Matthew Taylor, "Sport and the Home Front: Wartime Britain at Play, 1939-45" (Routledge, 2020)

Today we are joined by Matthew Taylor, Professor of History at De Montfort University, and author of Sport and the Home Front: Wartime Britain at Play, 1939-1945 (Routledge, 2022). In our conversation, we discussed why studies of British sport histories have frequently neglected the Second World War, how various arms of the British state attempted to mobilize sport during the conflict, and how and why ordinary people included sport in their everyday life despite the deprivations of the era. In Sport and the Home Front, Taylor uses a range of historical sources, including state documents, newspapers, diaries and memories, and most especially reports from Mass Observation, in order to better understand why and how people played sport in Britain during the Second World War. He shows that sport was both more commonplace and more meaningful than previous historians have assumed. Sport thus provided a lens to examine whether, in what ways, and to what extent the Second World War was a people’s war that unified the nation at a time of great threat. The book is organized thematically, with seven chapters analysing everything from state interventions into sport, the difficulties faced by clubs, and sport and the radio. These chapters cover a range of sports including popular games such as football, rugby, and cycling, but also less commonly discussed competitions including greyhound and horse racing. In each chapter, Taylor eschews any top-down analysis. Indeed, his work shows that the British government had a range of different views about sports – different ministries were more or less favourably disposed towards different sporting practices. Athletes and sporting officials also fought to help define what appropriate sport during the wartime might be and what value sports can bring to a country at war. Greyhound racing faced a possible ban. School children learned resilience through games. The War Ministry worried about football stadiums being bombed. Factory workers preserved their morale playing on Sundays. Newspapers