Have you ever wondered about the origins of the FA Community Shield? If you have then there is a one-word answer, whisky. And, as is the way of the World, where there is whisky there is usually a Scotsman. The story begins in 18987 when the Sheriff of London offered a shield on the understanding that it would be played for annually and between the two best teams of the season with the proceeds from the gate-money to go charity.
A committee of the some the greatest and "goodest" of English football was gathered, presided over by Lord Kinnaird, the Scottish President of the English FA. But he was not the Scotsman in question. The committee accepted the offer and the trophy was played for for the first time on 19th March 1898. But, of course, being 1898 and England there was a twist, in fact a couple.
The first was that the shield was not to be a match between the League Champion and the FA Cup winners, although both existed, but between either, that is whichever was regarded as the better professional side, and the best amateur side. Nor was it to be confined to English clubs. Although more often than not the best amateur team would be deemed to be Corinthian, in 1899 Glasgow's Queen's Park was the chosen one.
The second was that the Sheriff of London in question was not a Londoner. He wasn't even English. In fact, he was
Sir Thomas Dewar, a Scot, one of two son's who had taken on their father's whisky business. The elder boy, John, who would become Baron Forteviot, was the quiet one ran it day-to-day. Thomas was the, shall we say, flamboyant marketing genius, who made Dewar a global brand and, perhaps more than anybody, whisky a world-wide tipple.
The shield, all six feet of it, as it was envisaged, lasted nine years, until 1907. But it didn't go away. Instead, its ethos unchanged, it morphed. What had happened was the culmination of a rift within the Football Association that had begun the previous, said to be due to growing dissatisfaction over the professionalisation of the game. It seems a little far-fetched since professional football had in England been around for almost twenty-five years. However, it did lead to a meeting of a hundred or so clubs and setting up of Amateur Football Association. Interestingly the clubs were all from London, which betrays the real basis of the conflict. The Football League under William McGregor was even at that late date, twenty years after its foundation, the fiefdom of mainly of North of England and Midland clubs. The only clubs from the south in the First Division were Bristol Rovers and from London just Arsenal. Admittedly it was also changing.
Chelsea had bought its way into the Second Division that same year, joining only Clapton Orient, Fulham would joined the following season and Tottenham in 1908, both from the Southern League. However, amateurism still ruled and it was making a last, if ultimately futile, stand. And what would happen, that is the Football Association's response, was for it to take on the competition itself, changing the format and renaming it. The match itself initially became between the winners of the Football and the Southern Leagues and, when the latter was diminished still more by further defections, the winner of the FA Cup. The new name was the FA Charity Shield, with a new trophy, which was played for every year until 2002, when it became, again with very much the same aims as Dewar's original one, The FA Community Shield.
And by the way Dewar's shield still exists. In the 1930s it was played for to raise money for the National Playing Fields Association, in the 1960s for funds for the Corinthian Casuals, the successor of Corinthian, and in 1983 in a one-off game to mark one hundred years since Corinthian's formation. Then in the 1990s it was sold by the Corinthian Casuals again to raise funds for the club and was bought by a private collector. And much the same goes for the Charity Shield. In 2016 it was restored and also auctioned, with proceeds going to the Bobby Moore Fund. To all of which I suggest we raise a dram. May I recommend Glen Ord!