Putney Town’s footballers have recreated a 1912 team photo on the exact spot it was taken, and want help finding out what became of the men in it.
The Sunday league side posed on Putney Lower Common, across the road from the Spencer Arms, arms folded and a ball at their feet, just as a team called Putney Town did more than a century ago. Behind both teams is the same terrace of three houses, with the same windows and the same chimney stacks.
It is the second time around for the name. When a group of friends started Putney Town FC in July 2004, they had no idea that a club of the same name had played on the common before the First World War.
Today’s club plays in the Southern Sunday Football League, with home games at Barn Elms. This season it has new red and black shirts, a new sponsor in Specsavers Putney, and a history that goes back further than any of its founders knew.
That history turned up in 2022, when local resident A. Turner found the photograph on a hard drive. Turner had been given it in 2004 by Ken Bernard, whose grandfather is one of the men in it. It was restored and passed to the club’s secretary.
The photograph is captioned “Putney Town Football Club 1912-13” and has 15 names printed beneath it: the players and the men who ran the club, a chairman, a trainer and a groundsman among them. The club has been trying to find out who they were.
“We’re trying to discover what happened to those men in the team,” said John Bedford, the club’s secretary, who wants to “uncover and remember the lives behind the faces”.
One of them the club is confident it has found. J. Bolton, its research suggests, was Jason Bolton, a chimney sweep born in Putney who was living in Fulham when he joined up at Chelsea Town Hall in January 1915.
He landed in France with the Middlesex Regiment the following month. By the start of July he was in a London hospital with gunshot wounds and his left foot amputated. In December he was sent home to wait for a place at Roehampton, where Queen Mary’s Hospital had opened that summer to fit artificial limbs to wounded soldiers.
He was discharged in May 1916 as no longer fit for service. By then he had been mentioned in despatches, and that October the London Gazette listed Lance-Corporal J. Bolton of the Middlesex Regiment among the men awarded the Military Medal “for bravery in the field”.
Most of the others are still only a surname and an initial. For 11 of the 15, the club’s research page reads “No concrete findings at the moment”, and for five of those it has no lead at all.
A second man may lie in a war grave in Belgium. A. Bernard, whose grandson handed on the photograph, could be Arthur Barnard, a bill poster who was killed in action in June 1917, aged 39, and is buried at Dickebusch, near Ypres. He left a widow, Alice, and three sons aged 11, eight and six.
But those records are for a Barnard, not a Bernard, and the club has not been able to tie the two together. An A. Barnard is on the Roll of Honour inside St Mary’s Church. Putney researcher Maggie Jones has spent ten years tracing the names on that roll, and found him living in Danemere Street in 1911.
Reading the photograph
The club worked out where to stand from details in the picture. In its top left corner are the last letters of a name on a sign: “llivan”. The club reads that as Sullivan. The Spencer Arms was run at the time by Tom Sullivan, a New Zealander who had been professional sculling champion of England.
A shopfront behind the players carries the name F. J. Morrison, which the club believes was a dairy. The terrace next to it is the one still standing today.
Local newspaper reports collected by the club show the first Putney Town playing league and cup matches from 1908, some of them on the Lower Common. One fixture notice tells the players where to change: “Dress at ‘Spencer Arms,’ Lower Richmond-road.”
For six of the untraced men the club has a possible match and nothing firmer. J. Hawkins may have been a 21-year-old footman from High Wycombe. The 1911 census records such a man at North House on Putney Hill, in the household of the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava.
R. Aplin, the groundsman, may have been Robert Aplin, a house painter who lived on Lower Richmond Road and died in 1960, aged 87.
J. C. Kendrick, who appears in the photograph as a league secretary, was probably James Alfred Kendrick, a clerk from Fulham who joined the Royal Flying Corps in 1917.
The research has been done with help from contributors to the Great War Forum and from Thomas Reid, retail director of Specsavers Putney, the club’s new sponsor.
Do you know these names?
The club is asking anyone with family photographs, memories or service records of these men to email putneytownfc@gmail.com. Its research so far is on the club’s website.
The 15 names printed on the photograph are:
- A. W. Wood (chairman)
- J. C. Kendrick Esq (secretary, S.E.L.)
- J. Bolton
- H. Clark
- H. Reeves
- A. Bernard
- R. Aplin (groundsman)
- J. Wallace (trainer)
- H. Pooley
- J. Hawkins
- A. Logan
- C. Roberton (captain)
- J. Graham
- H. Wren
- W. Franklin (hon. sec.)
Nobody at the club yet knows what became of H. Clark, H. Reeves, J. Wallace, A. Logan or J. Graham.
What a lovely story: really impressive local research has gone into it, and it’s a joy to read. Thank you, Kieren, for this.