Making the People’s Game: Football History and the Second World War

16/01/2018  -  1.54

Matthew Taylor

Most general histories of sport pay little attention to the Second World War. At best, they show how the lessons of the 1914-18 conflict were absorbed by the governing bodies, who generally committed themselves publicly to the war effort. At worst, they ignore the period entirely, stopping the narrative in September 1939 and only resuming when the conflict ends in 1945. In both cases, the war is treated as if it were a gap in the chronology; an interlude or an aside in the established trajectory and in the relationship between the chosen game and British society and culture.

This type of approach is common in relation to football. But it is far from adequate. My current research on sport in wartime Britain demonstrates that important things happened in the politics of football during the conflict. But it also shows how wartime football changed the course of the game in the post-war decades and how football came to be seen as a symbol of the British nation.

The most controversial features of wartime football were the regionalisation of competition and the guest player system. Complicated schemes of regional leagues and cups – necessary due to travel restrictions – made it difficult for supporters and reporters to follow the flow of the football season as they had in peacetime. Matches were often abandoned, competitions were truncated and results could be unpredictable.

The guest player system helped turn clubs such as Aldershot and Blackpool, located close to service training centres, into formidable sides. But even fans of clubs who benefitted were frustrated by the lack of consistency. One Northampton supporter recalled that while he liked watching international players turn out for his club, he ‘never accepted any of them as a Cobblers player because they could play for you one match and against you the next’. A Mass-Observation report from November 1939 concurred, suggesting that the ‘free borrowing’ of players had ‘annoyed real supporters’ and ‘killed much of the incentive to go and see “my team.”’

In England, wartime football was marked by recurrent tensions between the leading London clubs and the Lancashire-based Football League. Led by Arsenal manager George Allison and Tottenham director G. Wagstaffe Simmons, the clubs from the capital pushed to be allowed to arrange their own fixtures as had occurred during the First World War. During the summer of 1941, they rejected the fixtures assigned to them and voted to leave the Football League. The eleven London clubs were soon joined by southern associates Aldershot, Reading, Brighton, Portsmouth and Watford who wanted to keep their more convenient and lucrative fixtures in the capital.

As the dispute between the League and the London rebels went public, both sides claimed to be acting in the national interest. Long-distance games, the rebels argued, would involve players ‘absenting themselves from work of national importance’. They claimed that the Football League’s scheme involved 9,000 miles of travel compared with 3,000 for its own league. As such, the League was accused of being unpatriotic and ‘acting contrary to the expressed wishes of the Government’. In response, the League accused the London group of quoting figures that were exaggerated and in some cases ‘absurdly false’.

No deal could be brokered and English football remained split for most of the 1941/42 season. Its greatest impact was on the southern clubs left outside the fold. With no London clubs to play, Bournemouth and Norwich City struggled to find sufficient fixtures. Both withdrew from league competition in the summer of 1942 and remained outside for the rest of the war. The same was true of Southend United, whose directors had considered moving the club to London in order to stay afloat.

The London rebels were reluctantly allowed to return to the League at the end of the season. They were compelled to issue formal apologies and pay a nominal fine. But they ultimately got their way with increased control over an enlarged London league, renamed League South, for the rest of the war. 

In Scotland, similar tensions emerged between the bigger clubs of the Scottish Southern League and a North-Eastern League which consisted of sides from Aberdeen, Fife and Edinburgh. When Glasgow Rangers agreed to help out the North-Eastern League by playing its reserve team in the competition in 1941, the Southern officials tried to prevent it from doing so. Tensions continued throughout the war, but the North-Eastern League ultimately survived and played a crucial role in helping Scotland’s smaller clubs survive and keeping the game alive in less-populated areas.

More than anything else, however, the war helped to connect football to popular understandings of British identity. The game played a key role as a source of home front morale and a means of keeping war workers fit and healthy. But it was also increasingly seen as central to ordinary British life; as part of the routine and rhythm of the everyday.    

This was recognised by the social research organisation Mass-Observation, which concluded in March 1942 that football was widely accepted as a crucial form of recreation and relaxation for the masses. It was also acknowledged by government ministers, MPs and civil servants. Football, one MP argued in the House of Commons in 1943, was ‘a great national game’ which should be protected and preserved by the government, especially at time of war. Other politicians saw it as ‘one of the necessities of the people’ and ‘a cement which enables us to be a nation in times of stress.’

The war provided a context in which playing and watching football could be justified as a vital ingredient of Britishness. Such sentiments were carried on into the post-war years and became commonplace during the 1950s. But it was during the so-called ‘people’s war’ that the idea that football had a central role in British social and cultural life first took root.

Biography

Matthew Taylor is Professor of History in the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University, Leicester. The author of numerous articles on the history of sport in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain and on sport and global history, his main publications include The Association Game: A History of British Football (Routledge, 2013) and The Leaguers: The Making of Professional Football in England, 1900-1939 (Liverpool University Press, 2005). Matthew also co-edits the ‘Sport, History and Culture’ book series (Peter Lang). His most recent article is ‘Sport and Civilian Morale in Second World War Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History, 53:1 (January 2018). He is currently completing a social and cultural history of sport in Second World War Britain.