“By my hopes,” said one Harry of another, “I do not think a braver gentleman, more active-valiant, or more valiant-young, more daring or more bold, is now alive to grace this latter age with noble deeds.”
Nothing to do with Harry Redknapp, Harry Kane or even Harry Winks, but still a conversation deeply relevant to Tottenham Hotspur.
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It is Prince Harry speaking about his rival, Harry Percy, before their battlefield confrontation in Henry IV, Part One. And even though the young prince is the title character of that William Shakespeare play, and the man who eventually becomes Henry V, he only becomes the hero at the end.
It is his defeated rival — the valiant rebel Percy, “Mars in swaddling clothes” — who brings the crowds in and casts a shadow over the relationship between Henry IV and his son. And it is Percy who has gone on to provide the name, the badge, and so much of the ethos and identity of the Premier League team who play in the Tottenham district of north London.
How did this happen? Why are they not simply Tottenham Lilywhites or Tottenham Rovers or Tottenham Athletic? And why does their badge look like this, a proud cockerel standing on a football?
Well, we could start with the play’s release in 1597, or the real Battle of Shrewsbury (which is its climax) in 1403, or the Battle of Homildon Hill (which starts it) in 1402, or Henry Bolingbroke’s usurping of King Richard II in 1399, which sets up his own shaky royal legitimacy as Henry IV, from which he never truly recovers.
But maybe it makes more sense, before we start disentangling our Worcesters from our Mortimers, to remember why we are talking about this at all. And that is because of a few schoolboys who wanted to play sport on a field in Tottenham in 1880.
Some of England’s football clubs started out for industrial or even commercial reasons. This one was purely recreational.
As is detailed in Julie Welch’s authoritative book The Biography Of Tottenham Hotspur, it all started with two brothers playing on their uncle’s field, before they were joined by another pair of siblings, Hamilton and Lindsay Casey. All they wanted to do was play cricket, and that was their first organising principle, before they moved on to football in 1882.
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The other thing they needed was a name.
The story is that the Caseys were so enamoured with the story of Percy — aka Harry Hotspur — that they named their cricket club after him, and then their football club, too.
The name was doubly appropriate because of the holdings of the Percy family in the Tottenham area, which meant the new club were never far from the land of Hotspur’s descendants.
Over the next few years, Tottenham Hotspur became bigger and more successful, going professional, winning the FA Cup in 1901 and establishing themselves as a force in London football. By the turn of the 20th century, it was very clear that they were permanently associated with the cockerel. You can see this from a quick look at contemporary newspaper cartoons, which would often draw a cockerel to represent this team.
Why exactly did the emblem of the cockerel develop from the name of Hotspur?
Well, one theory is that Harry Percy was keen on cockfighting, and that his birds had sharp spurs attached to their legs to inflict extra damage on their opponents in that blood sport. Another theory is the spurs he used to urge on his horses — hence his name — were merely associated with the spurs worn by those combative cockerels. (For more on all of this, try The Spurs Miscellany by Adam Powley and Martin Cloake).
Whatever the reason, what matters is that the connection was soon established in the minds of the public. This was not a top-down PR exercise, but rather an organic, even natural process. But its outcome was clear: the cockerel was the symbol of Tottenham Hotspur.
And so, when the old White Hart Lane was being updated to ready it for First Division football in 1909-10 after winning promotion from the second tier, there was a perfect chance to install a piece of what would now be called ‘branding’.
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Archibald Leitch, master stadium designer, built a huge new West Stand, thought at the time to be the largest in the country. To go on top, former Spurs player William James Scott designed a copper statue of a cockerel standing on a leather football.
That statue was 9ft 6in tall and cost £35 to cast, which is not much given the permanent legacy it has left. Because if you look at the badge today — a simple cockerel on a football, with no other imagery — it looks just like the old statue itself.
You could argue that this version of the badge, one settled on by owner ENIC in 2006, is closer to the spirit of the club’s early 20th century form than any other version. (Or, you may argue, simpler, cleaner, easier to slap on any sort of merchandise you want to sell around the world).
The first time the cockerel made it onto Spurs’ shirts was for the 1920-21 FA Cup final, cementing the association between the bird and the club that survives to this day. Maybe it helped that they won their second FA Cup that day, beating Wolves 1-0, with the new emblem in place.
Over the past 100 years, the badge has changed in various ways.
It was initially just the cockerel, only getting the football underneath its spurs in 1973. In the 1980s it became more of a crest, with the cockerel-atop-football now fighting for space within its heraldic shield. There was another shield within the shield, containing the letters ‘THFC’, and flanked by two red lions — a nod to the Percy family and the earldom of Northumberland, of which Harry Hotspur was heir.
In the top half of the shield was a castle, a nod to Bruce Castle, a 16th-century stately home just around the corner from White Hart Lane. Across from the image of the castle were seven elm trees, the trees that gave nearby Seven Sisters its name. And then wrapped across the bottom of the shield was the club’s Latin motto, ‘Audere est Facere’ — ‘To dare is to do’.
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Looking now, the whole thing appears slightly jumbled, too busy, too much going on. The fashion for heraldry and crests has rather passed, almost looking tacky or gaudy in 2022, even if a medieval framing would be quite appropriate for a club named after a medieval hero.
Maybe that is why the newer, simpler badge is better than the older one. Not just because it is cleaner and clearer visually — easier to put on something, easier to draw, easier to tattoo — but because it has such a direct connection to the history of the club.
If you could time-travel back to the 1909-10 season (bear with me), walk to White Hart Lane and show someone a picture of the current badge, they would be able to recognise it as an image of the statue on top of the ground’s new stand. That connection from now to deep into the past is why football clubs matter so much to us.
Perhaps the last word should go to Harry Hotspur.
His rebellion (SPOILER) against Henry IV failed; he never got to overthrow the king and take the throne for his own family. But he has been immortalised anyway, both on the stage and eventually in the name and badge of one of England’s most popular football clubs, now known around the world.
Whether he was a cockfighter himself is almost besides the point now, 120 years on from the cartoonists of London newspapers deciding this was the best way to illustrate an upcoming team.
(Top photo designed by Sam Richardson)
