There is barely a professional football club playing games in the English Football League that doesn’t have a nickname of some sort. Some of them are often really easy to decipher, such as Liverpool being known as the Reds, whilst others are a bit more opaque in their meaning. Others, meanwhile, might seem to have a nickname for one reason, only for a different reason to be the reality. You might think that Aston Villa are the Villans because they’re considered evil, for example, but that isn’t the case. West Ham definitely fit into the latter category, not least because they actually have two nicknames.
The Hammers
West Ham United’s main nickname that the majority of supporters of other clubs will know them by is ‘the Hammers’. If you thought that this was as an extension of the second part of their West Ham name, you wouldn’t be alone in that. In reality, however, it is a nickname tied into the club’s origins. In fact, both of the nicknames fit into that bracket, albeit in their own, different ways. Anyone who has ever paid any attention to the club’s crest will get a sense of where the Hammers nickname comes from, given the fact that the crest has often featured two hammers crossed over one another.
The first crest to have this feature was the one that was used by the club between 1923 and 1950, when two crossed hammers in claret appeared inside a claret circle upon a blue background. Although the crest has changed and altered since then, it has always featured two crossed hammers ever since. With this in mind, it doesn’t take a work of genius to figure out why it is that the media might choose to refer to the club with a reference to those Hammers chief in their thoughts. The more interesting question is why on earth hammers would have been chosen, which is linked to the second nickname used for the club…
The Irons
Any time you choose to watch a West Ham United match, you will almost certainly be greeted by the sound of the supporters chanting ‘Come on you, irons!’. In order to get a sense of why they might do so, rather than referring to the club as the Hammers, you need to look back to the club’s formation. The generally accepted history of West Ham is that the club was founded in 1895, put together as a works team of Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company. This was one of the last shipbuilders working on the Thames, with Thames Ironworks Football Club the name taken.
Announced in the Thames Ironworks Gazette in the June of 1895, the club was initially an amateur organisation that gave the workers something to do in their spare time. They turned professional three years later, with the owner of the Ironworks, Arnold Hills, responsible for the payment of the players. The reason the 1895 foundation is ‘generally accepted’ is that the club disbanded in the June of 1900 after a dispute over the financing and running of the club, but relaunched almost immediately with a new name: West Ham United. Obviously, the period it was known as Thames Ironworks is key.
The use of ‘Ironworks’ in the club’s title is the main reason why the side is referred to as the ‘Irons’ by supporters, even whilst the crossed hammers take centre stage on the crest and supporters of other teams, as well as members of the media, are more likely to call the club the ‘Hammers’. If you’re wondering about the connection between the hammers and the West Ham name, perhaps puzzling over how it is that they aren’t linked, the new name for the football club came from the fact that the matches were played in the London district of West Ham.