Service Games
Reading footballers’ autobiographies from between the 1940s and 1960s, and their accounts of national service, offers a useful insight into the hard practicalities underpinning national identities.
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This post is part of the newsletter’s regular ‘Research and Reflections’ series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal development.
I wrote a piece earlier this month on the seeming indefatigability of ‘bring back national service’ discourse, a perennially recurring authoritarian fantasy about compelling those on the threshold between late adolescence and young adulthood to do with their time whatever it is instead that people who are older than them think they should be doing with that time:
As I argued in that post, the idea’s continuing appeal relies on a half-remembering of Britain’s near-two dalliance with peacetime national service for young men after the Second World War, removed completely from the context that made it possible:
The 1948 National Service Act was passed after the second conflict in 30 years in which the state had engaged in mass direction of labour (both in military and civilian forms), to ensure Britain had the necessary military personnel to continue to fulfil a sort of ‘policeman’ role within the post-war international order, underpinned by its status as an imperial power. It also must be understood as part of a broader post-war national order, whereby the state during peacetime also imposed a wide range of restrictions on consumption and imports, drastically expanded universal welfare provision, nationalised swathes of industry, and pursued full employment, creating labour market conditions ripe for trade union growth. It was, in short, a context within which compulsion by government was both ubiquitous and accompanied by equally widespread commitments to its citizenry. It was facilitated by overlapping forms of moral economy, a sense of functioning mechanisms for ensuring obligations were honoured, and a degree of trust and deference rooted in a deeply class-bound society. The most coercive elements of that settlement swiftly frayed: the same Conservative government that abolished remaining forms of rationing also turned from conventional to nuclear forms of military deterrence in response to changing geopolitical circumstances, but also economic and electoral ones, and accordingly wound down National Service.
My interest in this topic comes from a rather leftfield direction: footballer’s autobiographies. I am currently revising a journal article I have written on this topic, concerned with reconstructing the ‘moral economy’ of the post-war British professional footballer as it was presented within those books, and its relationship with the wider context of both elite football as an industry, and Britain more generally. Unsurprisingly, for books about the lives of men who entered legal adulthood between the 1930s and the 1950s, sections of each were given over to accounts of their service in the armed forces – and indeed, of their playing for service teams. They offer a useful source for examining how wartime and peacetime national service was popularly represented at the time, as well as the practicalities of how this intersected with a wholly different career ladder.
Footballers and national service in context
With the outbreak of the Second World War, the FA suspended all organised competition under its aegis, and set up a War Council featuring armed forces’ representation. It continued to work closely with government bodies and the services, who agreed to let leading players with coaching experience join their physical training corps. In this context, services football established itself as the most elite version of the game being played in Britain, with the country’s best players retained to play for representative service and national sides. These matches raised significant funds for war charities, while overseas fixtures were a valuable diplomatic and morale-boosting tool, with service teams sent over to play in France at the start of war, and then across Europe towards its end. Domestic club football, meanwhile, resumed on a regional basis, aided by heavy use of guest players, until the 1946-47 season. The introduction of peacetime national service ensured armed forces football continued to have access to young elite players until it was abolished in the early 1960s.1
Within England, the economic conditions underpinning professional football shifted markedly after the war, with Football League attendances peaking in 1948-49 but thereafter declining, especially for lower league sides. At the same time, however, club revenues were bolstered during the 1950s and 1960s by a revenues-sharing agreement over pools money, the abolition of Entertainments Tax, and increased TV broadcasting of matches. Against this backdrop, the Professional Footballers’ Association, under the leadership of Fulham’s Jimmy Hill, successfully campaigned to abolish the maximum wage system that had existed in some form or another for over half a century and curbed the earning power of the Football League’s leading players.2
British football also began to reintegrate with the game at continental and global levels, starting almost immediately with a high-profile tour by Dynamo Moscow in November 1945.3 The four British FAs also re-joined the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) in 1946 and committed to playing in the World Cup from 1950 onwards.4 Persisting illusions about the superiority of British teams over their European and global counterparts were eroded in the process, not least when Hungary beat England 6-3 at Wembley in 1953 and then 7-1 in Budapest in 1954, as well as winning 4-2 away to Scotland that same year.5 At club level, friendly fixtures against European opposition became valuable money-spinners, and were followed by the establishment of formal European competitions overseen primarily by the Union of European Football Associations (established as regional branch of FIFA to run the new European Nations Cup).6
Footballers’ autobiographies also emerged as a subgenre in Britain in the wake of the Second World War, turned out by relatively recently established, London-based publishing companies developing a niche in sports and leisure-focused books, such as Nicholas Kaye and Stanley Paul. Eddie Hapgood’s Football Ambassador was published in 1944, followed by Tommy Lawton’s Football is My Business, in 1946. These became increasingly frequent, as the table below demonstrates.7 From 1947 to 1958, at least two further works of life-writing ostensibly authored by current and former players and managers appeared annually, before a spate of 27 between 1960 and 1962, and a further flurry of 46 between 1967 and 1970. A large degree of caution is necessary in attributing authorship of these books, as they were primarily ghost-written by sports journalists. Nonetheless, we ought to recognise footballers’ agency within them, both as economic benefactors from their production, amid limits on their existing sources of income, and as protagonists in the ‘real-life’ events described within them.8
Professional footballers and the nation
The moral communities that footballers’ autobiographies imagined their author-and-narrator protagonists to represent were inherently national. The earliest published were predominantly of players who had played regularly for England in the 1930s and 1940s. As the 1950s progressed, publication of autobiographies of players whose achievements were primarily at club level became more frequent. Welsh players who excelled both at international level and in English league football also had autobiographies published. During the 1960s, it became more common for players to have autobiographies published based upon their successes at club level, with notable efforts made to capitalise on Tottenham’s 1960–61 League and Cup ‘Double’ success, as well as Celtic’s 1967 and Manchester United’s 1968 European Cup wins.
Nonetheless, performance at international level continued to determine whose autobiographies were published: nine of the eleven players who started for England in the 1966 World Cup final ‘authored’ books over the next three years. During the subgenre’s infancy, the footballers’ autobiographies considered viable were primarily those with a likely England-wide market; as it became more established, more autobiographies were published with a more localised, or a Scottish, Welsh, or Northern Irish market in mind. Book titles sometimes emphasised this national dimension, as with Billy Wright’s Captain of England, or Bobby Charlton’s Forward with England. Even as titles referencing club allegiances became more common, they could also stress national ones simultaneously: for example, Jack Charlton’s For Leeds and England.
Beyond the title, selection for and achievements with national sides were frequently given prominence as pinnacles of footballing success. International football was integral to the football autobiography’s moral economy: it provided part of the player’s income, underpinned their star status, justified their efforts to earn more, and was frequently presented as a beneficiary of pet projects to improve the national game. Finney on Football justified Tom Finney’s consideration of a move away from Preston North End after the club was relegated in 1949 on the basis that playing Second Division football would have jeopardised his place in the England side, ‘and without being too mercenary about this, the fees that went with it…I had come to view international fees as part of my normal income, and I did not want to lose them’. Moreover, it advocated doubling the then international match fee to £100 for an England appearance and asserted that its proposed wage and league reforms were essential for ensuring England had sufficient high calibre talent to compete at international level.9
Similarly, Johnny Haynes’s Football Today linked the need for a suitable settlement over players’ wages and conditions to the general fortunes of the national game within an increasingly competitive global context, casting ‘the public…[who] pay the piper and call the tune’ as ultimate arbiter of the ‘striking and widespread’ changes that would occur in domestic football following the maximum wage’s recent eradication, and warning readers that ‘you really can’t expect to have a strong England team if you put its needs second to those of its clubs’. It asserted that whereas fans had previously been concerned primarily with the club game, complacently assuming Britain’s footballing superiority, televised World Cup football made it apparent that ‘The traditional brand of British football is no longer the best available’.10
Footballers and national service
British footballers’ labour was bound up with the national political economy in another sense as well. Conscripted by the armed forces either during the Second World War, or for national service in the late 1940s and 1950s, they had to cede to the state’s command on and direction of their manpower as a military resource. These experiences were incorporated into the footballer’s autobiography as a formative aspect of their careers, determining its geography, demarcating its temporality. Football Is My Business dedicated several chapters to Tommy Lawton’s wartime experiences and conflated his military and footballing roles, describing his experiences not only of playing for England in wartime internationals (see below), but also British Army sides. At club level, Lawton, stationed initially in Birkenhead, continued playing regularly for his then club, Everton, later guesting for Aldershot when stationed there. The book noted that Lawton experienced ‘hostility from many people who thought it wrong that fit, able-bodied persons like myself should be playing football in England’ but stressed that he had been retained in England ‘to do my war job’, and while his playing football was incidental to that, he had also raised ‘vast sums’ for war-related causes by playing in charity matches.11
Feet First described Stanley Matthews’ experiences of serving with the RAF and playing matches both for the Air Force and as a guest for Blackpool, where he was stationed; he remained in the town after the war ended, subsequently signing for Blackpool permanently.12 Captain of England similarly described Billy Wright’s wartime experiences as a physical training instructor for the Army in Shrewsbury, which it claimed improved his own fitness as a footballer, and of playing for Western Command alongside several leading England internationals.13 In keeping with the patriotic and gentlemanly personae they propagated, Matthews’s and Wright’s autobiographies expressed acceptance of national wartime requirements and deference towards military authority.
For footballers born in the late 1920s or 1930s, military service was a staggered experience at a certain point in their own lifecycle – a two-year period between the ages of 17 and 21 – rather than the longer simultaneous experience it was for men of a wider range of ages during the war. It therefore occupied a different place in this cohort’s autobiographies, a rite of passage that coincided with the embryonic phase of their football career, as they tried to establish themselves as first-team regulars, though there were continuities from earlier representations of wartime military life. Having become a stockbroker’s clerk after leaving school, Jimmy Hill was called up to the Royal Army Service Corps in the late 1940s, combining clerical work with regular football with the unit team in Hampshire, during which time he played alongside numerous professionals, an experience his autobiography credited with drastically improving his game. Hill was spotted by Ted Drake, manager of nearby Reading, whom Hill joined as an amateur once his service was completed; thereafter, he decided to pursue a career as a footballer, signing professionally with Brentford.14
By contrast, Cliff Jones was already a regular for Swansea Town and had been capped by Wales when he was called up for National Service in 1956, being stationed in North London with the Royal Horse Artillery. His autobiography, Forward with Spurs, claimed he had joined the Army with ‘completely the wrong attitude’, refusing to take his work seriously until he was threatened with being posted abroad. Faced with separation from his pregnant wife and from opportunities to play professional football, Jones decided ‘to pull his socks up’, and subsequently progressed not only far better in his military work, but also played for his unit, Eastern Command, and the Army, whose representative side featured several other promising young professional footballers. According to Forward with Spurs, Jones’ experiences of playing alongside First Division players and travelling regularly while in the Army prompted him to consider leaving Swansea in pursuit of a higher standard of football – something he attained shortly afterwards when he moved back to North London to play for Tottenham.15
Other narratives were more negative. Jack Kelsey left school at 14 in 1943 and tried his hand at several working-class jobs while playing for local side Winch Wen, before eventually signing up to do his national service. His autobiography revealed that he did not particularly enjoy Army life, finding the work dull, the lack of regular football frustrating, and his sergeant major something of a bully. Discharged early due to a recurring health complaint. he returned to play for Winch Wen, before being discovered and signed by Arsenal.16 Ronnie Clayton’s 1960 autobiography claimed that National Service had proven nothing but a problem for managers and players, adding that ‘a footballer, like any other youngster, is likely to find that National Service delays the development of his career, and a footballer’s career is much shorter than that of any other tradesman’; the poor standard of football he was playing in the Army, it argued, cost him his form, his place in the Blackburn team, and therefore his £6 weekly match fee.17 Post-war national service therefore had a more ambiguous place within the moral economy of the footballer’s autobiography. It might be presented as a legitimate component of their career trajectory, and of the broader structures of British football. Alternatively, it could be portrayed as an illegitimate claim on the time and labour of a generation of footballers less accepting of authority figures or restrictions on their earning power.
The economics of representing the nation(s)
I want to finish here by reflecting on the economics of nationhood. Footballers’ autobiographies make clear that these were not just nebulous imagined entities, but concrete ones with institutional heft and investment behind them. Footballers were paid to play for one of the four ‘Home Nations’ – England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland – by their respective football associations. They were, furthermore, compelled to but also (not especially well) paid to serve Britain for a time as members of the armed forces, in which context they also often played football to the highest levels possible within the services structure. In both cases, the autobiographies did not shy away from characterising representing one’s countries in transactional terms, as a matter of employment and remuneration, and of professional development and career goals. This was part of a wider meritocratic framing of players’ desire to maximise their earning power as legitimate given the extent of their talent and achievements, and the wider rise in living standards in the post-war period. The reader was invited to relate to the footballer on those terms, to see parallels and connections between the player’s life situation and their own.
It is a reminder, I think, of the conditional nature of loyalty to a nation. A sense of identification with and emotional attachment to that nation matters, in this regard. Yet it is also inseparable from the capacity of institutions invoking that sense of nationhood to distribute certain goods in return for that loyalty, whether material or symbolic, beneficial to the individual and the immediate, intermediate groups they belong to. It is a point worth bearing in mind when considering how a declining degree of identification with Britain over its composite nations might relate to the eclipse of post-war social democracy. It is equally important in trying to understand the rise of seemingly new forms of English, Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, and Irish nationalism within the UK. Analysis of this phenomenon needs to pay attention to what patronage the institutions promoting separate nationhoods offer. It also ought to heed the longevity of the separate institutional frameworks for different parts of the Kingdom – like, for example, individual football associations – within which such goods are distributed.
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For professional football’s wartime experience and relationship with the Army during and after the Second World War, see: Tony Mason and Eliza Riedi, Sport and the Military: The British Armed Forces 1880–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Chs. 6 and 7; John Ross Schleppi, ‘A History of Professional Association Football in England during the Second World War’ (PhD thesis, Ohio State University, 1972).
For an account of British professional football during this period, see Matthew Taylor, The Association Game: A History of British Football (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2008), Ch. 4
For in-depth accounts of the tour and its coverage, see: David Downing, Passovotchka: Moscow Dynamo in Britain, 1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 1999); Ronald Kowalsaki and Dilwyn Porter, ‘Political Football: Moscow Dynamo in Britain, 1945’, International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 14, No. 2 (1997), pp. 110–121.
On the four UK football associations’ difficult relationship with FIFA up until this point, see Peter J. Beck, ‘Going to War, Peaceful Co‐Existence or Virtual Membership? British Football and FIFA, 1928–46’, International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2000), pp. 113–134.
For the background to and impact of the games against Hungary on British football, see: Peter J. Beck, ‘Losing Prestige on and off the Field: England versus Hungary, 1953–54’, Sport in History, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2003), pp. 10–26; Jeffrey Hill, ‘Narratives of the Nation: The Newspaper Press and England v Hungary, 1953’, Sport in History, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2003), pp. 47–60; Ronald Kowalski and Dilwyn Porter, ‘England’s World Turned Upside Down? Magical Magyars and British Football’, Sport in History, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2003), pp. 27–46.
For the origins and establishment of the European Cup, see Philippe Vonnard, ‘A Competition that Shook European Football: The Origins of the European Champion Clubs’ Cup, 1954–1955’, Sport in History, Vol. 34, No. 4 (2014), pp. 595–619.
Based on analysis of data contained in Richard William Cox, British Sport: A Bibliography to 2000. Vol. 3: Biographical Studies of British Sportsmen, Sportswomen and Animals (London: Frank Cass, 2003); and Peter J. Seddon, A Football Compendium: A Comprehensive Guide to the Literature of Association Football (London: British Library, 1995).
For further analysis of the emergence of the footballer’s autobiography as a genre, see: Matthew Taylor, ‘From Source to Subject: Sport, History, and Autobiography’, Journal of Sport History, Vol. 35, No. 3 (2008), pp. 469–502; Joyce Woolridge, ‘These Sporting Lives: Football Autobiographies 1945–1980’, Sport in History, Vol. 28, No. 4 (2008), pp. 620–640.
Tom Finney, Finney on Football (London: Nicholas Kaye, 1958), pp. 83, 143, 146.
Johnny Haynes, Football Today (London: Arthur Barker, 1961), pp. 17–18
Tommy Lawton, Football Is My Business, ed. by Roy Peskett (London: Sporting Handbooks, 1946), pp. 86–102.
Stanley Matthews, Feet First: Autobiographical Reminiscences (London: Ewen & Dale, 1948), pp. 102–111.
Billy Wright, Captain of England (London: Stanley Paul, 1950), pp. 21–49.
Jimmy Hill, Striking for Soccer (London: Peter Davies, 1961), pp. 4–7.
Cliff Jones, Forward with Spurs (London: Stanley Paul, 1962), pp. 41–45.
Jack Kelsey, Over the Bar (London: Stanley Paul, 1958), pp. 23–26
Ronnie Clayton, A Slave – to Soccer (London: Stanley Paul, 1960), pp. 39–45.
Thank you for writing this - the patterns and narratives of autobiographies (regardless of authorship) are always of interest and this works so well as a companion piece to your earlier essay on National Service 👏