The previous blog entry draws attention to the fascinating story of Luton Town Football Club in the Great War which can be found on this website. It has been very satisfying to uncover this information and to add it here for others to explore. I hope it will encourage readers to research more of Luton's employers, clubs, churches or communities and how people connected to them contributed in the Great War. There must be many more such stories to tell.

As  a volunteer on this project and a Luton Town Season Ticket holder, it wasn't long before I became interested in researching which Luton Town players had enlisted during the Great War. With the help of my fellow volunteer and Luton fan,  Dave Watson, we found clues to a large number of Luton players and ex-players who served. I was particularly interested to discover that eight Luton players were amongst the first to join the Footballers' Battalion which was formed in December 1914 to encourage professional footballers to leave their Clubs and take up arms.

I was able to research most of  these players' stories further using the military records at the National Archives, census records etc and I was careful to double check that the players mentioned in the Club Handbook and newspaper reports were the same men as the soldiers whose service records I could access online. Once satisfied, I uploaded each player onto the website and linked them to each other and to the Club. Dave made contact with the Luton Town Football Club's historian, Roger Wash, and Roger kindly sent us images of the players and information about their playing careers. It was very exciting to finally see the faces of the soldiers I had come to know and to understand their commitment to playing for Luton Town and to serving their country.

Of the thirteen soldiers with connections to Luton Town that I have researched (so far); four were killed and five were wounded.