The Great War and the Greatest Game -- The Loss of a Footballing Elite

For the few brave souls that have read this series in its entirety, you will probably have noticed a marked difference between Canadian soccer in the late 19th and early 20th century (1885 v. USA, the 1888 tour of Britain, the 1904 Galt FC win), and soccer after the First World War. I've touched on this topic in one or two posts, yet because it is of tantamount importance to the direction soccer took in Ontario and Canada as a whole, it deserves further discussion.

Colin Jose remarked to me via email that that while league play continued through WWI, the war was totally devastating for the development of Canadian football. As Colin writes in his lovely, understated way --

"...Look at the figures for World War One. More than 56,500 Canadians died in the conflict. Canada lost 3,598 soldiers in one day at the famous battle of Vimy Ridge, while 7,004 were wounded. At the battle of Beaumont-Hamel, the Newfoundland regiment lost 801 soldiers. Even today Newfoundland doesn't celebrate Canada Day on July 1, on The Rock it's Beaumont -Hamel day. One other thing about Vimy Ridge. The soldiers attacking the ridge, either kicked, or carried a soccer ball with them. That ball is in the museum of the Royal Canadian Regiment in London, Ontario." (Ed note: my great-grandfather was among those at Vimy, and, I'm not kidding here, Timothy Findley wrote The Wars partly based on his letters home -- 'Tiff' was my grandmother's cousin).

Royal Canadian Regiment Museum
Curator, Claus Breed, with the Vimy
Football

Countless Canadian-born players, coaches and administrators had marched off to the battlefields of Europe, never to be seen again. The year 1919 provides a clean break with the past as far as Canadian-born leaders in the game are concerned; it seemed there could only truly be one David Forsyth.

Yet there is more to it than meets the eye. Post-war Canada witnessed an enormous influx of British immigration, primarily to fill in the gaps left by the mass slaughter of the four previous years. This was not mere happenstance; the British government actively encouraged the settlement of the colonies with the Empire Settlement Act. This ordinance played into the hands of Canadian government officials worried that there weren't enough adult professionals to keep the post-war economy afloat. The incoming English, Scottish and Irish immigrants were in love with football, and so it seems natural that, as Colin again points out, "...the first six presidents of the Ontario Football Association were all born in Canada. Between 1913, when Thomas Guthrie was elected president and 1929 when Tom Elliott was elected, all of the presidents were British born."

You can see this gradual change with the teams that came to the forefront with the rise of the Inter-Cities league in 1921, and later the professional National Soccer league in 1926: Toronto Scottish, Toronto Ulster United, etc etc. This 'Anglocization' is part of our game and deserves to be recognized as such, but one wonders which direction football may have taken in Canada had history deigned to be kind to the young, hopeful idealists, and allowed them to stay home to kick a football in Galt, or New Westminster, and not on the muddy, blood-soaked fields of Vimy, the Sommes, Ypres, and countless others...

5th Canadian Field Ambulance Soccer Team
(Front row, L-R): Tribe, Hay, McKerror, Bryant, Shorrocks, Wood, Simpson. (Centre row, L-R): McLean, Crompton, Thurston, Moore, Bridges, Clarke, Saunders, Thompson, Walker, Lickley. (Rear row, L-R): Rigby, Rich, Graves, Burgess, Sinclair, Sharpe, Hill. (Courtesy Canadian Archives).