On This Day: Our final match at the Crystal Palace

And with Selhurst Park celebrating its 100th anniversary this season - those lights, that turf, that roar which accompanies the boys in red and blue every single match-day - is set to be even more spectacular in the years to come.

Today (6th February 2024), however, marks 109 years to the day that the club played its final match at its very first home ground: the eponymous Crystal Palace.

Our home for a decade, and place of origin for our first nickname ‘the Glaziers’, the Crystal Palace Exhibition Ground would host England international matches and FA Cup finals with crowds of 100,000.

Its story follows that of the founding of the Crystal Palace Company in 1852, created to manage the titular giant cast-iron and glass structure, which was moved from Hyde Park to Sydenham in south London after the Great Exhibition.

The Crystal Palace at Sydenham was the world’s first major theme park, and was set in 200 acres of grounds.

Including sporting competition in its business plan, the Company formed the Crystal Palace Club – initially focused solely on cricket, but expanding to football in 1861 – and it was they who proved pioneering figures in the formation of the game we know and love today, as research from historian Peter Manning would confirm.

After a brief lull in matches, football returned to the Palace when Henry Gillman, an enterprising entertainments manager, persuaded his board to fill in two of their great fountains in 1894 and build a new football stadium to host the cup final, previously played at the Oval.

So came into being the Crystal Palace Exhibition Ground, where a total of 20 FA Cup finals were staged between 1895 and 1914.

While the resident club were initially amateur, the professional outfit’s formation in 1905 began life in Division 2 of the Southern League.

The Glaziers’ final match at the Exhibition Ground, on this day in 1915, was a 4-1 win in that competition over league-leading Reading in front of nearly 4,000 supporters.

Palace were then under manager Edmund Goodman, who led the club out over 600 times during 18 years at the helm.

"At Sydenham yesterday both sides were below full strength," the Weekly Dispatch reads, before going on to list Palace's opening half-an-hour goalscorers as forward Arthur Hooper ("with a high cross-shot") and George Smith (a brace - the first as he raced onto a poor clearance, the latter from an accurate Billy Davies cross). "Up to the interval Reading were seldom dangerous."

Albert Feebery added a fourth for the Glaziers 15 minutes into the second-half "with a fine long shot", before Allen Foster scored a late penalty for the visitors.

The victory was Palace’s seventh in their previous 14 league games, but following a poor start to the season, they were already out of contention for trophies despite having won the London Challenge Cup the two years prior.

Sadly, world events beyond football would take hold and in 1915, 21 years before the palace was razed to the ground, the south Londoners were forced to relocate as the Admiralty moved in to utilise the land as a recruitment and training centre during World War One.

Over 125,000 men were trained for war service in the grounds as Crystal Palace – known as Royal Naval Shore Station HMS Victory VI – was closed off entirely to the public.

Our football club, meanwhile, saw its fixtures postponed until we could find a new home, with the directors eventually opting to become tenants of amateur outfit West Norwood at their Herne Hill home.

But our links to the Crystal Palace live on.