{"id":1441,"date":"2022-04-22T10:49:21","date_gmt":"2022-04-22T09:49:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hosting.northumbria.ac.uk\/warephemera\/?p=1441"},"modified":"2022-04-22T11:12:25","modified_gmt":"2022-04-22T10:12:25","slug":"dr-alex-jackson-on-football-ephemera-and-the-first-world-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hosting.northumbria.ac.uk\/warephemera\/dr-alex-jackson-on-football-ephemera-and-the-first-world-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Dr Alex Jackson on Football, Ephemera and the First World War"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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\"Alex
The author posing with his magnum opus<\/figcaption><\/figure>

Dr Alexander Jackson has been a curator at the National Football Museum since 2011. For the last eight years, he has been researching and writing, Football\u2019s Great War: Association Football on the English Home Front, 1914-1918<\/em>, out now with Pen & Sword. He has written on various aspects of football history and has a particular interest in football in the first half of the twentieth century.<\/strong><\/p>

Alex has kindly provided us with some reflections on the role of ephemera in his research. If you enjoy this post, you can find the book at this link<\/a>\u00a0 and Alex is on Twitter at @DrAlexJack1<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Why have you written a book about Association Football on the Home Front during the First World War? <\/strong><\/h4>

It started when I worked on the museum’s 2014 exhibition on this topic. It was wonderful chance to spend time with the collections, especially as we started to find more and more relevant material. During the research, I found that there was more about football at the front, whereas, outside of women\u2019s football, the home-front tended to be underexplored. After the exhibition finished, I thought I\u2019d continue exploring it in my spare time. I quickly found lots of amazing material and decided to keep going. It\u2019s taken a while, but it\u2019s been worth it!<\/p>

I think the story of wartime football on the Home Front is important for three reasons. Firstly, most histories of the Home Front tend to pass over the 1915-1918 period, which gives the impression that football shutdown, but that\u2019s not the case. So, it\u2019s something of a hidden history. Secondly, it connects with the wider experience of war in all sorts of ways, from military recruitment to charity work, to the changing place of women in society. And finally, it’s an important period in the game\u2019s history, when the payment of players was temporarily banned \u2013 a pause if you will, in the growing commercialisation of the game that started in the 1880s and that continues to define the game today.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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What role did ephemera play in researching the book? <\/strong><\/h4>

Ephemera was vitally important to the research. While I used traditional archival resources, like the Minute Books of football organisations and clubs, I used a variety of other sources like letters, newspapers, programmes, boys’ story papers, collectables, postcards, illustrations, and cartoons. These were vital to finding the human detail and voices that hopefully bring some life to the book.<\/p>

One of the most important types has been the Saturday evening football or sports special. These newspapers were the most important commercial by-products of the rise of professional football, described by Tony Mason as \u2018much part of the cultural scene as the gas lamp and the fish and chip shop.\u2019 They are rich, nuanced, and complex sources, still awaiting a specialist history of their own. For the book, they emerged as an important compendium of all sorts of other ephemera \u2013 letters, photographs, cartoons, sketches, and illustrations. In many cases, the originals have long since disappeared, so it\u2019s only by carefully searching through these papers that we can start to explore the experiences of many ordinary fans and players. By way of example, the image you can see below is a self-portrait that a Nottingham soldier sent to the Nottingham Football Post<\/em>. He was a frequent correspondent, and the newspaper printed a variety of letters, poems, cartoons, and photographs that he sent in. It\u2019s a tiny treasure-trove of one man\u2019s wartime experience and how illustrates how the home and front lines connected.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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