Sport and the Home Front

Wartime Britain at Play, 1939-45

Matthew Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367229252
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000071368
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Sport and the Home Front contributes in significant and original ways to our understanding of the social and cultural history of the Second World War. It explores the complex and contested treatment of sport in government policy, media representations and the everyday lives of wartime citizens. Acknowledged as a core component of British culture, sport was also frequently criticised, marginalised and downplayed, existing in a constant state of tension between notions of normality and exceptionality, routine and disruption, the everyday and the extraordinary.

The author argues that sport played an important, yet hitherto neglected, role in maintaining the morale of the British people and providing a reassuring sense of familiarity at a time of mass anxiety and threat. Through the conflict, sport became increasingly regarded as characteristic of Britishness; a symbol of the 'ordinary' everyday lives in defence of which the war was being fought. Utilised to support the welfare of war workers, the entertainment of service personnel at home and abroad and the character formation of schoolchildren and young citizens, sport permeated wartime culture, contributing to new ways in which the British imagined the past, present and future.

Using a wide range of personal and public records – from diary writing and club minute books to government archives – this book breaks new ground in both the history of the British home front and the history of sport.

1

Sport, the government and civilian morale

The question of civilian morale has been a major preoccupation, yet also an elusive one, for historians of wartime Britain. Paul Addison described it as ‘the woolliest and most muddled concept of the war’. ‘No one’, he argued, ‘knew how to define morale, measure it, or affect it, but all agreed that it was there’.¹ For Mass-Observation which was commissioned by the Ministry of Information (MoI) to chart the highs and lows of morale, the concept was equally difficult to pin down. Tom Harrisson, one of the founders of Mass-Observation, thought that the failure ‘to analyse and define the complex moods covered by “morale” led to major deficiencies, both in writing about it accurately and dealing with it usefully’.² His own organization’s quasi-definition of morale as ‘the amount of interest people take in the war’ was later broadened out to include ‘not only determination to carry on but also determination to carry on with the utmost energy’. For Stephen Taylor, the Director of Home Intelligence at the MoI, morale had to be ‘ultimately measured not by what a person thinks or says, but by what he does and how he does it’.³ This notion of morale as a ‘composite of attitude and behaviour’ influenced the historian Robert Mackay, who suggested that indicators of ‘low’ morale could comprise calmness, cheerfulness, co-operation and high productivity among other things.⁴ Others have revealed the blurred boundaries between indicators of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ morale, noting that a ‘day-to-day erratic resilience’, in which people ‘could cry and carry on’, was as typical of ‘good’ morale as exuberance and cheerfulness.⁵

Morale has been central to the changing story of how the British people coped with war. Articulated first and most clearly by Richard Titmuss,⁶ the claim that morale held firm and that shared dangers, experiences and privations led to a reinforced sense of social solidarity and national unity has been carefully reformulated and nuanced over recent years after decades of revisionist critique. Andrew Thorpe, for example, has argued that, notwithstanding ‘serious downturns after military reverses’, morale remained ‘healthy’ and ‘never looked like cracking’; a view endorsed by David Thoms’ work on Birmingham and Coventry and Edgar Jones et al.’s study of the psychological effect of bombing.⁷ In his detailed book-length examination, Mackay endorsed the view of a people whose morale remained fundamentally ‘good’ through a careful modification of the overly ‘positive’ assessment of Titmuss and others. The role of the government was crucial, he argued, but ultimately it was a ‘combination of “public” and “private” factors, operating within a mental framework of common identity and shared destiny…that determined civilian morale’.⁸

The role of entertainment and recreation was an important theme in wartime discussions of civilian morale and national unity. Contemporaries noted their value as signs of normality at times of danger as well as during more routine periods of wartime life. Brad Beaven and John Griffiths, for example, have argued that levels of morale in bombed cities during 1940–41 were shaped significantly by the extent to which pre-war recreational facilities – such as social clubs, pubs and music halls – continued to function. This was crucial, they argue, for working-class people particularly, who identified ‘in their leisure pursuits traditional cultural icons and a collective purpose during a period of increasing danger and uncertainty’.⁹ The experience of bombing was only one determinant of morale and not always the most important. Mass-Observation found in December 1940 that recreation was considered the fifth most significant factor in ‘keeping up one’s spirits’ among men (behind ‘friends’, ‘health’, ‘work’ and ‘sleep’) and the eighth most significant (after the same four categories as well as ‘weather’, ‘meals’ and ‘good war news’) for women. People ‘coped’ in a variety of ways and chose their own means of ‘escaping’ from the realities of wartime life, or as one historian has termed it, of ‘resurrecting the “normal”’.¹⁰

Watching and playing sport was one of these, even though it has ranked well below cinema, theatre, dance, music and radio as popular topics for scholars of wartime Britain.¹¹ This chapter seeks to remedy this situation by unearthing and exploring the complex sets of interests and motivations that influenced official measures towards sport under wartime conditions. The existing historiography has failed to interrogate the role ascribed to sport as a means of raising morale and encouraging national unity in any depth, or to account for fluctuating attitudes over the course of the conflict.¹² Interpretations have tended to be one-dimensional, based on superficial analyses of a handful of policy statements and the conclusions of a small number of Mass-Observation file reports. Norman Baker, for example, whose analysis of sport ‘during and after the war’ concentrates on reconstruction and the immediate post-war years, has little to say about the detail of policy formation and public attitudes towards sport.¹³ A similar lack of depth and nuance is apparent in Tony Mason and Eliza Riedi’s suggestion that sport’s role in ‘lift[ing] the morale of servicemen, war workers and civilians alike’ was ‘largely accepted’.¹⁴ Well-publicised comments such as Home Secretary Herbert Morrison’s statement that public entertainments acted ‘as a lubricant, rather than a brake, on the war machine’ and Mass-Observation’s early assessment of the morale-boosting value of professional football, have led historians to neglect or downplay the conflicts, complexities and inconsistencies in both official and public attitudes to wartime sport.¹⁵

This chapter exposes the shifting undercurrents of intra-governmental debates over the value of sport for the British at war. Drawing on government archives and Mass-Observation papers that have hitherto not been consulted in any depth, it explores the influences involved in the development of policy in relation to the three spectator sports that held the bulk of the national government’s attention in wartime Britain: greyhound racing, horse racing and football. Although underpinned by an understanding that sport could be an important tool in sustaining morale, government policy, and the attitudes that informed it, was never fixed. As in the case of music and the arts, government departments harboured different conceptions of the value of sport, and conflicts consequently arose.¹⁶ Balances were struck within a matrix of shifting considerations and interests, including those relating to morale, public safety, war work and transport, and public and political opinion.

This chapter also builds on recent studies of the interplay between claims of national unity and class division in wartime Britain. Geoffrey G. Field has suggested that far from dissolving the boundaries between the classes, the war deepened notions of class identity and increased many workers’ perceptions of ‘belonging to a national class, superimposed upon more parochial loyalties’.¹⁷ This study argues that, as in the wartime debates analysed by Field, social class was crucial in informing official policy and public attitudes towards sport, and in determining whose morale was prioritised on each occasion. Whatever the precise social mix in reality, football and dog racing were perceived primarily as traditional working-class pastimes; their provision regarded mainly as a means of satisfying the morale of a class rather than the needs of a unified national community. A more genuinely cross-class activity, horse racing was nonetheless often linked to the rich and leisured classes, to privileged groups, as well as to criminals, idlers and gamblers seen as operating at the margins of wartime society. For this reason, it became the most controversial of wartime sports; an ambivalent emblem of public morale, and a prime target for accusations of class discrimination.

The wartime government

The formulation and administration of policy in the wartime government was complex, subject as it was to the interests of a range of new and established – and frequently competing – departments and a ‘shifting cast’ of ministers with contrasting personalities and beliefs.¹⁸ Neither was civilian morale an issue confined to one particular branch of government. The MoI, created shortly before the outbreak of war, was allocated a central role in monitoring, measuring and attempting to maintain morale. But it lacked status and authority within Whitehall and was not taken particularly seriously by the Cabinet. Its relationship with other departments was also imprecise, meaning that conflict became ‘inevitable’ and it was deprived of a secure position ‘from which to defend its authority against powerful adversaries’.¹⁹ The standing of the MoI within the government and among the public did improve later in the war, particularly after the appointment of Brendan Bracken as its head in July 1941.²⁰ But in terms of the development of wider policy it played no significant role, focusing instead on feeding information to other departments and using forms of mass communication to improve morale.

The main considerations related to the continuation of spectator spo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Sport, the government and civilian morale
• 2 Carrying on? Sports clubs in wartime
• 3 Sport, space and locality
• 4 Work, fitness and play
• 5 Sport and everyday life in wartime
• 6 Broadcasting wartime sport
• 7 Sport, war and nation
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index