Introduction

In the early stages of the Great War many writers posited a simple Newboltian equivalence between the fields of cricket and battle. Confirming the extent to which the images and symbolism of sports literature had become thoroughly assimilated, the Great War produced a great deal of doggerel verse that figuratively reduced the conflict to a series of sporting events. 'The Cricketers of Flanders' by American-born Royal Fusilier James Norman Hall, suggests that such rhetoric was believed to reassure and uplift the non-combatant population. Still inflected with Newboltian symbolism, images of the cricket field were nevertheless utilised antithetically to gauge the full horror of the war, and to represent the possibility of future peace and the reproduction of the old world. The Newbolt report of 1921 had led to the consolidation of English literature as a central part of the national culture. The spectres of England's cricketing past inhabited other cricket writings of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.