Tottenham and Middlesex

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Didn't woolwich attempt to merge with fulham at one point? But since fulham refused, it left them wandering for a home. #CuntsFromKent



Calling them Woolwich is actually incorrect, they played their home games in Plumstead but used the name Woolwich in an attempt to draw more fans.
 
Rightly or wrongly, (wrongly, I suspect) I`ve never really considered spurs a London club anyway. More a `home counties` club, drawing their support from a much wider area than other London clubs like Chelsea and Plumstead. But then again, I`ve never actually lived in London. Out of interest, who would you `locals` say has the most supporters within london itself ie the M25, other than Man Utd like ?
 
Rightly or wrongly, (wrongly, I suspect) I`ve never really considered spurs a London club anyway. More a `home counties` club, drawing their support from a much wider area than other London clubs like Chelsea and Plumstead. But then again, I`ve never actually lived in London. Out of interest, who would you `locals` say has the most supporters within london itself ie the M25, other than Man Utd like ?
goons & us no question!..
 
Also, I think the parrot story is an urban myth.
I think you'll find it's very true!!
In 1909, the Tottenham Hotspur team toured Uruguay and Paraguay. On the voyage back home they were gifted the ship’s parrot by the captain of the vessel. The parrot lived happily at the club for 11 years until it keeled over and died in 1919 on the very day Spurs were relegated from Division 1 and Woolwich promoted in their place.
....an alternative, but very similar account elsewhere online:
On leaving South America after the club's first overseas tour of 1909, the team won a fancy dress competition on the ship home as Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday, with the parrot used taken back to White Hart Lane as a memento of the trip by the cook on the liner, who had obtained it in Santos, Brazil. He lived happily at the club for 10 years until the day that Woolwich suspiciously got voted into the First Division in 1919 at the expense of Tottenham Hotspur, when he died.

I'd imagine that the 'urban myth' aspect of this story is more to do with the incident being directly (or indirectly) responsible for the phrase "Sick as a Parrot"... I've heard it's been in common usage since the 1700's... but maybe the connection with football was made because of this... I dunno?
All I know, is that apart from being fucking South London Gypsies, 'Plumstead ArseAnal' are Parrot Killers!!!!!!!
 
shows how stupid Woolwich fans are really as in 1965 the London Borough of Tottenham merged with the London Borough's of Hornsey and Wood Green to create the London Borough of Haringey.
 
I've kind of stayed out of this, since it's a rather silly thing for the Wanderers to be bringing up, and I'm not exactly a pro at the history of London. Basically all I know is that the government was always playing catchup with figuring out what London actually is. Until 1965, that is.

So instead, I decided to have a peep at some old newspapers and see what they have to say about "Middlesex's Tottenham Hotspur".

First, we competed for the London Cup, which is what makes up a lot of the articles from the 1880s and 1890s when I search for "Tottenham Hotspur" and "London". As do our matches against London Welsh. But there's over 1600 hits on both search terms between 1884 and 1900, so I narrowed it down to "Tottenham Hotspur" and "Londoner". This yielded 13 hits, but in none of them did the "Londoner" refer to our club. Usually it was in an entirely different part of the article, often a sports omnibus that included boxing (where they'd refer to a fighter as "the Londoner".

Considering our second division status for much of this era, I should not be surprised that we don't get much press other than a result printed. If you want to know what they looked like, here are a few examples:
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I'm a big proponent of "The Hotspur" as a nickname. "The ’Spurs" less so, though people should perhaps pause in mocking Americans for calling the club "The Spurs," as London papers did so 120 years ago.

Finally, apparently it was dangerous to be a footballer back then:
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Middlesex was in London: I know cause I was born there and watched Spurs from 6 years onwards. Spurs is as much a part of London as anyone else!!
 
Middlesex was in London: I know cause I was born there and watched Spurs from 6 years onwards. Spurs is as much a part of London as anyone else!!

no!!.. London was the county town of Middlesex!.. the southern boundary of Middlesex was the river thames
the name derives from "middle Saxons" goes back to when king Alfred trashed the Vikings
 
My Grandfather who was born, bred and died in Totteham in 1968 had lived there for 88 years always maintained that Tottenham a team he obviously supported and followed all his life was always a ‘proper’ Middlesex club and always said that it only ever started being called a London club in the fifties when games started to be filmed and it was just that by then no one seemed to know after the war where middlesex boundries started and ended. For whatever reason, he never liked the club being called a ‘London Club’. But I guess all this has been obscured for decades now and the reality is it means little. Tottenham is now as far removed from the North London I knew as a kid as the docklands is to the Olympic stadium.
 
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