1939–40 Brentford F.C. season
season of football team
During the 1939–40 English football season, Brentford competed in the Football League, playing three matches before competitive football was suspended due to the outbreak of the Second World War. The club played in three unofficial wartime competitions for the remainder of the season – groups B and C of the Football League South and the Football League War Cup.
Season summary
After narrowly avoiding relegation towards the end of the 1938–39 season, Brentford manager Harry Curtis allowed full back Joe Wilson and half backs Sam Briddon and Tally Sneddon to transfer away from the club. Curtis signed young Sunderland inside forward Percy Saunders and brought in former Manchester United wing half Tom Mansley as his new captain. The season opened with a heavy 5–1 Football League Jubilee Fund defeat to neighbours Chelsea on 19 August 1939. Brentford began the regular season with a win, a draw and a defeat, before competitive football was suspended following Britain's declaration of war on Germany on 3 September 1939. Percy Saunders, who had scored on his debut on the opening day, would be the only pre-war Brentford player to die on active service during the war, when his ship was torpedoed in the Indian Ocean in March 1942.
The cessation of competitive football was worrying for Brentford, with £12,000 having been spent on new players during the off-season (equivalent to £678,200 in 2025) and there was little prospect of recouping it through the turnstiles. 23 of Brentford's 30-man squad were called to arms, into the War Police Reserve or into the munitions industry. Within two weeks of the declaration of war, the Football League agreed that football could continue, in order to keep clubs in business and to raise funds.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “1939–40 Brentford F.C. season” as season of football team. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as season of football team. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q24993275. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1939, 1938, 1942 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “1939–40 Brentford F.C. season” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.