When the Whistle Blew World War I at Home

WHISTLE BLOWS

Back in 1914 the whistle was blown as

a signal to attack enemy lines during the Great War

and could be the last thing a soldier heard.

WHISTLE BLOWS

Back home the very same whistle was usually blown to herald the start of

a football or rugby match.

Those two games were asked to provide thousands of fit,

young volunteers to help win the war.

So what did our two biggest sports do and what effect did it

have on the war and people's lives?

I was capped over 50 times for my country and an officer in the

Royal Artillery.

So this is a story that's close to my heart and that 100 years

later I feel needs to be told.

It's the story of a world at war involving sportsmen from both

codes of football,

men who were employed in the world of professional soccer and

those that played rugby as amateurs just for the love of it.

Estimates that about 30% of rugby players were killed in the war.

Rugby took some really heavy hits.

The Footballers' Battalion played an important part in halting the

German counterattacks.

One of its officers was awarded a Victoria Cross.

Really, the way the two games were defined during the war became

the way that they were defined for the rest of the 20th century.

Two London clubs played a significant role in what went

on both back at home and on the battlefields.

WHISTLE BLOWS

Over in east London, Leyton Orient Football Club were at the

time called Clapton Orient.

WHISTLE BLOWS

Rosslyn Park Rugby Club is in south-west London, and 100 years

on they're finally unveiling a memorial to their fallen.

As part of the commemorations I've been asked to get the boots

out again to play in a special memorial match exactly as it

would have been played in 1914.

WHISTLE BLOWS

It was August of that year that we declared war on Germany and the

Government asked for volunteers to go and fight for King and country.

The playing of rugby matches immediately stopped and

Rosslyn Park's players stepped forward with vigour.

Rugby, as an amateur sport, was very quick to volunteer.

90% of the guys in the Rosslyn Park study that I've done

volunteered in August or September, so the first two months of the war.

A lot of guys coming out of public school, they'd been in the

Officers' Training Corps at school and it was

a natural thing for them to go on to a regular army or navy career.

And, indeed, we're not far from Sandhurst so we had

a lot of Sandhurst officer cadets playing at Rosslyn Park, and

a lot of the guys in rugby also joined territorial regiments

so they were what was even then called "weekend soldiers"

and playing rugby when they could.

The regular British Army was very small.

And the best place to get officers from quickly,

with a minimum amount of training, was those boys who had been

involved in the Officers' Training Corps at school

because they were halfway there in their training.

The reason so many rugby players signed up was it goes back to

the public-school ethos.

They understood that they were privileged,

but they also understood that with privilege came responsibility.

So they knew that when the country was in peril they had to sign up,

they had to do their bit and that often meant leading from the front,

getting up in the line of fire to lead their men into battle.

In Britain before 1914 there had been

a growing tide of nationalist and militarist sentiment in

boys' stories, and the idea of the noble warrior or the happy warrior,

in Shakespeare's phrase,

was very strong, and you can see that in some of the schoolboy

stories, that there's this idea that to die in the service of

one's country was the greatest honour one could have.

And, of course, the famous poem of that period,

Henry Newbolt's Vitai Lampada,

has the famous phrase, "Play up! play up! and play the game!"...

both in sport and in war.

It's a normal Saturday afternoon at Leyton Orient Football Club.

100 years ago they were still called Clapton Orient,

but much was the same as now.

Crowds gathered, excitement built.

Fans like these all over the country were still flocking to

stadiums, with crowds even bigger than today,

because during the early part of the gruelling war association

football did not cover itself in much glory.

On the 22nd of August, 1914,

the day before British troops fought their first major battle

around the Belgian town of Mons, professional football matches

went ahead and continued for an entire season.

Football didn't pack up when war was declared,

largely because the season had already started.

And football, even in those days, it was

a highly commercialised entertainment.

So bills had to be paid, players had to be paid, rent had to be paid.

And so it was very difficult for them to simply say, "Stop."

In rugby union it was relatively straightforward.

Most clubs didn't pay for their grounds,

they certainly didn't have professional players.

The other reason why football continued was because there

was a very strong argument...

We're in the middle of a war and what's necessary is to

maintain morale.

Football carries on because essentially it is a

professional game. There are players under contract.

The prevailing mantra of the day is very much "business as usual".

People expect the war to be over by Christmas.

Not everybody, but a sizeable majority.

And, basically, people are just hedging their bets.

Players who played football, in general,

had a working-class background.

They probably had jobs, they already had families, which meant that they

couldn't join up in the same way that the predominantly single,

young and very enthusiastic young men in rugby union could.

So enthusiastic were those rugby players to be volunteers that

the Government used them as poster boys in a recruitment drive.

Indeed, in November there was a recruitment poster issued by

the War Office saying 90% of rugby players have enlisted,

rugby union players, and they were very specific about union,

are doing their duty, and it said...

It actually had a statistic

that said the whole of the England

team from the previous season had all joined the colours.

And indeed, during the course of the war 26 England players will

be killed and the 27th died of his wounds after the end of the war.

Early on in the war casualties were higher than expected,

so more and more men were needed to fight.

So football matches, with their huge crowds, were targeted in

particular to try to get volunteers from the paying spectators.

In late 1914 there was an attempt to use football matches to

recruit spectators, to enlist actually at matches.

Before matches there would be a speech by a recruiting

officer and then people would be expected to enlist at half-time.

This wasn't very successful.

There was a recruitment rally at Arsenal and only one person

signed up.

Nothing seemed untoward.

In fact, it was a good way for people to go and relax and

watch a game of football at the weekend with all the bad news

that started to come through.

All of a sudden you started getting in the newspapers the casualty

lists, and public opinion changed.

Following an announcement that the FA were going to proceed with

plans for the FA Cup that season there were very angry letters in the

various newspapers criticising professional footballers for

not coming forward and criticising the game for not ceasing the

game immediately.

There's a famous cartoon produced in Punch magazine which was

indicative of the criticism towards the game, the fact that there was

no honour to be won on the football field but there was another

place they could win honour.

It shouldn't be forgotten that at the time the class system

was at its peak.

Rugby was played and watched largely by the ruling classes.

Football, on the other hand, was already the people's

game and had started to come in for serious criticism because the

players were not only still at home but still playing football

for money.

These are footballers at the time on tiny, tiny wages,

literally trying to earn enough to keep their family alive.

And bear in mind,

everybody at the time was saying the war will be over by Christmas.

There was no reason to give up your job, because it would all be

sorted by Christmas.

So people genuinely thought,

"I'll carry on because there's plenty of guys in the Army

"who will sort that little problem with the Kaiser and then

"everything will be back to normal in 1915."

Of course, it didn't work out that way.

As the criticism stirred up by the media grew,

football crowds did start to dwindle.

Rugby players, though, were being feted as heroes.

Bravery, gallantry, heroics,

these were all words being associated with Rosslyn Park

players at the time.

But that came at a cost.

It meant that the families of Rosslyn Park's players were

receiving devastating news all too frequently.

They were the first to join up and they became the junior officers,

the lieutenants and captains.

And we know from history that the death rate among junior

officers was the highest for any branch of the Army.

At its worst the life expectancy of a junior officer in the

trenches was something like six weeks.

And so the young men who had been brought up in that way and

who played rugby because that was the social class they came

from signed up in their droves and were killed in their droves.

Arthur Leyland Harrison.

Maurice Cazalet Harrison.

Whilst trying to uncover all the names for their memorial,

present-day Rosslyn Park club members were staggered to

find out just how many of their men were actually killed.

The club has the membership rolls from its very earliest days,

from 1879,

so working from about 1900 to about 1914, the outbreak of the war.

I took every member, there's about 700,

and I cross-referenced them with the

Commonwealth War Graves Commission database.

That was really the start of it because I found quite

a lot just in that sweep.

The final figure we arrived at was 108,

which for a club that had a standing membership of about 300 at

the outbreak of World War I is a huge number.

A third of the membership were killed.

I'm not shocked by anything in the Great War any more, but the

thing that did stun me, and it's a very interesting reflection

on how people dealt with the tragedy of the war and the losses,

is that all the talk at the time was about numbers and about decorations,

the numbers of men who died and all the VCs and the DSOs and the

Military Crosses they won. The men themselves hardly get a mention.

And it's almost as if people couldn't deal with the pain

of these men who lived and loved and played rugby.

They couldn't deal with that personalisation of it

so they reduced everything to numbers and decorations.

Stephen Cooper actually has brought the statistics to life.

He's written an award-winning book about some of the Rosslyn Park

players who died.

One such man was based here at the Queen's perfumers on Jermyn Street.

His role in the family business meant his journey to the

trenches wasn't his first trip across the Channel.

France was very much the capital of perfumery and it's

where lots of the ingredients are sourced from,

so he was often over there to source various rose oils and other

ingredients used for the perfumery back home here.

What fascinates me is a man to work in a perfumery,

he clearly had a sensitive nose,

to then be in the environment with all the smells of industrial

warfare, the death and the injuries and the blood and the explosives.

It's two opposite ends of the spectrum.

One minute you're smelling roses and the next you're in all sorts

of horrific conditions.

You get the sense that not much has changed here since 1914.

Floris is still a family-run business and Edward Bodenham does

a similar job today to that of his great-uncle Jack

and has kept his memory alive by holding on to many

photographs and letters sent from the battlefields,

in which most of Jack's concern was how life was back at home.

He grew up with three other brothers and the family was

a rather large one - there were 16 children altogether -

and brought up at a house called Ivy Lodge, which they refer

to a lot in letters as "dear old Ivy Lodge".

Near Acton, Chiswick sort of area.

And it's no longer there, unfortunately.

There's a great photograph of Jack actually playing tennis with

a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

-Typical gentleman.

-He looks very cool.

Your pictures of him here playing tennis in the family garden

and the lovely, big, happy family of 16 and then all of a sudden

they're put onto the front line in the First World War,

the most gruelling, brutal war arguably ever.

It must have been a hell of a culture shock for him.

Yeah, absolutely, and I think that's reflected in the amount of

letters he sent.

We've got a huge bundle of letters back home.

Just really caring about how his family are doing,

what they're up to.

There's an example here where he's writing to his father.

And there's a sentence where he says,

"I hope you're keeping well and will

"make the most of the grand weather to take

"a holiday in some quiet spot out of the range of the war zone.

"Why not a week or so in Devonshire?"

We have one here where he actually asks his mother if she can

pay the subscription fee to the rugby club.

He makes a point of saying,

"I promise I'll pay you back when I get back."

I find it fascinating that the rugby club would still charge

subscription fees to guys out on the front line.

"I posted my watch to Mr Paul the other day and asked him to

"have a new glass put in it.

"I suggested him taking it to 89 when it's ready.

"Perhaps you'd be so good as to settle the bill and enclose

"the watch when anybody's sending a parcel along.

"There's no hurry.

"Glad to hear the new gardener is a success and the garden is

"looking so well under his care. It must be perfect just now."

This is the last letter he wrote. He actually died two days later.

HE PLAYS LAST POST

Jack Bodenham was one who simply disappeared.

Like so many in the Great War his body was never recovered.

But earlier this year a group of club members took an

emotional trip to the battlefields

to pay their respects to one ex-Rosslyn Park

player who has the rather unique honour of having two graves.

The Belgian trip was a particularly emotional one because we

followed the path of a guy called Alexander Findlater Todd, who

had been a British Lion and then he got two caps for England but

then he, at the age of 40, when war broke out, joined up again.

He was what they called a dugout, he was dug out of retirement to

serve again because he had military experience.

He went off to the Western Front.

And he was at a place called Hill 60,

which is a grim old place which was fought over for the whole course

of the war, right up until 1918.

Where we're standing right now is within 50 feet or

50 yards at least of where Captain Alexander Todd was shot

through the neck on April 18th.

He was on leave at home with his family and came back from

leave on the 17th of April.

On that very same day the British blew the top off that hill

over there, Hill 60, with mines.

It's one of the first examples of mine warfare in the First World War.

They blew the top off the hill,

killing the Germans who were in the trenches on that hill at the time.

Many of the bodies were vaporised.

In the series of counterattacks and attacks that went on for the

next three or four days,

the very next day, so the day after getting off leave from seeing

his family, Alec Todd was shot through the throat.

He was then taken further back to a casualty clearing station

near Poperinge, where sadly

he died, and he was buried in the cemetery where we laid a wreath at

his grave in this very quiet little

cemetery in a back street in Poperinge.

And very emotional.

LAST POST PLAYS

By a bit of an oddity, and this is down to the confusion of war, he's

also on the Menin Gate, which is to those with no known grave.

And I guess you'd put this down to a clerical error,

that in fact he's got a grave and is on the Menin Gate, but in my mind

better to remember them twice than to forget them completely.

They do a wonderful thing, the firemen of Ypres, every night

at 8:00 they sound the Last Post in a very moving ceremony.

On this Menin Gate monument we have 54,896 soldiers

so they decided to

start a ceremony every day to remember all those fallen soldiers.

I started 13 years ago, so normally we play a week on,

a week off so it must already have been a few thousand times.

But I'm one of the youngest in service, because our chief

bugler in May of this year, he will be doing this for 60 years.

After the First World War the whole city was demolished,

they had to start again. Because of all those soldiers who gave

their life for our freedom, we could start again.

BUGLES SOUND

With news of more and more casualties on the battlefields

professional football came under even more pressure.

Casualty figures in the newspapers were a big thing.

You started getting games where the supporters and those

attending the game started to shout across to the players during

the match, "Why aren't you in France?

"What are you doing to support the country at this time of great need?"

And started booing and hissing.

It became apparent that various sections of the Government did feel

professional football was not pulling its weight.

The wording was in a private letter that they had no objection to

occasional recreation but did not feel that professional

football fell into that category.

The FA introduced a load of special recruiting measures on

the 21st of November, 1914. The response was - how should we put it? -

very disappointing and questions were asked in Parliament about it.

Thereafter it was felt that something had to be done to

take account of public opinion.

Literally five days after

Captain Todd's death in August, 1915,

professional football had played its last competitive game.

This is one of the last English league games to be played.

It's Clapton Orient against Leicester.

And it's significant because Clapton's players had played

a major part in changing football's role in the war.

Their march past at the end in uniform gives a clue

as to the outcome of a big decision taken eight months earlier at

a huge and vociferous meeting at Fulham Town Hall.

Up there, in a sadly now derelict meeting room,

Clapton Orient captain

"Spider" Parker decided to walk up on

a small stage in a rather grand room followed by two other players.

It turned out to be an act of great significance.

In Scotland 11 players from Heart of Midlothian Football Club had

already become part of a footballers' battalion but in

England Clapton's players were the first to sign up.

Spider goes up on the stage, signs on the dotted line and behind

him is the Orient goalkeeper Jimmy Hugall,

followed by Richard McFadden and then seven of their team-mates.

So ten Orient players sign up at this meeting.

In the Footballers' Battalion you had professional footballers,

you had amateur footballers, you had football fans,

you had staff from clubs, you had the assistant trainer at

Arsenal, for example, was a member of the Footballers' Battalion.

You had referees and linesmen.

And someone had the bright idea of thinking

that the referees and linesmen

would make ideal NCOs because the footballers were used to

taking their instructions on the field of play and why should

the field of battle be any different?

The battalion proceeded overseas in November, 1915

and went over to France.

The strength of the battalion was roughly 1,000 men.

They undertook their first real offensive action in

June, 1916 at the northern end of the Vimy Ridge before moving down

to the Somme in mid-July,

where they fought in three actions and sustained heavy casualties.

Three of Clapton's players, Richard McFadden, George Scott and

William Jonas, were killed fighting for the Footballers' Battalion.

In today's supporters club bar I met Mary Jaggs,

the niece of Richard McFadden.

She had had her life shaped by her father following in that

player's footsteps all those years ago.

My father brought us down from Glasgow when I was 11

with my brother and sister.

And when we came down we lived in Leyton Park Road, which is

just across the way.

And he took us to the Orient, which... He used to bung us over the wall.

So when we got talking about the games and when we'd go home

and discuss it, my father then told us about his uncle, or our uncle,

and said, "You know that your Uncle Richard played?"

My brother and I just went, "No."

How could he come down from Glasgow to here?

He said he came down as a young boy because there wasn't much

work and evidently he walked down.

He did say that he was quite speedy and that he was a high goal scorer.

My father followed down my uncle because he knew about the Orient.

And that's the reason he came down to live in Leyton.

All our family from the beginning of the 19th century had been

associated with the Orient.

All over Leyton and Clapton historical evidence of those

players' lives is to be found.

Supporter Stephen Jenkins does guided tours and has written

a book about their story and campaigns tirelessly to make

sure they're never forgotten.

How did you get to know about the three players?

Because it's in one of the Orient history books.

Just a paragraph saying the O's lost three players during the

battle of the Somme,

William Jonas, Richard McFadden and George Scott, and I decided to

look into that further myself.

Ended up visiting their war graves,

did it in a day, covering over 400 miles.

Got back exhausted but on the way back one of my friends said,

"You should write a book about this," and that's what I did.

So, specifically, Richard McFadden, because I noticed the block

of flats over there is the McFadden flats.

He was their company sergeant major but he had actually been promoted

to regimental sergeant major but never got to pick up the promotion.

Very tragic, he lost his life while leading

a group of lads along the trenches.

He was hit by a shell blast and taken to a field hospital,

in a little village on the Somme, where it was hoped

he would recover, but he died the following day.

To be a regimental sergeant major takes a special kind of individual.

Clearly a real leader.

He was a real local hero and somebody that was a bit of

a character, as well.

He was, yeah. He saved lives on three occasions

before the war started,

dragging a man from a burning building in Scotland before

he came to the Orient,

and rescuing a baby from a burning building in Clapton Park just

across the road from here,

and then dragging a boy that was drowning from the River Lea.

And he carried on in the same way in the Great War, going out to no-man's-land

on numerous occasions rescuing wounded comrades, and for that

he was awarded the Military Medal.

There were some real characters in the side,

one of which was William Jonas.

Known as Billy to a lot of people, he was

a real pin-up with the female admirers.

Almost like the David Beckham of his time, you know?

He was getting up to 50 letters a week

from the ladies of the Orient.

Whilst he was very, vary happy to receive the accolades,

he wanted to let everyone know that he was happily married.

So he had to ask the Orient to put

an article in the next-day programme saying,

"Whilst I appreciate all the kind wishes and letters being sent

"to me by the ladies of Clapton and Hackney, could you please

"stop, because I'm happily married to my sweetheart Mary-Jane?"

This was the home of William Jonas,

the heart-throb of the ladies at Clapton Orient.

Real character he was, eh?

And Richard McFadden moved in with him as well here?

-Yeah, that's right.

-So it was a real boys' den?

Boys' den, they were boyhood pals having gone to school

together in the north-east.

Richard McFadden come to London first of all when he signed

for the Orient, and he managed to get William Jonas a trial at the club.

Their partnership ended on the Western Front.

What amazes me is we're only one street away from where

Spider Parker lived.

That's right. It's indicative of the fact that the

players lived so local.

I'm sure it's not just Orient's case but clubs

from around the country at the time,

both in football, rugby, even cricket maybe.

They all lived more local than what sportsmen do these days.

So very much the heart of a local community, then?

Definitely, they would have shared the everyday life of the

people in the area,

would have gone to the shops, would have gone to the pubs, I'm sure.

But when you have three people,

their lives taken from such a small geographical area, that must

have had a massive effect on the people in the local community.

It would have done.

The loss of those three players was a major blow,

not just to the football club but certainly for the local area.

As the war finally came to an end and gallant men returned home,

virtually every street in London would have had either

a footballer or a rugby player living there at the time.

So street after street, house after house, counted its losses.

Football may have been slow to react at the start but on

reflection it became clear that many joined the

Footballers' Battalion to save the honour of their game

and fight in some of the bloodiest battles of the war.

4,500 men joined the battalion, of which nearly a quarter perished.

And, as a postscript, soccer won the royal seal of approval.

The Prince of Wales came down to see Clapton Orient play

Notts County as a show of respect for the Orient's war effort.

It shows you how Orient's example was looked upon in high

places at the time.

As for rugby, it was widely accepted that without players from

clubs like Rosslyn Park volunteering with gusto

so early on the result could have been very different.

So it had a huge rise in popularity but it lost thousands of its

young players. So it had to deal with much more misery than joy.

Rugby borrows the language of warfare. You hear it all the time,

talking about guys in the trenches, people with boots like Howitzers.

Rugby and warfare share a common language but at the end of the day

you've got to remember the injury time in war lasts a whole lifetime

and the whole team doesn't get to go for a beer after the game.

Hear more incredible stories about what happened in your area

during the war with World War One At Home

at bbc.co.uk/ww1.