100 years of memories

The turn of the year 2012 marked the start of centenary celebrations for Cambridge United, and on a chilly late January evening, fireworks erupted overhead. The festivity was not in celebration of the U’s, however; it marked another centenary, with friends and family gathered on the pavement in Green Park to celebrate the 100th birthday of a local lad. Luke Emson told the Ed Chapman story in 2012.

Following the entertainment and an outbreak of Happy Birthday with champagne held aloft, Ed retreated to the warmth of his living room, where he looked back on his memories of football in years gone by.

Very interested in sport, Ed played for Cambridge University Press (for which he worked from his early teenage years in Trumpington Street) in both football during the winter and cricket in the summer. The players were given Saturdays off to allow them to play and would travel to games by coach with their partners. Prompted to recollect when he started playing the beautiful game, Ed chortled: ‘I was about two, I think.’

This is Parker's Piece, where Ed Chapman watched Abbey United play and where Cambridge cricketer Tom Hayward held an annual charity challenge match. The great England batsman Sir Jack Hobbs, whom Ed dropped when he was on 99, is second from the right in the front row in this photo from the 1910 match. Hobbs' early life was spent in great poverty in the Barnwell area of Cambridge – also the birthplace of Abbey United.

Today it would almost be ridiculous to encounter a pitch that didn’t have a lush, flat surface, but Ed suffered unimaginably poor-quality pitches and described them as ‘awful’, before adding: ‘They weren’t pitches back then.’

His local club has played in five different locations in his lifetime, with the newly-formed Abbey United playing on Midsummer Common from the year of his birth until the First World War. In the club’s 20th year, following spells at Stourbridge Common, Parker’s Piece and the aptly named Celery Trenches, United move once more to Newmarket Road, and to the site of the current Abbey Stadium.

For most of this time, footballs were nothing like the light, swerving objects of today, but Ed shrugged off suggestions he had it tougher with the equipment of his era, saying: ‘They weren’t very hard – just leather and rubber.’ Asked about the big boots he used to wear, he replied, with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes: ‘No, mine weren’t big – I had small feet.’

Not only does Ed share the same birth year as his local club, he played a part in its history, as a 20-year-old, by playing in its first game at the current Newmarket Road ground. Playing left half, he was on the losing side as his Cambridge University Press team went down 2-0 in the 1932 friendly, but he remembers the facilities available at the time. ‘You’d always get a good cup of tea at the end (of a game) – there were eatables at half-time,’ he reminisced. ‘There were no pools or anything (to wash in) – just tin bathtubs.’

One summer, Ed had the pleasure of playing against cricket legend Sir Jack Hobbs, and agonises as he remembers dropping the England international on 99. The master proceeded to notch a century.

Whilst Ed’s football days have passed, the sport continues to progress and Cambridge United will be looking to reflect on their history to formulate a springboard for success over the next century.