Baseball and the Canadian Forces During the First World War
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Canadian Military History Volume 10 Issue 2 Article 3 2001 “Keep-A-Fighting! Play the Game!” Baseball and the Canadian Forces during the First World War Andrew Horrall Library and Archives Canada, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh Recommended Citation Horrall, Andrew "“Keep-A-Fighting! Play the Game!” Baseball and the Canadian Forces during the First World War." Canadian Military History 10, 2 (2001) This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Canadian Military History by an authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Horrall: Baseball and the Canadian Forces Andrew Horrall ester B. Pearson wrote the examination for and brothels. Canadian soldiers played a Lthe Department of External Affairs in June number of different sports during the war. Of 1928. Having passed, Pearson was interviewed the most popular, baseball was the most by a committee that included a representative distinctly North American. It had thrice failed of the War Veterans' Association, whose job it to take hold in Britain during the 40 years before was to ensure that returned servicemen received the war, was never seen as an allegory for virtue preferential treatment in federal government and honour and therefore provides a distinct hiring. When asked by this panellist to expound way in which Canadian forces differed from on his wartime service, Pearson could think only those representing other parts of the empire.3 of fatigue duties and "my home run at Bramshott Camp when I was playing third base for the 4th A short summary of Victorian sport is Reserve Battalion team." According to Pearson, necessary in order to understand the context of these anecdotes impressed his questioners and, First World War baseball. Modern sport 1 of course, he was offered a job. Whether it originated in the demographic and social documented Pearson's interview accurately or upheavals of mid-nineteenth century England. not, this articulation of his war-time experiences Industrialisation had drawn people into new emphasised the important role played by sport, cities, displacing the village as the basic and especially baseball, for Canadian soldiers demographic unit and eclipsing squierarchical of the First World War. social controls. In the process, a growing, and increasingly affluent, urban middle-class began Despite a growing list of investigations of the sending their sons to the public schools that had personal "experience" of war, the importance of once been the preserve of the aristocracy and sport in the Canadian forces during the First gentry. In very short order they demanded that World War remains almost undocumented, save these schools, which had often been anarchic in memoirs or as a subordinate component of and brutal, be brought under the control of morale and recruiting.2 However, military sport masters and older boys in a system embodied began almost as soon as men assembled in by Rugby School near Birmingham. Canadian training camps. These earliest matches were sponsored by junior officers and Under the rubric "Muscular Christianity," chaplains who believed in the moral values with games became allegories for spiritual virtue, which sport had been imbued by the British moral rectitude, and "manliness," qualities since the middle of the nineteenth century. To needed to conquer and control both schools and their first sponsors, team sports were empires. As this revised curriculum took hold undoubtedly seen as a means of testing men's throughout the empire, middle-class children leadership abilities, building cohesion and as a were taught a Muscular Christian mythology salubrious alternative to carousing, gambling communicated by such popular dictums as © Canadian Military History, Volume 10, Number 2, Spring 2001, pp.27-40. 27 Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2001 1 Canadian Military History, Vol. 10 [2001], Iss. 2, Art. 3 Wellington's that "Waterloo had been won on the Thanks to such images, sport became an playing fields of Eton."4 These public school important medium through which Imperial ideals reached the working-classes through ideals were transmitted. Finding it difficult to organisations like the Boys Brigade and the Boy continue playing games which had varied Scouts and thanks to an enormous hagiographic considerably from school to school, young men literature, beginning with Tom Brown's at university, in the military, the clergy and the Schooldays and begetting an unending supply civil service created the international rules for of boys' adventure stories. But no parable association football, or soccer, rugby and other expressed the ideals of muscular Christianity sports. These games then spread throughout the like Henry Newbolt's 1892 panegyric Vitae British Isles as men founded clubs designed to Lampada. The poem opens with an unnamed provide the working-classes with an alternative school's cricket captain rallying his team to to the public house. Simultaneously, British victory in the failing light. Years later the boy, engineers, immigrants, missionaries, soldiers serving as a subaltern in a distant desert, exhorts and businessmen took these games to the his men to fight on despite the square having corners of the world. With the development of broken and the sand being stained red with efficient and reliable regional, national and British blood. Finally, a younger generation of international transport, competitions emerged boys are inspired by this lesson of duty learned that turned participatory sports into a profitable within the school's cloisters. In each instance entertainment business played in stadiums by "Play up, and play the game!" was the rallying clubs representing local areas. But gentlemen cry. Newbolt's words encapsulated the Muscular looked down on the idea of earning their livings Christian belief that sport readied young men at games. Therefore, the last three decades of for war. Though these ideals were not unknown the nineteenth century witnessed a running in Edwardian Canada, baseball was never battle between advocates of amateurism under associated with them.5 which a gentleman - who likely had a private 28 https://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol10/iss2/3 2 Horrall: Baseball and the Canadian Forces income - would not deign to earn money from Vitae Lampada proclaimed that the virtues playing a game, and the working-class lads for instilled by gentlemanly sport were meant to whom being paid to kick a ball about was prepare men for war, and so in August 1914, enormously more attractive than working in a public figures in both Britain and Australia began mill or a mine. demanding that sport be curtailed. The English soccer season continued until May 1915, though Introduced to the colonies by an Anglophile, clubs deflected criticism by sponsoring British middle-class, based mainly in the private recruiting rallies and allowing troops to drill in clubs of Montreal and Toronto, Canadian sport their stadiums.8 However, when Lord Derby, was the product of a similar blend of gentlemanly Chairman of the Football Association, and soon ideals, industrialisation and urbanisation. to be chief architect of British conscription, Members of these exclusive social groups handed out that season's championship medals, supervised competitions, ensured that sport he declared that it was time for young men to became a central component of education in the engage in a "sterner game for England." colony's private schools and wrote amateur rules Professional soccer, the most popular sport in for the native North American games of lacrosse Britain, was abandoned until the peace. The and snowshoeing. By sponsoring championship Australian response was similar, with the press, cups for football and hockey, Governors-General church, parliament and leading citizens making Grey and Stanley epitomised this Anglophile it clear that sportsmen belonged in uniform.9 sporting vision. Such ennobling impulses were challenged by municipal governments who This debate was neither so heated nor so cemented public sport in Canadian life by laying- explicit in Canada. An implied criticism of sport out playing fields, while railways facilitated was carried on in the early months of the war competition between towns and cities, spread through reams of newspapers reporting star sport to the west and enabled those living in the athletes who had enlisted, sports leagues remotest regions to order equipment from retail collapsing for lack of players and speeches such catalogues.6 as that of Thomas Boyd, president of the Amateur Athletic Union of Canada, who in mid- Baseball led this democratic impulse. 1915 called for competitive leagues to be Though derived from the English game of disbanded.10 Many athletes responded to this rounders, baseball was an American invention message by enlisting, while the government that was neither sponsored by, nor subject to, requisitioned many sports fields for use as gentlemanly ideals. Baseball had been played in training grounds.11 Nevertheless, such Ontario since the late 1830s, while the country's Anglophile sentiments competed with the first permanent clubs, in Hamilton and London, powerful, omnipresent example of the neutral were formed in the mid-1850s. For the next two United States where professional sport, and decades teams adhering to different rules especially baseball, carried on unabated. sprouted in villages, towns and cities throughout Canadian newspapers reflected this tension by the colonies. Canadian baseball came of age carrying many stories about Ty Cobb and other during the 1870s when the modern, or New York, American professionals for every call to end rules were adopted by leagues across the sport at home. country. Next, businessmen sponsored teams as a means of promoting their products, Though debate about sport's role in the professional players were recruited in the United conflict was not as strident as in some other States, and the Canadian Association of Baseball parts of the empire, men enlisted in great Players was founded.