ABSTRACT
In November 1935 a Football Pictorial cartoon looked forward to the England-Germany international scheduled to be played on 4 December at Tottenham Hotspur’s White Hart Lane ground. Despite being dwarfed by the German goalkeeper, an England forward scored by shouting ‘heil’ and slipping the ball past the goalkeeper whose arm had been raised automatically in the Nazi salute. 1 Inevitably, the fixture gained considerable visibility in both the footballing and political senses, especially as it resulted in what Sir John Simon, the Home Secretary (1935–37), described as the ‘Nazi invasion’ of London, it being the largest one-day influx of foreign visitors to date. 2 Moreover, controversies within and outside Britain about the forthcoming Berlin Olympics meant that the match was viewed in part as a ‘test case’ for the 1936 Games as well as yet another element in the Nazi ‘cultural offensive ... to give British people a favourable impression of Germans’. 3
