Tommy Allsop — Unsung Hero

You can see the lists in all sorts of places; at a train station, in a town square, in a village hall or inside a church. A commemorative brass plaque, a wooden hanging board, a shaded ceremonial brick. A list of names of the young men who lived here or worked here or worshipped here. Young men who died in the Great War.

Thomas Allsopp had already enjoyed a modest sporting career before joining Norwich City in 1907. A Leicester native, he’d played in the Football League for Leicester Fosse (now Leicester City) and Brighton & Hove Albion. As every dashing young footballer from the 1900s seems to have also been; he was a good cricketer — and had taken 88 first class wickets for Leicestershire in the County Championship.

Allsopp joined the fledgling Canaries as they were starting just their 3rd professional league season. An outside left (a sort of proto-left winger), he scored on his Southern League debut for Norwich against Portsmouth; the first of his 27 goals in 132 appearances for City. Not content with galloping up and down the left wing at The Nest; Tommy also turned out in his whites for Norfolk County Cricket Club. His debut for them was pretty decent too, as he took 7 wickets and scored a half century. Allsopp apparently retired from football (and cricket) in 1911, and took to a quiet life in becoming a publican.

This quiet life lasted all but three years, as a bullet from a gun — shot by a man he had never heard of in Sarajevo — turned his life upside down.

Allsopp’s service record indicates that he was initially enlisted in the 18th Battalion of the Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment. While the historical record of where Allsopp himself was during the war is patchy, records do show that the Queen’s fought at the Somme, so it is safe to assume he was there. As if that was not grim enough, as a member of the Labour Corps later in the war, he was tasked with exhuming (or, sometimes more accurately, salvaging) the many bodies from the front — ready for reburial.

Just as the war was finishing, seemingly on the boat ride home, Allsopp fell ill with flu. He made it back to Norwich but his illness worsened, and with that, Tommy died — as one of the war’s last casualties. He is buried in Norwich Cemetery with military honours.

As I go about my busy modern life, with my places to be and my people to meet, and scurry past these lists of names that sit at the train station or in the town square or in the village hall or in a church, all they do initially seem to be is just that: a list of names.

But then I remember Sergeant Tommy Allsopp. Footballer, cricketer, publican. Soldier.

And I remember that they are not.

The writer would like to credit Leicester City club historian John Hutchinson, whose prior research greatly helped with this piece.