On Christmas Day, 1937, Charlton Athletic were playing Chelsea at The Valley (Charlton’s home ground) in London. Partway through the match, a dense fog began to roll in over the pitch. Visibility got worse and worse until players could barely see each other, let alone the ball.
Eventually, the referee decided to abandon the match because the fog made it impossible to continue safely. However, no one managed to inform Sam Bartram, Charlton’s goalkeeper, who was stationed at the far end of the field.
Oblivious to what had happened, Bartram remained alone in his goal, peering into the mist, convinced that play was still going on somewhere beyond the fog. He stood there patiently, occasionally shifting position and waiting for his teammates or opponents to appear.
“I saw less and less players,” Bartram recalled. “I was sure we were dominating the game, but it seemed clear to me that we hadn’t scored because my teammates would have gone back into their defensive positions and I would have seen one of them. There were not even shouts of celebration.”
After about ten minutes, a policeman emerged from the fog and approached him. The officer said something like, “The game’s been stopped! Everyone else has gone back to the dressing rooms!”
Arriving in the locker room, his teammates were surprised to see him running late and jeered when they learned the story. “After a long time, a figure loomed up in the fog and I shouted, ‘What’s happened?’ ‘The game’s been abandoned,’ came the reply. ‘The field’s been empty for ten minutes!’ I walked back to the dressing room, feeling my way, and found my teammates laughing at me.”
Sam Bartram made his debut at the age of 20 for Charlton and played 623 games in 22 years. He retired at the age of 42 as the club’s most capped player and was also part of the team that won the only trophy in their history: the 1947 FA Cup.
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