ABSTRACT
The importance of sport as a symbol of ordinary British social life was crucial to its wartime significance. Attitudes to sport in wartime Britain were also often influenced by arrangements in other countries involved in the conflict. Sport’s importance as a provider of morale connected Stanley Rous, Phyllis Colson, and other important administrators tightly with policy makers and officials in Whitehall. The war turned sport into a political issue and into a matter of national significance. Representations of sport remained overwhelmingly masculine during the war. Because the imagined war worker whose morale it was assumed was being boosted by sport was unequivocally male, the activity itself became gendered in much political and cultural discourse. The ‘unspectacular normality’ of sport in everyday life was also a common feature of many wartime societies. Different phases of the war prompted diverse reactions, and the playing and watching of sport emerged as less socially acceptable at some times than at others.
