Founder of Arsenal FC

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LAST month, as Thierry Henry and his new Barcelona team-mates held court at St Andrews, down the road in Burntisland, with rather less fanfare, another seminal figure in the Arsenal story was being accorded an overdue and much deserved tribute.

The Frenchman may not be too familiar with the name of David Danskin but he, and every other player who has donned a Gunners shirt down the years, owes Danskin a debt of gratitude. The Fifer is the man who laid the foundations of the London club, 121 years ago, and the first in the line of a little-known football dynasty that continues to this day.

On July 23, with former Arsenal and Scotland keeper Bob Wilson in attendance, Danskin's role as Arsenal's founder was formally acknowledged with the unveiling of a commemorative plaque near the site of the tenement where he grew up.

Danskin was born in 1863, the son of an iron-turner. His family had moved down the coast from Kirkcaldy to Burntisland following the opening of the Edinburgh and Northern Railway in 1847, when the town had become a major ferry port and railway terminus.

Like Lanarkshire and Ayrshire, Fife was already a strong football hotbed, and the source of many talented players who would later move south. As a teenager, Danskin captained a Kirkcaldy Wanderers team that featured two other future Arsenal players, Peter Connolly and Jack McBean.

In 1883, aged 20, he gave up his engine fitter apprenticeship in Kirkcaldy and moved to Kent, where he had been offered a job at the Woolwich Arsenal munitions factory.

Association football was viewed by many with suspicion in the rugby-dominated south of England, but Danskin was a determined evangeliser for the round-ball game. After several failed attempts, in October 1886, he persuaded a group of like-minded colleagues to club together and buy a football. It was the first important step towards the formation of Dial Square, named after one of the workshops in the factory, and the earliest incarnation of the team that would eventually become Arsenal.

The club was officially formed on December 1, 1886 at meeting at the Royal Oak public house in Woolwich, with Danskin and his fellow members agreeing that it should be rechristened Royal Arsenal. Ten days later, with full-back Danskin named captain, the team played its first ever fixture on a bog of a pitch on the Isle of Dogs in London's East End, thrashing Eastern Wanderers 6-0. Lining up behind Danskin was fellow founder member, Fred Beardsley, who doubled up as keeper for Nottingham Forest. Beardsley had managed to borrow some old shirts from his other club, which is why, to this day, Arsenal, like Forest, play in red.

Danskin featured regularly for the next three years With the team still making its mark, there was no silverware, but he was part of the team that reached the semi-final of the London Association Senior Challenge Cup in 1889, losing to local rivals Clapton Wanderers.

Plagued by injuries, Danskin reluctantly decided to stop playing later that year. However, he made a one-off return to the team in March 1890 as makeshift goalkeeper, standing in for Beardsley, who was away playing for Nottingham Forest. His passion for the game did not wane, and he remained involved as a coach, and even occasional referee. In June 1892, by which point the club had changed its name to Woolwich Arsenal and turned professional, he was elected on to the club's committee.

According to the 1901 census, by the turn of the century Danskin was earning a living as a mechanical engineer, and had also started his own business - making and selling bicycles under the brand name Cushie-Doo - from above the family home in Plumstead, a stone's throw from Woolwich Arsenal. In 1907, after being offered a senior job with the Standard Motor Company, he sold up and moved the family to Coventry. In March 1916, Danskin's wife Georgina died of emphysema. He remarried two years later, to Rose Clara Richardson, and the couple had three children.

When Arsenal won the FA Cup in 1936, Danskin's employers threw a special celebration dinner in his honour. Danskin, though, was by now suffering serious problems with his legs - probably the result of old football injuries - and had been forced to listen to the live radio broadcast of the final from his sickbed.

Told he would need to have a leg amputated, he replied: "I've got two legs now and if I'm going to die, I'll die with two legs."

Eventually he had to be admitted as a hospital in-patient. He died in Warwick on August 4, 1948, at the age of 85, and is buried in Coventry. For the best part of half a century his story died with him.

It was largely down to the efforts of his grandson, Richard Wyatt, that his connection to Burntisland has been identified. Wyatt, who lives in Canada, made his first pilgrimage to the town several years ago, and has since collaborated closely with the Burntisland Trust to piece together his grandfather's story.

"The curiosity about my grandfather's life has always been there," he said in an interview during that visit in 2004.

"But without the internet there were few starting points for my research in Canada. I always wanted to make the trip to Burntisland and see where he was born.

"It's amazing to think of all the great players and managers Arsenal have produced over the years and know they are linked back to my grandfather and Burntisland."

There is another contemporary twist to the Danskin tale. Twelve decades on, the family tradition is being kept alive, down under, in the person of Danskin's great-great nephew, Matt, an Australian youth international who was once on the books of Werder Bremen.

Matt Danskin's father, Andrew, himself a footballer with Leeds United before emigrating to Australia in the 1970s, explained the thread that links his son to the Arsenal founder: "David Danskin had a younger brother called William, born in 1874. William's son John William was my grandfather. He had ten children, one of whom was my father, also John William.

John William's branch of the family moved to the north-east of England in search of work, before settling in Yorkshire, where they provided three generations of Leeds United players.

"My grandfather's brother, Bob Danskin, played for Leeds and Bradford Park Avenue in the late 1920s and 1930s. My father also went on to play for the Leeds reserve team," added Andrew Danskin.

"I also played for Leeds United from 1967 to 1970. So there is a great soccer tradition in the family, and now my son, Matt, is continuing it."

In 2001, Matt Danskin was spotted playing for Western Australia Under-16s by a scout from Werder Bremen and went on to play for the Bundesliga club's U19 team. After failing to break into the senior squad, he headed home in 2004, signing for Perth SC of the Western Premier League. He has since featured for the Qantas Young Socceroos (the Australian under-20 team).

According to his father, the latest member of this remarkable football clan could now bring the Danskin story full circle.

"He has been hoping to get a contract in the Australian Hyundai A League; but if this doesn't happen, he could try his luck in the UK."


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