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Elgar's Football Chant

In August 1998, it was widely reported that the Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club had unveiled a tablet commemorating Sir Edward Elgar's attendance at their Molineux ground.

A rumour soon started spreading that Elgar had written the "first football chant".

Elgar had indeed written a short phrase in 1898 in which he set the phrase "He banged the leather for goal" to music. The phrase came from a newspaper report of the game and it caught Elgar's imagination. At the time he was working on Caractacus, and the sketch shows that the words were intended (jokingly) as a recitative for Caractacus himself.

I've transcribed the sketch as a very MIDI small file which you may be hearing already.

The full story of Elgar's composition is given in "Memories of a Variation" by Mrs Dora Russell.