Now then,

Why is being a goalkeeper much like being a soldier in a war? There are long periods of dull inactivity punctuated by heart stopping moments of action when it seems the fate of the world depends just on you.

That’s something they never tell you about the First World War – that conflict that passed recently from memory to genealogy. You imagine those brave lads with their clipped English accents going over the top and being mown down by ghastly Hun machine guns. One day was like that; one day in four long years. The rest of the time involved sitting around in muddy fields and bayoneting sacks of straw.

William A Fisk was the name Tommy Fiske was born with, but the time he reached the City Ground, he was plain old Tommy Fiske. When he was a child in Beccles in Suffolk, his parents called him Will. He was one of thirteen children, he had six brothers and six sisters. His father was a railway carter and his mother was mostly busy giving birth it would seem.

As soon as he could run he played football. His first team was Beccles FC and his first County game was for Suffolk. He was short for an Inside Forward, just five feet six, but then again, everyone was shorter back then. In 1903, aged eighteen and with little success in jobs in a bakers and as a labourer, William joined the Norfolk regiment. By then, he had already decided that his best position was in goal, after deputising for an injured keeper for Beccles.

By 1905, he’d gained the nickname Bill and whilst serving with the 2nd Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment in Bloemfontein, Orange River Colony, South Africa, he kept goal for the Army team versus the Corinthians. In those days Club scouts were limited to patrolling local parks looking for kids that could kick a bit, so how Norwich City heard about his skills is anybody’s guess. However, they did and were sufficiently impressed with him to buy him out of the army whilst he was serving in the reserves in 1906. His one game for Norwich was a win against Hastings and St Leonards, during which he conceded one and Norwich scored four.

Three weeks later he made his debut for Blackpool FC. It was here that he played out most of his football career. He made 217 appearances for the club, for much of the time, an ever present. He adopted the name ‘Tommy’ and his surname ‘Fisk’ gained the final ‘e’.

Tommy started the 1907/08 season in the Blackpool reserve side but, following a 1-0 win at Barrow on 28th September when, according to the match report, he “was dashing and daring in his defence of goal, and was nimble as a cat with shots at close quarters”, he got a first team call. The following season he “gave a thrilling exhibition and covered himself with mud and glory” in a Lancashire Senior Cup tie against Everton.

Two days later, on 27th October 1909, Tommy married Bessie Nelson, who would follow him to Nottingham and die there in 1946. The Blackpool players turned out in force to see him married and a football and a large ham bone were fixed to the wedding carriage to wish the couple good luck. Tommy interrupted his honeymoon to take part in Blackpool’s 2-1 win at Hull City on 30th October. Tommy could never decide if football were interrupting life or if life was interrupting the match.

On 22nd March 1913 the Blackpool directors gave him a benefit match for five years service. He was presented with a gold watch donated by Mr Saul Shiers and it was said that “there was no Blackpool player more worthy of such a presentation than Tommy Fiske”. Tommy was so overcome with emotion that he had difficulty speaking.

The following year, however, Tommy disagreed with the Blackpool directors over terms for the 1914/15 season and left them by mutual agreement to join Nottingham Forest on 29th May 1914. His decision seems even stranger when you realise that Forest were in such financial difficulties at the time, if other events had not interrupted the league programme for four years, the club might have ceased to exist.

Nineteen fourteen. An archduke killed in some forgotten Balkan motorcade and the world went mad. It is almost impossible today to appreciate the pressure ordinary men came under to join up. There were women giving out white feathers; there were posters of a pointing Kitchener; there were letters in the papers. Footballers were the fittest of these men that were needed at the war. One vicar’s sermon sounded like this:

Football is an excellent thing, even in time of war. Armies and navies can only be maintained so long as the community fulfils its function of producing means for their support; and healthy recreation is essential for efficient production. A man may be doing his duty in other fields than the front. But there is no excuse in diverting from the front thousands of athletes in order to feast the eyes of crowds of inactive spectators, who are either unfit to fight or else unfit to be fought for … Every club who employs a professional player is bribing a needed recruit to refrain from enlistment, and every spectator who pays his gate money is contributing so much towards a German victory.

There were five thousand football players at the beginning of that conflict in this country and two thousand of them went off to war. There was even a footballers battalion, the 17th Middlesex which included the entire first eleven from Leyton Orient FC.

Tommy was one of the first Forest players to become a Tommy. He joined up on August 21st 1914 before Forest’s season had even kicked off. He served with the first battalion of the Norfolk regiment in France until November 9th that year. He returned home and played five games for Forest before returning to the war. He played in the League against Derby County, home and away. He conceded fourteen goals in five games including four from Norwich which knocked Forest out of the FA Cup.

His entire Forest career was just an interruption to his service in the trenches. He went back to the war.

He was wounded twice over the next four years. Once he was shot by the Germans and was returned to Southampton Hospital in 1916 and then once in February 1918, he twisted his ankle whilst playing in goal for the men against the officers’ eleven. The rest of the time, he stood in muddy trenches and kept his head down like the rest of them. He must have been good as they made him a sergeant.

Tommy was 32 years old and had a seven year old son when the Germans made their big push in the spring of 1918. He was in the Border regiment stationed on the Marne and was looked up to as an old hand by the newer recruits in his platoon. Men who were there from the beginning of the war were a rarity. The German attack had cut through the British front and pushed it back for forty miles in movement unknown since the trenches were first dug.

It was May 27th 1918 near the village of Fismes. The British orders were to retreat but the barrage laid down by the Germans was a deadly one. With his platoon surrounded, Tommy rolled up his shirt sleeves and went over the top. No identifiable part of the cat-like goalkeeper’s body has ever been found.

His name is carved on the Soissons memorial and remembered here today.

I’ll see thee.