted. What followed was one of the most remarkable expressions of community loyalty in the history of the area.

[speaker1]: Volunteers flooded the recruiting offices. By late February 1915, over a thousand men had enlisted. Formed as the 13th Service Battalion of the Essex Regiment, they became known as the West Ham Pals — and many of them, perhaps most of them, were West Ham United supporters. The first generation of men who had stood on the terraces at Upton Park, who had cheered those first goals in claret and blue, who had grown up with this club as part of the fabric of their lives.

[speaker1]: They had no uniforms at first. No rifles. Many had no military experience of any kind. The Council applied for their cap badge to carry two crossed hammers — in reference to the Thames Ironworks heritage — but the War Office refused. They were soldiers now, not footballers or shipyard men.

[speaker1]: The Reserve Companies of the battalion used the Boleyn Ground as a parade ground to encourage further recruitment. The stadium that had rung with the sound of a crowd cheering West Ham's goals now echoed with the drilling of men who were preparing to go to war.

[speaker1]: The West Ham Pals landed in France in December 1915. They fought through some of the most brutal engagements of the entire war — the Battle of the Somme, Vimy Ridge, Cambrai. Their last stand at the Battle of Cambrai in late 1917 made the front pages of newspapers across Britain.

[speaker1]: By the time the war ended in November 1918, of the original one thousand men who had enlisted, roughly two hundred and fifty had been killed. Half of the remaining seven hundred and fifty had been severely disabled by their wounds. Only one in four had come through the war unscathed — and even those men carried scars that no one could see.

[speaker1]: They never received a victory parade. The West Ham Battalion was disbanded and quietly forgotten by history — as so many Pals battalions were, men who had volunteered for their community and their country and been given very little in return.

[speaker1]: West Ham United has never forgotten them. A memorial plaque was unveiled at the Boleyn Ground in 2009 by Sir Trevor Brooking, carrying the inscription: 'Up the Irons.' It now stands near the entrance to the London Stadium. A small marker for an enormous sacrifice.

[speaker1]: Dedicated in memory to the sacrifices made by the West Ham Pals — 13th Service Battalion, the Essex Regiment — France and Flanders, November 1915 to February 1918. Up the Irons.

[speaker1]: When the war ended and football resumed in 1919, the Football League was reorganised and expanded. Four new clubs were elected to the Second Division. West Ham United were one of them — alongside Coventry City, South Shields and Rotherham County. It was the moment the club had been working toward for nearly two decades. Proper Football League football. The national stage. The real thing.

[speaker1]: They had earned it. They had built steadily through the Southern League years under Syd King. They had survived financial crisis, rebuilt their squad, moved to a new ground, adopted their iconic colours, and produced local talent with a consistency that would become the envy of other clubs.

[speaker1]: And they had done all of this while the community they represented sent its sons to die in France. In 1919, West Ham United looked ahead. The Football League beckoned. And something extraordinary was just around the corner — though nobody quite knew it yet. We'll cover that extraordinary thing — the 1923 FA Cup Final, the White Horse, the birth of Wembley — in our next episode.

[speaker1]: For this era — the years from 1900 to 1919 — the player I want to spotlight is Syd Puddefoot. And if you haven't heard of him, that tells you something about how football history tends to work: the further back you go, the more the brilliant players get lost in the noise of time.

[speaker1]: Syd Puddefoot was born in Limehouse in 1894 — East London born and bred, the kind of player that Syd King and West Ham had been identifying and nurturing from the local area. He joined the club as a teenager and made his first-team debut in 1913, just as West Ham were reaching their best Southern League finish and knocking on the Football League's door.

[speaker1]: What made Puddefoot special was his extraordinary goal-scoring ability. He was a centre-forward of genuine quality — quick, clever, and with a natural finisher's instinct that seemed almost unfair in a young man from the East End streets. He was exactly the kind of player that the 1905 football annual had been talking about when it praised West Ham for finding raw material on the local marshlands.

[speaker1]: The war interrupted what might have been his best years — as it interrupted the careers of countless footballers of his generation. But when football resumed in 1919, Puddefoot hit the ground running. He would go on to become West Ham's top scorer, and his goals would play a significant part in what was coming in the early 1920s.

[speaker1]: He was also, to the immense pride and slight resentment of every West Ham supporter of the era, sold to Scottish club Falkirk in 1922 for the then-remarkable sum of £5,000 — at that point a British record transfer fee. It was a bittersweet moment. Pride that their player commanded such a fee. Anger that the club sold him at all. A dynamic that will feel familiar to West Ham supporters of every subsequent generation.

[speaker1]: Syd Puddefoot. Local boy. Natural goalscorer. The first of a long line of West Ham players who became too good — and too valuable — for their own club to keep.

[speaker1]: For this episode's fan's eye view, I want to stay with the West Ham Pals for a moment. Because there's a detail about them that I find extraordinarily moving, and I think it captures something essential about what West Ham United means to this community.

[speaker1]: When the men of the 13th Essex Regiment went into battle — when they were advancing across the mud and wire of the Western Front, under fire, toward positions that many of them would never return from — they had a battle cry. It wasn't a military slogan. It wasn't a regimental motto. It was a football chant.

[speaker1]: They shouted "Up the Hammers!" as they went over the top.

[speaker1]: Think about what that means. These men, in the most terrifying moments of their lives — moments of genuine, existential terror that most of us will never come close to experiencing — reached for their football club. They reached for the thing that connected them to home. To their streets. To their families. To the Saturday afternoons at Upton Park that felt, from the middle of a French battlefield, like a different world entirely.

[speaker1]: West Ham United was not just a football club to these men. It was a piece of identity so deep, so fundamental to who they were, that they carried it into war with them. That's what a football club can be, at its best. Not just a team. A home.

[speaker1]: West Ham United. Born in the summer of 1900. Dressed, thanks to a sprint race at a Birmingham fair, in the claret and blue of Aston Villa. Settled, from 1904, into a home at Upton Park that would last more than a century. Built by a manager named Syd King who understood that football and community are inseparable. And tested, like everything in East London, by the catastrophe of the First World War.

[speaker1]: By 1919, the club had survived all of it. They were battered, financially fragile, and scarred by the losses of the war years. But they were Football League members now. And they were wearing claret and blue.

[speaker1]: Next week, on Episode Three — the 1920s arrive, and with them, something West Ham had never experienced before. Wembley. An FA Cup Final. A crowd of a quarter of a million people. And a white horse named Billy.

[speaker1]: Until then — thank you for listening. Come on you Irons.