Words: Dominic Bliss
The Corinthians and the Casuals lost more than 100 former players between them during the First World War. Indeed, the number of young men who were killed in conflict between 1914 and 1918 was so high that the Englishmen born in the 1880s and 1890s became known as the Lost Generation.
Those who survived were left with the memories of the horrors they had witnessed and the hardships they had experienced at the front. Yet they still had responsibilities when they returned to civilian life after the war; they had families to sustain, industries to rebuild and institutions to revive.
Unsurprisingly, membership of both the Corinthian Football Club and Casuals Football Club dwindled, and very few players from the 1913/14 season returned at the end of the war. On top of that, the split between the amateur and professional Football Associations in 1907 had prompted many public schools to switch their focus to rugby union. In short, it was becoming harder and harder to source amateur footballers of a decent standard.
The people who stepped up to keep sports clubs like ours going in those difficult days deserve as much recognition as those who sparkled during the gilded age of amateur football two or three decades earlier. Casuals were grateful for the determination of pre-war captain M. Morgan-Owen for calling a meeting in April 1919 at which it was decided the club would continue, and the search for a new team began. Among those who came back from the war and returned to the football pitch was Henry Francois Dubuis, or ‘D’ to his team-mates.
H.F. Dubuis was one of the new faces recruited by the Casuals in 1919 and became one of the most significant figures of the inter-war period, playing 134 games and scoring 32 goals, from almost every position on the pitch. He also acted as Honorary Secretary and Honorary Treasurer over the course of two decades’ service.
A little over a year ago, the club received an email from Dubuis’ son, Giles, who had read that we were building a club archive. His reason for getting in touch was twofold – he wanted to discover if we could give him any new information about his father’s playing days, but he also wished to donate some of the treasured items that ‘D’ had kept from his time with the Casuals.
Over the weeks and months that followed, we pieced together a remarkable life story, and discovered just how big a part Dubuis had played in reviving and sustaining the Casuals during that era.
“‘D’ was one of the oldest and staunchest members of the club,” stated his obituary in the Corinthian-Casuals newsletter in 1955, “and during the shaky years after the 14-18 war, it was ‘D’, with Percy Sargeant’s assistance, who kept the club alive.”
Dubuis was only 22 when the war ended. In fact, he had just come to the end of his schooldays at Ardingly College, in Sussex, when the war broke out, and he immediately signed up for a Commission. His father was Swiss and his mother was French but ‘D’ was British born and raised, and his mother put her signature alongside his on the commission form due to the fact that he was only 18, when the official age to join the armed forces was 19.
Dubuis was in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, first at Gallipoli and then in France, where he served with the 3rd Battalion and met Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves.
At Gallipoli he contracted malaria. In France he was wounded by shrapnel. At one time he was near Albert, where he told Giles he was “bloody lucky” to survive. He was one of the fortunate ones who returned to England not just alive but in good enough shape to play elite-level football after four years of war.
He did so at a testing time for Casuals, who struggled for players and finished bottom of the Isthmian League in 1919/20, his first season with the club, during which we played our home games at the Essex County Cricket Ground in Leyton. In his first three competitive fixtures, Dubuis played in three different positions across the forward line as we lost 8-1, 6-0 and 5-0 to Dulwich Hamlet, Ilford and Woking respectively. Thankfully, better years followed during his time here.
An accountant by profession, his contribution as a committee man was vital, and when he took over the secretaryship in 1920/21, he helped to secure the East Molesey Cricket Club as our home ground, five minutes’ walk from Hampton Court Station. A year later, we moved to a slightly grander venue at the Crystal Palace, where many early FA Cup finals were played.
Dubuis was not just a good clubman, he was a talented player too. He had captained one of the best teams Ardingly College had ever fielded for two years prior to the war, and took up the same role for the Casuals in 1921. His versatility came in handy too, as he operated as an inside-left in his early appearances, before dropping into centre-half for two seasons in the early 1920s, and reappearing as a centre-forward for a whole campaign after that.
His performances for Casuals earned him a call-up to represent the Corinthians on ten occasions, during which he scored six goals. Most of those appearances were in ‘A’ team games against schools, but he was also selected to play up front in a marquee friendly against Tottenham Hotspur, held to celebrate our return to the Crystal Palace in 1922. The following year, he was part of the Corinthian touring party to the Netherlands and Belgium, during which he played against Willem II.
Dubuis played in several other European countries over the course of his playing days, representing a number of amateur touring teams, including Oxford City, London Caledonians, Middlesex Wanderers and the London FA. On a 1922 tour to Spain, with Civil Service FC, he played two games each against Barcelona and Real Madrid. Among the artefacts sent to us by Giles was a photograph of his father heading the ball in one of the matches on that tour, which Spanish football historian Lartaun de Azumendi was able to confirm was taken in a game against Barcelona at Industria Field.
“The Spanish player pictured is the striker Armando Martínez Sagi, who was just 16 at the time,” he added.
Civil Service – and Dubuis – played two games against Barcelona on back-to-back days during the course of their visit, drawing 2-2 in the first, before winning 5-3 the following day.
Their games against Real Madrid ended similarly – the first a 1-1 draw, in which Santiago Bernabeu was playing for the hosts; the second a 7-4 loss for Civil Service, in which Dubuis scored against the club whose white shirts are believed to have been inspired by the Corinthians.
A year later, he was back on the Iberian Peninsula with Casuals, as we played three games in the Basque Country – two of them against Athletic Club of Bilbao. For this tour, Dubuis was the right-half, as he continued his one-man rotation policy around the pitch.
In the mid-late 1920s, Dubuis moved to India, where he took up a position in an accountancy firm connected to the Jute industry in Calcutta. He returned to England a few years later as a married man, settling down in Guildford and taking up a role on the committee at Casuals. His character was as important as his ability in keeping the club on an even keel at times, as one matchday programme article noted.
“Perhaps one of his priceless additional attributes is his keen sense of humour,” it read, “without which his tremendous efforts in the past with the Casuals FC would have rendered him old before his time.”
Among Dubuis’ prized mementos from his time with the club is a signed programme from the 1936 FA Amateur Cup final at Upton Park, in which Casuals beat Ilford 2-0.
By the time of that game, Dubuis had hung up his boots, but he made sure to get each player to sign their pen pic in the programme – all of them except Len Couchman, who Giles joked was “probably still in the shower.” He added that his mother would often recall drinking from the Amateur Cup on the steps of Kingston Town Hall at the civic celebrations that followed.
H.F. Dubuis died in 1955, while Giles was still a boy, but the two clubs – by then amalgamated – didn’t forget him. When the Corinthian-Casuals Schools XI visited Ardingly College in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they would seek out the son of the legendary H.F. Dubuis and present him with gifts of chocolate as a token of their appreciation for his family’s contribution to their team. Giles has never forgotten that kindness and is proud to have had this opportunity to return the favour by donating his father’s Casuals memorabilia to our growing archive.
“It has been a privilege,” he explained, “to have been able to contribute to the club’s heritage in a small way.”