ARTHUR CAIGER – THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT

The onset of the new football season – and talk already of the likely champions and cup winners - prompts me to ask: how many of you fans remember this chap? In 1947 he was recruited to lead the community singing at the FA Cup Final each year, until he stepped down from the famous rostrum for the last time in 1962.

Arthur was born in 1890 and eventually went from his home in Malvern to study at the Church of England’s Culham College for Schoolmasters outside Abingdon from 1911 to 1913. He had only been teaching for a short time when the First World War broke out. Along with a group of fellow Culhamites he enlisted with the Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and went on to gain the Distinguished Conduct Medal and bar for bravery.

Following the war his teaching life was spent in London: firstly at Lambeth and then Clerkenwell. Music was a major part of his life (he even married a member of the Covent Garden Opera company!) and he gained a high reputation for leading large numbers of people in community singing. Not only did he lead the singing at Cup Finals, but at internationals, at rugby matches and at schools’ hockey and football internationals. His programme would be tailored to suit both sets of supporters – e.g. ‘Blaydon Races’ for the north east, ‘She’s A Lassie From Lancashire’ for the County Palatine contestants, ‘Ilkley Moor Baht Hat’ for Yorkshire clubs etc.- mixed with traditional sing-along favourites.

The onset of Parkinson’s Disease put an end to his role but the singing of ‘Abide With Me’ at the Cup Final provides a link to the memory of Arthur Caiger. What has all this to do with me? I’m proud to say that I too attended Culham College; in fact I was there only a few weeks ago for a reunion – at which an exhibition had been mounted in Arthur’s memory, fifty years on from his last appearance.