In 1914 the town football team came under pressure to support the war effort. Football was seen as a distraction for young men who ought to have been enlisting and there was national debate on the morality of professional football being played whilst the country was at war. (Some teams – famously Edinburgh’s Heart of Midlothian – answered the call by joining up en masse.)
In late August, in the hope of avoiding criticism, a nervous Surrey County Football Association gave local teams a dispensation to continue to play matches, but only if all receipts went to the Prince of Wales’ Relief Fund.
But by early September the ‘Chicks’ faced critical letters in the local paper suggesting that there ought not be enough able-bodied young men left to form a team. At a meeting at the Red Lion Hotel the club cancelled all its fixtures for the season, announcing that that it would be unpatriotic and ‘ungracious’ to those who had enlisted to carry on playing and to give their places to those who had declined to enlist.
The Dorking Cricket Club at Pixham abandoned all fixtures in the autumn of 1914 but every now and then throughout the war a makeshift team would be put together to play visiting soldiers or hospital teams.
The Warnham Staghounds followed suit and in December the annual Boxing Day hunt meet at the Burford Bridge Hotel was also cancelled.
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