Links With The Past: Churchill's Visit To Leicester
While compiling the Club’s photographic archive in 2007, we came across this 98-year-old photograph of an old car. On the reverse, in spidery writing, the driver of the car had written ‘Minerva car in which I drove Mr Winston Churchill during his campaign in Lester'.
The Minerva was an eight-cylinder luxury saloon manufactured in Belgium. Further enquiries led us to Jane Palmer, who confirmed that the car belonged to her grandfather, Arthur Needham, who was a director of the Club in the 1920s and 1930s.
A few weeks later, organising a newspaper archive relating to the Club’s history, we found a Leicester Mercury from 1965 which published another photograph taken in 1923. It shows Churchill meeting the Leicester City team before their Second Division home match against South Shields.
Further research revealed that in the general election of December 1923, Churchill stood as a Liberal candidate for West Leicester. The local press did not support him and he was, by all accounts, uncharacteristically uncommunicative during the campaign.
However, on the Saturday before the election, Leicester City were playing at home to Second Division leaders South Shields and Churchill went to the game.
The players in the picture being introduced to Churchill are (from left to right, top image): Tom Duncan, Sandy Trotter, Bill Thomson, George Hebden, Arthur Chandler, Mick O’Brien, John Duncan, Billy Newton, Billy Barrett and Reg Osborne.
Inside-left Harry Graham is missing from the picture. The man in the flat cap is the trainer Dave Gardner.
Leicester City won the match 4-1. The programme for the game, illustrated here, is in the Club’s archive. The markings on it indicate that Chandler scored three goals and that Graham scored one.
The following Thursday, on a foggy December night, Churchill went to the count at the De Montfort Hall to discover that the voters of West Leicester had rejected him.
Churchill would, of course, help to lead the Allies to victory in the Second World War during the first of two terms as Prime Minister between 1940 and 1945. He was also a Nobel Prize-winning writer, an historian, a prolific painter and one of the country's longest-serving politicians.
As for South Shields, their existence as a league club only lasted for 11 seasons, from 1919 to 1930. In 1930, they were renamed Gateshead, who were themselves replaced by Peterborough as a league club in 1960.