Episode 1 - The Club That Was Built for the Stadium (1905–1915)

The founding story of Chelsea is unlike any other in English football. There is no factory, no church hall, no cricket club, no lamppost. There is a businessman, an athletics ground, and a rejected lease. In the spring of 1905, after Fulham FC declined to rent Stamford Bridge, Gus Mears made a decision that would define West London football forever: he would build a club to fill his stadium instead. That single rejection — Fulham's chairman Henry Norris turning down Mears' offer — is the seed from which Chelsea grew. The West London derby, the neighbour relationship, the gentle sense of competition between the riverside club at Craven Cottage and the bigger, wealthier operation at Stamford Bridge — all of it flows from that one conversation.

Within months, Chelsea FC had been created from nothing — players signed, a manager appointed, a badge designed — and elected to the Football League Second Division without having kicked a single ball as a club. This episode tells the story of that audacious founding: the 22-stone goalkeeper Fatty Foulke signed as the first marquee name; the astonishing crowds that flooded Stamford Bridge from the very beginning (67,000 for a league game against Manchester United in 1906, a London record); the rapid promotion to the First Division; and the inaugural top-flight London derby in 1907 — Chelsea beating Woolwich Arsenal 2-1, drawing a record crowd to Stamford Bridge and prompting one newspaper to declare that this new rivalry would "be fought over again a thousand times in factory, office and workshop." It also covers the 1915 Khaki Cup Final — Chelsea's first appearance at a major final, played at Old Trafford in the shadow of war.

Research Sources

Rick Glanvill, 'Chelsea FC: The Official Biography' — the definitive club history; essential for the founding period and the Parker dog-bite story.

Rick Glanvill's 'Founders Day' long read on chelseafc.com (published March 2026) — contains primary source material including the original press release from J.E. Dixon & Co., March 1905, announcing the club's formation.

Wikipedia, 'History of Chelsea F.C. (1905–1952)' — reliable overview; cross-check all dates against primary sources.

Wikipedia, 'William Foulke' — comprehensive biographical details; corroborated by Spartacus Educational entry and Chelsea FC's own archive.

Graham Phythian, 'Colossus: The True Story of William Foulke' — the definitive Foulke biography; essential for the Player of the Era section.

Chelsea match programme, December 1905 — the Foulke dinner quote; reproduced in multiple sources including Read the League and Dawley Heritage Society.

Chelsea FC official website, '1915 vs 2020 — Two Chelsea FA Cup Finals in Historic Times' — detailed account of the Khaki Final with contemporary source material.

The Football History Boys website, 'The Khaki Cup Final: Sheffield United vs Chelsea, 1915' — good contextual material on the wartime atmosphere.

West London Observer archive (British Newspaper Archive) — match reports and crowd descriptions from 1905–1910; especially valuable for the Good Friday 1906 Manchester ...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

There is a pub on the Fulham Road in West London. It stands across the road from the main entrance to Stamford Bridge, as it has for well over a century. For much of that time, it was called the Rising Sun. These days it goes by a different name, the Butcher's Hook. But the building is the same, the road is the same, and the football ground it looks out across is the same ground it has always looked out across. A pub that has watched a club grow from nothing into one of the most famous and most decorated in the world. On the evening of the 10th of March 1905, a group of men climbed the stairs to an upstairs room in the rising sun and held a meeting. They were there to do something that had never quite been done before in English football, not in quite this way, not with quite this audacity. They were not there to form a club because they wanted to play football. They were not there because a factory had closed for the winter, or a church needed something to do on Saturday afternoons, or a group of schoolboys had met under a lamppost. They were there because a businessman had a stadium and needed someone to put in it. The businessman was Gus Mears. The stadium was Stamford Bridge. And the club they founded that evening, Chelsea Football Club, would go on to win the Champions League, the Europa League, the FA Cup eight times, and six top flight league titles. It would be bought and sold and nearly demolished and very nearly go bankrupt. It would be reinvented so many times that future historians will struggle to identify a single thread connecting the early pensioners of 1905 with the billion-pound franchise of 2025. But that single thread does exist, and it begins here, in an upstairs room, in a pub, across the road from a ground that was built before there was any club to play in it. This is the story of Chelsea Football Club. It begins, as all the best stories do, with a refusal. To understand Chelsea Football Club, really understand it from the inside out, you first need to understand the city it grew up in, and specifically the patch of it that matters here, the stretch of West London running along the north bank of the Thames, through Fulham, and into what the Victorians called the Royal Borough of Chelsea. This was not the East End. It was not the industrial north. It was not the dockside communities that produced West Ham, or the munitions workers who gave Arsenal their name, or the shipbuilders of the Tyne who made Newcastle what they are. West London in 1904 was something more mixed, more genteel in patches, more entrepreneurial in spirit. The streets of Fulham, the borough where Stamford Bridge actually sits, despite the club's name, were a patchwork of terraced housing for working families, market gardens that were rapidly being swallowed by bricks and mortar, and the occasional grander establishment that hinted at the proximity of Chelsea proper and Kensington beyond. Football was already here, of course. It was everywhere by 1904. The game had spread from its public school origins in the 1860s to become, by the turn of the century, the dominant Saturday afternoon religion of English working life. Fulham FC had been founded in 1879, making them one of London's oldest professional clubs, and they played their home games at Craven Cottage. A short walk from Stamford Bridge along the Fulham Road. They were a modest outfit, second division, occasionally flirting with the first. But they were established, they were local, and they were loved. And then there was Stamford Bridge. Stamford Bridge had been built in 1877 as an athletics ground, a vast, bowl-shaped arena designed by the renowned stadium architect Archibald Leach. By the standards of the time, it was enormous, an open bowl of grass and terracing capable of holding nearly 100,000 people. The second largest stadium in England behind Crystal Palace's ground in South London. For nearly three decades it had hosted athletics meetings, the occasional cricket match, the odd rugby union fixture. It was impressive, it was capacious, and it was perpetually underused. The London Athletic Club, who ran it, were not making anything close to the money the ground could theoretically generate. Into this picture came Henry Augustus Mears, Gus Mears, as he was known, a self-made businessman of considerable wealth and considerable vision, a man who had built his fortune through construction contracts and who looked at underperforming assets and saw opportunity. In 1896, he and his brother Joseph began acquiring Stamford Bridge and the adjacent market gardens, building towards full ownership. By 1904, they had it. The whole site, 12.5 acres, the second biggest stadium in England on the Fulham Road in West London, and now they needed to work out what to do with it. Meir's plan was straightforward. Turn Stamford Bridge into a football ground and lease it to an existing club. The existing club he had in mind was the obvious one, Fulham FC. They were a mile up the road. They needed better facilities. It was a natural fit. Fulham said no. The precise details of the negotiation between Mears and Fulham's chairman, a sharp-minded property developer named Henry Norris, are lost to time. What we know is that a deal was proposed and a deal was rejected. Fulham had recently had Craven Cottage redeveloped, ironically, by the same Archibald Leach who had designed Stamford Bridge, and were reluctant to uproot themselves. The financial terms may have been a sticking point. The politics of the boardroom may have played a role. Whatever the reason, Norris said no, and Mears found himself in possession of a vast and expensive stadium with no one to put in it. His response in the early months of 1905 was to consider cutting his losses. The great Western Railway Company had expressed interest in the Stamford Bridge site. They wanted to use the land as a coal yard. It was not romantic, but it was practical. Miars walked through the streets of Fulham one Sunday morning with his friend and advisor, Fred Parker, the two men debating what to do, according to the story that has passed into Chelsea folklore, a story probably improved in the telling, but which Parker himself recounted in later years. Mears' dog bit Parker through his cycling stockings on that walk, bit him hard enough to draw blood, and Parker, rather than crying out in pain, laughed. Miers, surprised and charmed by his friend's equanimity, asked what he found so funny. Parker told him he was being ridiculous, that selling to a railway company would be the greatest missed opportunity in London sport, that the stadium was worth fighting for. On that walk, on that morning, Chelsea Football Club was decided. Not in a boardroom, not through a grand strategic vision, through a dogbite and a friend's laughter and a man's sudden change of heart on a West London street. What Mears faced was a logistical challenge unlike anything English football had seen before. The normal sequence, club formed, ground sought, was reversed. He had the ground. He had to build the club from scratch, from nothing, and fast. The Football League's annual general meeting, at which new members were voted in, was on the 29th of May 1905. That gave him less than three months from the founding meeting at the rising sun on the 10th of March. Chelsea first tried to join the Southern League. The competition that housed Tottenham, Fulham, and the other major London clubs outside the Football League at that time. They were rejected. Tottenham Hotspur and Fulham both objected. Unwilling to welcome a well-funded new competitor into their territory, it was the second time Fulham had made things difficult for Chelsea, and the second time Chelsea would find a way around it. Rejected by the Southern League, Mears turned to the Football League itself, and Parker made the case so effectively at the May AGM, emphasizing the new club's financial resources, its magnificent stadium, and its marquee playing staff that Chelsea were elected to the second division without having played a single competitive match. An entire football club, players, manager, colours, badge, name, assembled in under three months. It remains one of the most extraordinary feats of institutional creation in English football history. The name came relatively easily, given the circumstances. There was already a Fulham in the borough of Fulham. The adjacent borough was Chelsea, a name that carried a certain resonance, a certain class. Names like Kensington FC, London FC, and Stamford Bridge FC were mooted and rejected. Chelsea it was. The fact that the ground itself was not in the borough of Chelsea, it was and remains, firmly in Fulham, was an irony that nobody dwelt on at the time. It would not be the last time Chelsea Football Club operated in the gap between its image and its reality. The colours were chosen, according to club tradition, after the horse racing colours of Lord Cadogan, the club's first president, a pale, powder blue known as Eton Blue, the kind of colour you associated with Edwardian elegance, rather than football terraces. It would not be until 1912 that Chelsea shifted to the deeper royal blue that supporters know today. The original badge featured a Chelsea pensioner, one of the retired soldiers from the Royal Hospital Chelsea, distinguished figures in their scarlet coats. And this gave the club its first nickname, the pensioners. A name that had a certain charm, a certain eccentricity, and that would eventually be swept away by Ted Drake in the 1950s as insufficiently serious. But for the first 50 years, Chelsea were the pensioners, wealthy, slightly theatrical, and not quite as tough as they looked. The manager was John Tate Robertson, Jackie Robertson, a 28-year-old Scottish international halfback and the former captain of Glasgow Rangers. He was hired as player manager, responsible for building the squad and playing in it simultaneously. The task was formidable. In the spring of 1905, Robertson and Parker went on what amounted to a whistle stop tour of Football League clubs, identifying players and making signings. They raided Small Heath, now Birmingham City, for forwards Jimmy Windridge and Bob McRoberts. They signed defenders, midfielders, and a handful of established names who gave the new club instant credibility. And then there was Falk. William Henry Falk was, by the summer of 1905, the most famous goalkeeper in England. He was also, with some certainty, the largest. Accounts of his exact dimensions vary. The records of the era were not always reliable, but the broad consensus is that he stood over six feet tall and weighed somewhere between 20 and 24 stone, depending on the season, the mood, and how many breakfasts he had managed to consume before anyone else reached the table. He was a man of extraordinary physical presence, formidable athleticism for his size, and a personality that could fill a ground almost as effectively as his frame-filled goal. Fulk had won two FA Cups and a league championship with Sheffield United. He had earned a single England cap. He had also, in the years before his arrival at Chelsea, become something of a national character, the goalkeeper who was known to pick up opposing forwards who annoyed him and deposit them bodily into his own net. The man whose appetite was so legendary that the Chelsea match program of December 1905 saw fit to report, with affectionate amusement, that Fulk says he doesn't care how much they charge him, so long as they don't charge him too much for his dinner. He was bought from Sheffield United for a transfer fee of £.50, the same fee at which he left Chelsea a year later for Bradford City, suggesting either that the market for 22 stone goalkeepers was precisely calibrated, or that nobody was entirely sure what he was worth. Chelsea stationed two small boys behind Fulk's goal during home matches at Stamford Bridge, a deliberate piece of theatre designed to make his size look even more imposing against their smallness. When the ball went out of play, the boys would run to retrieve it and return it to Fulk. It was, according to football folklore, the moment the ball boys came into existence. Whether that is entirely true is open to debate. What is not open to debate is that Fulk was exactly what the new Chelsea needed. Something spectacular. Something that drew the eye, something that people would cross the city to see. Stamford Bridge in 1905 was extraordinary by the standards of the age. Leach had designed it as an athletics venue, which meant the pitch sat in the centre of a vast oval bowl, with running tracks on either side, giving spectators the elevated panoramic view of a natural amphitheatre. One covered grandstand ran along one side, the rest was open banking and terracing, vast grass slopes on which supporters stood and swayed in their thousands. The capacity theoretically was close to 100,000. In practice, the early Chelsea drew something considerably less than that, but still remarkable for a brand new club in its first season. The first official home match was a friendly against Liverpool in September 1905, which Chelsea won 4-0. The club also issued London's first four-page matchday program that day, a small detail that says something about Mir's instincts. This was a man who understood presentation, who understood that the experience of attending a match was as important as the match itself. Chelsea were, from the very beginning, in the business of putting on a show. The first competitive league match was away at Stockport County on the 2nd of September, 1905, a 1-0 defeat. The first competitive win came a week later at Blackpool. The season brought a third-place finish in the second division, respectable for a new club, and confirmation that the experiment was viable. Chelsea were not going away. And then came Good Friday, 1906. On the 1st of April 1906, Chelsea played Manchester United at Stamford Bridge in a second division match. It was not a title decider. It was not a cup final. It was an ordinary league fixture between two clubs competing for promotion from the second tier. And 67,000 people attended. 67,000? It was a London football attendance record, the biggest crowd the Capitol had ever gathered for a football match. The terraces heaved and swayed. The noise was a physical thing. And at the centre of it all was a brand new football club, 14 months old, announcing itself to a city that had not even known it was missing one. The crowd figure said something essential about Chelsea that would remain true for most of their history. Whatever else the club was or was not, it was a draw. It was attractive. It pulled people in. Even when, especially when, it had very little in the way of trophies to offer. The Stamford Bridge atmosphere on a big day was its own reward. Chelsea had understood, from before they played their first match, the spectacle was inseparable from the football. Promotion to the first division came the following season, 1907, and with it, the first top flight, London Derby, Chelsea vs. Woolwich Arsenal, on the 9th of November 1907 at Stamford Bridge. Chelsea won 2-1, goals from the prolific George Hilsden, who would become the first Chelsea player to reach a century of goals for the club. The crowd was enormous, another London record in the making. And the Morning Leader newspaper, in a line that has been quoted ever since, declared that this great game would be fought over again 1,000 times in family circle, in club, workshop, office, and factory. They were right. The Chelsea Arsenal rivalry, the longest-running, most frequently contested top-flight London derby, was born on that November afternoon. It has been running ever since, through all the different eras and all the different versions of both clubs, through war and relegation and revolution and European glory and managerial madness. It began when Chelsea were 14 months old. It has not stopped yet. The years between 1907 and 1915 are the years in which Chelsea's early personality took shape. It was not a personality built around trophies. The club won none of consequence in its first decade. It was built around crowds, around entertainment, around the sense that Stamford Bridge was a place where something was always happening. They attracted the biggest average attendances in the country in several seasons running. A crowd of over 80,000 turned up for a derby against Arsenal in later years. The most popular comedian of the Edwardian age, George Roby, was signed as a player, briefly more as a publicity stunt than a serious footballing proposition. But typical of the Chelsea approach, they were not so much a football club as a happening. The team continued to feature genuine quality alongside the spectacle. George Hilsden, Gatlingun Hilsden, as the press nicknamed him for his shooting, plundered goals throughout this era. Bob Whittingham, a centre forward of formidable strength and finishing, became a crowd favourite. A halfback named Ben Warren was among the best players of his position in England. Chelsea were consistently competitive in the first division, consistently capable of beating anyone on a given day, and consistently unable to sustain the kind of season-long performance that produced a title challenge. It was the first iteration of a pattern that would define the club for most of its existence. The other London clubs watched Chelsea's rise with a mixture of admiration and wariness. Fulham, who had started the whole thing by saying no, remained in Chelsea's orbit, sometimes sharing divisions, sometimes drifting into the second division, while Chelsea competed in the first. The relationship was cordial in the way that neighbors with very different means are always cordial. Polite, slightly watchful, each quietly measuring the other. Tottenham had been playing in the Southern League for most of this period, joining the Football League in 1908, the same year Chelsea had been there for three seasons already. West Ham was still in the Southern League, not joining the Football League until 1919. Arsenal had moved from Woolwich to Highbury in 1913, establishing themselves as Chelsea's primary rival for North London's attention, even though Chelsea were technically a West London club. The geography of London football was settling into patterns that would persist for generations. And then, in 1914, the world changed, and with it, football. The Great War did not end football immediately. The 1914-15 season was played out in its entirety in an atmosphere of growing unease and growing criticism. Parliamentarians demanding to know why young men were kicking balls about on Saturday afternoons while their contemporaries were dying in the mud of Flanders. The FA Cup was contested, the league was contested, and Chelsea, who had struggled in the first division that season, finishing 19th out of 20 and narrowly avoiding relegation on a technicality, somehow, improbably, made it to the FA Cup final. It was played on the 24th of April 1915, not at Crystal Palace where the final had been held for two decades, but at Old Trafford in Manchester. The move was deliberate. The authorities wanted to avoid the disruption to war work that a final in London would cause, and to spare the strain on the capital's transport network. The attendance was around 49,500, lower than finals past. Travel restrictions, the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of young men, and the general weight of the war bearing down on ordinary life had all taken their toll. The crowd that was there was unlike any cup final crowd before or since. The terraces and the stands were packed with men in uniform, soldiers on leave, soldiers recovering from wounds, soldiers who had found their way to Old Trafford on that April afternoon for a few hours of something resembling normality. The Manchester Evening newspapers, reaching for words to describe the scene, settled on one the khaki final. So many men in his majesty's uniform, one correspondent wrote, that one could be forgiven for mistaking the occasion for a military parade that happened to include a football match. The Earl of Derby presented the cup afterwards. He was careful to compliment both sides for their performance, and then asked the crowd to remember that there was a greater game to be played for England. It was the kind of speech that the moment demanded. Solemn, patriotic, conscious of its own inadequacy in the face of what the country was going through. Football seemed very small that afternoon, and yet it was also, clearly, necessary. 49,500 people had needed to be there. Chelsea lost 3-0 to Sheffield United. Jimmy Simmons opened the scoring with 36 minutes played. Stanley Fazakali added a second with six minutes remaining, and Joe Kitchen wrapped it up in the final moments. It was not a close match. Chelsea's best chance had come and gone with the form of their leading striker, Bob Thompson, playing with his arm in bandages after dislocating his elbow, and the composed, well-organised Sheffield defense that had given them nothing all afternoon. There is a footnote to the final that speaks to the character of the era. Chelsea had in their squad a player called Vivian Woodward, the finest England captain of his generation, a man of extraordinary skill and reputation, who had volunteered for military service and was home on leave from the army when the final was played. Woodward made known that he did not wish to take the place of Thompson, who had been part of the run to the final. He would not deprive a man who had played his way to Wembley of his moment on the pitch. Thompson played, bandaged arm and all, and Woodward watched from the stands. It was a small act of decency, easily overlooked. It remains, perhaps, the most honorable decision in Chelsea's first decade. After the final, the Football League was suspended for the duration. Chelsea would not play a competitive league match for four years. The players went to war. Some did not come back. The great Stanford Bridge Bowl fell quiet. The pensioners' first decade was over. Looking back across a century, the years 1905 to 1915 establish almost everything that Chelsea will be. They establish the importance of spectacle. The understanding that a full stadium is an end in itself. That entertainment matters as much as results. They establish the gap between promise and silverware. The ability to attract big players, big crowds, and big occasions, without quite turning any of it into trophies. They establish the club's relationship with money. Mears was a rich man, and he used his resources to build something bigger and better funded than almost anything around it, which is a template that would recur in rather different circumstances 90 years later. And they establish, from the very beginning, Chelsea's place in the London football landscape, not as the working class club of a specific community. Chelsea's geographic identity is from the start more ambiguous than that. Not as the rebel Southern Club fighting the Northern establishment, but as something more distinctive and more complicated. The glamorous outsider. The newcomer who arrived with money and ambition and a vast stadium and the cheek to ask to be taken seriously. The club that Fulham created by saying no. The club that London football had not been expecting and could not quite ignore. In each episode of Blue is the Colour, we spotlight one player who captures the spirit of their era. For this founding decade, the choice is irresistible. There is no other option. It has to be William Falk. He was born in Dawley, Shropshire in 1874. He was, by any measure, a genuinely excellent goalkeeper. Agile for his size, commanding in the air, capable of saving penalties at a rate that would be impressive in any era. In his one season at Stamford Bridge, he saved 10 penalties in the league alone. 10. In an era when goalkeepers were expected to do little more than catch the ball and punt it clear. Fulk was a positional sophisticate as well as a physical freak of nature. And it is worth saying this clearly because history has not always been fair to him. The stories about his weight and his appetite have somewhat obscured the fact that he was, at his peak, one of the best goalkeepers in England. But the stories, the stories. There is the one about the Chelsea team travelling to an away match by train. Fulk was separated from the rest of the squad at the station, separated specifically from the player who was carrying the tickets. He approached two ticket collectors, explained who he was, and was laughed at. He picked up both ticket collectors, one under each arm, and carried them to the stationmaster's office to have his identity confirmed. There is the one about the team breakfast. It was reported, though whether this is entirely reliable, is difficult to say, that Fulk was known to arrive early to the dining room before his teammates and consume the breakfast that had been set out for the entire Chelsea squad, alone, in one sitting. Whether this is true matters rather less than the fact that it was reported without anyone apparently finding it implausible, and there is the one about the ballboys. Chelsea, keen to draw the maximum possible attention to their star attraction, stationed two small boys behind Fulk's goal at Stamford Bridge, partly to make his size look even more extraordinary by contrast, and partly, pragmatically, to retrieve the ball when it rolled wide of the posts, saving Fulk the inconvenience of having to retrieve it himself. The boys would chase stray shots and returns and bring the ball back to the goalkeeper. It was, according to football tradition, the moment ball boys came into being, a piece of modern football infrastructure, invented to save one very large goalkeeper from unnecessary exercise. The Chelsea Match Programme of December 1905, in a line that deserves to be framed and hung in the Stamford Bridge Museum, noted simply that Fulk says he doesn't care how much they charge him, so long as they don't charge him too much for his dinner. It is perhaps the most perfect sentence ever written about a Chelsea player. Self-aware, comic, and entirely unbothered by what anyone thought. It captures something essential about the man. He wore his own legend lightly, laughed at the absurdity of his own existence, and got on with the business of being brilliant between the posts. He played only 35 league matches for Chelsea before moving on to Bradford City in 1906, for the same £50 fee at which he had arrived. He was perhaps already past his physical best by then. The weight that had always been remarkable was becoming a genuine impediment. He died in 1916, aged 42, in Sheffield. He is buried there. The Dawley Heritage Society have placed a blue plaque outside the house where he was born. But he lives on in Chelsea's history as the club's first great character. The first player who was not merely good but was impossible to ignore, who filled a ground not just by playing football but by existing. He was Chelsea's first superstar in the oldest and most fundamental sense of the word, something that made people stop and stare. And that, in the end, is what Chelsea were always going to be. In each episode of Blue is the colour, we try to bring in a voice from the terraces, to recover something of what it felt like not to manage or play for Chelsea, but to watch, to be one of the people for whom all of this was done. For this founding episode, I want to stand on the Stamford Bridge Terraces on Good Friday, the 1st of April 1906. Chelsea vs Manchester United. 67,000 people. Think about what that means for a moment. Chelsea Football Club is 14 months old. It has played fewer than 50 competitive matches in its entire existence. And 67,000 people, a London football record, have turned up to watch it play a mid-table second division game against a club from Manchester. They came from across West London, from Fulham and Chelsea and Hammersmith and beyond. They came, many of them, because they had heard about the ground and the atmosphere and the giant goalkeeper. They came because Stamford Bridge had already established itself in barely a year as a place where something worth seeing was always happening. Contemporary accounts of the day described the terraces and banking as packed beyond comfort, thousands standing pressed together on the open slopes around the pitch, the noise building as the players emerged. The ground was not designed for football. The athletics track that ran around the pitch put spectators considerably further from the action than they would be in a purpose-built stadium. But the scale of the bowl, the sheer sweeping ambition of it, created its own atmosphere. You were part of something very large. You could feel the size of it. One reporter, writing for the West London Observer in the days after the match, described the scene in terms that feel almost startled by their own subject matter. One would not have thought, he wrote, that a game between two sides yet to establish themselves in the first division could draw a congregation so vast or so enthusiastic. A congregation. He used the word deliberately. The crowd that April afternoon had come to worship something. Not yet a trophy or a triumph, but a promise. The promise of what this place might become. That is, perhaps, the defining emotional fact of Chelsea's first decade. The supporters who came to Stamford Bridge in those early years were investing in something that had not yet proved itself. They were the first generation of Chelsea fans, and there is always something particular and irreplaceable about being the first generation of anything. You have no tradition to inherit, no great victories to stand on the shoulders of, no legends to compare the current team against. You are the tradition. You are, in the most direct possible sense, making it up as you go along. 67,000 people on a Good Friday in 1906, watching a second division match in the April sunshine, making up a football club as they went along. That is where Chelsea begins. That is the foundation everything else is built on. So, Chelsea Football Club. Founded on the 10th of March 1905, in an upstairs room of the Rising Sun pub on the Fulham Road, by a businessman who needed someone to play in his stadium because the club he'd actually wanted had said no. Named after a borough they didn't play in, wearing colours chosen after a Lord's Horse Racing silks, elected to the Football League before they had kicked a ball, and already, within a year, drawing the largest crowds in London to watch a second division side with a 22-stone goalkeeper who may or may not have invented ball boys. This is not the founding story of a club with a cause. It is not the founding story of a community expressing itself through sport, or of a factory's workers finding solidarity on a pitch, or of schoolboys gathering under a lamppost to name something that would outlast all of them. It is the founding story of an enterprise, ambitious, resourced, and professionally managed from day one, but nonetheless found, despite everything, that people cared about it, that the supporters who walked through those Stamford Bridge turnstiles in 1906 and 1907 and 1908 were not customers attending a commercial event. They were fans. They were the West London neighbours who had found their club, their team, their Saturday afternoon church. The gap between Chelsea's commercial origins and the genuine human emotion it inspired in its supporters is there from the very beginning. It is there throughout the entire history of the club. It is in many ways what makes Chelsea interesting. A club born from a business decision that somehow, despite itself, became something people loved. The khaki final of 1915 ended with the cup going to Sheffield and the country going to war. When football resumed in 1919, Chelsea would return to a very different England, and to four more decades of near-misses and spectacular crowds before anyone finally gave them a trophy worth keeping. Next week, on episode 2 of Blue is the Colour, Chelsea Between the Wars, we cover the years from 1919 to 1955, including the long and mostly fruitless reign of David Calderhead, the painful shadow of Herbert Chapman's Arsenal dynasty, and the arrival of one former Arsenal centre forward named Ted Drake, who would finally, 50 years after the club's founding, give Chelsea something to celebrate. Until then, thank you for listening. Come on, you blues.