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Abstract
‘The football season of 1914–15 has opened under the shadow of the greatest and most momentous war in the history of the world’, wrote the editor of The Chelsea F.C. Chronicle, in the programme for the first match after war was declared. So far, the story of football in England during the First World War has been addressed only briefly in academic research. This article, however, presents the public debate about the abandonment of professional football from the cultural perspective — and through the war story of the Chelsea Football Club. I discuss the phenomena which I identified in the club's programme — the use of war-euphemism in the discourse about football, and the fight against the calls for the cessation of the league — and argue that that was the way in which the urban community of Chelsea fought against the changes that the Great War had brought to the home-front.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my supervisor, Prof. Iris Rachamimov, for guiding me through the academic world.
ORCiD
Assaf Mond http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7894-4608
Notes on Contributor
Assaf Mond is a Ph.D. student at the Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies in Tel Aviv University, under the supervision of Prof. Iris Rachamimov. In his research, titled ‘The Changing Urban Space of Great-War London, 1914-1918’, he examines the way the British capital city was changed because of the war — whether by bombs dropped during Zeppelin raids, public debates regarding the continuation of the professional football league or the internment of civilians of enemy origin.
Notes
1 See also B. Luedtke, ‘Playing Fields and Battlefields: The Football Pitch, England and the First World War’, Britain and the World, 5 (2012), 115.
2 G. L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 126–43.
3 Punch, 21 October 1914, 331.
4 See, for example, T. Mason, Association Football and English Society 1863–1915 (Brighton: Harvester, 1981); N. Fishwick, English Football and Society, 1910–1950 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989).
5 See, for instance, M. Bell, Red, White and Khaki: The Story of the Only Wartime FA Cup Final (Calver: Peakpublish, 2011); A. Churchill and A. Holmes, Over Land and Sea: Chelsea FC in the Great War (Stroud: History Press, 2015); T. Tate, For Team and Country: Sport on the Frontlines of the Great War (London: Metro, 2014).
6 Football was not the only sport to face this problem: The First Class Season of Cricket was abandoned on September 1914; the amateur Rugby Football Union suspended its matches at the beginning of the war; and the professional Northern Rugby Football Union ceased playing after one war-season. See T. Collins, Rugby League in Twentieth Century Britain: A Social and Cultural History (London: Routledge, 2006), 1–22.
7 During the Great War, Fred Parker was credited for editing The Chelsea F.C. Chronicle only once: an obituary published on 16 November 1918 recording the death of his son. See R. Glanvill, Chelsea FC: The Official Biography. The Definitive Story of the First 100 Years (London: Headline, 2006), 117–8; R. Groves, Chelsea: The Story of Chelsea Football Club (London: Newservice, 1947), 37; A. Jackson, ‘The Chelsea Chronicle, 1905 to 1913’, Soccer and Society, 11 (2010), 508.
8 Chelsea F.C. Chronicle, 27 August 1914, 1.
9 This definition is based on several works in that field. See E. C. Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976), 65–6; J. Bale, Sport, Space and the City (London: Routledge, 1993), 2–6, 56, 73; C. Stone, ‘The Role of Football in Everyday Life’, Soccer and Society, 8 (2007), 173–5; G. Delanty, Modernity and Postmodernity: Knowledge, Power and the Self (London: Sage, 2000), 117–8; R. Rein, Fútbol, Jews and the Making of Argentina (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 134–58.
10 P. Dilwyn, ‘‘Coming on with Leaps and Bounds in the Metropolis’: London Football in the Era of the 1908 Olympics’, London Journal, 34 (2009), 114.
11 See, for example, the letter of Clara Butt from Southwark Park in Chelsea F.C. Chronicle, 26 September 1914, 6.
12 Jackson, ‘Chelsea Chronicle’, 509–10.
13 A. Horrall, Popular Culture in London c. 1890–1918: The Transformation of Entertainment (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 160–3.
14 J. Walvin, The People's Game: A Social History of British Football (London: Allen Lane, 1975), 88; Fishwick, English Football, 144.
15 National Football Museum Collections, Minutes of the Football Association – Meeting of the Consultative Committee, 31 August 1914.
16 Chelsea F.C. Chronicle, 27 August 1914, 1–2.
17 J. White, Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War (London: Bodley Head, 2014), 57–64.
18 J. Rüger, ‘Entertainments’, in J. Winter and J.-L. Robert (eds.), Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919, vol. II: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 112.
19 S. Goebel, ‘Cities’, in J. Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. II: The State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 368–9.
20 Tottenham Hotspur Football & Athletic Company, Official Programme and Record of the Club, 2 September 1914, 3.
21 Cottagers’ Journal and Official Programme, 5 September 1914, 3.
22 Daily Mail, 12 September 1914, 4.
23 J. Kemp and A. Riddoch, When the Whistle Blows: The Story of the Footballers’ Battalion in the Great War (Sparkford: Haynes, 2008), 14.
24 The Times, 3 September 1914, 6.
25 Daily Mail, 9 September 1914, 4.
26 Chelsea F.C. Chronicle, 12 September 1914, 1.
27 P. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 175–8.
28 Fussell, Great War, 27–8; C. Veitch. ‘“Play up! Play up! and Win the War!”: Football, the Nation and the First World War 1914–5’, Journal of Contemporary History, 20 (1985), 363–4; A. Jackson, ‘Football and the First World War in Fifteen Objects’, in R. Sheppard (ed.), The Greater Game: A History of Football in World War I (Oxford: Shire, 2014), 26.
29 Chelsea F.C. Chronicle, 10 October 1914, 1.
30 Ibid., 24 October 1914, 1.
31 Ibid.,20 March 1915, 1.
32 Ibid.,2 April 1915, 1.
33 Ibid., 24 September 1914, 4.
34 Ibid., 7 November 1914, 1.
35 Ibid., 7 November 1914, 4.
36 Ibid., 5 December 1914, 6.
37 The Times, 3 September 1914, 6.
38 For example, Robert Baden-Powell's calls which appeared in Daily Mail, 12 October 1914.
39 The Times, 7 November 1914, 10.
40 Chelsea F.C. Chronicle, 5 September 1914, 1.
41 Ibid., 5 December 1914, 5.
42 Ibid., 6.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid., 1.
45 Ibid., 12 September 1914, 5.
46 Ibid., 12 December 1914, 6.
47 Ibid., 5 December 1914, 4.
48 Ibid., 23 January 1915, 3.
49 Ibid., 6 February 1915, 5.
50 Ibid., 5 December 1914, 5–6.
51 See Veitch, ‘Play up!’, 368–9; Walvin, People's Game, 62–3; T. Mason, Sport in Britain (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 38; T. Collins, Sport in Capitalist Society: A Short History (London: Routledge, 2013), 32.
52 Chelsea F.C. Chronicle, 5 December 1915, 5.
53 Daily Mail, 12 September 1914, 4.
54 Chelsea F.C. Chronicle, 26 September 1914; 9 January 1915, 7.
55 Ibid., 20 March 1915, 4–5; 2 April 1915, 5.
56 Ibid., 2 September 1914, 4–5.
57 Ibid., 7 November 1914, 4.
58 Ibid., 14 November 1914, 2.
59 Ibid., 17 April 1915, 3.
60 Ibid., 28 April 1915, 2.
61 See D. Birley, Playing the Game: Sport and British Society, 1914–45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 74; T. Mason, Association Football and English Society 1863–1915 (Brighton: Harvester, 1981), 252–5; Fishwick, English Football, 144–5.
62 The Times, 20 April 1915, 7.
63 Ibid., 21 April 1915, 10; 24 April 1915, 5.
64 Daily Express, 26 April 1915, 9.
65 Bell, Red, White and Khaki, 6–7;B. Mears, Chelsea: The 100-Year History (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2005), 22.
66 Daily Express, 26 April 1915, 9.
67 Kemp and Riddoch, When the Whistle, 59–60.
68 Daily Mail, 20 July 1915, 6.
69 Walvin, People's Game, 137–8; Kemp and Riddoch, When the Whistle, 325.
70 Daily Mail, 26 April 1915, 7.