Historical Football Stories

Introduction

So far as I am aware these stories are the earliest football stories known. Twenty Five Football Stories was published in 1908 by George Newnes who published the Strand Magazine, an illustrated monthly magazine of stories, topical articles, and trivia, best known for first publishing the Sherlock Holmes stories. The collection was actually 14 association football and 11 rugby union stories: back then, when the codes were still quite novel, less of a distinction was made. For this collection I have just published the association football ones (rugby being to me something very different and alien — coming from Sheffield where we have no strong tradition of either rugby union or rugby league).

I first came across these stories when researching my novel The Evergreen in red and white. I wanted to get a feel for how football was perceived outside of the newspaper match reports, and fiction can provide a better insight into some aspects of life than factual accounts: particularly emotional life.

These stories provide huge insights into the obsessions of a certain class, with regards football, at the end of the 19th century. As history is the account written by the powerful, so these stories are football as told by the literate middle classes. The working class footballers of the time let their boots do the talking and fans did their talking in the pub afterwards — consequently, their voices are few and far between.

The principal obsession in these stories is that of the curse of professionalism. For example in An International Proxy we read: He was an amateur to his finger-tips. The association of money with sport was abhorrent to him. He was an opponent of the League system because it drew an invidious distinction between League matches and friendly matches — as if they were not all friendly! — and of the system of bonuses he had said some very bitter things, and had argued against it many and many a time with both directors and players since he came to Flaxton. Then in A Matter of Luck: ‘I like you Jack,’ he said, ‘and Nell loves you, but I can’t give my lass to one who makes his play his work. If you wish to win her you must give up soccer… ’Tis a pity, lad, you are not as rich as he; then you would not have to give up the game, but there’s no use fretting, ’twon’t make you richer; the only course for you use to keep your word as I keep mine, for, mark you, Jack, break it and I go over to Ridgeway’s side. I won’t have my lass throw herself away on a man who does not think her worth the working for.’

Some of the stories ooze snobbery towards those getting paid to play the game: Oxford and Cambridge-educated men playing the pure form of the game, looking down on those who contaminate the Corinthian ideals with money. This battle was fought throughout the early years of the game: the Football Association being dominated by men wanting to keep the game untainted, and gradually having to retreat in the face of reality. That obsession with amateurism: the gentleman-player turning out at weekends after a life allowed by independent means. The notion that somehow training or learning combination play or tactics was akin to cheating. This attitude infected the Football Association right through into the 20th century, when for example The Corinthians were allowed to enter the FA cup at the third round stage. It is part of the reason the England national side continues to be outclassed: a belief that talent is inherent, and that learning of skills from an early age, techniques, and all the myriad of minor improvements that go towards building success (diet, kinetics etc.) are just excuses for lack of passion.

The middle and upper classes did not like their loosening grip on power in the domain of football any more than they did in the political one. Ernest Needham, of Sheffield United and England, is one of the few working class men whose voice was heard: he wrote a book in 1901, simply entitled, Association Football. He strongly defended the right to earn a living from the game: Would that all could play for love, and be the perfect gentleman on and off the field, as so many of my amateur friends are. He talked of: "the advantage to the style of the game, and the necessity for paying those who devote themselves to its improvement. I might claim for payment of players all the arguments in favour of the payment of Members of Parliament. To play the game scientifically a man must bring to it a mind free from fear of personal or family difficulty in case of disablement or retirement and only substantial pay will guarantee this. (Needham earned about £5 per week at that time, just over twice the pay of an ordinary working man — which gives you an idea what he meant by substantial.)

Another obsession strongly reflected in the stories is that of gambling. The Victorian amateurs often raised this demon in arguments against professionalism. The middle classes were in fear of the depraved lower classes, their lack of morality, and this leading to riotous behaviour and a threat to order and security of property. Sport was encouraged as a way of counteracting vice of all kinds (rather than actually tackling the roots of poverty itself). This muscular Christianity was a way of providing healthy distraction from drink and sexual energies of the underclass. So to see money as the motivator was anathema — and then to see large riotous crowds assembling and betting on the outcome was abhorrent. Needham dismisses this. He says: We hear a lot of talk about betting at football matches. Some people given over strongly to romancing have likened the game to the racecourse — with bookmakers and all their paraphernalia. Such highly spiced tales are nonsense. Betting there is, but it is done more or less secretly; and once let the delinquents come within the clutches of the officials of any club, let alone the police, and I will vouchsafe a bad quarter of an hour for them. Any sane person who attends matches knows that betting is not allowed openly and it is only so asserted by those who decry the pastime.

This obsession with match fixing is, I believe, one of the reasons that suggestions somehow emerged that Rabbi Howell, who I write about in The Evergreen in red and white was suspected of match fixing when he left Sheffield United suddenly. A few weeks earlier he had scored 2 own goals in a crucial end of the season game against Sunderland. The contemporary reports do not suggest anything other than bad luck — one of them being a ricochet. What I believe was the real reason he left — falling in love with another woman was covered up as an even greater scandal, so this ‘in-vogue’ match fixing rumour filled the vacuum of facts.

Amateurs saw money as distorting the game in other ways. When penalties were introduced in 1891, it was claimed that that was the effect of professionalism — of those who had not imbibed the sporting spirit of the game at school (i.e. public school). The famous amateur C B Fry said It is a standing insult to sportsmen to have to play under a rule which assumes that players intend to trip, hack, and push their opponents and to behave like cads of the most unscrupulous kind. This was of course just rank snobbery. The Amateur Rowing Association, custodians of a sport even harder for oiks to break in to, kept a tighter hold: their rules excluded, not only anyone in receipt of payment for rowing, but also anyone who had been by trade or employment a mechanic, artisan, or labourer or engaged in any menial duty. Even up to 1920 rowing banned Olympic gold medallist Jack Kelly from Henley because he had once earned money as a bricklayer.

Another aspect of the early game shown by the stories is its physicality. Early football was far more brutal and dangerous than the modern game. By the late 1890s, ten years into the League structuring of the game, the rules were largely as they are now, partly in response to an understanding that the game needed to improve its safety record. Hacking, tripping, jumping at a player and charging from behind were not allowed. The main differences in risk were probably down to factors such as interpretation by referees, equipment and condition of pitches: matches were almost never abandoned unless fog was so dense that neither the spectators nor, more to the point, referees could see whether the ball had gone in the net. Frozen pitches, mud, hale, snow etc, were not reasons to call games off.

The physicality of the game provided different responses in Victorian society. They upheld virtues of manliness and codified aggression that sport provided — as can be seen in the stories by players continuing despite broken bones. This is as common a theme as that of bribery in these stories. A player playing on with a broken collar bone was something to be admired — and this was not just a fictional device. In those days substitutes were not allowed, so there are frequent accounts in contemporary match reports of bloody and broken players playing on. (Can modern players who go down and roll about in agony at the slightest touch please take note?)

The physicality of the game was also, however, something that provoked feelings of horror amongst some in society; particularly the idea of working class men being violent — how could you possibly trust them to be aggressive with chivalry, like a gentleman.

The female characters do not on the whole emerge very well from the stories. They are almost always meek and pale complexioned, and often, to make them even more dependent on men, sickly. The exception is Isabella — a child with a strong will who is a well-drawn, engaging character. The only other female character of substance, Joan Romney in P G Wodehouse’s Petticoat Influence, is quite vacuous and is gently mocked by the author throughout.

It is not for their literary merit that I wanted to make the stories available to readers again (the original book is an extreme rarity). As literature they are on the whole not very strong with one or two exceptions. What makes them unique is that they are the first fiction written about the beautiful game and for that alone they are worth reading.

I have not been able to find out a great deal about many of the authors. If anyone is able to point me in the direction of any sources I would be most grateful.

The most famous is obviously Wodehouse. He wrote Petticoat Influence when he was in his mid-twenties. It shows his emerging talent for comedy and Joan Romney is clearly out of the same upper class mould as Bertie Wooster.

Bertram Atkey is perhaps the next best known. He is best remembered today for his cockney crime stories about Smiler Bunn, none of which remain in print.

Sybil Read, appears to have also written a story called An Unredeemed Pledge, but I can’t find out any more about her. Isabella is a charming story, told quite cleverly from the point of view of the young Isabella. We only learn of characters’ by the names that Isabella uses. So we have Mamma, Uncle James, the dark young men, and those terrible gentleman with flags — the linesmen. When Uncle James gets tackled it is described from Isabella’s point of view: five minutes later Uncle James fell down again — this time with two other men.

Of the other writers I have found that A B Cooper was Alfred Benjamin Cooper and that he lived from 1863-1936. Amongst other things he appears to have written: Poets in Pinafores, Affair and No.5 Surrey Place, Wriggley Bill, and Tom Browne’s Travel Stories. I know nothing of these. S A Smith appears to have been from Salisbury. David Lechmere Anderson lived from 1860 — 1934.

In addition I have reproduced here the Arnold Bennett story: The Matador of the Five Towns. This was published as one of a collection of short stories in 1912. It is in many ways a more accomplished piece of writing, Bennett being one of our greatest writers and much under-appreciated. The reason for this lack of recognition is surprising. It perhaps started with the panning he got by the Bloomsbury set, who condemned him as Old Guard. This, I have no doubt, was driven by snobbery on their part: how dare this Northerner of humble background move in society circles. And write to try to make a living, to boot! I also don’t doubt their was an element of self-promotion in their attack. This critique set a fashion which continues today. Make your own mind up: both The Card and The Old Wives’s Tale are excellent. Bennett clearly understood football; references feature in several works. The Matador is particularly interesting, historically, for the accurate descriptions of how news of matches was conveyed to the masses. Like the influence of television today, back then, the rise of newspaper reports contributed massively to the popularity of the game.

I have also included three additional stories Side by Side first published in issue 5 of the Football Pink, Doing the Right Thing, inspired by the others in this collection, and Silver Linings. You can judge for yourselves whether their inclusion was merited.

I am grateful to Niall Kennedy for allowing me to reproduce his story The Partick Thistle Goalie and the Port Glasgow Hooligans in this volume. I met Niall through Twitter, since we share an interest in football history. He runs a website called: Partick Thistle — The Early Years, dedicated to the noble history of Partick Thistle. http://www.PTEarlyYears.net

Notes on the text

In Isabella I have taken the liberty of changing the fictional names given to the to universities: Oxbridge and Camford since to the modern reader Oxbridge has come to mean both universities together and it just confuses unnecessarily.

In A Matter of Luck, the name Corsairs is my invention. In the original this team was just called C— which irritated me.

The original version of The Matador had expletives written d—n, b—s etc. There's no need for such prurience these days so I have re-instated them.

All the others are un-edited. I have kept original spellings. Things like a goal-keeper, and I have left things in inverted commas as they were in the original. It may seem odd to the modern reader to see terms such as semi-final, save, or corner in inverted commas, but it must be remembered that when the stories were written some of this terminology, in a football context, was still a novel use of the language.

Steven Kay 2015

Petticoat Influence — P G Wodehouse

My brother Bob sometimes says that if he dies young or gets white hair at the age of thirty it will be all my fault. He says that I was bad at fifteen, worse at sixteen, while present day, as they put it in the biographies of celebrities, I am simply awful. This is very ungrateful of him, because I have always done my best to make him a credit to the family. He is just beginning his second year at Oxford, so, naturally, he wants repressing. Ever since I put my hair up — and that is nearly a year ago now — I have seen that I was the only person to do this. Father doesn’t notice things. Besides, Bob is always on his best behaviour with father.

Just at present, however, there was a sort of truce. I was very grateful to Bob because, you see, if it had not been for him I should not have thought of getting Saunders to make Mr. Simpson let father hit his bowling about in the match with the Cave men, and then father wouldn’t have taken me to London for the winter, and if I had had to stay at Much Middlefold all the winter I should have pined away. So that I had a great deal to thank Bob for, and I was very kind to him till he went back to Oxford for the winter term; and I was still on the lookout for a chance of paying back one good turn with another.

We had taken a jolly house in Sloane Street from October, and I was having the most perfect time. I’m afraid father was hating it, though. He said to me at dinner one night, ‘One thousand five hundred and twenty-three vehicles passed the window of the club this morning, Joan.’

‘How do you know?’ I asked.

‘I counted them.’

‘Father, what a waste of time!’

‘Why, what else is there to do in London?’ he said.

I could have told him millions of things, but I suppose if you don’t like London it isn’t any fun looking at the sort of sights I like to see.

The morning after this, when father had gone off to his club — to count cabs again, I suppose — I got a letter from Bob.

‘DEAR KID’ (he wrote), — ‘Just a line. Hope you’re having a good time in London. I can’t come down for Aunt Edith’s ball on your birthday, as they won’t let me. I tried it on, but the Dean was all against it. Look here, I want you to do something for me. The fact is, I’ve had a lot of expenses lately, with my twenty-firster and so on, and I’ve had rather to run up a few fairly warm bills here and there, so I shall probably have to touch the governor for a trifle over and above my allowance. What I want you to do is this keep an eye on him, and if you notice that he’s particularly bucked about anything one day, wire to me first thing. Then I’ll run down and strike while the iron’s hot. See? Don’t forget. — Yours ever, BOB.

‘P.S. There’s just a chance that it may not be necessary after all. If everything goes well I may scrape into the ’Varsity team, and if I can manage to get my Blue he will be so pleased that a rabbit could feed out of his hand.’

I wrote back that afternoon, promising to do all I could. But I said that at present father was not feeling very happy, as London never agreed with him very well, and he might not like to be worried for money for a week or two. He does not mind what he gives us as a rule, but sometimes he seems to take a gloomy view of things, and talks about extravagance, and what a bad habit it is to develop in one’s youth, when one ought to be learning the value of money.

Bob replied that he understood, and added that a friend of his, who had it from another man who had lunched with a cousin of the secretary of football,