In this multi-part series, I will look at the connection between the world of work and baseball in Great Britain from its origins to the start of the Second World War. Later parts will cover the story of the growth and maturity of teams like Kodak, Thames Board Mills, and their East London counterpart, Ford Sports, in the interwar period, alongside the separate, but concurrent, development of works baseball in the Midlands. But first, I want to look at the origins of that connection and the role that baseball played in efforts to promote physical recreation amongst the working classes in Great Britain, and vice versa, with particular attention on the late-Edwardian blue-collar British Baseball Association.

Baseball found its earliest adherents in the white-collar workers of America’s Northeastern urban centres, particularly New York and Chicago, and offered its players lessons in the science and teamwork that exemplified modern business practice.[1] In its early years, baseball found itself in a life-or-death struggle with cricket in the competition for the hearts and minds of American sportsmen. That the victory went ultimately to baseball was due in no small part to the more predictable, and more predictably shorter, duration of baseball games being more compatible with the time-is-money ethos of Yankee capitalism. Thus, from its origins, the connection between baseball and the world of work has been key to the survival and growth of the game.

[1] This analysis comes virtue of: S. M. Gelber, ‘“Their Hands Are All Out Playing:” Business and Amateur Baseball, 1845-1917’, Journal of Sport History, 1984, 11, 5–27. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43609288, accessed 8 June 2025.

Prequel: Iron and Ash, the story of the blue-collar 1890s Middlesbrough baseball scene.

Health, Friendship, and Baseball, Part I: 1890—1919 and the late-Edwardian, blue-collar British Baseball Association.

Health, Friendship, and Baseball, Part II: the blue-collar game in South Wales from 1904 until 1918, a period that saw the game explode in popularity before suffering the trauma of the First World War. The war years would also bring American baseball to South Wales.

Health, Friendship, and Baseball, Part III: the blue-collar game in South Wales from 1919 until 1939, a period that saw the emergence of women’s baseball in South Wales and the return to the region of the American game.

Health, Friendship, and Baseball, Part IV: The industrial leagues in Birmingham, Midlands, from their inception in 1934 until the start of the Second World War.

Health, Friendship, and Baseball, Part V: The story of the interwar Kodak Company baseball section, Harrow, Middlesex, in the words of its members.

Sequel: By Kind Permission of Colonel J.A. Killian, the story of the wartime Midlands League.

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