A Game Sustained

70 Shocks to the system: 1916 officials pointed out that the League had no power to interfere in clubs’ business. A statement was instead issued begging clubs to avoid such arrangements. The Star Green’un in Sheffield took a longer-term perspective, also seeing league cricket as a threat to county cricket when it resumed. It noted that the Lancashire League had managed to attract men like Llewellyn, George Leach and William Shipman (who played for Leicestershire between 1908 and 1921) before the war and wondered whether Hobbs and Woolley would similarly be tempted once it was over. The financial burden of professionalism in the Bradford League also caused alarm. In early August, the Yorkshire Post commented that ‘The balance-sheets of some of the clubs...are likely to furnish some interesting and instructive information. No-one experienced in the working of League professionalism will be surprised, however, for it is obvious that only a minority of the clubs concerned can make professionalism pay.’ More immediately, the Military Service Act and the imminent adoption of general compulsory service was expected to add to the difficulties for clubs in the 1916 season. In May, the Yorkshire Post noted that a Bradford League club was still looking for ‘two good all-round cricketers (amateurs preferred)’. It also observed that every leading professional now attached to League clubs would come within the age range of the new recruitment measures. The players were engaged in munitions or other work, and some had been rejected for military service as physically unfit, but all were now liable to be reviewed by a tribunal. As the summer continued, there was further speculation about who might leave. George Thompson, the Northamptonshire and England all-rounder, had an exemption until 31 October as he was the proprietor of a dairy business at Leamington and had a family. Jack Hobbs was reported to be seeking an exemption until September 1916 (which he secured at a tribunal in Wandsworth on business and domestic grounds), and C.B.Llewellyn had appealed and been offered munitions work. The newspaper considered the public was sympathetic towards such men (‘their sporting favourites’) securing alternatives to fighting, although it presented no evidence