A Game Sustained

13 Cricket, war and the ethical dilemma day existence. As one historian has commented, ‘Britons argued incessantly about the proper way to behave during wartime.’ 11 There were perhaps four main responses in Yorkshire during the war to the question of whether cricket should be played. The first was an outright rejection of the idea that it was appropriate to play any sport publicly. As a result, some cricket clubs closed or ceased to compete, and many people criticised as unpatriotic and insensitive those who continued. In January 1915, for example, at a meeting of the Yorkshire Cricket Council 12 – the league which included many of the principal clubs in the county – a representative from Rotherham moved that no Council cricket be played during the war, commenting it was: the very worst of taste that they should be indulging a mere pastime from a pleasure standpoint when their comrades, their relatives, and their friends were sacrificing their lives for the sake of their welfare and to secure them privileges in the future. 13 The following spring, a correspondent to the SheffieldEvening Telegraph complained bitterly at the small proportion of men from the Swinton and Mexborough districts who had volunteered to fight compared to elsewhere. In contrast, he claimed that the same area still had many flourishing cricket clubs. Other people were genuinely shocked by the attitude of their countrymen and women. At the end of July 1915, a piece in the Whitby Gazette heavily criticised ‘shirkers’ who could be seen in press photographs watching cricket and football. And in 1916, one man stationed in France wrote that he would never forget how he felt in the early weeks of the war when: I received an English newspaper in which the cricket matches were reported almost as fully as usual...the presence of crowds at these cricket matches...convinced many foreigners that the extraordinary apathy of the Englishman in regard to the war was due to his unconquerable selfishness. 14