Now the top club in Chislehurst!
When our club was founded in around 1860, belief is that the Wanderers of the day played against makeshift local village teams in the surrounding areas. One by one those local sides seemed to have disappeared into thin air well before organised football was introduced by the Football Association in around the 1870s. Until their eviction from Grassmeade and, correspondingly, St Mary Cray itself the Wands were the top senior football club in Orpington, the Crays and most of North West Kent.
With the eventual introduction of Dartford FC (1888) and Bromley FC (1892), Cray finally had some worthy opposition to look forward to playing. Already believed to be one of the oldest surviving football clubs in the world, the Wands (as they were eventually nicknamed) always had problems exerting their seniority status in a superior way; in short, they may have been the oldest club around but, they never often had the results to show that seniority means success. Perceived smaller clubs were beating Cray hand over fist.
And therein lies an anomaly, because the Crays and even more so Orpington, were considered to be a reasonably good catchment area for the south of London back in the Victorian and Edwardian days just as they are now. But the really good players seemed to swerve away from Cray Wanderers to settle in at the likes of Bromley and Dartford. Why? It's anyone's guess but, I'd lay a pound to a penny that, it had something to do with financial backing.
Cray's 'lords of the manor' title was challenged for supremacy for a short while by a club called the New Crusaders in the Crays and Sidcup areas between 1905 and their demise in 1915. Based around six brothers with the surname of Farnfield, the New Crusaders tended to upset the applecart a bit by not only beating some well-known clubs in cup competitions (a 16-0 FA Cup win over Woking was recorded) but also by steamrollering them into submission. The Crusaders never re-emerged after the First World War.
Come forward many years to around the time that Cray Wanderers commenced playing on a permanent basis at Grassmeade in the 1950s. More and more clubs had been popping up in the surrounding areas. Clubs like Crockenhill (1946) and Swanley (1950s) appeared over the horizon, Swanley changed their name to Swanley Town sometime in the 1970s and then disappeared from the footballing radar in the late 1980s. Alma Swanley (founded in the 'early 1960s') went the same way as their neighbours at roughly the same time.
By 1965, Orpington and the Crays had been sucked up into that vacuum called Greater London and the Wands suddenly found themselves being not only the oldest continuously existing football club in Kent but also in London, which sort of put Fulham FC's nose out of joint, so much so that the EPL club's claim to fame now is not 'the oldest football club in London' but 'the original football club in London'. I think Cray Wanderers have happily settled for 'oldest'. In the world, of course, our club is joint second-oldest along with Hallam FC (1860), with our friends from Sheffield FC being the oldest (1857).
But now... the Wands are the premier team in Chislehurst, as Flamingo Park is officially listed as being in the Chislehurst area. And that brings up another interesting fact (or two, or three). Glebe FC, who now play in Foxbury Avenue, Chislehurst and just up the road from Flamingo Park 'between the War Memorial and the Queen Mary's Hospital/A20 roundabout', changed their name to Chislehurst Glebe in 2012... yet only started using the newer name in sporting circles in early 2025 (this year, as I write this), after the Wands had become their neighbours. Coincidence? Or, more ominously, do they feel threatened by Cray Wanderers now parking on their doorstep? After all, we are now the most senior and highest-ranking football club in the Chislehurst area. And, did Glebe move from their former home of West Wickham to Chislehurst, in order to become a bigger cheese? That all sounds very bombastic on the face of it but, strange occurrences like that tend to happen in football. Just a thought.
So, there we have it. Cray Wanderers are the oldest association football club in London, Kent, the whole of the south of England and now in Chislehurst and, I dare to mention this again in the same season... we're the original football club from the Cray Valley!