This article appeared in the Cambridge United official programme for the game against Accrington Stanley on Saturday, 1 October 2016.

Footballers’ nicknames can be really boring, can’t they? Too often it’s just a case of adding a ‘y’ or an ‘o’ to a surname – Mooro, Bally, – or shortening the name and adding an ‘s’ – Becks, Blatts, Cholmondeley-Warns.

The U’s have been as guilty of this lazy practice as any other club. On the other hand, we have a proud history of nickname creativity: who was the genius who first dubbed John Taylor ‘Shaggy’? How did Gary Clayton become Hedgy? Was Lindsay Smith’s ‘Wolfie’ moniker the result of a Habbin wit’s contribution to a Saturday afternoon?

Go further back in U’s history and you’ll come across the likes of Buzzer, Cruncher and Scobie. But if you explore the period covered by Andrew Bennett’s wonderful book Newmarket Road Roughs, published this month by Lovely Bunch, you’ll be able to mine a fabulously rich seam of nickname gold.

Here are some of the mysteries 100 Years of Coconuts researchers hope to solve (if you know the answers, please get in touch at 100yearsofcoconuts@gmail.com): whence came the ‘Pop’ in Stan ‘Pop’ Ballard? Why was Harold Watson known as Darley? Who put the ‘Pim’ in Bill Stearn? What was the story behind Jim ‘Squatter’ Smith? Why did everyone call William Freeman ‘Fanny’? Was it a result of dressing room bants? I shudder to think.

This article appeared in the Cambridge United official programme for the game against Yeovil Town on Tuesday, 27 September 2016.

This may be one of those stories that will have you wondering what on earth it’s got to do with Cambridge United. Stick with it and you’ll see.

Got a few spare minutes? Cross Newmarket Road from the Abbey and wander a little way up Ditton Walk, on the opposite side of the road to The Globe – sorry, Pipasha. Cast your eyes to your right – pretty unremarkable, you’re thinking. Retrace your steps to Newmarket Road, turn left and proceed, eyes left, in an easterly direction. You’ll see the fronts of the same houses whose rears you saw in Ditton Walk – nothing much to get excited about.

But if you’d followed the same path before the builders got started on the Ditton Fields estate in the 1930s, you would have been looking at a field. Its name – Hospital Field – reveals its history.

During World War I, the First Great Eastern Hospital operated in various sites in Cambridge, finally settling in the spot now occupied by the University Library. It gained fame for its treatment of wounded, mangled and otherwise damaged combatants – tens of thousands of them – in wards that were open to the elements. There was one category of patient, however, that was not treated for long at the First Great Eastern.

In 1915, two auxiliary hospitals were set up just outside the Cambridge borough boundary: one in Cherry Hinton and another, the 850-bed Barnwell Military Hospital, in Newmarket Road. In September 1915, Colonel Joseph Griffiths, officer commanding the First Great Eastern, addressed patients at the Barnwell establishment thus: ‘Soldiers of the British Empire: those of you to whom this is addressed have caught a venereal disease, usually, because you have been with strange women.’

Griffiths went on to urge his patients to co-operate, so that they might get themselves ‘into a condition worthy of manly men’. These folk were treated with suspicion within the hospital and fear outside. They were in fact more detainees than patients, and they were treated inside barbed wire fences.

Townspeople expressed outraged opposition to the siting of the hospitals on their doorsteps. Perhaps it was justified: escaped patients plundered orchards in Fen Ditton, the town council was told; there had been attempted indecent assaults on Cambridge women; promises about tight discipline and unclimbable fences had not been kept. There were other incidents, including the burglary of the nearby Globe by members of a hospital-based gang, who left with a rich haul of alcohol and tobacco.

One councillor suggested the men should be given distinctive uniforms so townsfolk could spot them easily and ‘shun them as they would a leper’. Such harsh measures were not introduced, but the hospital’s security was tightened with a doubling of the guard, formed by military police officers.