ABSTRACT
Until the late 1980s, historians of sport in general, and footballin particular, had tended to overlook the inter-war years. Much of the initial work had focused on the origins and embryonic growth of sport in the Victorian and Edwardian period – the ‘making’ of games in their recognisably ‘modern’ forms – and seemed to find a natural ending with the outbreak of war. Underlying this has been an assumption, particularly in football, of continuity between the pre-and post-1914 periods. The way in which the game was played, watched, understood and identified with seemed to be much the same in 1935 as it had been in 1905. Yet the work of Nicholas Fishwick, Stephen Jones and Dave Russell has emphasised the changes that took place in the game and its social role, changes which in Russell’s opinion ‘almost seem to lead into a new era’.1
Martin Johnes’s study of south Wales, meanwhile, provides an important reminder of the uneven development of football. Here, as in many parts of Britain outside what Fishwick loosely refers to as the ‘traditional areas’, it was not before but after 1914 that football matured into a game with a genuinely mass following and popular profile.2
