Carey Harrison and Fred Woolley, pictured reunited recently after a gap of over 50 years, were West Acre contemporaries from 1957 to 1961. They shared a passion for the round ball game which had been outlawed at Harrow since 1927 when the School changed to rugby. This passion, along with that shown by others most notably Elmfield’s David Buik, led to the formation in 1962 of an unofficial new OH club, Exhill FC. The spirit was willing but the flesh was all too evident. Certainly the level of fitness was around that expected of a group of 18 year olds working in London in the absence of university offers and enjoying their new found freedom. Team performances did not impress. Players arrived in strange dress including pyjamas and black tie, and encounters with improbable opponents Manor Rangers and Stevenstown Rovers resulted in an aggregate negative scoreline of 17-0. In 1963, as proposed by Alex de Grunwald, Exhill FC was re-named the OHAFC as members had become aware that the Club had in fact originated in 1859.

No official organisation of football existed until the formation of the Football Association in 1863 when the rules governing the game played at Harrow formed the basis of the original 14 FA rules. Charles W. Alcock (Druries 1855-1859) became FA Secretary in 1870. His finest achievement was persuading the FA in 1871 to establish a knock-out cup based on the Harrow Cock House competition named the Football Association Challenge Cup. Members of the OHAFC should feel proud of Harrow’s long and intimate association with the origins of football and of the flourishing club they perpetuate today.

For those who took part in our heroic beginnings – meaning the 1962 ‘Exhill’ beginnings, not the 1859 origins – there was a surreal sense of adventure. Harrison maintains that these first two games took place on Hackney Marshes, but no one is quite sure, and certainly our pitch was as strange to us as if we were on a piece of wasteland in Mozambique. To our opponents, however, it was home territory, and we were crushed as few of us had ever been crushed before. This, despite our miraculously agile goalie, whose astonishing saves we casually explained by telling our opponents that we had borrowed him from nearby Tottenham Hotspur. We are certain that without him (this unsung hero – oh to have his name!) the score against Manor Rangers would have been in the region of 45-0, possibly a record for any form of soccer match in the history of the game. More like a rugby score. But what did we care? We had made a start! We were a team (for one more match, anyway), and somehow we felt we were retro-fitting soccer, once more, into School tradition. Harrovian soccer! It’s now a commonplace – but at the time it felt so transgressive and so alien it might as well have been Harrovian Extreme Frisbee.

We were thinking of you – you subsequent and current Old Harrovian soccer players – much in the way that Walt Whitman speaks of containing within himself his future readers, in ages to come. We want you to know we were thinking of you! And remain proud to have kicked the first Harrovian round ball, in earnest, after so many decades in the dark.