Football in Portsmouth · from the 1860s to the champions of England
The city fell for football long before Pompey lifted a trophy — through a Sherlock Holmes author in goal, a garrison of gunners, a chant timed to a town-hall clock, and a rise from potato fields to champions of England.
Portsmouth's football story is older than Portsmouth Football Club — and a good deal stranger than the trophies suggest.
The game reached the city in the 1860s, carried south by soldiers, sailors and dockyard workers from the football-mad towns of the north. For a generation it was played by garrison teams, schools and works sides before any single club came to stand for the whole city. When that club finally arrived in 1898, it inherited a game the city had already embraced — through a future knight of crime fiction keeping goal, an army side that became the finest on the south coast, and a chant sung in time with a clock.
Arthur Conan Doyle kept goal for Portsmouth AFC in the 1880s under the alias "A.C. Smith" — writing Sherlock Holmes in the same city.
Royal Artillery's Irish goalkeeper Matt Reilly was nicknamed after Portsmouth's tallest building — then followed the fans to Pompey.
The Pompey Chimes began as fans singing along to the town-hall clock to hurry the referee — one of football's oldest organised chants.
Both 1939 finalists were reportedly given monkey-gland / testosterone treatment; the press nicknamed it "The Gland Final." Pompey won anyway.
Manager Jack Tinn wore the same spats — put on by the same player, in the same order — throughout the winning 1939 Cup run.
Fratton Park sits a mile from Fratton station in Milton; the name was chosen to borrow the station's pull for arriving fans.
Royal Artillery were thrown out of the Amateur Cup after the army was found to have secretly funded a training week in a hotel.
Fratton Park was laid out on former agricultural land off Goldsmith Avenue — the club literally rose from the city's fields.
The nickname is older than the club and its origin is genuinely disputed. The most-repeated theories are all naval: that it comes from "Pom P.", an old chart abbreviation for Portsmouth Point; that Portsmouth-based sailors who scaled Pompey's Pillar near Alexandria in the 1780s came home as "the Pompey boys"; or that a bored sailor being lectured about the Roman general Pompey the Great gave the city the teasing name. The truth is lost — but the word stuck, and by the time football took hold it was already the city's own.
