A Game Sustained

22 Keeping going: 1914-1915 down the Loxley Valley, he recorded that he could see men playing football and cricket despite the fact that ‘Europe is the throes of dissolution’. He did not suggest that all the games should end but argued that the young men could at least demonstrate that they had a ‘reasonably intelligent grasp’ of the situation. Less sympathetically, a few weeks later, the wife of a senior army officer was widely reported for asking why she should have to ‘feel ashamed to be an English-woman when we see you skulking at home, watching football or cricket matches... while the manhood of Europe is shedding its blood on the battlefields!’ Regardless of the risk of criticism, Scarborough Cricket Club decided on ‘business as usual’ and arrangements for the annual Festival continued as planned. The first match was to start on 3 September, with receipts to be given to the Prince of Wales’s War Fund and the Mayor of Scarborough’s distress fund. On 22 August, the Hull Daily Mail spoke of ‘heroic efforts’ being made to keep sport going and commented that the cricket season was following its normal course. A cartoon in the Yorkshire Evening Post saw the funny side of the dilemma and suggested that it must annoy the German Kaiser to know that, among other things, ‘John Bull’ was playing out the county championship ‘with apparent unconcern’. It seemed many people preferred to act as normal and the Sussex fixture at Bradford at ‘Bowling Tide’ (the local general holiday when mills and factories stopped work) saw the largest crowd of the summer for a Yorkshire home match, the game helping ‘to ease the war tension’. Elsewhere, however, the realities of the country’s predicament began to show as many club tours, planned for the final weeks of the season, were called off. The turning point in public mood is usually seen as the last week of August due to appalling news from the battlefront. In France, on 23 August, the small and inexperienced British Expeditionary Force came into contact with the Germans and was out-manoeuvred at Mons and then at Le Cateau. Losses – although small compared with what was to come – shocked British opinion at home and led to a surge in enlistment. 23