Football's Great War: Association Football on the English Home Front, 1914–1918

Football’s Great War

Football’s Great War

Association Football on the English Home Front, 1914–1918

Alexander Jackson

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by

Pen & Sword Military

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire – Philadelphia

Copyright © Alexander Jackson 2021

ISBN 978 1 39900 220 2

eISBN 978 1 39900 221 9

mobi ISBN 978 1 39900 221 9

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To Mum and Dad

And to John Thomas Jackson, 8th and 13th Durham Light Infantry and The Labour Corps, Mary Elizabeth Jackson, Women’s Land Army, and their son Victor, born 9 November 1918.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: And What Did You Do During the Great War?

Chapter 1:Fifty Years of Progress

Chapter 2:Should it be Carried Through?

Chapter 3:The Muddied Oaf is Sound

Chapter 4:Fighting Footballers

Chapter 5:To Play or Not to Play

Chapter 6:Among the Soccer Throng

Chapter 7:The Khaki Crowd

Chapter 8:Lending a Hand to the Weaker Brother

Chapter 9:Turning Many a Man’s Hair Grey

Chapter 10:He Has Kept Football . . . Going.

Chapter 11:Dick Downs, You’re the Man They Have Asked for at the Front!

Chapter 12:Are you Buchan the Footballer?

Chapter 13:Hard Blows Were Given.

Chapter 14:Stoke 16 Blackburn Rovers 0

Chapter 15:The Grand Recantation

Chapter 16:The Lady Footballer

Chapter 17:A Chain of Sympathy

Chapter 18:A Most Despicable Kind of Betting

Chapter 19:He Wants It – We Send It

Chapter 20:The Toll of War

Chapter 21:Peace is Here

Chapter 22:My Life’s Dream Was Gone with the Wind

Chapter 23:A Solemn Duty

Chapter 24:Promoting Friendship between Nations

Bibliography

Notes

Acknowledgements

Writing the acknowledgements for a book during a global pandemic is a strange task. For almost a year, most of those responsible for its creation have been reduced to small sections of a laptop or a voice on the phone. To list their names is not only to recall past help or advice, but to reflect on when we last met, and how long it might be before we meet again. Since March 2020, the debts I owe have risen significantly. Friendship is the bedrock of this book, and I have been lucky to have benefited from so many acts of kindness.

For the chance to become a historian I owe a great deal to Dave Russell and Kevin Moore. As my lead supervisor, Dave taught me the historian’s craft and a great deal more as a mentor. With typical modesty Dave would eschew any credit for this book, but if there is any merit in it, it comes from what I have learnt from him. Special thanks are also due to Daryl Leesworthy for advice, analysis and support throughout, especially in the publication process.

A decade working at the National Football Museum means I owe a lot to a great many friends and colleagues past and present. From the Collections Team, special thanks go to Wiebke Cullen, Nick Jones, Sally Hawley, Peter Holme and Belinda Scarlett. Thanks also to Tim Ashmore, Katie Cavanagh, Laura Crossley, John Donald, Philippa Duxbury, Denise Lambert, Andy Pearce, David Pearson, Louise Rutherford, Gordon Smailes, Jon Sutton and Daniel Routt.

I am lucky to have had help from many fellow researchers. My thanks go to Iain Adams, Alex Alexandrou, Tony Collins, John Davis, Dave Day, Clive Harris, Gary James, Paul Joannou, Phil Martin, Iain McMullan, Ian Nannestad, Paul Ploughman, Andrew Riddoch, Ian Rigby, Margaret Roberts, Gary Sheffield, Ray Simpson, Mike Smith, Duncan Stone, Matthew Taylor, David Toms, Nicholas Turner, Helen Walasek, Jean Williams, Patrick Brennan and David Woods. Thanks also to members of the British Society of Sports History for their support and feedback.

My thanks to the staff of Sheffield, Barnsley, Newcastle and Manchester Local Studies Libraries, the British Library and in particular its newsroom, the British Newspaper Archive, Lancashire Records Office, Tyne and Wear Archives and the National Archives. Thank you to the National Football Museum, Neville Evans Collection, the Priory Collection, Nicholas Turner and Paul Joannou for permission to use images from their collections. At Pen & Sword, Jonathan Wright, Aileen Pringle, Harriet Fielding and George Chamier were a pleasure to work with. I’m also very grateful to all club historians and the creators of the Long, Long Trail and England Football Online websites for making their detailed research accessible.

Amongst my friends, I owe thanks to Andrew, Steve, and Peter of the Black Horse History Society for illuminating and convivial company. Thanks to George, Ross, Jamie, Lois, Henry, Jonathan, Rebecca, Claire and Punita for all their support and kindness over the years, also to teammates from Bingham Park Rovers and Olympic Park Crookes.

Finally, and most importantly, I wish to thank my parents. Since the death of my father over twenty years ago, my mother’s support has been the single most important factor in my life, and without it this book would simply not exist. It is the bittersweet nature of life that, as I started on the first major steps to becoming a historian, that my father was taken from us both. His was a deep and passionate love of history, sport, and literature, and only she will know how much this has shaped this book, and how much it would have meant to him.

Introduction

And What Did You Do During the Great War?

When, after the war, the fever seizes upon the good people who will in their thousands feel the world is wailing for their views upon how England ‘carried on’ . . . a chapter will be surely required to show how one great branch of the people’s pastime held on, and thereby contributed to the patience and the relief of the strain among the workers.

—Alfred Martin, Editor of the Sheffield Telegraph and Star Sports Special or ‘Green ’Un’, 30 December 1916

Like millions of others, Alfred Martin’s experience of the First World War was of daily life on the Home Front. His was a war viewed from his office at the Sheffield Telegraph and the press boxes of Bramall Lane, Hillsborough and other grounds across the country. This might seem a narrow and parochial view of a world war, but as President of the National Union of Journalists he was conscious of the role his profession filled in creating the first draft of the history of the war. His positive view of football’s contribution was echoed by the Sheffield Green ’Un ’s cartoonist in 1919. Recently demobbed from the army, he referenced Saville Lumley’s famous recruiting poster of a child asking, ‘Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?’ Instead, ‘Tommy (Demobbed)’ poses the same question to ‘Mr Football’. In the original, the father looks pained, hinting at personal guilt and cowardice, but ‘Mr Football’ happily answers the question by offering the paper’s football annual, saying, ‘Read this. It’s all inside.’ ¹

The wartime game on the English Home Front that Martin felt was so deserving of attention is the subject of this book, the first to treat it as its sole focus. Today, football’s place in the popular memory of the First World War is associated with events on the front line, such as the disputed football games of the Christmas Truce of 1914 or the East Surreys’ football charge at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. In recent years, the popularity and value of football within the British Army has become better known, while the histories of individual players have attracted increasing attention. All this understandably reflects the well-established and enduring hold of the image of the trenches of the Western Front on much of the British public.²

But what of the Home Front story that Martin felt was so vital? Here, he would no doubt be frustrated. In general histories, football’s story is presented in the following terms: the continuation of the professional season in 1914/15 produced an anti-football campaign, which forced the FA to suspend the men’s game in 1915. This view was articulated (briefly) by Arthur Marwick in 1965, while more recent histories by Gerard De Groot, Adrian Gregory and Simon Heffer also end their analysis of wartime football at the completion of the 1914/15 season, with Gregory arguing that while interest in the game did not wane, ‘it moved to France for the duration.’³ Instead, most writing has concentrated on the important rise of women’s football.⁴ Some have gone so far as to explain the rise of the women’s game during the war as caused by a void created by the cessation of organized men’s football.⁵

This prevailing view has meant that football has rarely been discussed in histories of culture and leisure on the Home Front, despite their fascination for writers and historians. The most influential studies have focused on the war as marking a potential ‘culture clash’ between modernist and older forms of culture. For some it marked a fundamental break between old and new, for others the war was the product of modernism, while others yet have argued that there was both change and continuity.⁶ But for most, culture meant theatre, music and literature, what may be termed ‘the arts’. Popular entertainments like the cinema and the music-hall have received increasing attention in recent years, but the place of sport within the wartime entertainment industry has yet to be fully explored.⁷ Despite Matthew Taylor’s observation that the war had ‘fundamental repercussions for public . . . perceptions of the sport’, beyond specific club histories of the war years, historians of football have also tended to pass over the war, treating it primarily as an interval between peacetime developments.⁸

This book challenges these prevailing views with three key arguments. Firstly, the game did not disappear, nor was it suspended by the FA. In 1915 the FA banned the payment of players and the awarding of trophies and medals, but encouraged the game to continue. Whether one wished to play was a personal choice, but many continued to do so, from elite professional clubs to humble amateur sides. Moreover, in the absence of county cricket and given the reduced scale of horse-racing, the game was the country’s most popular outdoor spectator sport, attracting over three million spectators per season between 1915/16 and 1917/18. Servicemen may have taken their enthusiasm for the game abroad, but there were many civilians and servicemen at home who continued to play, watch or read about the game.

Secondly, the way the FA re-organized the game represents another facet of the wartime clash of cultures. The football world of 1914 was composed of two different, often conflicting, sometimes competing visions of the game, one commercial, the other amateur. The commercial, in the shape of 5,000 professional players at over 300 clubs watched by millions of spectators each week, presented the game as public entertainment to those who wished to use their leisure time to spectate. This side of the game had been born in the 1880s, but the game’s roots lay with the public-school amateurs of the 1860s, who codified and popularized playing as a participatory leisure activity. Many of these early players became the game’s administrators, and throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century they attempted to control and discipline professional players and club directors in the rapidly developing football industry.

Just as the game did not disappear, neither did the conflict between commercialism and amateurism. Instead, the controversy over the continuation of the 1914/15 season heightened this divide and led the FA to make a conscious decision to temporarily remodel the game on strictly amateur lines; this was in contrast to Scotland, where limited professionalization was still allowed. Some contemporary writers called the period that followed ‘The New Football’, but those who welcomed it did so because it promised a return to the past. The commercial game was still less than thirty years old, and many of its senior administrators had played in the amateur era that had preceded it. For them, and for sympathetic observers in the press, the war offered a chance to examine, challenge or even remove what they perceived as the worst excesses of commercialized sport. For others, it represented an unwelcome, possibly dangerous attempt to unfairly enforce amateurism on those who could not afford to play for nothing. These tensions would manifest themselves throughout the war.

This conflict between professional and amateur sporting values was arguably distinctive to British and Commonwealth experience of the war.⁹ While other European combatant countries had broadly comparable musical or theatrical traditions and institutions, the organization, scale and, crucially, professionalization of sport, along with the idea of sporting values, were seen by contemporaries as something particular to British society. Exploring this sporting dimension of the Home Front allows us to better understand the distinctive English experience of the Great War. It focuses on England, since Welsh, Scottish and Irish football need specific histories to do full justice to the wider social currents in which they were located. But the richness and variety of English experiences more than compensates, by allowing us to ask how local and regional experiences differed.¹⁰

Finally, the game was deeply connected with the broader wartime effort. Participants and supporters were faced with three key demands: to volunteer for the armed forces, or for the wider war effort if they were civilians; to sacrifice money or blood; and to provide support for civilian and military morale. For some, the best way to meet these demands was to close the game down entirely. But to many others, they were best served by adapting, and continuing to adapt, to wartime conditions. In all sorts of ways, great and small, the war created a ‘new normal’ in which the game was played, watched or consumed. As such, this book tries to explore how the experience of everyday life changed for millions still interested or involved in the game.¹¹

After dealing with the state of the game on the eve of war, the bulk of the book is divided into three periods, with each chapter exploring a key theme. The first explores the 1914/15 season, focusing on the anti-football debate and the response of amateur and professional players to the nation’s call to arms. The second concentrates on the forgotten seasons of 1915/16 to 1918/19, exploring the game at all levels and how it was experienced by players, administrators, and fans. The final section considers reconstruction and remembrance in the post-war period of the 1920s and 1930s and the legacy of the war. This is a lot more than the chapter envisaged by Alfred Martin, but I hope to show that the game’s history warrants it.

Chapter 1

Fifty Years of Progress

Fifty years ago, at the Freemason’s Arms, Great Queen Street, there was a little gathering of sportsmen that resulted in the formation of what is now the most powerful sporting organization in the world, which controls 15,000 clubs, with 500,000 members in Great Britain alone, and whose influence is felt in almost every country in both hemispheres.

—London Evening Standard, 4 November 1913

Football has conquered the world. The lusty game of a fighting people has been seized by vanquished races, and foreign nations who have neither affinity nor ties with the British have also seen that this sport is good for them as for us.

—Athletic News, 3 November 1913

On 3 November 1913, over 400 of the great and the good in the football world came together to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the English Football Association. They consumed a banquet of fourteen courses accompanied by sherry, hock, claret, champagne, port, brandy and liqueurs as they toasted the King, the Queen and the Federation of International Football Associations (FIFA), a toast proposed by, among others, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The String Band of the Royal Artillery played throughout, including a performance of the anthems of the twenty-five members of FIFA. Each was accompanied by the unfurling of its national flag and cheering, ‘until the climax came when the Union Jack burst into view, and the great company present . . . representing every phase of our national life – sprang to their feet in uncontrollable enthusiasm, and made the rafters ring.’ ¹

In attendance was 82-year-old Ebenezer Cobb-Morley who, as the FA’s first secretary, had drafted the first Laws of the Game at a small gathering of eleven founding clubs in 1863.² At this stage they had been trying to establish a single unified code of football. Though they failed, during the 1860s and 1870s association football came to rival the popularity of rugby football amongst the upper and middle classes. Crucial to its popularization was the creation of the FA Cup in 1871. The FA’s President, Lord Arthur Kinnaird, was the competition’s most illustrious player, appearing in a record nine FA Cup finals and winning five of them. The cup was originally the preserve of ex-public schoolboys, but in 1883 Kinnaird and his fellow Old Etonians lost to Blackburn Olympic, the first team of working-class men to win the cup.³

Blackburn’s success was symbolic of the emergence of forces that would transform the game and produce ‘a commercial juggernaut that commanded the attention of millions’.⁴ Whereas rugby would split into rival codes over professionalism, Association football did not, due in part to men like the FA Chairman, Charles Clegg. He also had experience of the game’s early days, having played in the first official England international in 1872. A provincial lawyer, he was snubbed by the other England players, who looked down on ‘a man fra’ Sheffield’. As the Chairman of the Sheffield and Hallamshire FA in the 1880s, he stridently opposed professionalization but pragmatically accepted its legalization in 1885. Appointed FA chairman in 1890, Clegg ensured that professionalism remained tightly controlled, supporting the introduction of a maximum wage, clashing with the Players Union and investigating any signs of corruption by professional clubs. But when some Southern County FAs sought to exclude professionals, he resisted a breakaway Amateur Football Association. Known as the ‘Napoleon’ of football, Clegg was a strict, teetotal Methodist whose favourite maxim was ‘No one got lost on a straight road.’⁵

Equally domineering were the leaders of the principal kingdom within the FA’s empire, the Football League. Its President, ‘Honest John’ McKenna, the frail-looking but hardened Charles Sutcliffe, and John Lewis, a former referee known as ‘The Chief Constable’, were tolerant of professionals if they remembered they were ‘servants’ to their League ‘masters.’⁶ Theirs was the oldest but not the only League, for what set British football apart from the rest of the football world was the sheer number of professional competitions. The FL represented the North and the Midlands, with only five of its forty members below the River Trent.⁷ Southern clubs predominantly played in the Southern League, while a variety of other leagues in the North-East, Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Midlands produced many of the players that FL and SL clubs recruited.

Supporting these clubs was an array of shareholders, directors and chairmen. Most directors were not working men, coming instead from the ranks of the commercial middle classes. For some banquet attendees, like Henry Norris, Mayor of Fulham and Chairman of Fulham and Woolwich Arsenal, involvement was part of a broader pattern of seeking civic approval.⁸ For others, like Wilhelm Pollack, it was pure love of the game that led them to invest huge portions of their wealth. Born in Germany, Pollack had anglicized his name to William, becoming Bradford City’s Chairman and overseeing the club’s 1911 FA Cup triumph. But for every Norris or Pollack who thrived in this environment, there were dozens of other directors who would have echoed Councillor Barlow, embittered director of Bursley FC in Arnold Bennett’s The Card, as he berated his fellow shareholders:

‘There’s one thing the matter with first-class football in Bursley,’ he concluded, ‘and it isn’t the players. It’s the public – it’s yourselves. You’re the most craven lot of tom-fools that ever a big football club had to do with. When we lose a match, what do you do? Do you come and encourage us next time? No, you stop away, and leave us fifty or sixty pounds out of pocket on a match, just to teach us better! Do you expect us to win every match?’⁹

Possibly, but they also wanted hope, as Barlow’s rival, Henry Machin, understood when he bought the country’s leading striker back to his home town as a ‘gift’. One real-life Machin was industrialist Lawrence Cotton, who bankrolled record-breaking transfers that made Blackburn Rovers champions of the FL First Division in 1914. Elsewhere, the presence of Glossop FC in the Second Division of the FL was explained by the generous patronage of local mill-owner, newspaper-owner and MP Henry Hill-Wood, although such generosity earned the club a rebuke from the FA for its poorly kept accounts. But not all could earn the public’s love. At Stoke FC’s annual meeting, ‘Calm reason was forsaken and passion was allowed to run unbridled. Not only were there prolonged disorderly interruptions, but shareholders excitedly shook their fists at the directors, and one person so far forget himself as to make a paper missile and hurl it violently in the face of the chairman, the Rev. A.E. Hurst.’¹⁰ A director’s lot was not always a happy one.

The public that supported these clubs had grown dramatically in size since 1863. In 1913/14, the top sixty FL and SL clubs attracted over 15 million spectators to their league games. FA Cup ties attracted even larger crowds, culminating in a record 120,081 for the 1913 final. They watched in venues that are often still in use today. Manchester United’s Old Trafford ground opened in 1910, a ‘marvel’ of modern stadium design. The stands catered for middle-class supporters while the open terraces held the lower-middle-class and working-class fans on their Saturday half-day holiday.¹¹ Many walked to the game, but just as many travelled by cycle, bus, car, tram or train, with major clubs attracting substantial regional support from many miles away. In London, the casual football fan had the choice of a variety of clubs, the leading light of which was Chelsea; astutely built next to excellent transport links, it attracted a truly metropolitan crowd, the biggest in England. The rhythm and scale of attendances moved with the light and the weather, although fans often displayed an impressive willingness to endure the elements. The Edwardian football fan was discerning, or fickle if you were a hard-pressed director, with big games attracting the largest crowds. Games on public holidays were the most popular, with clubs crowding in as many as possible. At Christmas 1913 games were held on three consecutive days, while at Easter 1914 they occupied three out of four days.

The impact of spectating on the working-class fan divided opinion. Some argued that it reduced drinking, kept him out of trouble and got him into the open air. Others decried the absence of ‘sportsmanship in a football crowd . . . partisanship has dulled its idea of sport and warped its moral sense.’¹² The Labour Leader bemoaned a ‘race of workers who can only obey their masters and think football . . . this is the material out of which slaves are made; the material which gives us shouting Jingoes, ignorant electors, and craven blacklegs.’¹³ For the conservative Morning Post, ‘A Cup Tie match is disquieting; it suggests of the days of the decline of another Empire when corrupted citizens clamoured for free food and circuses.’¹⁴

Most worrying of all was the popularity of gambling. One guest at the anniversary banquet was the Chelsea director Sir Hayes Fisher MP, who was attempting to introduce Parliamentary legislation to prohibit ready-money (cash) betting on football coupons.¹⁵ He was supported by the FA and the FL, where Methodists like Clegg, Sutcliffe and Lewis strongly disapproved of gambling and feared the spectre of corruption. The Edwardian period had seen several attempts at match-fixing, one in 1913 sensationally focusing on England’s Jesse Pennington.¹⁶ But attempts to stop it, like the 1906 Street Betting Act, criminalized working-class betting while ignoring it amongst the better off.¹⁷ On the streets, bookmakers employed a small army of runners to collect bets and paid their fines when they were caught or bribed policemen to look the other way.¹⁸ Fans also gambled amongst themselves at games through informal sweepstakes or private wagers.¹⁹ Newspapers both decried and exploited the gambling instinct, running competitions with prizes as big as £500. And growing ever more popular were fixed-odd coupons, with up to two million issued each week and 250,000 in Liverpool alone.²⁰ These might be obtained from local bookmakers or agents working on commission for larger firms operating out of Holland to evade legal restrictions.²¹ Opponents of such practices could join John Lewis as members of the National Anti-Gambling League (NAGL), an organization that lobbied politicians, policemen and newspapers.

The modern player who made all this possible had only limited representation at the banquet, restricted to the captains of the England International and Amateur International teams, Robert Crompton (Blackburn Rovers) and Vivian Woodward (Chelsea). Crompton, the first professional to captain England, was the kind of man to appeal to senior figures at the FA. Quiet and given to reading on train journeys, he ran a motor business and owned a car, one of the first professionals to do so. He was not a member of the Players Union.²² The Union’s chairman, Manchester United’s Charlie Roberts, was not invited to the banquet, a consequence of his activities. The PU was part of a wider growth in working-class trade unionism, and in the summer of 1909 the FA ordered it to withdraw from the Federation of Trade Unions, with PU members told to resign or be banned. Militant players stood out on strike until the eve of the new season. In truth, the PU lacked the membership numbers and strength of collective will that other unionized workforces had in this period. At its peak in 1909, the PU represented only 1,300 of the 5,000 professional players in England, and this declined in the years before the war, with only fifty-eight clubs having PU connections by 1914. By then even Roberts was losing patience with his fellow professionals:

I know of no class of workpeople who are less able to look after themselves than footballers; they are like a lot of sheep . . . unless the players next season take a greater interest in the Union, I, for one, am going to leave them to it.²³

Union members tended to be the better paid full-time professionals, those earning closest to the £4 per week maximum wage. The great majority of players were, as today, not on these headline figures. Lower-league players were often semi-professionals with industrial jobs, playing for a few shillings a week.

Retiring professional players either returned to jobs in industry or to trades they had temporarily left, opened small businesses or traded upon their fame from behind a pub bar. A small group, however, stayed on in the newly emerging position of manager. More numerous were Secretaries or Secretary-managers drawn from amateur players of the 1870s, like Bradford Park Avenue’s Tom Maley. His career showed that a talented leader could transform a club’s fortunes. An amateur player with Glasgow Celtic, he left a teaching career to manage Manchester City in 1902, winning the FA cup in 1904. Initially banned for his part in the club’s financial irregularities, he was given a second chance at Bradford. There he changed the club colours to the green-and-white hoops of his beloved Celtic, while his astute signings earned the club promotion to the First Division in 1914.

Also absent from the dinner were any representatives from the Amateur Football Association. In this case, though, the exclusion was entirely voluntary, as the AFA had split from the FA in 1907. Ever since its legalization, professionalism had unsettled the more socially exclusive members of the FA. The Amateur Cup was introduced in 1893 but was quickly dominated by working-class teams, so in 1903 the Arthur Dunn Cup was set up for the old-boy clubs of the elite public schools.²⁴ Southern amateurs also rejected the introduction of the penalty kick for ‘professional’ fouls, arguing that it was ‘an insult to their dignity to have to play under such a rule’.²⁵ Like the gentleman purists in rugby union, they abhorred the commercialized game of the masses. One AFA loyalist argued that football

is only a fit game for those who by their bringing up and training can play it as it should be played, robustly, yet fairly, as between man and man, and do not want a vast and ignorant crowd of partisans to egg them on to all kinds of malpractices to win, tie or wrangle, for pocket-filling purposes.²⁶

When compelled by the FA to admit professional clubs, the Middlesex and Surrey County FAs refused, leading to the formation of the AFA. For the die-hards, Charles Clegg was their arch opponent, derided as an autocratic northern ruler. The future creator of Winnie-the-Pooh, A.A. Milne, wrote a sarcastic sketch which mocked the dictates handed out by ‘Emperor’ Clegg.²⁷

The AFA revolt lasted for seven years, but ultimately Emperor Clegg won. The AFA’s very exclusivity meant that it did not represent working-class amateurs or many middle-class amateurs beyond Nottingham. Clubs still needed spectators to help balance their finances, but as one navvy said after watching a game, ‘If this ’ere is what they calls amateur football, I’m ––ed if I come to see any more of it. They ––ing seem to love one another.’ In 1914 the AFA returned to the fold. A symbolic match was organized at Stamford Bridge between the AFA standard-bearers, the Corinthians, and the English Wanderers, who had been set up for the best middle-class amateurs loyal to the FA. The English Wanderers won 4-2.²⁸

The invited guests were entertained by the music-hall star George Robey, evidence of the game’s wider popularity. A keen amateur footballer, Robey appeared for the reserve teams of several London clubs, and his was not the only overlap between stage and field. Harry Wheldon’s ‘Stiffy the Goalkeeper’ sketch, featuring a young Charlie Chaplin, became a celebrated performance in which real footballers made celebrity appearances. These acts were part of the wider commercial exploitation that boomed in the Edwardian period. Younger fans could consume the game through a range of collectable goods like postcards, cigarette cards and collectable Baines cards that could be bought at the corner-shop and swopped, bartered or competed for in the playground.²⁹

More imaginative was the popular fiction published in boys’ story papers aimed at the newly literate working and lower-middle classes. The father of juvenile sporting fiction was A.S. Hardy, who started a veritable boom with the Boys’ Realm in 1905. This was one of a stable of weekly penny papers published by the Amalgamated Press and owned by Lord Northcliffe of the Daily Mail.³⁰ Hardy was quickly imitated, but none wrote so frequently or with such popularity. His real name was Arthur Joseph Steffen, and he was the son of a German tailor and an English mother who anglicized his name to Arthur Steffens Hardy in the 1900s. His stories blended the fantastic with the realistic, placing his heroes in the modern world of professional football and including characters based on real stars like William ‘Fatty’ Foulke of Sheffield United. Hardy’s fictional characters played against real-life teams and players, while his villains, greedy directors and corrupt betting agents, reflected wider concerns about the commercialization of the game, including the problem of the narcissistic star: ‘Then be hanged to ’em’, shouted Maxwell. ‘A player of my class isn’t going to Accrington to play in a reserve game. The team can do without me.’ Hardy’s heroes, though, were a cut above this: ‘Jack Galway was the purest type of the professional footballer, a man who would have been an ornament to any game.’

The most popular commercial exploitation, however, took the form of the football press. By 1913 the game not only enjoyed a regular presence in the morning, evening and Sunday papers, but had also produced the football special, which ‘was as much of the cultural scene as the gas lamp and the fish and chip shop.’³¹ With their distinctive green, pink and buff colours, no fan could fail to distinguish these titles on a Saturday evening as they were hawked by small armies of newspaper boys. However, the FA’s 1913 banquet snobbishly ignored them in favour of metropolitan papers. Bruce Campbell of the Sheffield Telegraph sarcastically noted that ‘the provincial press has always been rather indifferent to the national game, and in the opinion of the omniscient Southerners, knows nothing about it.’³² The one northern pressman who could not be ignored was James Catton, editor of Athletic News, known as the ‘Times’ of the sports world. For Catton, the power and prestige of his post and the paper itself was the culmination of decades of hard work establishing the new genre of sportswriting as a legitimate sphere for professional journalism, although many writers still looked down upon their sporting brethren.³³

If Catton was the elder statesman of football writers, close to him were the leading regional sportswriters and editors, who wrote for hundreds of thousands of readers each week. Men like Alfred Martin (‘Looker-On’) and Bruce Campbell (‘B.C.’) of the Sheffield Telegraph, Harry Hill (‘Argus Junior’) of the Birmingham Gazette, Frederick Lintott (‘Adjutant’) of the Bradford Telegraph and Ernest Edwards (Bee) of the Liverpool Echo were a new breed of influential sportswriters, shaping regional coverage. Ernest Edwards, who was recruited in 1902 as the Echo’s first specialist football reporter, apparently suggested the name of ‘Spion Kop’ for a new Anfield stand in 1906 and became the Liverpool Football Echo’s editor in 1914 at the age of thirty-two.³⁴ Notoriety brought its own pressures, though, as Arthur Brierley (‘Perseus’) of the Lancashire Evening Post explained in his homage to Gilbert and Sullivan.

When the bold and enterprisin’ football player’s Not a-playin’

And he’s finished with the turmoil and the Stress

He loves to sit and read the pretty things they Are a-sayin’

About him in the columns of the press.

But if he finds he’s criticised he starts to go And smother

The simple pressman who his simple duty’s done:

Taking one consideration with another, With another,

A critic’s life is not a happy one.³⁵

One unhappy player was Grimsby Town’s William Birch, who assaulted Ernest Tunbridge of the Grimsby News in the press box, earning a fine of £3 8s. Hypersensitive players were not the only things that concerned sportswriters. Complaints about players being paid too much and not having jobs outside of football, too many foreign (Scottish) players, excessive transfer fees, too much defensive football, the excessive use of the offside trap, over-elaborate passing, the prioritization of speed over skill – all of these represented the fundamental conflicts and contradictions between viewing football as a game, as entertainment and as a business.

Catton and his contemporaries saw football as a ‘manly’ game, and the FA’s banquet reflected this; no female guests were invited. The highly gendered nature of Edwardian society meant that women were only allowed to engage with football in limited ways. Women’s early attempts at playing in the 1880s produced pitch invasions and assaults on the players. Another attempt was made between 1895 and 1897 by Nettie Honeyball and the British Ladies Football Club, but it did not lead to popular grassroots participation. By 1914 there were glimpses of women playing again: a club was formed in Burnley, while in Portsmouth two teams played before several thousand spectators in aid of a naval charity. But women were still more likely to appear on the football field in the guise of chorus girls in charity games, or music-hall actresses kicking off charity matches.³⁶

Discouraged from playing, women were able to follow the game as spectators. Free entry in the 1880s had proved too popular to be commercially sensible, so women were charged, like boys, at half-price. When the Chelsea Chronicle asked readers, ‘Why I take my best girl to the match’, Annie J. Killock explained why she took ‘her best boy’:

My boy derives admitted exceptional pleasure in being allowed to escort me to my favourite pastime. Both supporting the same club, we both agree on all fouls or questionable tactics; we weekly shout ourselves hoarse over the same favourite players, always having a companion to console with: in the event of disappointing results we usually end being satisfied. Yes . . . we go to football with the thorough intention of having a good time and what is more – we have it.³⁷

Men, though, were less likely to recognize female interest in such equal terms. More common was Bruce Campbell’s view:

Personally, I look to the presence of the ladies as one of the things that will help to give a better tone to our games, and there is no doubt that they exercise a very fine restraining influence on some of the male persons round about . . . They become very keen critics of the game too, do the ladies, once they begin to know the ins and out of the play, and some of them can argue about it very skilfully. Of course I will be told that the ladies can argue skilfully about anything they set their minds to, that being a pet hobby, but the man who would make a remark of that sort must be a nasty prejudiced person. Probably his wife is a suffragette.

For suffragettes, football was a male bastion to be attacked. In 1913, attempts were made to burn down stands at Doncaster Rovers, Preston North End and Blackburn Rovers. At Preston the attempts were only thwarted by the last-minute arrival of the police, while at Blackburn, the press and directors’ seats were seriously damaged by the fire.³⁸ Under titles like ‘No Vote, No Football!’ and ‘War on Football’, newspapers discussed thwarted suffragette plans to sabotage the 1913 FA Cup final.³⁹ For the Lincolnshire Echo it showed the lengths to which ‘malignant suffragettes will go, and the nature of their criminal method’.⁴⁰

With women discouraged from playing, amateur football was the game of boys and men. The many FA County officials at the dinner represented between 300,000 and 500,000 affiliated amateur players, around one in seventeen of adult English males aged 15–39 in 1911. Teams were often sponsored by or associated with church, chapel and workplaces, while schools’ Old Boy sides extended beyond the upper-class circles in which they originated. One distinctive group were servicemen, who made up a third of the Hampshire FA’s players. Army football became a popular recruiting ground for professional clubs, with fines for illegal approaches.⁴¹ Beyond the official figures, there were more players in unaffiliated clubs. FA County officials decried them, associating them with untrustworthy organizers and rough play. There may have been some truth to this, but many affiliated clubs and players were hardly models of good behaviour. In 1913 the Durham Football Association lamented fighting between players, dangerous play, obscene language, players refusing to obey the referee and assaults on referees. Nor were unaffiliated leagues without rules or regulation.⁴² One writer estimated that there were over 5,000 unaffiliated players in Sheffield, and his advice that the FA should seek to dispel common assumptions that registration fees were high, private grounds a necessity and players would not be excessively punished gives a good idea of why many players, probably from working-class backgrounds, did not wish to affiliate to a County FA.⁴³

Many amateur players first experienced football as schoolboys, with the first official organizations being founded in London in 1885. In 1904 the English Schools Football Association was created to help co-ordinate and support schoolboy