Union City Blues
Friday, 14th Aug 2026 14:27<\/p>\n
The head of English communications at Union Berlin, the Blues\u2019 hosts for their final friendly on Saturday, is Town fan Jacob Sweetman, who reveals that the connection between the Ipswich and Berlin goes back almost a century to the remarkable life of Edwin Dutton (above, top left), German international, World War One internment camp sporting goods entrepreneur and Town\u2019s first ever professional coach. <\/p>\n
This weekend, my worlds will collide. Born in Ipswich Hospital, 10 days before Ipswich won the FA Cup final, I moved to Berlin in 2007 where I started writing about football, a passion that began with a single piece written for the TWTD fanzine about my experiences as a Town fan discovering a new club\u2026 1. FC Union Berlin.<\/p>\n
Having known nothing about the Regionalliga side, I bought my first season ticket for the Stadion An der Alten F\u00f6rsterei almost as soon as I arrived. They say you should never fall in love with another club. Well, they say a lot of things; I never left.<\/p>\n
This would be a long and weird path. Stephen Glennon, Ian Stenhouse and I founded No Dice Magazine in 2012, covering all aspects of the game in the German capital from the (at that time) uncharted waters of women\u2019s and amateur football, up to the biggest teams, Hertha BSC and, some way behind, Union.<\/p>\n
I went on to interview Urs Fischer, Steven Skrzybski and Christopher Trimmel and dozens more of the heroes of this small corner of south-east Berlin over the years until my dream job called, and I took over the role of head of English communications at Union four years ago. <\/p>\n
And now, on Saturday afternoon, I will be there when we \u2013 and it\u2019s definitely now we \u2013 host the club of my birth.<\/p>\n
So, with all this in mind, I am delighted to present a piece I wrote for our magazine in 2013 about how my worlds first came together, Ipswich and Berlin. Though some of it is out of date, it seems more relevant than ever this weekend.<\/p>\n
And I do so with the greatest thanks to Phil at TWTD, who published that first story almost 20 years ago. I couldn\u2019t be prouder. <\/p>\n
Jacob Sweetman. Berlin, 2026.<\/p>\n
Internment Affairs (From No Dice Magazine. 2013)<\/p>\n
There was once a flag hung in the Olympiastadion. I know it was there because I saw it. Most people probably don\u2019t even remember the occasion now because it was just a friendly, but this was November 2008, the day that England beat Germany 2-1; the day that my fellow Ipswich Town supporting mate and I turned around to a bunch of Borussia Dortmund fans sitting behind us and told them that Darren Bent (who had left Town but was still beloved in our parish) was about to score the winner. They laughed, but not as much as they did when he somehow tripped over his own boots with Rene Adler\u2019s goal gaping in front of him.<\/p>\n
Bouncing with drunken English hubris, we were too smug leaving the stadium that night, our faces flush with the warmth of rare victory, but our hosts remained gracious. They knew the score \u2013 the real score. As far as they were concerned England were welcome to their crappy victory through a crappy John Terry goal in a crappy friendly. They knew that Germany won the games of football that mattered. Unlike us.<\/p>\n
That flag, hung over one of the main exits to the old stadium, bore a simple message: Thank you for inventing the beautiful game. <\/p>\n
We held our heads a little higher as if it had been us who had first kicked a ball through the long grass of Tempelhof before it became an airfield, where the game first took root in the city that I now call home.<\/p>\n
But I, we, had failed to read between the lines on that flag. There is a silent implication in the phrase \u2018Thank you for inventing the beautiful game\u2019. What it really meant was \u2018Thank you for inventing the beautiful game… but it\u2019s ours now. So, best of luck with the leveraged buyouts, the terminal disappointments and the kick and rush. We\u2019ll see you again in the World Cup. We\u2019ll see you when it matters\u2019.<\/p>\n
I didn’t know that the German players on the pitch that night were the sporting descendants of a man I had at that point never heard of. I didn\u2019t know either that he had lived a fag end\u2019s throw from the house I now live in, or that he had coached the club I had always supported. I didn\u2019t know that parts of his life – his English, immigrant background for instance – were a precursor to so many of those in the city now, or especially that he was involved in a remarkable story that happened here almost 100 years ago. I feel like I should always have known about Edwin Dutton.<\/p>\n
It was the English who brought football to Berlin, as it was the English who brought football to the rest of the world. It may have been the Scots who showed everybody how to pass the ball (the tricky bastards), but the kicking it \u2013 that sublimely natural action that somehow captures so many of us from the earliest of ages \u2013 came over with the English.<\/p>\n
It came with people like John Dutton, who co-founded of BTuFC Britannia 1892 Berlin, a club that still exist to this day as Berliner SV 92, only four years after the English Football League had kicked off in earnest. Of course, they were also a cricket club, but it was the visceral thrill of the kick that took root, and it was that, as opposed to hitting, that quickly dominated the city’s sporting culture. <\/p>\n
John Dutton had moved here in the late 19th century as a footballing missionary, but, like so many, primarily as a businessman. He would surely have had no idea that football would take such a firm grip on the country that was still at that time the Kaiser\u2019s Reich, the country where his son, Edwin, was born in what they then called Mittelwalde, but is now Polish Mi\u0119dzylesie.<\/p>\n
He would surely have had no idea that Edwin would make a living in Berlin selling sporting equipment to the Germans, or that he would make his first callow steps in his sporting career as an outside right at the club he founded, Britannia, or that later he would play for Newcastle United or become the first professional coach at Ipswich Town. <\/p>\n
He would certainly have had no idea that his son would play a role in one of the First World War\u2019s strangest stories, or that he would appear for Germany as an international footballer.<\/p>\n
But it happened. And in one of those weird twists of language, history and fate that seem to collide all too readily in Berlin, alongside playing for Britannia, Edwin also played for a short time for BFC Preussen. Before he played and lived in England, and before he played for Germany, he played for clubs named for Britain and for Prussia.<\/p>\n
For me though, he represents the clash of my footballing homes, Ipswich and Berlin.<\/p>\n
——————————————————<\/p>\n
Edwin Dutton made history at the age of 18 years and 361 days old when he took to a sandy Budapest pitch wearing the soon-to-be-famous white shirt against Hungary. The game itself, however, is largely a footnote in Germany\u2019s rich footballing history, remarkable largely for the fact it was refereed by the great Austrian coach Hugo Meisl, who it seems never travelled anywhere without his whistle and the will to strap his boots on.<\/p>\n
There are almost no remaining newspaper reports because this was at the very beginning of international football in Germany. Outside of the scoreline all we really do know is that VFB Leipzig\u2019s Camilio Ugi scored the country\u2019s very first in a long, long line of converted penalty kicks.<\/p>\n
This was Germany\u2019s fifth international but due to a tedious dispute amongst the regional FAs, it would take place on the same day as their sixth. They were split on how to choose the side. Should they pick the best players on merit or should they be equally shared amongst the regions?<\/p>\n
A fudged compromise meant that one team would travel to Karlsruhe to try to avenge the humiliation of the previous year\u2019s 5-3 loss against Switzerland and the other would go by overnight train to Hungary. <\/p>\n
April 4th, 1909 was to be a good day. Switzerland were despatched 1-0 in Germany\u2019s first-ever international victory with a goal from Eugen Kipp.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile in Budapest, Hungary took the lead three times, but Dutton’s team set the perfect precedent for all of the hackneyed, though often true, stereotypes (as stereotypes so often are) about Germany never giving up on the pitch, summed-up in Gary Lineker\u2019s quote, still pinned to the toilet door in a pub in Mitte: \u201cFootball is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end the Germans win.\u201d Actually, only one German side won that day, but the 3-3 in Hungary still exceeded all expectations. <\/p>\n
Six of the side playing that day were from Berlin, but he was the only one still considered an Englishman. His teammate Fritz Schultz, who won the Berlin championship with Hertha in 1906, would fall in the Great War. Dutton could consider himself relatively lucky.<\/p>\n
Hopefully the timing of his runs was better than that of his return after the couple of years he spent at Newcastle United following his single, and only, international appearance.<\/p>\n
Back at Britannia he first had to settle a drawn-out hassle about his questionable amateur status (FAs being FAs, they have always been stuffy, priggish and bureaucratic the world over). But petty squabbles about football were the least of his worries. When the First World War broke out, a direct response to the British internment of any German citizens of a fighting age was that the same happened here. Though Dutton was born in the Reich, his status was that of a Staatsfeind \u2013 an official enemy of the state. <\/p>\n
The police arrived at his house at Bl\u00fccherstrasse around August 14th, 1914. He\u2019d have known what was coming and it is likely that he would have been treated with a modicum more respect than many others, but as with all civilians at the time he was sent to the prison camp that had sprung up at the horse racing track at Ruhleben, near Spandau in the west.<\/p>\n
The barracks and meagre facilities dotted the inside of the course, taking up the grandstand and the paddocks. Tents and makeshift buildings covered the former track. Ruhleben was hard, but it was a camp that would be remembered as resonating with a peculiar Englishness at the heart of the most brutal war the continent would ever face.<\/p>\n
The internees of Ruhleben would sit out the war. Without meaning to sound too glib, it would have the surreal atmosphere of a Butlins in hobnail boots. <\/p>\n
In his book The Ruhleben Prison Camp: A Record of 19 Months\u2019 Internment, Israel Cohen describes the \u201chundreds of tragedies being slowly and secretly enacted behind the brick walls and barbed wire fences… of men torn from their families, reft of their livelihood and tormented daily by gnawing anxiety about the future struggle for which physical privation and mental depression are rendering them more and more unfit\u201d.<\/p>\n
But it is worth remembering that the percentage of deaths in the camp was a little over three percent while, outside, the horrors of the Great War were laying waste to countless millions of young men in the most gruesome and barbarous of circumstances. <\/p>\n
As civilians, they were treated comparatively well (comparative to the times, that is), and, as groups of predominated by Englishmen often do, they formed clubs. Lots of clubs. There was a self-serving and antagonistic dramatic society whose reliance on the works of Ibsen and Shakespeare would be a constant scourge to the other prisoners. They formed a university, a police force, a cricket league and a golf club (Ruhleben contained \u201calmost all of the professionals connected with Germany within its walls\u201d). <\/p>\n
Of course, they also formed a football league. Life would go on in increasingly frustrating circumstances, but ones that also developed a strange edge as time slowly passed. They were missing out on, in most cases, certain death, but it is clear that many of them would have rather fought than waited out the War. Instead, they played football. A lot of football. <\/p>\n
Dutton had a business inside the camp, continuing the shop he had run on the outside in Berlin selling imported sporting equipment \u2013 although quite how one got hold of imported sporting equipment in an internment camp in the middle of the Reich during the middle of the First World War is anyone’s guess.<\/p>\n
He advertised his wares in the first few issues of the brilliant and pithy Ruhleben Camp Magazine: Dutton: Can get you anything you want in the sports line. Splendid bargains going in cricket bats, cricket shirts etc (although the additional line suggesting that internees should patronise home industries does seem a little superfluous under the circumstances).<\/p>\n
A charming oddity in the first issue spells his name wrong, calling him Button. Next door to his little store were the offices of the football league, occupied by former Tottenham manager and Everton player, Mr John Cameron, in his position as secretary.<\/p>\n
The spirit of the times is summed up in the words of the magazine’s football writer, Fred B Pentland, as the announcement was made that part of the grounds could be used for football: \u201cThe sporting spirit of the Britisher was evidenced by the magnificent roar of approval which greeted the news.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pentland was himself a player of some note, who went on to win two La Liga titles as the manager of Athletic Bilbao, but the undisputed king of the camp, on the pitch at the very least, was Steve Bloomer, the legendary England striker who had, somewhat unfortunately, moved to manage Britannia just three weeks before the start of the war. He was the captain of Dutton\u2019s Number 1 Barracks, the captain of the camp representative and England sides, too.<\/p>\n
Barely an issue of the magazine goes by without the man being talked of in hallowed tones. His name is made into a monogram one month, his glowering, serious, winning face is drawn in another. The next month they admire his right arm medium-pacers setting the cricket league on fire.<\/p>\n
Dutton\u2019s name is often on the periphery, after all he could barely be mentioned in the same breath as the man of whom Pentland says, \u201cWhat couldn\u2019t I write of my old comrade and friend, the captain of the league winners. Such generalship, such unselfishness, such keenness for the success of his side need no words of mine to praise. A toast to Steve, Good luck old sportsman.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dutton himself could hardly have been clearer about the poor chances for his internment coming to a quick end. The camp\u2019s mood remained realistic and he would write after a year, \u201cNext season \u2013 well you shouldn\u2019t grin, because there is going to be one…\u201d <\/p>\n
By the time of the War\u2019s denouement, the Ruhleben football association had spawned two separate leagues and a cup competition. The cup was, in fitting with the times, a simple metal drinking cup, which it was hoped would \u201cbe accepted in the true spirit of amateurism in which it is intended\u201d.<\/p>\n
Crowds grew and grew until over 3,000 spectators (almost three quarters of the internees) witnessed the match, for which it was apologised that they must play on a Sunday, between Barracks 8 and 20. The determination to \u201csmile our way through the winter without noticing [the War]\u201d had been mostly realised in unimaginable circumstances. <\/p>\n
Dutton went back to Newcastle immediately on his release, returning to Germany only for a couple of years in the twenties when he managed Stuttgarter Kickers, and never again to Berlin.<\/p>\n
He eventually arrived in Ipswich in 1927, where his name still stands as being the first paid coach at a club that was still resolutely amateur, staying for five years until 1932. For me, Edwin Dutton stood out for those two towns, Ipswich and Berlin, Berlin and Ipswich. <\/p>\n
But for many others, for many footballers of immigrant backgrounds in Germany – the likes of Mesut \u00d6zil and Miroslav Klose spring to mind, who have probably never heard his name outside of possibly glancing past it in a list of young internationals making their debuts – he was undoubtedly blazing a trail.<\/p>\n
——————————————<\/p>\n
The house that Dutton left on Bl\u00fccherstrasse still stands today, cowering in the shadows of the mighty neo-gothic church at S\u00fcdstern. But it is now on a fault-line, where the tectonic plates of central European history and migration have collided, springing up new populations in ways that he could have never imagined.<\/p>\n
It stands as a metaphor for that clumsy tagline bestowed by the city, on the city: Das neue Berlin. On the ground floor is an Afro hairdresser, offering braiding and cornrows. To the left is a chic and brutally expensive clothes shop that seems to define itself by the lack of clothes actually on sale within its whitewashed walls.<\/p>\n
To the right are the offices of a project dedicated to helping deprived schoolkids get into art and on the balcony a rainbow flag flutters in the greying light.<\/p>\n
On the corner stands a Sp\u00e4ti, selling tabloids to go alongside the bottles of Sternburg for 60 cents and the individually sold fags for the working and drinking classes. The woman breaks off her conversation in Turkish to sell me one in perfect English. I answer in broken, clumsy German. <\/p>\n
A couple of hundred yards away is the pitch where T\u00fcrkiyemspor, the city\u2019s best known migrant team, played their first game back in the district after years of exile across the city. It is a remarkably fitting tribute. Better than a plaque to the man any day.<\/p>\n
On the street outside Dutton\u2019s old house one last time I watch a group of lads kick a ball around on the way home from school, laughing and shouting as young lads on the way home from school do.<\/p>\n
He may not recognise the languages batted around, the haircuts or the clothes, but he would recognise the recreations of so many. He would understand the obsession with keeping a ball moving and with it the individual\u2019s search for a coherent place within the many.<\/p>\n
He would understand their love of the beautiful game and within it that endless quest for perfection on the pitch and the recognition, success and, above all, acceptance that come with winning at the gloriously simple game of football.<\/p>\n
Like Dutton too, they could also end up playing football for Germany.<\/p>\n
Photo: Contributed<\/p>\n
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