Sport and the Home Front: Wartime Britain at Play, 1939–45

Abstract

The Second World War continues to occupy an important position in Britain's collective memory and national mythology. During the so-called people's war, Britons united to support the war effort and defend the nation and its values. As COVID-19 brought Britain—and the world—to a standstill, it was, therefore, no surprise to see public figures call for the “blitz spirit” or to read ventilators described as spitfires and private laboratories as “Dunkirk little ships.” Nevertheless, as Matthew Taylor observes in the introduction to Sport and the Home Front: Wartime Britain at Play, 1939–45, scholars have been slow to explore the war's sporting history. Even as historians of the conflict turned to culture and leisure to examine life on the home front, sport “has been almost completely neglected” (6). Similarly, among historians of sport, scholars have generally held that “not much sport took place and there was neither much debate nor disagreement about what did happen” (8).Sport and the Home Front challenges these assumptions and seeks to fill the resulting silences. To do so, the book's chapters explore several specific dimensions of wartime sport: official and popular attitudes toward sport, especially regarding its contribution to “civilian morale”; the decision of clubs to “carry on” during the conflict; the competing demands that the war placed on sporting spaces; the role of sport and fitness in supporting wartime production and active duty; sport's significance as a marker of “everyday” life on the home front; its role and representation in national broadcasting; and the intersection of sport with ideas of nation during the conflict. Drawing on the analytic lenses of social and cultural history—chief among them gender, class, locality, nation, and citizenship—Taylor deftly explores each of these facets in turn.Tying these divergent threads together is the author's attentiveness to the multidimensional contest(s) that underpinned sport and its role in wartime Britain. Whether following debates over racing programs to illustrate the shifting calculus that officials considered in forming policy or tracing the contours of public opinion toward sport along class lines, Taylor is always alive to caveats, complexities, and contingencies. This same sense of contest is also apparent in his examination of clubs’ internal conflicts and debates as they navigated the exigencies of war, as well as in his reading of the BBC's shifting attitudes toward—and representations of—sport throughout the conflict.Another defining feature of Taylor's account is his emphasis on local and even individual perspectives. Sources are key to accessing these perspectives. For example, in his analysis of sites of sport as “contested spaces” across Britain, Taylor combines local press reporting with records from councils, parks committees, and local clubs. In so doing, he unpicks the factors—notably sympathetic officials, influential advocates, and community lobbying—that decided whether parks and swimming pools remained open in various British locales. To capture individual experiences, conversely, Taylor draws on a range of personal narratives, including—most intriguingly—the more discursive responses of Mass-Observation's National Panel. These accounts help capture the lived experience of wartime sport: one panelist reflects on the guilt he felt watching sport while “half . . . [his] friends are overseas in the thick of it” (187), while another maintains that “we should get just as much pleasure out of life as we can at any time and even more so now when we don't know what the future will be like” (190). Such responses imbue the account with a sense of layered subjectivity; they enable Taylor to “get at” sport's place in the everyday lives of British men and women.This forensic focus on the “smaller picture” necessarily involves compromises, of course. For all his laudable (and generally successful) efforts to locate the voices of women, workers, and children, for instance, Taylor acknowledges that his sources do not speak to girls’ experiences of sport. More broadly, historians writing outside the British context might be discouraged by the author's somewhat equivocal stance on the value of cross-country comparisons and his reticence in considering the wider “British world.”Yet it is unfair to criticize Sport and the Home Front for something it never claims to be or do. Scholars outside Taylor's target audience will find much to admire in his skillful use of sources and his capacity to generate rich, nuanced insights. For scholars of British sport and social historians of the war, meanwhile, this is an indispensable account that meaningfully advances their respective historiographies. Sport and the Home Front is no revisionist polemic, but it succeeds in methodically filling silences and deconstructing myths—most notably the belief that sport was a “casualty” of the war. As Taylor's account makes clear, not only did Britain remain “at play” throughout the conflict, but the war actively “reinforced and expanded sport's role in British cultural life” (296).