A Game Sustained

78 Shocks to the system: 1916 footballer, who had played seven times for England. Such were to be some of the final, fleeting glimpses of both men, as the Anglo-French campaign on the Western Front, agreed during the winter, opened near the River Somme. There, on 1 July at 7.30am the campaign began. The story of how British forces suffered 57,000 casualties in a single day, including 19,000 fatalities, has been widely told and is one of the most appalling tragedies of the entire war. The scale of the killing and the number of men from the same areas who were slaughtered had a devastating impact on Yorkshire society as hundreds of soldiers met their death within minutes. One of those was Major Booth who was in charge of a machine gun team and was one of the first ‘over the top’, urging his men on. Very soon he was hit by a shell fragment which penetrated his upper body and he was pitched forward and lay in a shell hole with numerous other men. Remarkably, one of those following on was Private Abe Waddington of the 1 st Bradford Pals (who three years later would fill a vacancy left in the Yorkshire side by Booth and play for the county until 1927), who was also hit and crawled into the same hole as Booth. According to Mick Pope in his book ‘Tragic White Roses’, Booth died in Waddington’s arms. Waddington was later rescued, but Booth’s body was not recovered for nine months. 58 Within days Booth’s family in Pudsey received a message from his commanding officer informing them of his death, emphasising how much he had been loved by the officers and men, and how he had earned his commission through real merit. Reports that Booth and Lintott had been killed in action appeared in the Yorkshire press some six days after the assault. The shock of the news was reflected in the Sheffield Evening Telegraph, which wrote that ‘The death roll and the general casualty list have hit sport fairly hard from the very beginning of the war, but nothing heretofore experienced quite parallels the tale told in today’s papers.’ It added that never was there a ‘cleaner living, finer stamp of sportsman’ than Major Booth. The papers also reported injuries to Booth’s friend and