Wembley Stadium is one of the most famous sporting venues on earth. Its story began with one of the most chaotic afternoons in football history: the 1923 FA Cup final between Bolton Wanderers and West Ham United, forever remembered as the "White Horse Final".
A stadium built for an Empire
The Empire Stadium, as it was first called, was built in north-west London as the centrepiece of the British Empire Exhibition. Construction took around 300 days, and it was completed only shortly before the 1923 final. With its famous Twin Towers, it was the biggest stadium in the country, with an official capacity of about 127,000.
A crowd nobody could count
The organisers did not make the final all-ticket, believing the vast new stadium would hold everyone who wanted to come. They were badly wrong. On 28 April 1923 an enormous crowd descended on Wembley. Fans climbed walls and pushed past the turnstiles, the terraces filled far beyond capacity, and people spilled onto the pitch itself. Estimates of how many got inside vary widely, from around 200,000 to as many as 300,000.
King George V was in attendance, and for a time it seemed impossible that the match could go ahead at all.
Billie and PC Scorey
Mounted police were sent in to clear the playing area. One of them, Police Constable George Scorey, rode a horse named Billie. Billie was actually grey, but in the black-and-white photographs and newsreels of the day he looked bright white against the dark mass of the crowd — and that image captured the public's imagination. Calmly and patiently, Scorey and his colleagues eased the crowd back towards the edges of the pitch.
Kick-off was delayed by around three-quarters of an hour, and even when the game began, spectators lined the touchlines, sometimes only a step away from the players.
The match
Bolton took the lead within the first few minutes through David Jack, who scored the first goal in an FA Cup final at Wembley. Jack Smith added a second early in the second half, and Bolton won 2–0. They went on to lift the cup twice more in the 1920s, in 1926 and 1929.
Lessons and legacy
Remarkably, nobody was killed, although many people were injured. The near-disaster led to future cup finals being made all-ticket. For the next eight decades the old Wembley hosted FA Cup finals, England internationals, the 1948 Olympic Games and the 1966 World Cup final.
When the new Wembley was built on the same site, the footbridge leading to the stadium was named the White Horse Bridge — a quiet tribute to Billie and the afternoon that began Wembley's legend.