Football and the General Strike
Plymouth Strikers v Police
The 1925-26 football season ended on May 1st 1926 with Huddersfield Town, once under the tutelage of the legendary Herbert Chapman, league champions for the third year in a row. Chapman, of course, would repeat this feat with Arsenal in the 1930s – some achievement for a former player at Swindon Town.
The planned international against France in Paris for May 13 had to be cancelled because of the General Strike – impossible to travel – and the nine days of the strike with attendant consequences meant that a match against Belgium was delayed until May 24. Belgium lost 5-3: an explicable goal-fest as this was the first season to witness the new offside rule (2 not 3 – you know what I mean …) and, in consequence, there was around about a 50% increase in goals scored in the top division.
I looked at the attendance figures for the last game of the season and they were much lower than I anticipated. But with so high a proportion of the workforce miners back then, and, again, in consequence, so many spectators at the matches often being miners, and with the wage subsidy for miners ending the day before … and with all the nearly a million miners locked out from that day unless they accepted wage cuts and longer hours, spectators and players and directors and managers all knew that there was a distinct probability that the TUC would call a general strike in support of the miners.
Within a couple of days, twenty per cent of the workforce would be out with the TUC calling out the first wave of unions …
Money was tight. Watching a football match a luxury, perhaps.
The spectators would pretty well have all been men and even though Kipling had written of ‘flannelled fools at the wicket’ and ‘muddied oafs at the goals’ during the Boer War, and even though an amateur miners’ team from West Auckland had won the first ‘world cup’ before the Great War, and even though football has become half-mythologised after the Great War (Christmas truce; Walter Tull; officers kicking a ball over the top at the Somme and Loos; Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Disabled’), the flat-capped sepia images of massed men at football matches doesn’t tell the whole story.
In fact, there were over 150 women’s football teams in the post-war period and women’s matches could attract a higher attendance than those of the men’s top professional clubs. But the F.A. in its wisdom closed the gates on women’s football in, I think, 1921. It would be another fifty years before that ban was reversed.
Now to the police. The first Wembley cup final occurred three years before the General Strike – the famous final where (again) a half-mythologised tale has entered national, collective memory: the overcrowded match where safety was maintained by a policeman on a white horse. Four years before that the police had been on strike. During the Great War, many men who would join the police after 1918 and many men who would be on strike in 1926 would have been comrades in arms. So, in some ways, perhaps it’s not utterly surprising that there could have been the possibility of mutual understanding between police and strikers in 1926 in some localities, even though at a structural class level, they were ultimately bound to be opposed during the nine days in May.
So even though foreign commentators found it fantastic, incredible, utterly bizarre and quintessentially English that a football match between police and strikers could take place, perhaps there is some sort of explanatory context.
But having said that, there is only one match definitively on record (but see addenda point 3 below): that match in Plymouth. The British Worker carried a small piece the day preceding the match: ‘PLYMOUTH: Teams representing the local police and strikers are to play a game of football to-morrow. The Chief Constable will kick off. “Plymouth is playing its part admirably in the great national dispute thrust upon us by the Conservative Government,” was the message from the Trade Council.’
The next day, a column ran thus: ‘Strikers beat Police at Football MUSIC AMD DRAMA In many parts of the country excellent amusement and recreation facilities have been provided for the strikers and their families.
Special football and cricket matches and a variety of other sports took place yesterday, while there were plenty of indoor attractions, such as concerts, dramatic entertainments, and whist drives.
The keen desire of the strikers to keep on good terms with the authorities is exemplified by a novel event at Plymouth, where, in the presence of several thousand people, a strikers’ team defeated the Police team at football by 2 goals to 1. The wife of the Chief Constable kicked off.
Railwaymen at Play
A strike football match between members of the National Union of Railwaymen and the Railway Clerks’ Association at Wimbledon was won by the latter by four goals to two. In the evening, under the auspices of the Strike Committee, an open-air dramatic entertainment, held in the rear of the Labour Hall, attracted a tremendous crowd. “The united workers of Wimbledon,” said a member of the Strike Committee, “spent one of the happiest days of their lives.”
Football Ground Lent
Organised sports have been arranged in the Workington area for trade unionists by the Trades Council, which has secured the free use of the Association Football Ground.’
The British Gazette (the government’s newspaper) on May 10 ‘practically crowed about the scene’, according to Jonathan Schneer in Nine Days in May. ‘Churchill’s British Gazette’ reported thus: “Several thousands of persons had gathered to watch … The wife of the Chief Constable kicked off. The match was played in the best spirit from start to finish …” Even the New York Times carried the story, informing its readers that 4,000 “striking workers marched in an orderly procession headed by a brass band.”
(David Torrance in The Edge of Revolution points out that ‘Churchill wanted to exclude coverage’ and he was ‘overruled’ in Cabinet by those who put forward the view that ‘it was good propaganda.’ We also have one last football reference from this 2026 publication: the government commandeered paper supplies destined for the British Worker but the newspaper was saved by supplies from elsewhere, including Racing and Football Outlook. Which is a fact I like.)
Here’s a last sporting flavour from the British Gazette from May 1926:
‘CRICKET AND THE STRIKE M.C.C.’s Suggestion for the Test Matches
The following minute has been issued by the M.C.C.:
“The Committee of M.C.C. have no desire to dictate to either the counties or to cricketers, but believe that both may be desirous of an opinion … owing to transport difficulties, some matches may have to be reduced to two days, or even abandoned, and although their elevens may be much weakened owing to the absence of some cricketers on public duty,
they suggest to cricketers that they should be guided by a sense of public duty rather than by affection for their counties, but they strongly recommend that the best possible starting elevens should be put into the field against the Australians, as on those occasions cricketers may, out of courtesy to our guests, legitimately obtain leave from their public duties.”’
I wonder what those public duties were …
Oh, it’s such a lark being a volunteer and helping to break this damned strike, don’t you know. Just listen to this!
‘Seeing it Through’
Tommy is stoking an engine,
Grandpa waves flags red and green,
Innocent Florrie
Is driving a lorry,
While Millicent runs a canteen.
Daddy, of course, is a Special,
Mother is ready to nurse,
And we all think alike
That this jolly old strike
Is bad – but it might have been worse!
Addenda:
- On the previous day of the football match in Plymouth a confrontation took place in the city when police provided protection to ‘volunteers’ who were trying to break the strike by taking out trams on to the road. There was a mass confrontation with thousands gathering to express their vehement opposition.
- Beatrice Webb’s diary: May 18
‘The Government has gained immense prestige in the world and the British Labour Movement has made itself ridiculous. A strike … with a football match between the police and the strikers and ends in unconditional surrender after nine days with densely-packed reconciliation services at all chapels and churches of Great Britain attended by the strikers and their families will make the Continental socialists blaspheme.
Let me add that the failure of the General Strike shows what a sane people the British are. If only our revolutionaries would realise the hopelessness of their attempt to turn the British workman into a Russian Red and the British businessman and country gentleman into an Italian Fascist. The British are hopelessly good-natured and [full of] common sense …’
October 24
‘The state of mind of the miners and their wives was less easy to discover than their state of health. I had a lunch of the thirty chairwomen and secretaries of the Women’s Sections and a delegate conference of about four hundred representative members. They all seemed in good spirits, running relief funds and collecting money by whist drives, football matches (women players), dances and socials; they had raised, in the last two months, £1,700 for the central relief fund for pregnant and lying-in women and infants. Some of the lodges were paying a few shillings a week to the unmarried men; the [Poor Law] Guardians were paying 12s a week to the wives and 4s a week (3s 6d deducted for school meals) to each child.’ (My emphasis)
- Nine Days in May Jonathan Schneer OUP 2026 Schneer looks at the Newcastle area where the authorities though troops might be needed to augment the police and special constables The Northern Light strike bulletin reported on May 10 that, “The friendliest relations possible already exist between the strikers and our friends in the forces”; the authorities were worried that most of the troops were locals and reported to London that the Newcastle Strike Committee was “endeavouring to seduce the troops from loyalty to their oath by the subtle means of arranging sports between the soldiers and workers.” Scheer writes, ‘Most accounts of the General Strike point to the football match … played between strikers and police in Plymouth, as evidence of British workers’ ineradicable moderation. Perhaps that is too fond and simplistic an interpretation.’
- Gloucester Strike Bulletin May 10
FOOTBALL
Gloucester Strikers V Forest of Dean
To-day (Monday) at 3 o’clock
On SISSON ROAD GROUND
Admission 2d.
Proceeds for Relief Fund
- Gloucester Strike Bulletin May 11
SPORT
FOOTBALL
Co-operative Employees V Gloucester Strikers
On Sisson Road Ground
Look out for further particulars
- Gloucester Strike Bulletin May 12
SPORT
FOOTBALL
Gloucester Strikers v Forest of Dean
Rain delayed the start and greatly lessened the attendance at the very pleasant football match before a team of Gloucester strikers and Forest of an strikers on the Co-operative Field, Sisson Road, on Monday afternoon.
The first half resulted in no score, the Gloucester forwards missing a number of chances. In the second half the Forest of Dean scored twice from quick bursts, and then again from a penalty.
Final Score: Forest 3, Gloucester 0
Conclusion
T.S. Eliot:
‘We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring,
Will be to arrive where we started,
And know the place for the first time.’