Arsenal v Torquay at Enfield

Good old Stefano makes the point, elsewhere on the web, that we shouldn't overlook the fact that our youth team is playing Arsenal tomorrow. That, I suspect, is the message behind this particular thread: Torquay United don't face Arsenal too often. At any level. And when they do it's on a non-league ground somewhere in Middlesex or Hertfordshire. Enfield in 1938; Boreham Wood in 2013.

A spot of research on the Non League Matters site took me to a spreadsheet of Arsenal's line-ups in that 1938/39 Southern League season. Appearing that day at Enfield was an Arsenal player called David Pryde.

Pryde was a perennial Arsenal reserve who was initially "farmed out" to Margate, Arsenal's nursery club in the 1930s. Then, just as he'd broken into the first team, WW2 intervened. That interruption lead to war service in India and Burma.

Without the war, the years 1939-45 may have been the best of Pryde's career: twenty-five at the start of the conflict, he was only thirty-one at the end. Add another year for 1945-46 and Pryde was thirty-two - going on thirty-three -when League football re-commenced. No more Arsenal for David Pryde but a move in a westerly direction. To Plainmoor.