The International Journal
of the History of Sport, 2014 Vol. 31, No. 18, 2345–2361, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09523367.2014.911730
College of Arts, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia
Soccer is rarely
remembered as a vital part of Australia’s military history and the Anzac legacy. Yet, soccer contributed greatly in the First World War. In terms of moral support, enlistment, participation and ‘sacrifice’, soccer was at the forefront of sporting-body commitment. Using recently
digitised newspaper archives,
this paper will outline
soccer’s place in the Australian armed forces during
the First World War, especially in relation to the Australian
Rules states of Western Australia
and Victoria, as a part of an overall
project intending to reveal soccer’s
place in Australian culture.
Keywords: Australian soccer
history; soccer and military history;
Australian Rules football; football and war; Anzac legend
This paper emerges from my interest
in the cultural representation of soccer, along with the rhetorical, journalistic and historiographical practices
that have contributed to the game’s assumed position on the edge of Australian culture and society. This interest
is attuned to the cultural
and political struggles
between football codes
and is focused largely (though not exclusively) on the states in which Australian Rules football has become a powerful and hegemonic football code.
The paper is also one of a new kind, the post-digitisation research paper which, given the widespread availability of searchable and digitised newspaper
archives, is more easily able to identify and capture archival material
than in previous times. This capacity is both a strength and a weakness
of such research. The technology facilitates and promotes
the quotation and assimilation of a great volume of primary text into the body of the paper. This is advantageous to my interests
because it enhances the texturing
of the paper using the language of the period
in question. It enables the easy representation of both the content and the form of the material
being cited. Given that the rhetoric of inclusion and exclusion is one of my central themes, this new-found
efficiency of capture
is a boon.
The weakness of this technology is that it can enable a departure
from more conventional historical research
methods. If the tendency is to quote material and let it ‘speak for itself’
rather than explicate
such material, then a new form of unconventional historiography is generated. My task is to balance
my interests in displaying the rhetorical and stylistic with those of the reader interested in a more generalised story.
In 1931, soccer authorities in Hobart sought access to the North Hobart football
ground, normally reserved
for Australian Rules.
They requested its use for representative games
on the two days of the season
when it was not needed by the Southern Tasmanian
[Australian Rules] Football
Association for first-grade matches. Typically, there were expressions of resistance to this desire, one of which was a letter to the Mercury penned by ‘Derwentside’. He argued that:
‘Soccer’ players and followers in Hobart are in a minority only a self-centred, and, which is worse,
a selfish, player or supporter, would deny. Whatever
merits ‘Soccer’ has as a
winter game, it has not here the following,
status, or genuine sportsman-like appeal to the average Australian as the
game which some fifty odd years
has evolved under the name of Australian football. The proper development of a nation’s
national pastimes, particularly the winter ones, does more to build up a virile nation
than attempts to foster – or is it foist? – an exotic pastime upon them.
Among the many thousands of Australians who manned so doggedly the trenches and trudged
the fields of France and Flanders – to say nothing of the Gallipoli campaign – not a small percentage got the qualities which made the A.I.F. world renowned from the fields
in at least four States devoted in winter to football
played under Australian
Rules.1
This is one more letter published
in relation to one more moment in the interminable squabble
for playing space
in Australian sport.
And it articulates many of the sentiments that had come to take hold in the Australian sporting imaginary: soccer
is low, unpopular, unestablished, minor, foreign
(‘exotic’ in fact) and is being imposed/foisted on Australians by selfish
and self-centred agents
of foreign influence.2
The letter also raises an interesting and new basis for exclusion.
‘Derwentside’ claims that Australian Rules supplied many of the troops who fought in the First World War and his necessary
implication is that soccer did not. Accordingly, Australian Rules should have prior claim on whatever
sporting fields over which it has established patterns of usage. Australian Rules paid for this access with the blood,
sweat and sometimes the lives of many of its adherents
who enlisted in the Australian Imperial
Force (AIF). While the validity
of the argument is questionable, it has been a persuasive one, then and now.
Four years earlier,
in 1927, a letter to the editor of the Sunshine Advocate
in Melbourne also invoked the Anzac3 spirit. ‘Dinkum Aussie’4 revealed:
It was stated by two returned soldiers,
and reported in your paper, that an attempt is being made
by some Johnny-Come-Latelys to supplant our national game of football
with an importation. On making inquiry, I find that a local school teacher is working might and main against the national game, and I am told that at least one of the local soccer
team is an Australian. I should like to suggest that the local football club report the matter to the head office in town, so that it may be brought before
the Minister. If Victoria is good enough
to live in,
its games should be good enough to play.5
Many of the usual tropes are deployed: the national is game being supplanted by a ‘Johnny-come-lately’. The ‘when-in-Rome’ argument
is invoked. And those pesky ‘Pommy’ schoolteachers are up to
their usual tricks.6 Moreover,
we get a hint of treachery insofar as an ‘Australian’ lad has been tempted into tasting the forbidden fruit.
Amplifying this is the prefatory fact that it was reported
by two returned soldiers, as if their being moved to comment proves
the outrage.
Both writers suggest
that soccer was a marginal
game in post-war Australia. Moreover, it can be inferred that they think
it is a game with very little
to do with the Anzac history or spirit. A vital question
is the extent to which the sentiments expressed by ‘Derwentside’ and ‘Dinkum Aussie’
represented significant popular
thought and the
extent to which
they have stuck in Australian cultural
memory.
Australian soccer neither was nor is a marginal game in participatory terms, having been popular and widely played
for over 100 years. The cross the game has to bear is that it is often considered marginal and foreign, for a vastly complex set of reasons.
Ultimately, soccer is absent from most of the positive
stories Australians tell themselves about themselves and has failed
to embed itself
as a component of the national cultural- mythological discourse, especially when it comes to military history.7
These arguments are important because in contemporary Australia sport and war have
obtained a close emotional connection. Relying on assertions
of their cultural centrality and intimations of their contribution to war service,
the two dominant football codes have assumed the right to put the sport/war
connection front and centre. The Australian [Rules]
Football League and the National Rugby League each conducts intensely publicised and popular Anzac Day matches.8 It is a tradition to which supporters of both codes have been drawn in large
numbers and which coincides with the rejuvenation of the Anzac
legend in Australian cultural life over the past 20 years.9
Through this connection, the dominant football codes have been able to insert themselves into mythologised narratives of the past and the present.
One implied narrative is that Rugby League players from NSW and Queensland and Australian Rules players from the rest of Australia
made up large sections
of the fighting force, to the extent that in mythological terms the
spirit of the soldiers and the footballers have crossed over and merged.10
Yet any present-day understanding that the two codes dominated military preparation stems ironically from
the poorly subscribed Sportsmen’s Battalions, a push that
effectively covered up the apparent
tardiness in the enlistment of Australian Rules and League players.11 Murray G. Phillips points out that:
Several sports, like rugby league, boxing and Australian rules football, used the military units of sportsmen to rebut criticisms
about continuing their activities during war time; other sports, which ceased their programmes, were involved because they considered
it was their patriotic duty.12
Some contemporary retellings of the role of football in war also help to cloud the issue. Dale Blair’s
‘Beyond the Metaphor: Football
and War, 1914 – 1918’, published in 1996, conveys the sense that Australian Rules was the most significant sport played by Australian troops.13 Blair’s article is based on the sound premise that ‘Sport and war have long been synonymous with Australia’s national
identity and the “ANZAC” legend provides one of the great pillars upon which that identity has been built.
Of equal, if not greater standing, is the nation’s
penchant for sport’. He also makes the important observation that given
‘the extent to which Australia’s First World War experience permeates the national psyche, it is somewhat surprising
that the implications of and influence of sport during this period have been largely
neglected’.14
However, while Blair acknowledges ‘the various football
codes’ and gestures
towards the complex
geneses of football
in Australia, he nonetheless makes
a too-easy transition from the generalities of sport and football to the specificities of Australian Rules without properly
negotiating the minefield
of exclusion and forgetting what such a move involves. Sometimes
he transitions from one generalised discussion of Australian Rules football to the next by citing specific evidence
of a game or a practice that had no necessary connection with Australian Rules. For example,
he discusses the practice of ‘mobbing’:
The lack of proper
playing fields, particularly of the large size required
for Australian football, was always
a problem. The 40th Battalion, a Western Australian unit, resolved the problem by devising their own game which they called ‘mobbing’. It was played with a hessian
bag filled with straw, and the game had no rules other than that the bag could not be kicked. The basic object of the game was to force or throw the bag through
the opposition’s goal.
The beauty of the
game was that it could be played ‘on any old ground’.15
Assumptions run deep in this passage. Blair seems not to countenance the possibility that the soldiers were not looking
for a next-best activity to Australian Rules
but were creating a game, from scratch, out of the equipment and conditions that were available
to them. He possibly assumes
that because they were a Western Australian Battalion they were Australian Rules footballers by default. Blair’s
elisions are symptomatic of a whole
range of cultural
practices through which hegemonic football
codes assert and justify their contemporary dominance while rewriting the past in their own image.
Sporting contests
were significant activities within the AIF during the First World War. Members of the armed
forces gravitated to them in great number,
whether as participants or spectators. Military
authorities saw these contests as an important
means of maintaining good morale and letting off steam, and the AIF went to great lengths
to facilitate competition and even recognise sporting excellence with awards and trophies. Blair suggests that ‘the Army patronised
sport in many ways – including creating facilities and ovals and organising
regimental teams and competitions – because sport enhanced fitness, boosted morale, provided
a physical outlet
and countered boredom’.16
There are a number of means through which this
assertion can be sustained. Substantial official reports, and photographic and officer-diary records are housed at the Australian
War Memorial.17 These demonstrate a
virtual Olympiad
of sport across the theatres
of war.
A significant indicator of sport’s
general role in the overseas
AIF is not contained in detailed formal and informal accounts
but in a simple brief list published
broadly across Australia. Among many other newspapers, the Camperdown Chronicle contained a report in May 1916 claiming
to have seen ‘a cable from Cairo to headquarters’. The cable had urged: ‘Send immediately six tents, 10 small pianos,
5,000,000 printed letter paper and envelopes, 50 sets of cricket
material, 50 soccer
footballs, 50 association footballs’.18
An underutilised but particularly valuable source of information about how servicemen identified with this culture of military sport is contained
in the many ‘From the Front’ letters
published in the Australian press during the war. The recent digitisation of Australian newspaper archives has made the discovery
and collation of this genre a relatively easy matter.19
A typical letter ‘From the Front’ contained
much discussion of sport, particularly football, played or observed by the author. Or it spoke glowingly of a footballer
who had performed heroically and sometimes a strong correlation was constructed between
prowess on the football field and in battle. The Adelaide Register noted that a number of letters:
from soldiers at the front state that Pte. Stanley F. Carpenter
has been recommended for the Victoria Cross. He is a native of Newcastle,
and one of the best-known footballers in New South
Wales. He has been playing
football for 20 years, although
only 36 years of age, and has represented New South Wales and Australia
in interstate and international matches.
He has always played with the East Newcastle
Club and is a life member of the New South Wales Rugby League.20
Soldiers from the northern
states were often
identified as Rugby players or advocates. The following letter published
in the Warwick Examiner and Times in February 1917 uses a group of Australian
soldiers’ familiarity with Rugby to explain their poor performance against an English soccer team:
We all went down to a Tommies’ camp recently and played a football match with them. They played ‘soccer’. Of course Rugby is our game so the Tommies
scored an easy win. We enjoyed ourselves very well looking
on, as some very good players were on the field.21
The Barassi
line22 is often drawn in the letters, with those from the northern
states naturalising the rugby codes and those from the south and west naturalising Australian Rules. Some of the letters of soldiers from the Australian
Rules states refer to the good- natured rivalry they have with advocates of the rugby codes.
Servicemen from the southern and western states sometimes expressed
their frustration that games of Australian Rules
were hard to come by in England.
Similarly, they voiced a longing to see games at home. Private
‘Jack’ Brown wrote such a letter from Gallipoli on August 17, adding the rider that the footballers at home might be better
placed in the armed forces:
We
get great instructions in case gas comes
here, but so far they are playing
the game. Good old North Launceston! Guess they will nearly
be premiers this season, though
it’s time they gave up football and came along here. The more that come the sooner we will get home.23
The Emerald Hill Record, a newspaper that ran only for the duration of the war, was a vehicle for many such letters. Published in and to the South
Melbourne district, it kept tabs on the South Melbourne Australian
Rules footballers at the front. In 1917, it published
a Roll of Honour for the club listing
those players who had served and noting
those who had been killed.24
A number of these players wrote letters home ‘from the front’ and were published by the Emerald
Hill Record. Wal Laidlaw was published around 15 times in 1917 and 1918 and invariably mentioned football:
A few more lines to let you know that I’m well. I am still receiving the [Football Record
]
regularly, which is most welcome. I was sorry to hear poor Bruce Sloss was killed. He was one of the best, but these things must be expected
... Things were fairly quiet a week ago, so we had a football
match between a couple of picked teams.
We played in mud about six inches deep. One side played in sheepskin
jackets and the other in shirts. After the first quarter it was hard to distinguish the difference between the players,
as all were caked in mud. Our side won by seven points after the hardest day’s toil I’ve ever done.25
I will be looking forward
to future papers
for the results
of the football. We are having a short
rest, and we concluded our football season after playing
eight matches, losing two.26
In the main the Emerald Hill Record’s focus is on Australian Rules football, though other codes and games get an occasional mention. Laidlaw wrote
again: ‘We have finished football, and were undefeated after playing twelve matches. Sport
was booming through the winter, and our brigade
had the champion
Rugby and Australian team, besides the heavy weight boxing
champion, so we did well’.27
The Record’s function of keeping track
of the South Melbourne players
at the war is exemplified in the following
letter from Private Frank Arnold, who had played for South Melbourne Football Club in the 1890s:
I witnessed a football
match between two battalions. It was a match well worth going to see. It was in the danger zone, but that did not make much difference. Tich Bailes was playing. He kicked four goals, but he is not the Tich of old. The —th had not been beat for two years. It was a terrible
shock to them. One of our prominent
officers took £30 to £90, and the rank and file all had their few francs on. I captained the —th Battalion. We won by a point just on time. This was when we were training on Salisbury Plains. Poddy Hiskins is not very far from where I am camped. I saw poor Bruce Sloss’s grave. I would, very much like to send you a photo of it. I will do my best
to do so. I have two of the
old South footballers with me – Joe Lowrey and Bert Mills. Both wish to be remembered to you and all the old boys.28
A few months later,
Wal Laidlaw regretted
to say: I haven’t come across any of the boys yet. At the present time it is difficult to get in touch with any of them. I suppose you will be thinking of the football season by the time this reaches you. I hope you have better luck this year. Kind regards to all.29
Soccer obtains some direct mention
in the letters. Private Marshall
Caffyn was another ex-South Melbourne player, published a number of times in the Emerald Hill Record. Here, he reports on his own participation in a game of soccer:
I had a game of footer
the other Sunday – soccer. They put me in goals, and thought I was a marvel when kicking
off – I used to put the old round
ball half way up the ground every time
–
the game is not much good. Give me the good old Australian
rules every time. I have also played rugby over here. The games aren’t to be compared.30
Les Turner, also a South Melbourne
player, wrote from Scotland, ‘I went to see a British Association football
match last Saturday.
It was a good display
of their football
and I enjoyed it, but give me our game every time for top place’.31
This was an
echo of a letter from Laidlaw,
two years previously. He had been ‘to see
an English soccer football match’. He thought the game was ‘interesting to watch’,
and that ‘both teams
were evenly matched.
They had some top-notch men, and the game was played at great speed’. But, in the end he felt ‘there
is nothing like our Australian game’.32 Soccer is acknowledged and enjoyed to an extent
but the letters display a felt need to remind readers
that it is an inferior,
replacement activity for what they would rather
be doing. It is an interesting prefiguring of a significant mode of the Football Record’s anti-soccer rhetoric
in years to come.33
As Stan Hiskins
writes, some bluntly
refused to participate: ‘Every Sunday we have a game of soccer. We enjoy it too, although
most of our boys won’t have it on any account’.34 It is notable that a Victorian Football
League (VFL) footballer is happy to try the
game and enjoy it, whereas some of his less-accomplished comrades refuse. Perhaps
they would not ‘lower’ themselves; or perhaps
their self-image as sportsmen would be compromised in the likely event that they were to play soccer badly.
Other sportsmen also took the opportunity to play soccer,
while expressing a yearning for their main sport at home, in this case cycling in Queensland:
I am O.K. Still
in the same old place,
and not likely
to shift yet.
I often get ‘Sports’ and read up the
cycling. I suppose the racing season is starting again in Brisbane.
The only sport we are able to take up is football,
and we had a good game of soccer today.35
When soccer is discussed fully it is sometimes as a curiosity. The following piece from Turner reports positively on a game he observes
but is written with a sense of the shock
of the new:
I saw a great football match here the other day between an Egyptian and a British
army team. Football here is very different to Australian. It is purely
foot-ball – hands are not allowed
to touch the ball, which is perfectly round.
I can see it is a far more scientific game than ours, and the Egyptians
are particularly clever
with their feet, and very active. The game is called soccer, and was introduced by the British 10 years ago. As
it happened the British team won, but there was very little difference between the two teams.36
While Turner is complimentary towards, the game he nonetheless sees soccer as exotic. His writing exemplifies the way that soccer has a curiosity status in many of the letters and, while it was often played
by Australian troops,
it is seen as a game to be played
for secondary reasons.
It is what the locals
played; it was the best available, but second-best to Australian Rules or a version
of Rugby – and so could be enjoyed on that basis. Some letters also make it clear that when an opportunity to play their preferred code presented itself, soldiers took it with glee.
If the evidence
presented in many of these letters constructed soccer as a necessary yet tolerated secondary indulgence, another stream of letters made a different point. They spoke to soccer’s
ordinariness (or unextraordinariness) in the military
context.
Sometimes when Australian servicemen attended soccer matches
they referenced a familiar ‘home’ code but came away with less certainty about the superiority of that code and felt less inclined
to offer judgements. Private
Edward J. Ryan wrote to his
uncle in 1916:
Well, I can tell you that football does not worry me much at present,
but I went to look at a game of ‘soccer’ while I was in Edinburgh, and I wouldn’t
like to pass my opinion
as to which is the best game – Australian or ‘soccer’.37
One soldier’s
letter to the Euroa Advertiser alludes to home football
colours (probably to Euroa Magpies Australian Rules FC) but fails to cast a judgement on what he had observed – apart from the inferred
mild disappointment that his adopted
team lost – ‘Had a stroll through the glorious
gardens and saw the teams from the H.M.S. Swiftsure playing soccer, and as one side appeared
in black and white I got a bit excited.
The red team won’.38
Many of the letters
‘normalise’ soccer without
comparative reference to any other code. A soldier in Egypt in February
1915 describes soccer as explicitly un-exotic: ‘They then started their football
match. They played English soccer, so it wasn’t anything novel’.39 A letter from HMAS Australia bandsman, Jack Richardson, in September of the same year speaks with the fatalism of a genuine supporter
about his team’s prospects in an upcoming game: ‘We are going to play them at soccer,
but I think they will win, and give us a hiding as they are the best band team in the Navy’.40
Farrier Bob Anderson, who played soccer
for Moonyoonooka (outside
Geraldton) before the war,41 was published in the Geraldton Guardian in March 1916:
We have
plenty of football (soccer).42 We have formed
a team out of this
company, but it’s the same old story
only about half of us know the game. We have had three matches
and haven’t been beaten – two wins and a draw. Duncan got a team out of the 11th. He also got the old Queens Park centre (Swan) to play for them. He didn’t play himself but he had a better football team
than ours. However,
it is not always the best team
that wins, and
they were very lucky to get a draw. They
only scored in the last
five minutes. Our goalkeeper thought
the ball was going past, but it struck
the post and went through.
I was playing back and had plenty to do. I stopped Swan a few times. No doubt he is a good player
and a dandy shot, but I think
he is a bit
rough. We will be playing
next Saturday, so we may get knocked.
I’m captain of this lot, and it’s not too easy a job, as sometimes the best men either go to town (Cairo) or are out on duty. News is scarce,
and a man can’t say too much, as all letters are censored now. I met McPhie. He came over a week or ten days ago. I hope this finds all of you Geraldton boys in the pink. Give one and all my kindest
regards. I’m afraid I won’t be back in time for the football this season, so au revoir.43
Anderson
indicates a flourishing soccer culture within the armed forces, even if not
all of the participants were from soccer backgrounds. While Anderson complains
that half do not know the rules, he might have rejoiced in the fact that half did know
the rules.
Anderson’s letter also raises the suggestion that the Australian teams are at least competitive. Lance-Corporal Gates reported that ‘Our soccer
football team lost to a team from an English
regiment, by one goal to nil’.44 Mr T. Jones, YMCA secretary
with the troops ‘who had both “Tommies” and “Kangaroos” in his charge’
on the Sinai Peninsula, reiterated the familiarity many had with soccer. He wrote that ‘Football matches
are arranged about twice
a week, both “Soccer and Rugby”, and the excitement displayed is intense,
and reminiscent of the old days at home’.45
In May 1916, Unomi wrote that he had:
received letters
from several soccerites on active service.
Courcey O’Grady, Jimmie Cutmore, and Bert Shellat are all late officials of the J.B.F.A. They were all well at date
of writing and desire to be remembered to their many soccer friends.
Needless to add, they have been taking an active interest in football, particularly O’Grady and Cutmore who were members of an Egyptian team that did well in competition.46
Suggested in this latter gathering of letters is an extensive
and coordinated soccer programme within the AIF.
As a whole, the letters ‘From the Front’ reveal that soccer was available for Australian servicemen to play and/or
observe – and they did one or the other, in their thousands. However,
there are three tonalities in these letters: soccer subdominant, soccer neutral
and soccer dominant. Further research will help to ascertain the regional factors in these tonalities and answer the vital question
of whether Australian troops participated in soccer as a second-best to their preferred
sport or as their preferred option.47
A significant and potentially contradictory point lost in the contemporary mythologisation of Anzac is that many of those
in the very first Australian troopships were
British-born, a good number of them recently arrived
migrants. E.M. Andrews,
in The Anzac Illusion, argues that the ‘AIF had a large minority
of British-born in it’. With C.E.W. Bean and other ‘purveyors of the Anzac
legend’ very much in his sights, he suggests that a ‘fact often overlooked’ is that the British-born made up:
13.3 or 15.65 per cent of the Australian population, but either 18 or 22.25 per cent of the AIF
for the whole war, depending on whose figures
are taken. They were more numerous in some formations, however, being 27 per cent of the first contingent, and 50 per cent of the 28th Battalion, from Perth ... Whatever
figures are accepted, the British-born clearly
volunteered in higher proportions than the Australian-born, and considerably higher
in the opening days of the
war.48
Bean concedes
that many of those who enlisted were British-born, but suggests that their relative numbers were severely whittled
down prior to embarkation. The following reads like a bad-faith rendering of statistics, over-determined as it is by Bean’s idea of the superiority of the Australian bushman:
Since the only places for enlistment were in the capital cities,
many men had been recruited who would not have been taken had the time been longer. The floating population
of these towns probably
secured too large a proportion of the acceptances. Immigrants from Britain who happened
to be about the cities showed an extraordinary preponderance in the earlier stages – Colonel MacLaurin
left it on record that at one period 60 per cent of the recruits for his
brigade were British born; before it sailed, 73 per cent of the men in the first contingent were Australian
born.49
And Bean suspects that many of the remainder
would be as near as good as Australian- born, their having
‘lived in Australia since childhood’.50 It is not clear what Bean makes
of the fact that of
the first 58 to fall at
Gallipoli (from the 11th Battalion) only just over half
(31) were Australian-born or had Australian domiciled parents. Most of the remainder were recently arrived,
British-born, adult migrants.51
The widespread enlistment of British-born soldiers invites the question of the percentage of the British-born enlistments who were also soccer players, given the extent to which these migrants represented the overwhelming majority
of Australian soccer players. John Williamson in Soccer Anzacs – a book that tells the story
of the Perth Caledonians’ contribution to the war effort – claims a direct nexus between the British- born, soccer and enlistment. Citing P.S. Reynolds’
report, The New History of Soccer, he claims that ‘300 players and officials enlisted
from the Western
Australian soccer community and this is not surprising
in light of the high proportion of Anzacs who were born in the United Kingdom’. It is possible
that this figure sells WA soccer enlistments short.52
Exemplifying Williamson’s point is the following excerpt from the Daily News in April 1915, prior to the Gallipoli
landing. The Perth YMCA:
Soccer Club has responded splendidly to the call for men to serve our King and country abroad. By about the end of January the following members of the team had volunteered: Harry Amos, J. W. Balsdon, Herbert A.
Bell, Frank M. Gill, James F.
Jack, Cyril Jeans, J. S. Neale, A. Sage, Sid. Stubbs, P. Wrightson. Three
are in Egypt, five are still in camp here,
and two are waiting to be called up by the military
authorities. The club is proud of the large number of soccer boys who have enlisted, and we are looking forward to seeing them return safe
and sound. An interesting letter is to hand from Frank Gill, now in Egypt. He is fit and well, but anxious to get to the front. He says he has climbed the Pyramids.53
A willingness to enlist was a prevalent
attitude found in soccer clubs
in Western Australia and beyond –
a commitment that had significant long-term
ramifications for both the Caledonians Club and for the game across Australia.
In October 1915, Perth soccer journalist Unomi was able to report some astounding figures from WA:
The European war has played havoc with all winter pastimes,
for every branch of sport has
nobly responded to the country’s call, and Westralian soccerites in particular have well maintained their name of sportsmen by giving of their best to the army at Gallipoli, as a glance at the list hereunder
will testify. On looking back on the past year, the uppermost
feeling of the soccer community
must be sadness with a measure of pride. Pride in the knowledge of the self-sacrifice made by many of our comrades in answering the appeal of the nation,
and regret at the pitiless sacrifice of life. A number of those who were with us this time a year ago will no longer
play the game. They fill honoured graves on the heights of Gallipoli, and much as I
would like to write an appreciation of their courage
and devotion of their country
I do not feel equal to the task.
From time to time the names of those players
who enlisted have appeared in this column,
it may therefore be fitting
to give the number that has gone,
or about to go, from each club. In doing so, however,
it is not with any spirit of boastfulness, nor is it with the object of inviting comparisons, but in view of the somewhat disparaging statements made some time ago about football,
I think it only my duty to show that soccer
has done its bit and has nothing
to reproach itself with. The list, which includes both associations, is:
Club Enlistments Wounded Killed
Austral
|
17
|
4
|
1
|
Caledonians
|
7
|
0
|
0
|
Casuals
|
11
|
1
|
2
|
Claremont
|
46
|
3
|
4
|
City Rangers
|
13
|
3
|
3
|
College
|
25
|
4
|
3
|
Fremantle
|
6
|
0
|
1
|
Perth
|
14
|
1
|
6
|
Referees
|
7
|
1
|
2
|
Thistle
|
11
|
1
|
1
|
Y.M.C.A.
|
23
|
0
|
2
|
Leederville
|
11
|
0
|
1
|
Other Clubs
|
50
|
14
|
7
|
On the resumption of soccer in Geraldton in 1919:
Mr J. G. Scott, Hon. Secretary, in an interesting report to the meeting of the British
Football Association, referred
to the difficulties under which the last playing season,
1915 was concluded, owing
to so many of the players going to the war, and which caused
the game to be suspended the following seasons.
From the lists he had been able to secure
he found that 62 of their
players went to the front, and 16 of these had made the supreme
sacrifice in defence of
the Empire.55
In
1933, informed by Scott, R.C. Webb, then president of the Geraldton Soccer Association, revised these figures upward, claiming that 80% of its players had enlisted:
At a recent club meeting Mr. J. G. Scott,
past president of the Association, in speaking of the formation of the soccer
code in Geraldton, mentioned that in 1914, at the outbreak of the Great War,
there was just over one hundred players
on the books of the Association. Over eighty of these
men answered the great call and saw active service.56
Like their Western Australian brethren, soccer players
across the country enlisted in droves,
many of them prior to the Gallipoli campaign. Harry Dockerty,
president of the Victorian British Football
Association, claimed in February 1915 that ‘his organisation, numbered 500 members, and 200 had already gone to the front’.57 These numbers are questionable given that in July,
after the Gallipoli
campaign began, it was claimed
by another representative that ‘they had a total of 170 out of 550 players (30%) serving with the colors or out at Broadmeadows’.58
Despite the Emerald Hill Record’s tendency observed
above to focus on Australian Rules footballers, it sometimes acknowledged the commitment of soccer players
to the enlistment process. It reported the day before the Gallipoli
invasion:
Considerable difficulty has been experienced by the council of the ‘Soccer’
clubs in providing
a satisfactory competition for the forthcoming season, and it is only quite recently
that they have been able to draw up a complete fixture
list. As is generally known, the chief reason of this is the fact that so many clubs have been hard hit by the large number of players who have joined the Expeditionary Forces
that it has been extremely doubtful whether some of them would be able to raise a team of any description.59
In July 1915, it reported (going so far as to break standard
practice and name individual soccer players)
that more ‘than a dozen players of the Thistle club have joined the forces this week, and the senior team had to take the field without
the services of Goodson, Hogg,
G. Brown,
and Raitt’.60
According to the Argus, when soccer resumed in Melbourne
in 1919:
At the first annual meeting of the British
Association, on June 16, the report covering a period of four
years commencing 1915 disclosed the interesting fact
that
90 per cent. of the players had enlisted for service abroad or at home. No competitive football had been played during the war.61
The Hobart Mercury recollected prior to the resumption
of the interstate rivalry between Tasmania and Victoria in 1921: ‘The last occasion
on which a Victorian team visited Tasmania was in August, 1914,
and it was at Hobart when war was declared. Seven of the team volunteered for active service
immediately on return to Melbourne’.62
In March 1915, the Mercury claimed that ‘Soccer
football stood out as a fine example to all sporting
organisations in Tasmania.
The Elphin Club had sent every one of its playing members to the war’.63 Fifty players from the top 10 soccer clubs in Tasmania, north and south had enlisted by April 1, 1915.64
In South Australia, player
enlistments were also mounting. In April 1915, the Sturt Club reported losing ‘the services
of eight of last year’s players, who have enlisted
in the Expeditionary Forces, and are now in Egypt, but several new men having been secured the prospects are bright’.65
While these departures were causing the game to wane, the clubs ‘happily’ sent their
members off to the AIF with a sense of duty and pride,
as well as a semblance
of propriety. The Adelaide Tramways
team placed its enlisted members in a prominent position in its 1914 team photo.66
In the Queensland town of Toowoomba
(population 13,000 in 1914) the commitment was remarkable. On the resumption of soccer in Toowoomba in 1919, at ‘the annual meeting of the British
Football Association it was reported
that 140 members
of the association had gone to the Front’.67
In NSW the soccer enlistments were vast. Typical of the Sydney clubs, the Granville Magpies contributed heavily
to the war effort. In total, 17 out of 22 Magpie
players in 1914 could ‘be accounted for as having done or are doing their bit for King and country
in foreign parts’.68
Australian soccer players were as (if not more) keen as the players of other codes to do what they perceived as their duty. The next question is to ask how well the players
were ‘embedded’ in the mechanics of war. Were they there?
For good or ill, Gallipoli is at the centre of the Australian
story of sport and war. As the first major site of Australia’s participation in the invasion of Turkey, it is commemorated as a tragic and courageous beginning
of Australia’s war campaign. As suggested earlier,
it is also a location for a powerful contemporary imagining of Australian nationality and cultural development. If ‘ANZAC’ can convey a general sense of Australian
spirit, then ‘Gallipoli’ is the place
of that spirit’s founding.
And soccer was also at Gallipoli, and not merely in the actions of the soccer players (Allies
and Australians) who fought and died there. It was played there. The image of a soccer match being played at Gallipoli69 is the kind of picture that leaves nothing to be said. An organised game of soccer
was played between Allied troops and they were being cheered on by hundreds of others.
While more evidence is needed to connect this visual image directly with Australian
troops, they certainly played soccer on Lemnos in December 1915. Lemnos was loaned by Greece as a base ‘for operations on the Gallipoli
Peninsula’. An image collected by the Australian War Memorial shows members of the 6th Battalion playing
there against a team from HMS Hunter.70 The men were likely en route to Egypt after participating in the Gallipoli campaign.
Former Geelong VFL footballer Leo Healy reported
on his recuperation in Lemnos after having a tumour removed
from his leg – resulting from an injury at Gallipoli. Healy described ‘Lemnos
as quiet, but the natural harbour is beautiful. The men chiefly
amuse themselves playing cricket
and Soccer football’.71 Not only was soccer played
at Gallipoli, it
was used as a means of refuge,
recovery and relaxation by Australian troops
in the aftermath of the events that created the legend of Anzac.
More symbolic
evidence of soccer’s
intimate connection with Gallipoli lies in the remarkable story of the Soccer
‘Ashes’. They were conceived in 1923 during
New Zealand’s
tour to Australia:
Mr. Mayer (manager of the New Zealand soccer team) took back to the dominion
the ashes in a box with a history attached to it. Mr. W. A. Fisher (secretary
of the Queensland
association) possessed a silver safety razor case presented
to him when he left for the war, and it was with him when he landed with the Anzacs. He presented
it to Mr. Mayer, and it contains
some of the soil of Queensland and New South Wales, whose representatives played in the test matches.
Mr. Mayer intends to have it mounted
in New Zealand
woods so that it may be a prized memento in connection
with international matches between Australia
and New Zealand.72
The ‘Ashes’ tag appeared to be a typical symbolic nod to the cricketing
Ashes until it was revealed
by the Sydney Morning Herald 13 years later that the case literally
contained ashes:
The ‘Ashes’, incidentally, are a genuine trophy.
They are a relic of the New Zealand team’s visit to Australia 13 years ago, when the ashes of cigars smoked
by the captains of the New
Zealand and Australian team were placed in a plated safety-razor case, which, in turn, was enclosed in a casket
of New Zealand and Australian timbers, honeysuckle and maple, suitably ornamented and inscribed. This trophy bears a record
of the test games between
the two countries since
1922, and was won three
years ago by Australia, which beat the visiting New Zealand team in every test.73
The Sydney
Sun-Herald reiterates the story of the Australia– NZ soccer
‘Ashes’ during the 1954 New Zealand
tour of Australia:
Ashes of two cigars,
smoked in 1923,
have become the
Soccer Test ‘Ashes’, won by Australia yesterday.
The cigars were smoked at a Soccer
dinner by the Australian captain,
Alec Gibb, and the New Zealand captain, George Campbell, after New Zealand
had won the 1923 Test series. They are contained in a silver
safety razor case which was carried in the landing
on Gallipoli by a New Zealand soldier.
The razor
case is set in a casket made of Australian and New Zealand
woods inscribed with a kangaroo and the New Zealand fern
leaf. The ‘Ashes’ were presented to the Australian team at a dinner in honour of the New Zealand side last night.74
Frequent test series for more than 30 years between the two Anzac
nations, playing for a trophy that ‘witnessed’ action at Gallipoli
and is inscribed with powerful
cultural icons, seems to be clear evidence of a deep and abiding relationship between
soccer and the Anzac story. Richard Cashman wonders why this tradition
died out in 1954 without ever stopping
to marvel that it lasted
as long as it did or ponder
the mechanics of its gestation.75
Indeed, this is a vital question because
even as Australian soccer’s quality,
profile and professionalism were starting
to rise in the 1950s,
the game’s connection with the Australian
past and its status within legend and mythology
were undergoing erasure.
The final grisly question
is to ask: what sort of toll did the fighting take on Australian soccer players? In May 1915, Unomi wrote ecumenically about the unfolding
tragedy of the war and its impact on local Perth soccer:
At the great match now raging in the Dardanelles
the enemy is no respecter of codes. It is all the
same to them whether their bullets find billets in an
adherent of the Australian, Rugby or
Soccer games. Therefore, with so many of our players
at the front British Associationists must expect to contribute towards the blood toll now being exacted.
That we are doing so is
evidenced in the fact that since the declaration of war no less than five have passed hence. Two, Private
Courtney and Major
Parker through illness,
and three in action – namely Private Amos (Referees’ Association), Major Carter (Perth Club),
and Private Algy Hale (Claremont Glebe). At the usual meeting of the association on Wednesday last, reference was made to the loss sustained, and a motion to the effect that letters of condolence be sent to the relatives
of the deceased was passed. Amongst
those reported on the injury list is Lieutenant Rockliffe. Old timers will remember
Mr. Rockliffe as being the first secretary of the Junior Association and also a great enthusiast in schools football.
I am sure every soccerite will wish him a speedy recovery.76
Ultimately, the most powerful
(and harrowing) evidence of soccer’s ‘being
there’ lies in the bodies of the men who ‘stayed there’, those who died in the carnage. When the Toowoomba British Football Association re-gathered in 1919, they noted their own toll:
During the evening the Chairman extended
a hearty welcome
home to the returned men present, and Mr. S. Morgan responded
on behalf of the returned
men. The secretary stated that the British
Football Association (‘Soccer’) was the only football
association that had an honour roll in Toowoomba. The names of Syd. Cousens,
Lit. Groom, A. Dundas[ch], Colin Groom, W. Bury, and J. McManus were recorded
in the minutes as having paid the supreme sacrifice in the late Great War.77
Pre-war soccer had not only grown in the metropolitan and larger regional
centres. It had taken root in the country
as well. Towns like Broken
Hill, Rockhampton, Charters
Towers and Warwick
had established bustling
soccer cultures that were all inevitably truncated by the war effort.
Mildura’s developing two-team competition in this period resuscitated a game that
had flowered
there briefly in the mid-1890s. Weekly matches were played
between clubs based in Mildura
and the neighbouring town of Irymple.
This microcosmic competition provides
its own story of the war’s impact on small towns and sport. Of the 11 players
in the Irymple team of 1913, at least seven enlisted. Of this number,
five lost
their lives.
Yet, the scale of this tragedy is sadly exceeded
by the example of the Caledonian team in Perth. Eight
members of the club (six first team players) lost their lives in active
service. John Williamson’s Soccer Anzacs documents the Caledonian
story from origins to the club’s final
demise.
Williamson concludes poignantly, making a claim
for soccer’s centrality to the legend of Anzac and radically defining
Australian heritage in terms of actions and commitment rather than birthplace:
Few sporting
clubs in Australia were so decimated in the War’s bloody battles as the Caledonian Soccer
Club. Practically every player and official enlisted
and served under the Australian
flag in the First World War. They took part in battles
that are remembered throughout Australia every
year on 25th April
– battles burnt into the Australian psyche.
These Caledonians were Anzacs and what started off as a Scottish strand was woven into the fabric of Australia society
by the deeds of its gallant youth.
If we reflect on the sacrifice of this team
we realise that it paid in blood
for the right to use the name Caledonians and be accepted as
part of our Australian heritage.78
How might ‘Derwentside’ have responded to such a claim?
Australian soccer historians rarely write about the First World War. It is usually a mere lacuna in their narrative. Yet as I hope to have shown,
it needs to be far more than that. It is, first, the place of another dislocated kind of rich soccer history that reveals a game far more central to Australian stories
than has been hitherto acknowledged. Australians played and observed games of soccer during the war and many were newly introduced to the game solely because
of their participation in the war. Second, the war is that which prevents, perhaps more than any other force,
the game’s then seemingly inevitable rise to a degree of prominence across Australia. After the war, with more migrants and with renewed enthusiasm, soccer set off once more on its merry course of rebuilding. But this time the enemies within the other football
codes were forewarned
and forearmed.
The migrants of the 1920s were greater
in number but perhaps lesser
in commitment to spreading the ‘British game of football’. History was once more unkind79 and despite the seemingly better organised
streams of migration,
it was not until after the Second World War
that the kind of ferocious
passion for soccer generated by a migrant
boom was seen again.80 Future research may well reveal
that this 30-year
break was a great developmental blockage for the game of soccer in Australia. It may also reveal that the elision of soccer and its British-born adherents in the construction of the Australian legend of the First World War was a significant factor in this limit to soccer’s growth.
I would like to thank Paul Mavroudis
for his vital assistance in pulling this paper into shape, Roy Hay
for his general inspiration and Damian Smith for his exemplary commitment to the project
of researching Australian soccer soldiers.
Ian Syson is a senior
lecturer in literary
studies at Victoria
University. He is writing a cultural history of
soccer in Australia.
1. Mercury, April 3, 1931, 8. The name ‘Derwentside’ is derived from the Derwent,
Hobart’s main
river.
2.
These issues are canvassed by Hay in “‘Our Wicked Foreign Game’.”
3. Anzac stands for the Australian and New Zealand
Army Corps and in Australian mythological terms often stands
metonymically for the entirety of Australian military
history. Moreover, the term is sometimes
deployed as a symbol of ‘Australian spirit’
in general.
5. Sunshine Advocate, November 5, 1927, 1. This letter is so extreme that it is possible that it was a hoax – what might be called trolling today.
6. ‘Pommy’ is the derogatory Australian slang for ‘English’. English schoolteachers were seen as especially proactive
in illicitly introducing soccer to Australian schoolboys. Prior to the war, this tension
came to a head in Perth, Western
Australia. A retrospective on the death of J.J. Simons, the founder of the Young Australian [Football]
League mentions this attitude in relation to 1905: ‘Soccer was firmly established in the schools,
but Mr Simons fought for the national
game until he had overcome
the prejudices of English schoolteachers’. Daily News, October 25, 1948, 6.
7. Philip Mosely and Bill Murray put it another way: ‘it has not entered the Australian soul’. Roy Hay claims that ‘there has been a failure to make the game Australian’ on the part of its custodians. Mosely and Murray, “Soccer,” 214; Hay, “‘Our Wicked Foreign
Game’,” 172.
8. Since 1995, Collingwood and Essendon have battled for AFL Anzac supremacy at the MCG. St
George and Eastern Suburbs commemorate the day in the NRL. In recent years, a cross-
Tasman NRL game between Melbourne
Storm and New Zealand Warriors
has also been added to
the Anzac Day mix. In 2013, AFL club St Kilda FC played their inaugural Anzac
Day game in Wellington.
9. See Lake, Reynolds, and McKenna, What’s Wrong with Anzac? for a thoroughgoing history and critique of the rise of Anzac Day in this period.
10. Green, “Anzac Day.”
Green sees a great deal
of transference involved
in the sporting co-option of Anzac:
The deeds of our veterans are at once honoured and dragged down to the humdrum of ordinary life through constant acts of easy equivalence. The further we travel from those great wars that saw the mass involvement of ordinary men and women, the more we see their sacrifice, their often terrible
sacrifice, as analogous
to the recognisable struggles of our modern lives: the valor of footballers, something
as universal and banal as ‘mateship’.
11.
Less than 1% of Australia’s fighting
force was recruited via the Sportsmen’s Battalions. Booth and Tatz, One-Eyed, 100.
12. Phillips, “Sport, War and Gender Images,”
81.
13. Blair, “Beyond the Metaphor.”
17. A term search
for ‘sport’ limited to the First World
War in the Australian War Memorial’s web site http://www.awm.gov.au/ obtained 691 hits, the vast majority being photographs.
18. Euroa Advertiser, July 21, 1916, 5; see also: Horsham Times, June 21, 1916, 3; Warrnambool Standard, July 29, 1916, 8; West Gippsland Gazette, July 25, 1916, 4; Traralgon Record, July
21, 1916, 6; Bairnsdale Advertiser and Tambo and Omeo Chronicle, July 22, 1916, 6; Prahran
Telegraph, May 27, 1916, 5; Camperdown Chronicle, April 20, 1916, 2; Cumberland Argus
and Fruitgrowers Advocate, May 16, 1916, 3; West Australian, October 3, 1916, 8.
19.
Perhaps the long-standing historiographical prejudice against
history from below and a healthy distrust of editorial practices
during wartime have also militated
against the widespread and systematic use of these letters.
22.
The ‘Barassi
Line’ is an imaginary line drawn across Australia that divides the country culturally
into Australian Rules and Rugby zones. A good outline
is available in Fujak and Frawley, “The Barassi
Line,” 94.
33. See, for example,
the Football Record 8, June 4, 1928, 3. This edition contained the following statement from ‘Chatterer’:
Australia’s game is recognised by people from other lands who have followed the codes of those countries as the most spectacular of any winter
game of the kind, and the Soccer and Rugger lads who have settled among us and have taken to Aussie’s
football will tell you that it is the best of all.
41.
A player listed
as B. Anderson played for the Moonyoonooka soccer team in 1914. Geraldton Guardian, May 21, 1914, 3.
47. In my research so far, soccer
dominant letters seem at this stage to come mainly from Western Australia, with some from Queensland and NSW. Soccer
subdominant is very much the tonality from Victoria. Further
work needs to be done to establish
patterns and emphases.
48. Andrews, The Anzac Illusion, 44.
49. Bean, Official History
of Australia.
51. These figures are drawn from the ‘First to Fall’ web site: http://www.anzacsite.gov.au/1l anding/first-to-fall/11battalion/index.html.The remainder were made up of English
(14) and Scots-born (6), with 2 Irishmen, 1 Englishman born in Brazil,
1 Maltese, 1 man whose parents were domiciled in India. All those without
a given place of birth and with next of kin domiciled in Australia
have been attributed
Australia-born status.
52. Williamson,
Soccer Anzacs, vii. It is not clear whether
the Geraldton numbers
are included in this figure.
54.
West Australian, October 16, 1915, 9. These figures
are by no means accurate
or up to date at the
time. The Caledonian
figure is clearly incorrect given their tragic story.
66.
State Library
of South Australia, “The Adelaide Tramways British Football Club, 1914 team photo,” http://images.slsa.sa.gov.au/mpcimg/35750/B35670.htm
69. Youtube, “World War I: Gallipoli
Campaign 4/4,” see the image at 5.49 – 5.52 in this video,
http
://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼ SQsCQ4k8WTA. The
game was conducted as part of the illusion that the Allies were carrying on as normal
when in fact plans were being made to evacuate the Gallipoli Peninsula.
70. The team from the destroyer HMS Hunter playing a game of soccer against a 6th Battalion team at a camp on the Aegean island of Lemnos. Australian War Memorial,
http://www.awm.
gov.au/view/collection/item/C01191/.
74. Sydney Sun-Herald, September, 1954, 41.
75. Cashman, Sport in the National Imagination, 109.
78. Williamson,
Soccer Anzacs, 113.
79. Hay and Syson, The Story of Football, 10 – 11.
80.
This ‘boom’
is discussed in-depth
by Kallinikios, Soccer Boom.
Bean, C. E. W. Official History
of Australia in the War of 1914 – 1918 – Volume I – The Story of ANZAC from the
Outbreak of War
to the End of the First Phase
of the Gallipoli Campaign, May 4, 1915, 11th ed. 1941, http://www.awm.gov.au/collection/records/awmohww1/aif/vol1/ awmohww1-aif-vol1-ch5.pdf.
Blair, Dale. “Beyond
the Metaphor: Football
and War, 1914 – 1918.” Journal of the Australian War Memorial, Apr. 28, 1996, http://www.awm.gov.au/journal/j28/j28-blai.asp.
Cashman, Richard.
Sport in the National
Imagination: Australian Sport in the Federation Decades.
Fujak, Hunter, and Stephen Frawley.
“The Barassi Line: Quantifying Australia’s Great Sporting Divide.” Sporting Traditions 30, no. 2 (Nov.
2013): 93 – 109.
Green, Jonathan. “Anzac Day is About Their
Deaths, Not Our Lives.” The Drum, Apr. 25, 2012, http
Hay, Roy. “‘Our Wicked Foreign Game’: Why Has Association Football (Soccer) Not Become the Main Code of Football in Australia?” Soccer and Society 7, nos 2 – 3 (2006): 165 – 186.
Hay, Roy, and Ian Syson. The Story of Football
in Victoria. Melbourne: Football Federation Victoria, 2009.
Kallinikios, John. Soccer Boom:
The Transformation of Victorian Soccer Culture 1945 – 1963.
Lake, Marilyn, Henry Reynolds, and Mark McKenna.
What’s Wrong with Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History. Sydney: University of NSW Press,
2010.
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