MARGINAL COMMENTS
Dy WARREN POSTBRIDGE
And so to Wembley, where what the Court Circular admirably and accurately styles the Final Match of the Football Association Challenge Cup Competition between Preston North End and Sunderland was due to begin an hour or so later. It was my first attendance at what, pace the Court Circular, I shall take leave to call the Cup Final, and the prospect of watching the Cup Final left me cold. I would rather see Rugger, than Soccer any day, and if I did want to see Soccer, I need go no further afield than Highbury. And I didn't care a bent pin which side won. I have never been to the North End or the South End or any other end of Preston, and I have never been to Sunderland, and with al respect for the Mayors and Corporations and burgesses of those county boroughs I have no desire to. All I wanted to see is what a Cup -Final was like, and as everyone knows the essential constituent of a Cup Final is not the players but the crowd. There was plenty of time to survey, and medi- tate on, that I have never seen so many human faces together before—and the average human face is no more attractive in the mass than it is individually. Thatching about half the faces was a white and blue or red and blue cap. One gentleman, like an ensanguined zebra, was dressed in red and white from top—the top being a top- hat—to toe, and bore on his back a legend the tenor of which escapes me. His side won. (So I discovered later, for at that stage I had no conception which team was uni and which raye.) After walking about twice as far round Stadium walls as Joshua did round Jericho I found by a miracle the right turnstile, the right block, the right row and the right seat. It was opposite the half-way line. The King in the Royal Box could look straight across at me—and doubtless did.
All round, in a gigantic oval, were faces, faces, faces. Sometimes they opened, to take in portable* sustenance. Sometimes they opened to make their contribution to the community singing, conducted by an incredibly electric gentleman in white flannels on a stand elevated in the middle of the arena. They sang "Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag " ; they sang that venerable ditty about a bicycle built for two ; and finally—most astonishingly and most impressively—they sang "Abide With Me." They did much more than sing it. Ninety-three thousand people rose to their feet (except thirty thousand or so who were on them already), ninety thousand hats came off (the odd three thousand were women's), the policemen and ambulance men stood to attention, the volume of sound was triple what any of the songs had evoked. As I boomed my flat way through the familiar words I cast a horizontal glance at my hard-faced neighbours. None of them was silent "In life, in death, 0 Lord, abide with me "—down to the last line we sang it, and the last line was loudest of all. What a subject for an essay on the psychology of the English crowd.
Then the players came out and played their game for ninety minutes, and I went home. I suppose there will be another Cup Final day next year. It will find me on a Surrey hill.
*? liotabie..—En. The Spectator.
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