With the Arsenal no doubt counting their coffers after a highly lucrative pre season tour of Australia and China now seems a good time to look back at a tour from a different age and what happened to those proceeds.
For Arsenal fans in the late 1950s we were no longer the power we had once been and we were in a trophy drought that would extend right through to 1970 when we lifted the Fairs Cup on that famous night at Highbury against Anderlecht. But while we may not have been challenging for trophies our exploits in the pre war years meant Arsenal was still a name to be reckoned with in Europe and most years saw us heading across the channel, none of this private, branded aircraft.
In 1959, for the second year running, we spent part of the pre season in the Netherlands where we played a couple of friendlies against local opposition before beginning our league campaign with a home loss against Sheffield Wednesday.
8 August v Sparta Rotterdam 2-2 (Danny Clapton, Gerry Ward)
12 August v ADO Hague 7-0 (David Herd 3, Danny Clapton, John Barnwell, Joe Haverty, OG)
Nearly GBP 1,000 was raised on the tour and the above image shows how the money was spread around a number of charities with a fair whack going to military and police charities as well as schools, youth clubs and churches.
Nowadays of course the Arsenal have their own charity foundation with its work being felt far beyond North London with club ambassador Ray Parlour recently in Indonesia opening an all weather pitch in North Jakarta but it's good to know the Arsenal have a fine, long tradition of giving back to local communities. Indeed just last week the football club hosted a number of fireman who had been kept busy in the recent Grenfell Tower fire.
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