<![CDATA[100 YEARS OF COCONUTS

<![CDATA[100 YEARS OF COCONUTS - News]]>Wed, 04 Mar 2026 04:39:09 -0800Weebly<![CDATA[The Pioneers of Abbey United - Charles Pink]]>Mon, 02 Mar 2026 13:28:33 GMThttps://www.100yearsofcoconuts.co.uk/news/the-pioneers-of-abbey-united-charles-pink

In this series of articles profiling the boys who played for Abbey United before the First World War, the church of St Andrew on Newmarket Road – better known as the Abbey Church – is mentioned frequently.
That’s appropriate, of course: the church is accepted as our club’s birthplace. The story is that its curate organised games for lads who either sang in the church’s choir or attended its Sunday school.

The tale is embellished by the legend that tells of night-time games under the gaslights of a nearby street – perhaps Stanley Road. ChatGPT has had a bash at depicting such a kick-about in the illustration on this page.

All of the youngsters lived within spitting distance of the church, but none lived nearer than Charles Pink.
His dad, also called Charles, was a horse dealer who also kept the Bird Bolt pub on Newmarket Road – slap bang opposite the church. Cambridge Refrigeration Technology now occupies the site.

The younger Charles, who played at least twice for Abbey United in the 1913-14 season, was born in 1897 and baptised in his local church in 1904. He attended Brunswick Boys’ School and in 1916 enlisted in the Worcestershire Regiment.

He was attached to the Machine Gun Corps on the Western Front when he was wounded in October 1917, and he was discharged the following year.

By 1921 Charles, still living at the Bird Bolt, was working as an assistant miller at the Norman cement works at the far end of Coldhams Lane. Getting to work would have entailed either a brisk 35-minute walk or a more leisurely pushbike ride.

His younger brother Rundle worked a little nearer, at the Saxon cement works, part of whose site now forms a piece of Sainsbury’s car park, and sister Edith was a factory hand at the ARC Knitting Company in Abbey Walk.

Charles married widow Hilda Day in 1926, and they went on to have two children. In 1930 the family moved to Horningsea – they would have been neighbours of future U’s starlet Brian Hart as he grew up in the village in the 1940s – but Charles was described as incapacitated in the 1939 Register. We don’t know the nature or cause of his disability; perhaps it stemmed from that old war wound.

He was just 52 years old when he died in 1950.

If you believe you are a descendant of Charles, or if you know someone who is, please get in touch: danb@cambridgeunited.com.

]]><![CDATA[The Pioneers of Abbey United - Wilderspin brothers]]>Fri, 20 Feb 2026 12:24:30 GMThttps://www.100yearsofcoconuts.co.uk/news/the-pioneers-of-abbey-united-wilderspin-brothers

Working out which of the Wilderspin brothers played for Abbey United in the 1913-14 season was a tricky task until Carole Hillen got in touch.

Carole, a daughter of Ernest Wilderspin, recalls that her uncles Len and Reg were both keen football followers. But while Reg became a Cambridge City supporter, Len lived for decades on Newmarket Road and was a diehard U’s fan.

So it was probably Len who played for Abbey in at least two matches, against Watts & Sons and Saint’s Building Works, but there remains the tantalising possibility that both brothers turned out for the newly born club. One Wilderspin appearance was as goalkeeper while the other was on the right wing, and we know that Reg played in goal for his employer’s team.

Len was born in 1895 and baptised the following year at the Abbey Church, a stone’s throw from the Wilderspins’ Saxon Road home, to Henry, a carpenter born in Cambridge who became a picture-frame maker, and Hauxton-born mother Mary Jane.

Len attended Brunswick Boys’ School and by 1911 was working as a porter in a chemist’s shop. Reg was later to follow a lifelong career in the printing trade with Heffers.

Len and Reg both enlisted in the Cambridgeshire Regiment when the First World War raised its ugly head; younger brother Ernest was too young to engage in the conflict. From military records we learn that the older Wilderspins both had blue eyes and dark hair.

While Len seems to have come through the war unscathed, Reg suffered a shattered right wrist at Ypres and, according to family members, thenceforth always wore a bandage on the injured part.

In 1921, when he was back living in Saxon Road (pictured) and working as a water gas operator at the nearby gas works, Len married Petersfield woman Daisy Elvin at Christ Church. Brother Reg acted as best man and the happy couple spent their honeymoon in Hove.

At first they lived in Beche Road, just round the corner from Len’s birthplace, but in 1937 they moved to a detached house on Newmarket Road, beyond Ivett & Reed’s stonemasonry business but within a short walk of Len’s beloved Abbey Stadium.

Len died at the age of 85 in 1980 – five years after the death of Reg and three years after Daisy’s decease.

If you believe you are a descendant of the Wilderspins, or if you know someone who is, please get in touch: danb@cambridgeunited.com

]]><![CDATA[The Pioneers of Abbey United -William Maltby]]>Mon, 16 Feb 2026 09:33:31 GMThttps://www.100yearsofcoconuts.co.uk/news/the-pioneers-of-abbey-united-william-maltby

We’ve discovered much about the lives of the lads who played for Abbey United in the months leading up to the First World War, but we don’t know what most of them looked like. We’ve found very few photographs, and descriptions of the young men are rare.

But thanks to military records we can have a stab at imagining the appearance of William Maltby, who played at least nine times and scored a minimum of seven goals for Abbey in 1913 and 1914.

Created when he was discharged from the Cambridgeshire Regiment in July 1916 because he was “no longer physically fit for war duty”, the document notes that, at 19 years old, William stood five feet seven inches tall and had a fresh complexion, brown eyes and dark brown hair.

The file also notes that William, who was wounded by shrapnel to the left forearm during the second Battle of Ypres in May 1915, sported a tattoo devoted to “Ethel” on that same forearm. It’s heartwarming to find that the young lovers married in the parish of St Andrew the Less in 1920 and went on to have two sons.

William was born in 1897 and was baptised in the Abbey Church the following year. His labourer father Harry and his mother Sarah lived, like so many Abbey United families, in Beche Road. Sadly, tragedy struck the family in May 1910 when Harry committed suicide.

After leaving Brunswick Boys’ School later that year, William began work as an errand boy for the shoe retailer Freeman Hardy & Willis (pictured). By 1911, all members of the Maltby family – the widowed Sarah, William and his four sisters – were working to make ends meet.

Staying in Beche Road after the war, William found work as a labourer for the Cambridge building contractor W Saint, but by 1924 he was making a living as a window and carpet cleaner in partnership with his mate Ernest Gill. The enterprising pair were happy to clear guttering and trim creepers, a newspaper ad (pictured) promised.

It’s possible that William resumed his football career in the 1920s, but not for Abbey United: a W Maltby played and scored for Barnwell United in 1928.

William and Ethel moved to Stourbridge Grove, off Coldhams Lane, in the 1930s. Ethel died in 1974 and William survived her by three years.

If you believe you are a descendant of William’s, or if you know someone who is, please get in touch: danb@cambridgeunited.com.

]]><![CDATA[The Pioneers of Abbey United - Alfred Bull]]>Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:17:20 GMThttps://www.100yearsofcoconuts.co.uk/news/the-pioneers-of-abbey-united-alfred-bull

To our list of pre-First World War Abbey United players who didn’t survive the war years must be added the name of Alfred Bull.

But unlike several of his Abbey teammates who were killed in action on the Western Front, Alfred didn’t die as a result of enemy action.

He fell victim to tubercular peritonitis, a bacterial complication of tuberculosis, while he was serving in France and, having been invalided back to England, died at a military hospital in York at the age of 21 on 10 December 1918.

Reverend RF Wright, curate of the Abbey Church, conducted the funeral service at the borough cemetery, Newmarket Road four days later. At the graveside were his father – also called Alfred, a labourer at Watts & Son’s timber works (pictured) just along the road – his mother Emily, five brothers and two sisters.

Alfred was born in 1897 and lived his early life in Beche Road, where he was a close neighbour of several of the young men who played for Abbey United.

There is some evidence that he attended Brunswick Boys’ School, situated just round the corner in Walnut Tree Avenue (pictured at its junction with Newmarket Road). The avenue no longer exists, having been demolished to make way for the 1971 opening of the Elizabeth Way river crossing.

We know that by 1911 Alfred was apprenticed to a boot and shoe maker – a fairly common occupation in working-class Cambridge at the time.

On the other hand, we can’t be sure that he ever kicked a ball in anger for our young football club. He was named as a reserve for a fixture on Midsummer Common against his father’s employer’s works team in November 1913 (a match won 3-2 by Watts & Sons) but the records don’t reveal if he made an appearance.
Unusually for a Barnwell boy, Alfred didn’t enlist in the Cambridgeshire Regiment when war broke out a few months later. Instead, he signed up for the Queen’s Royal (West Surrey) Regiment – sometimes known rather unflatteringly as the Mutton Lancers after their ‘Lamb and Flag’ cap badge.

He found himself in France in August 1916 but it’s not known where he was serving when he fell ill.

We now know that early antibiotic treatment can relieve the symptoms of tubercular peritonitis, but Alfred was not to receive that succour.

If you believe you are a descendant of Alfred’s, or if you know someone who is, please get in touch: danb@cambridgeunited.com.

If you have any further information concerning the article above or related to Thomas Tyrrell
contact 100yearsofcoconuts@gmail.com

]]><![CDATA[The Pioneers of Abbey United - Walter Howlett]]>Mon, 26 Jan 2026 10:04:53 GMThttps://www.100yearsofcoconuts.co.uk/news/the-pioneers-of-abbey-united-walter-howlettA very large proportion of the young men who played for Abbey United in the latter part of 1913 and the first months of 1914 were exposed to the many horrors of the First World War. A few didn’t live to tell the tale.

One who did – although he experienced the unimaginable terror of being subjected to a mustard gas attack – was Walter Howlett, resident of Beche Road for his entire life.

In July 1917, Walter, like so many of his teammates a private in the Cambridgeshire Regiment, was fighting in the early days of the Third Battle of Ypres, better known as Passchendaele – a conflict that became a byword for mud, blood and futility.

Mustard gas, first used by German forces in that month, caused enormous numbers of casualties and many fatalities, not least because its effects, at first slight, were often underestimated. Images of temporarily blinded soldiers being guided to treatment stations are among the most powerful of the entire conflict.

Walter recovered and, although he was treated for trench fever in 1918, saw out the war and returned to Cambridge in 1919 – unlike his brothers Frank and William, who were killed in action in 1916 and 1918 respectively.

Walter was born in the city in 1894, was baptised at the Abbey Church and lived with his blacksmith father Robert and mother Susannah just round the corner from the church in Beche Road (pictured). After attending the Abbey School and Barnwell Boys’ School, he was apprenticed to a tailor in 1909.

We know he played at least once for Abbey United – at left back in a 4-0 win over St Phillip’s in December 1913. We don’t know if he ever played football after the war.

He married Priscilla Rolfe, known as Fanny, in 1921 and the couple lived in Walter’s father’s Beche Road house.

By the time of the 1939 Register, compiled as another great war loomed, Walter was working as a salesman of flower and vegetable seeds, while Fanny (office cleaner) and their daughter Evelyn (factory worker) were both working at one of the Cambridge area’s largest employers – the Chivers jams and preserves company in Histon.

The Howlett family never left Beche Road, and it was there that Walter died in 1961 at the age of 66. Fanny died in Ely ten years later.

If you believe you are a descendant of Walter’s, or if you know someone who is, please get in touch: danb@cambridgeunited.com.

If you have any further information concerning the article above or related to the Cowling contact 100yearsofcoconuts@gmail.com

]]><![CDATA[Amber & Black Abroad! U's legends in Germany]]>Fri, 23 Jan 2026 10:58:44 GMThttps://www.100yearsofcoconuts.co.uk/news/amber-black-abroad-us-legends-in-germanyGo behind the scenes as John Taylor leads a group of Cambridge United favourites - Danny Potter, Andy Duncan, Ian Miller, Warren Goodhind, Omer Riza, Wes Hoolahan, Michael Kyd and Dave Kitson - to Germany for the Bretterknaller tournament.

Film produced with thanks to Leon Isenberg and Ben McFadyean.

]]><![CDATA[The Pioneers of Abbey United - Bob Codling]]>Mon, 19 Jan 2026 09:26:01 GMThttps://www.100yearsofcoconuts.co.uk/news/the-pioneers-of-abbey-united-bob-codling

Those who played for Abbey United in 1913 and 1914 were very young, but Bob Codling was an especially youthful player. He was also much too young to be sent off to war in September 1915.

Born in June 1899 and baptised in the Abbey Church, Bob was only 14 when he played in the half-back line at least six times for our club – and scored at least three goals – in the months before the outbreak of World War One.

The lowest official age for enlistment in the British Army was 19, but such was the need for manpower that recruiters often turned a blind eye to an eager would-be Tommy’s juvenile looks. So it was that Bob was able to join the Cambridgeshire Regiment in the spring of 1915, when he was just 15. By September of that year he was serving in France.

Bob was listed as wounded twice – in June 1916 and September 1918 – and it’s probable that he sat out the last weeks of the war far from the front line.

As a child he had lived with father Robert, a plasterer born in Great Yarmouth, and Cambridge-born mother Amelia in Beche Road, and attended Barnwell Boys’ School.

And it was to Beche Road – on the Abbey Estate between the Abbey Church and the river – that Bob returned after the war. Like his father, he worked in the building trade, qualifying as a carpenter and being admitted to that trade’s union in 1920. By 1921 he was working on the site that later became the National Institute of Agricultural Botany in Huntingdon Road.

In 1925, by which time he was working on Cambridge Corporation housing contracts in Vinery and Coleridge Roads and was involved in local politics with the Labour Party, he married Emily Wenham, who had lived not far from Beche Road in Newmarket Road.

A change of career was in prospect. The Codlings took over at the much-missed Cow and Calf pub in Pound Hill (pictured) in the 1930s, and they proved popular licensees. Bob, however, still took pride in stating that he was qualified as a carpenter.

It was back in Beche Road that he died in 1973. He was laid to rest in the borough cemetery in Newmarket Road, where Emily joined him nine years later.

If you believe you are a descendant of Bob’s, or if you know someone who is, please get in touch: danb@cambridgeunited.com.

If you have any further information concerning the article above or related to the Cowling contact 100yearsofcoconuts@gmail.com

]]><![CDATA[The Pioneers of Abbey United - Thomas Frederick Tyrrell]]>Mon, 12 Jan 2026 23:01:45 GMThttps://www.100yearsofcoconuts.co.uk/news/the-pioneers-of-abbey-united-thomas-frederick-tyrrellThomas Frederick Tyrrell – let’s call him Tom – played at least three times for Abbey United in the year in which the First World War broke out. He came through the war in one piece and lived a quiet Cambridge life until his death in 1968.

But if Tom seldom moved far from his Barnwell birthplace, the same cannot be said for his antecedents.

His father William, who when Tom was born in Cambridge in 1899 was custodian of a free library in East Road, was born in Blanchardstown – then a small village north-west of Dublin, now a sizeable suburb. His wife, Emma, was from East Mersea in Essex, and their children were born in places as far-flung as Alderney in the Channel Islands, Mullingar in County Westmeath, York, Pontefract and, nearer home, the fenland village of Reach.

Tom was baptised in the year of his birth in the Abbey Church, cradle of our club, and in 1901 the family was living in Nelson Street, which lies buried beneath the Grafton Centre.

By the time of his admission to Barnwell Boys’ School in 1908, the Tyrrells had moved to Norfolk Terrace (pictured) below; you can find their house if you wander down Blossom Street off Norfolk Street.

We know that Tom played at left back for Abbey United against Granta United, Old College Choristers and Swifts in early 1914. He may have played more often – we have precious few details of most of Abbey’s matches.

Similarly, we don’t know much about his military service during the war, but he may have been the TF Tyrrell who served with the Royal Army Medical Corps.

Back in Cambridge, Tom married Edith May Lucas in 1920, and they had at least two daughters. At the time of the 1921 census, he was still living in Norfolk Terrace and was working for a manufacturer of ‘artificial bricks’ (perhaps what we call breeze blocks today; do you know better?) in Devonshire Road.

Sad to say, Edith died at the age of just 35 in 1932. By 1939, Tom had moved to nearby Sturton Street and was working as a maltster, maybe at the maltings in Ditton Walk

He was still living in Sturton Street at the time of his death nearly 30 years later.

If you believe you are a descendant of Tom’s, or if you know someone who is, please get in touch: danb@cambridgeunited.com.

If you have any further information concerning the article above or related to Thomas Tyrrell
contact 100yearsofcoconuts@gmail.com

]]><![CDATA[The Pioneers of Abbey United - Charles Griffiths]]>Thu, 08 Jan 2026 22:50:34 GMThttps://www.100yearsofcoconuts.co.uk/news/the-pioneers-of-abbey-united-charles-griffiths

Anyone researching the life of Charles Griffiths, who played for Abbey United in the 1913-14 season, faces a knotty problem: he didn’t always go by that name.

Charles’s father, known to Cambridge folk as Con Griffiths, was born in the Borough, south of London Bridge, under the name of Albert Hawes. His adopted son Charles, born in Walworth in 1894, also went by the Hawes surname.

At some point the elder Hawes adopted the Con Griffiths name, moved to Cambridge and, billing himself the ‘champion ten stone wrestler of the world’, started work as wrestling instructor to the university. He’s shown here demonstrating the head creel, a Lancashire wrestling hold.

He also ran a series of pubs, ending up at the Butcher’s Arms on Newmarket Road. The Griffiths/Hawes family was living here, almost opposite the Abbey Church, when our club was born.

Charles attended Brunswick Boys’ School and by 1911, when he was again going by the Hawes family name, he was working as a general labourer. He played in Abbey United’s forward line in three fixtures, and possibly others, in early 1914.

Like so many of his teammates, Charles found himself fighting in France with the Cambridgeshire Regiment early in World War One. On 2 April 1915 he wrote to his parents as his platoon enjoyed a short rest six miles behind the front line: ‘There are some sights to see out here.

‘One town we were in was blown to atoms, not one house standing and the church blown down.’

That unfortunate town may have been Armentières, whose ruined hôtel de ville is pictured below. The town, near Lille on the France-Belgium border, was cited as Charles’s residence when, on home leave in June 1915, he married sweetheart Frances at St Matthew’s Church.

He seems to have come through the war unscathed, and it’s possible that his sports career continued. A certain C Griffiths is recorded as running the 440 yards for the Amateur Athletic Association against the university at Fenners in December 1919, and playing football for Wanderers on Parker’s Piece a fortnight later.

Charles’s history after the time of the 1921 census – when he, Frances and son Albert were living at 10 Abbey Street – becomes somewhat murky. It’s possible that he changed his name to Bartlett, perhaps his birth mother’s name.

If you believe you are a descendant of Charles’s, or if you know someone who is, please get in touch: danb@cambridgeunited.com.

If you have any further information concerning the article above or related to the Griffiths/Bartlett/Hawes contact 100yearsofcoconuts@gmail.com

]]><![CDATA[The Pioneers of Abbey United - Walter Whybrow]]>Mon, 05 Jan 2026 19:13:53 GMThttps://www.100yearsofcoconuts.co.uk/news/the-pioneers-of-abbey-united-walter-whybrow

The haunting tones of the Last Post sounded over the Borough Cemetery, Newmarket Road on 21 November 1916, as Private 1857 Walter Whybrow, former Abbey United player, was laid to rest with military honours.

The 22-year-old, who had enlisted in the Cambridgeshire Regiment two years before, had endured three agonising months after falling victim in August to a German shell on the front line in France, possibly as the Cambridgeshires joined the Battle of the Somme.

The blast half-buried him in a trench, and he suffered spinal injuries so severe that he was paralysed from the waist down.

By October Walter had been admitted to the the UK’s largest hospital, the King George in Stamford Street, London. This enormous facility consisted of five floors of wards, each extending over an acre and a half; its gift store procured 50,000 to 60,000 cigarettes a week so that each patient could have half a dozen smokes a day. Today’s health professionals would be horrified.

Walter died of his wounds at the hospital on November 16. His funeral service, attended by his widowed mother Ellen, brother Ernest and four sisters, was conducted by Rev CF Bouquet, chaplain of the First Eastern General Hospital, which was sited where the University Library now stands.

Walter was born in 1894 in Cambridge, son of Ellen and gravel pit foreman George. Growing up at 2 Coldhams Lane, he was baptised in the parish of St Andrew the Less in 1905, on the same day as sisters Lily and Ellen and cousin Horace.

In 1911 he was living in the Norfolk village of Stoke Ferry and earning a living as a plumber’s mate, but by late 1913 he was back on home ground and playing for Abbey United.

We know that he turned out in at least four games, in a variety of positions including goalkeeper, between November 1913 and April 1914, and that some time in the latter year he signed up for the Cambridgeshires.

At the time of his death, Walter was the youngest of four brothers serving in the army: 32-year-old bombardier Edward was in the Royal Horse and Field Artillery; 24-year-old sapper Alfred of the Royal Engineers sustained severe head wounds in battle; and 30-year-old Ernest was in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Apart from Walter, they all survived the war.

If you believe you are a descendant of Walter’s, or if you know someone who is, please get in touch: danb@cambridgeunited.com.

If you have any further information concerning the article above or related to the Wybrow family please contact 100yearsofcoconuts@gmail.com

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