Armistice Day: shame FA didn't make a stand in 1914

SO, THE VALIANT Football Association has fought the dastardly Fifa and won the right for England to wear poppies on their armbands during Saturday's friendly against Spain at Wembley. It is, after all, Armistice Day today, and as FA spokesman Adrian Bevington said: "We're really committed to supporting the armed services, remembering them and supporting those currently serving."

All of which is terribly admirable, if also a little ironic. For there was a time when the FA wasn't quite so in step with Britain's armed forces.

When Britain went to war with Germany in August 1914, all cricket and rugby competitions ceased as players flocked to enlist. The Rugby Football Union asked that all its members aged between 19 and 35 join up and stadiums such as Leicester's Welford Road were turned into recruitment centres.

Football, however, saw no reason to disrupt its schedule in order to help defeat Kaiser Wilhelm, even though many professional players were keen to enlist. Charlie Buchan, the Sunderland and England centre-forward, recalled that he "wanted to join up but, when the league decided that the competition should run until the following April, I was reminded that I had a contract to carry out".

As the autumn of 1914 wore on and casualties in France among the British Expeditionary Force began to mount, prominent figures rushed to condemn the FA's attitude.

The writer Arthur Conan Doyle said the time for sport was now at an end and "if a footballer had strength of limb, let them serve and march in the field of battle". The former England cricket captain turned writer, C B Fry, demanded that football be abolished and in November 1914 Lord Durham launched a stinging attack on Sunderland FC, which was paraphrased by the Athletic News:

"He did know there were eleven men wearing Sunderland colours who, he thought, ought to have preferred wearing Khaki. He did not know whether it was ignorance or – he was almost ashamed to say the word – cowardice on their part. If it was the latter, could Sunderland people go to look at a football match?"

The Athletic News was one of the few newspapers to defend the conduct of professional footballers, pointing out that the continuation of league matches boosted morale on the home front and provided a welcome distraction for soldiers on leave.

The paper was in the minority, however, and when the Bishop of Chelmsford used an address at the beginning of December 1914 to declare that he could not understand "men in the prime of life taking large salaries at a time like this for kicking a ball about", the FA reluctantly began to relent.

First it allowed unmarried players to break their contracts, while also encouraging recruitment rallies at grounds during half-time. Yet many of the top clubs held their players to the contracts that expired only in April 1915. Charlie Buchan enlisted in the Grenadier Guards the moment he was released from Sunderland, arriving at his depot to be greeted by a cold-eyed drill sergeant. "We don't tame lions here," he told the England striker. "We eat them."

Buchan went on to serve three years in the trenches, winning a Military Medal before returning to play for Sunderland and then Arsenal. But despite the courage of Buchan and dozens of other professional footballers, the initial response of the FA in answering its country's call to arms had irreparably tarnished the sport's image for many.

One result was that rugby became the dominant winter sport at public schools in the years after the war. As one anonymous headmaster wrote to The Times in February 1919, rugby "has proved itself to be unequalled by any other game as a school of true manhood and leadership".

The FA's current stance is to be applauded though the cynic might say it's nothing more than manufactured emotion, and an attempt to atone for its predecessors who held football to be more important than war. ·