Saved by a Foul

by Mike Edwards

George was a fit young man, passionate about his football and a member of the local yeomanry, the army reserve. In 1913, in his army uniform, he posed proudly for a photograph on his cavalry mount. George worked at the Royal Small Arms Factory, Enfield, where the county of Middlesex met Essex and Hertfordshire.

During a football match for the RSAF team, in 1913, following a rough tackle that left his right foot with a nasty bruise, George limped off the pitch and, at the end of the match, hobbled home. This was part of the game and would soon get better, just like all the other knocks he’d sustained and recovered from. But this was different and George’s life was about to change. The bruise got worse and worse and, in that time before antibiotics, began to show worrying signs of gangrene. In the end, the doctors had only one choice and amputated all of George’s right foot in front of his heel and ankle. George was desolate: he was a cripple and his life was wrecked. He could no longer play football and was invalided out of the Yeomanry.

The next year, Europe blundered its way into the Great War and, a few at a time, George’s footballing friends and his RSAF workmates volunteered for service in the army, joining up in ‘friends’ platoons’ and marching off to France, until they were all gone. George was now on light duties, alongside the new female workforce, making leather scabbards for the bayonets that his mates were fixing to their Lee Enfield rifles in France – and he hated it. If only he could join their adventures!

Fast forward to late 1918 and the Armistice was signed, the war was over and George’s mates began to return home. Well, a few of them did. Most of them had new homes: for some, neat rows of graves in the French and Belgian soil of the First World War battlefields; for others an unknown final resting place in some foreign field.

Who knows… if it hadn’t been for that apparently innocent knock in a football match in 1913, perhaps Albert George Edwards would have ridden off to war on his cavalry horse – I still have that photo – and joined his mates in the carnage of the trenches and their known and unknown graves.
Personally I am grateful that my grandfather was unfit to serve in the war. He married his Mary and, in 1923, their second child, my Dad, came along. As a small child in the years before George died in 1965, I’d help Grandad lace up the long boot that contained his artificial foot before he went off, walking stick in hand, to the Enfield Highway Working Men’s Club for his customary Whitbread Stout.

There is every chance that I owe my very existence to that rough tackle in a local football match in 1913.