Читать книгу The Times Great War Letters: Correspondence during the First World War - James Owen - Страница 39

RACING AND FOOTBALL

4 March 1915

SIR,—LORD ROBERT CECIL, speaking in the House of Commons, asserts that football and horse-racing are on exactly the same footing. I am curious to know how he arrives at this conclusion. Football is played with a ball and 22 strong and sturdy young men. Racing is played with horses, ridden by small men, the majority under 8st., and never more than 9st. A football when its day is over is useless. Racehorses when they can no longer race, if they have proved themselves on a race-course to be sound and good, retire to the stud, where, as stallions or brood mares, they continue the stock of the English thoroughbred, which forms the foundation of horse-breeding in this country, and from which have come those horses that, in the earlier stages of war, rendered such invaluable service. To be a good football player you must be big, strong, courageous, active, and alert, all the qualities you look for in a soldier. To be a good jockey, you require these qualities, except that instead of being big, you must be small—no one can be a jockey who weighs over 9st., and a large majority weigh very much less. Consequently they are not fit to be soldiers.

If there was no racing a great many people who are unfitted for other employment would be thrown out of work; can anyone say that the same result would arise if those professional football matches did not take place? If professional football matches were not allowed, it would not stop football; and there can be no one who wants to stop it when played as a game—but if race-meetings are stopped, the whole machinery comes to a standstill, and needless loss is caused to every one connected with it. The arguments for the continuance of racing are many, there are also arguments against it, and for which we most of us have sympathy, but the former outweigh the latter considerably, and I can say from my own personal knowledge that many owners of racehorses, had they simply studied their own inclinations and convenience, would have shut up their racing establishments at the beginning of the war.

Yours, &c.,

GEORGE LAMBTON

The Football League was shortly to suspend competitive matches. Horse-racing continued for another two years.