Even in Borehamwood, people aren’t quite sure why the football club insists on two words where the town is one. It isn’t quite alone: no less a significant local institution than the Elstree & Borehamwood Museum hedges its bets, continuing to use a logo that refers to Boreham Wood. It may be safe to say that there is not a right way and a wrong way.
There may not even be an original way and a new-fangled way. The local newspaper switched from Boreham Wood to Borehamwood in 1972; but it noted a 16th century reference to ‘Borramwode’, and the Ordnance Survey used one word on its maps from the 19th century onwards.
On the other hand, the two-word version also crops up throughout history. People lived and, according to their wills, died in Boram, Borham or Barham Wood centuries ago. Any suggestion that the club honours a historical tradition, or that fans of an older generation prefer the two-word name, is likely to be wrong. Another explanation, that the club was named before the town became one word, is plainly bonkers, unless BWFC was founded in 1548. Perhaps, at most, the club is slightly eccentric.
It could easily have been more so. The ‘wood’ in the name of the town was probably originally a ‘bosci’. In the Home Counties, that occasionally turned into ‘bois’, as at Theyden (a little under 20 miles away) and Chesham (a little over). In Theyden Bois they favour an anglicised pronunciation; Boreham Bois might easily have become Young Boys Boreham, or even the Juventus of Hertfordshire.
By coincidence, one of the components of the modern football club had a French name. Boreham Wood FC was formed in 1948 from the merger of Boreham Rovers and Royal Retournez. The latter were mostly returning ex-servicemen, it seems.
My own view, for the very little it is worth, is that the two-word rendering deliberately establishes a favourable comparison with Borehamwood’s twin-town. No, not Offenburg or Fontenay-les-Roses. Elstree. Anyone who ever travelled by train into St Pancras will think of Elstree & Borehamwood as essentially one place. In fact the renaming of the railway station in 1953 might have been the greatest single factor in the emergence of ‘Borehamwood’ as the town’s name.
But that’s by the by. The point here is that Elstree is regarded as posh and Borehamwood isn’t, especially up the line in places like Radlett and Harpenden, which are even posher. But Boreham Wood clearly beats Els Tree for quantity.
If Boreham Wood were to set a trend and the components of place-names were to be separated elsewhere in the National League, what treats could emerge. My favourite would be Bar Net, with Dagenham & Red Bridge or Chester Field as runner-up.
This feeble imitation of a Towns of Two Halves chapter is the result of a fixture being rearranged, twice. Boreham Wood were due to play Oldham at first on Saturday 10 September. The death of Queen Elizabeth II prompted the grief-stricken football authorities to cancel all that weekend’s fixtures.
The new date, Tuesday 1 November, proved unsuitable for obscure reasons supposedly related to fixture congestion.
So the match eventually took place not on a warm Saturday afternoon in the late summer but on a fiercely cold evening in December. I gratefully accepted the hospitality of a family of Wood supporters that night, and gave no time to exploring Borehamwood’s potential as a tourist destination. Another day, perhaps.
Boreham Wood 2 Oldham Athletic 1
Meadow Park, 6 December 2022
Attendance 801 (Eight hundred and one)