Kodak opened the season with a convincing 17–1 win over Thames Board Mills on Sunday, Brown pitching steadily and being unlucky not to obtain a shut-out. The fielding was excellent and Duffey, Cox, and Feasey led the batting, which was consistent rather than spectacular. Kodak have four players in the South of England team to meet the U.S. Navy at Selhurst Park on May 26. S. Russell, J. Mahoney, P. Staples, and R. Wayrenan.[1]

By the time the Kodak and Thames Board Mills teams faced each other at the start of the 1963 Southern Baseball Association (SBA) season, both teams had been in existence for decades. This longevity, which was extremely rare in baseball in Great Britain before the modern era, though impossible without the dedication of committed individuals, was due primarily to the fact that they were company teams influenced primarily by internal policies toward recreation, not the external wax and wane in interest in the sport. As such, they were inheritors of a connection between baseball and the world of work that goes all the way back to the origins of the game.

In this two-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. Part Two 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.[2] 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.

In time, the appeal of baseball would spread to blue-collar workers, aided by the belief of paternalistic company owners that playing the sport improved fitness, fostered company loyalty, and taught employees to work together as a team, thereby teaching what one author has termed the three graces of Victorian progress: ‘health, friendship, and science’.[3]

Many of those same business owners saw sport—any sport—as a counter to the regrettable tendency of their workers to indulge in vice and indolence, something that baseball’s boosters were quick to pick up on, with no less a personage than Henry Chadwick, the ‘father of baseball’, extolling the virtues of baseball as a counter to the worst tendencies of the ordinary working man, promoting instead a ‘love of discipline, order, and fair play’.[4]

In England, these sentiments found their echo in the ethos of the ‘Muscular Christianity’ movement, exemplified by the character of Tom Brown in Thomas Hughes’ famous novel, which was the inspiration for the physical recreation movement embodied by the National Physical Recreation Society (NPRS), which was formed in 1886, ‘to promote physical recreation among the working classes’ and, as we will see below, the secular evangelism of the University Settlement movement.[5]

It is no coincidence, then, that the early promoters of American baseball[6] in England would point to its virtues as a sport for both the physically active and the actively employed. Newton Crane, the American-born first president of the National Baseball Association (NBA) in England,[7] writing in his 1891 introduction to baseball for British readers, stated that baseball…

…was found to be a hardy, vigorous game, which called into play the wits as well as the muscles. It could be begun and finished in a couple of hours, and thus afforded in summer evenings, and on holiday afternoons, the recreation and diversion required by young men engaged in work and business.[8]

One British company owner in particular would prove receptive to that message.

The first baseball match ever played in Derby took place on the splendid ground provided by Mr. Francis Ley for the recreation of his employees this (Saturday) afternoon. The contestants were Ley's Recreation Club and Erdington. The former club have had the advantage of the coaching of three American professionals Reidenbach, Bryan and Bullas—and they proved themselves more expert at every department of the game. So one-sided was the game that the close of two innings each Derby led by 23 love. Bullas and Reidenbach then went on to the other side, and this made the game more equal.[9]

In the late 1880s, while on a visit to business partners in Cleveland, Ohio, Derbyshire industrialist Francis Ley became enamoured of the game and requested the transfer of employees from the Cleveland works to his own Vulcan works in Derby so that he could add a baseball section to the works recreation club. Two of those transferred employees, John Reidenbach and Simeon Bullas, went on to form a battery of such lethality that Ley’s team swept all before it.[10]

The Reidenbach–Bullas battery had such a destabilising effect on the progress of the first baseball league to be established in England (in 1890) that Ley had to promise not to field the two men together in matches against any other team in the league except the second-place team Aston Villa. Ley failed to keep that promise, which led to words being exchanged between Ley and the owners of other teams in the league, and a lawsuit—subsequently withdrawn—between Ley and the sponsor of the league, American sports equipment manufacturer and baseball booster Albert Spalding.[11] This rancour resulted, ultimately, in Ley withdrawing his team from the league. The issue of professionalism would continue to dog attempts to introduce American baseball to Great Britain.

Ley would continue to support his baseball team for the next ten years, leading it to three national championships, and would himself rise to the top of the game in England, becoming chairman of the [UK’s] National Baseball Association in 1895 and remaining in charge until the organisation’s demise in 1900.[12] He was the exemplar of the paternalistic employer, very much in the mode of the founders of the physical recreation movement, in that, his was a top-down approach directed at teaching the working man and woman that physical recreation was good for them (whether they liked it or not).

In the years immediately following the success of the Derby club, other paternalistic employers in England would look to Ley’s example and set up their own baseball clubs. Chief amongst these would be Scottish distiller Thomas R. Dewar and American-born confectioner William B. Fuller, whose eponymous teams played in the London Baseball Association (LBA) of 1895, with the Fuller’s team going on to play Ley’s Derby in that year’s National Challenge Cup. However, these teams were something of outliers in this discussion as, although both Dewar and Fuller aspired to field teams formed of their employees, in practice, the LBA never really broke free from its origins as a league formed of American and Canadian music hall entertainers playing largely to crowds of fellow expatriates. Both the Dewar and Fuller’s teams would draw largely from that same pool, and it is perhaps more accurate to say that, as fielded, these teams, like other teams in the LBA, such as Remington Typewriters and ‘St Jacob’s Oil’ (affiliated with the London branch of the Charles A Vogeler Company of Baltimore, MD), were sponsored by companies rather than being company teams, whatever the aspirations of their backers.[13]

Instead, the next important chapter in the connection between baseball and physical recreation for the working man and woman would be written largely by people more directly inspired by Hughes-esque Muscular Christianity. Chief among them would be the founders of the ‘University Settlement’ movement. University settlements were institutions set up in Britain’s inner cities by academics and alumni of Britain’s universities for the betterment of the lives of working men and women. The settlements were staffed by volunteers drawn from students of those same universities, men and women who saw themselves as secular missionaries (it was no coincidence that many were divinity students) preaching something akin to Chadwick’s maxim of ‘discipline, order, and fair play’.[14] Baseball would play its part in spreading that message. The Splott University Settlement, founded by academics and alumni of University College Cardiff, would run its own baseball team, playing in the local league operating under the English not American code,[15] for over thirty years, and also play an important role in the development of women’s baseball in Great Britain, but, I will save that story for Part Two of this series. Here, I want to focus on the baseball activities of the University Settlement in London’s East End.

BASEBALL NOTES. After a long interval, in which the team has had no work to do whatever, the Brentford Baseball players were very keen on Saturday last for the match with Fairbairn House. This was the fifth time the teams had met in the London League.[16]

Fairbairn House was the boy’s club attached to the Mansfield House University Settlement in Canning Town, East London. It would achieve lasting fame as an incubator for footballers—West Ham Football Club started as the Thames Ironworks company team, all of whose players learned the game while members of Fairbairn House; while Jack Leslie, a player of African-Caribbean heritage who would go on to captain Plymouth Argyle in the 1920s and 1930s, was a notable individual old boy. As an aside, I have seen one source refer to Thames Ironworks fielding a baseball team in the late 1890s; however, I have been unable to confirm that with a second source.[17]

Fairbairn House first fielded a baseball team in 1906 and its involvement with the game would, like its Welsh counterpart, last, off and on, for over thirty years. Like the longer-lasting company teams, it was able to sustain this effort irrespective of external changing tastes in baseball precisely because the game aligned with its internal goals as an institution. One thing to note in this respect was that its student volunteers came from Oxford University, which was host to a thriving baseball scene thanks to the presence of Rhodes Scholars. In that respect, it is hard to view it as a coincidence that 1906 was also the first time that an Oxford team played against a London team, this being in a match that was the prelude to the launch of the leagues to which Fairbairn House would belong.[18] However, at the same time, it should be acknowledged that the immediate impetus for the founding of the team was the fact that it already had a football team and it was to football-playing institutions that many of the early promoters of American baseball in Great Britain looked for supporters.

For years, we have both been earnest students and followers of Association Football, and it seemed to us that Baseball was the very game for the football clubs to adopt during the close season, beginning May 1 and ending September 1.[19]

The first attempt to launch American baseball in Great Britain, which led to the 1890 league that included Ley’s Derby club, was built on the back of the creation of a baseball association whose council was formed primarily of the chairmen of Association Football clubs or their representatives.[20] Most of the teams in the league, other than Ley’s, were allied with football clubs and included football players in their rosters. This was in line with baseball’s British boosters’ belief that the best way to promote the sport was as a close season complement to Association Football, drawing from the same player base and appealing to the same fans (and playing on the same grounds). That league failed in part due to the disparity between the skills of these players—none of whom, of course, had grown up with the game—and Ley’s American-born guns-for-hire, and in part, due to the distance between the teams, requiring fans to travel, for example, from Stoke to Derby—a major commitment in time and money for people at best ambivalent about this new sport.

Four years later, the founders of the LBA tried to address both of the above issues by basing all its teams in London and employing mostly expatriate players of similar levels of experience, if not skill. However, as we have seen, this resulted in a spectacle that was largely of interest only to other expatriates.

At least two of the men involved in the LBA were conscious of the association’s failings.

Nelson Pingrey Cook (1864–1928), the LBA’s first organising secretary, was a relentless self-promoter who, aged 25, had left the Vermont farm where he grew up with the avowed intention of earning his way around the world and selling the story of his exploits to a Boston newspaper. His scheme came to a crashing halt when he was arrested in Berlin for fraud over an unpaid hotel bill. He retreated to England, where he put his flimflamming skills to ‘good’ use as a travelling salesman.  Despite having no more experience in baseball than watching games from the grandstand, he scored himself the job of organising secretary of the LBA. However, he quit the role after a couple of years, either for business reasons or after clashing with Knowles over their competing visions for how to grow the game in England (Cook told different versions of the story to different people). He continued his travelling salesman career for the next few years before settling in Newcastle Upon Tyne following his 1902 marriage to local woman Nora Gallagher. As we will later see, in 1909, he left the UK to return to Vermont with Nora and their children. He died in Vermont in 1928.[21]

Cook’s replacement as organising secretary of the LBA was John Aloysius McWeeney (1869–1925), a Scot who would later claim to have seen his first baseball game in 1889 while studying for the priesthood in Rome (one of three games that the Spalding World Tour played in Italy that year). He was so moved by what he saw, he claimed, that he decided to give up on the idea of becoming a priest and instead took up sports journalism. However, while it is possible he did study for the priesthood in Rome and true that he would eventually find success as a sports writer under the byline ‘McW’, writing mostly about Association Football, which he also played, that success came only after a period working as a seller of insurance and snake oil (he wrote adverts for patent medicine). In the mid-1890s, he also turned his hand to songwriting. Given the music hall character of the LBA, it is hard not to conclude that this association with the music hall was what led him to join the LBA, starting as a player but later (1896) replacing Cook as its organising secretary. He would go on to contribute to several Spalding Guides as a writer and editor and remain most well-known as a football writer. He died in London in 1925.[22]

A few years after the collapse of the LBA in 1901, Cook and McWeeney decided to work together to try to revive the game in England. They endeavoured to learn from the past mistakes of both of the previous attempts, returning to the idea of baseball as the close season complement to Association Football, played by football players and watched by football fans. Critically, this time around, Cook and McWeeney restricted their activities to teams based in London and its environs. As with the 1890 attempt, the council of what would become known as the British Baseball Association (BBA) would consist largely of football club chairmen and their representatives. It is clear that, whichever of the two men came up with the idea originally, it was McWeeney’s contacts in the world of Association Football that made the establishment of the BBA, at least in the form that it took, possible. In that light, it is interesting to note that, in a move typical of the man, Cook would later claim in an interview with an American journalist sole credit for founding the BBA, failing to mention McWeeney even once. Just as typically, he did this while affecting a ‘sense of modesty that cover[ed] him like the hide of a rhino’.[23]

The top tier of the BBA, which by 1907 would be known as the British League, launched in 1906 under no fixed name. It consisted of six teams, five of which were affiliated with Association Football clubs in London: Tottenham Hotspur, Woolwich Arsenal, Clapton Orient, Leyton, and Fulham.[24] Their rosters comprised a smattering of footballers, London-based Americans with baseball experience recruited to help train the novice locals, and men recruited from the areas local to the clubs, including Britons who had learned their baseball in America. Prime among the latter were battery mates pitcher William Jarman and catcher ‘Fairy’ Marsh, who had learned their baseball in the Ohio National Guard and U.S. Navy, respectively.[25]

Jarman’s presence in the league was controversial, as McWeeney, cognisant of the ire invoked by Ley’s use of John Reidenbach in the failed 1890 league, had promised in print that ‘No American, nor anyone who has learned his baseball in the States, will be allowed to pitch’ in the BBA. In reality, in the top tier of the BBA, there were sufficient Americans and Britons with baseball experience to stage an exhibition match in which these players faced each other as ‘England vs. America’. Ultimately, the match did not go ahead in 1906 but did the following season. The top tier of the BBA would thus, from the outset, have an identity problem: claiming to be homegrown in character but dependent on the skills of Americans and Britons who had lived in America to maintain a high level of play.[26]

The sixth team in the top tier of the BBA was an amateur team called the Nondescripts. In theory, the Nondescripts was open to all-comers, but in practice, it was a club for gentlemen and white-collar workers, harkening back to the origins of the game in America. Its backers clearly had aspirations of it becoming the MCC of British baseball. Its president was J.A. McWeeney, co-founder of the BBA, and its team captain was New Yorker William C.J. Kelly, who was the head of the British Sports Publishing Company, the London arm of the Spalding Sports Publishing Empire (for which McWeeney wrote). Cricketer Plum Warner was an honorary member, and its team for the 1906 season included, alongside Kelly, a stockbroker (William E.S. Burgin), a lithographic artist (William E. Lee), an actor (Fred Wright Jnr), a hospital director (R.A. Wilson), and an American-born sales manager (Chicagoan Benjamin L. Pyper). Boxer Tommy Burns would turn out for the team in 1908. It was no wonder that it was given the nickname the ‘Dandies’. In its one concession to working-class East London being the centre of gravity of the league, it was based in Ilford. Not coincidentally, this was where McWeeney lived at the time.[27]

As an aside: The involvement of Kelly, an Albert Spalding employee, in the BBA, alongside McWeeney’s work for the Spalding company’s publishing arm, raises the question of what involvement, if any, did Albert Spalding have with the BBA? Alas, I don’t have an answer to that question. However, in a further intriguing intersection, as we will see below, in December 1907, Kelly and Nelson Cook launched a British Basketball Association, which is interesting because 1907 is also the year that Kelly published a British edition of the Spalding ‘Guide to Playing Basket Ball’. So the London arm of the Spalding publishing empire launched the same year as the BBA, with two books, one of which was edited by John McWeeney (Guide to Soccer); that same year, Spalding’s London publisher, William Kelly, joined the BBA. Then, the next year, Kelly published British editions of two US Spalding guides, the first to baseball, with a contribution by John McWeeney, and the second to basketball, the promotion of which became Nelson Cook’s next project. However, as I said, this is an aside.

Of more interest to us here is the BBA’s second tier, which would, by 1907, be known as the London League. This is not least because, in common with the Football Association, and, indeed, with later attempts to introduce American baseball into Great Britain, the BBA saw its second tier as a training ground for future top-tier players; it is thus an excellent guide to the vision that the BBA had for the game in the long-term. In its inaugural 1906 season, it was composed of five teams: Woolwich Arsenal Reserves, i.e., the second-tier of the Woolwich Arsenal team, Hayes, Erith, Heinz, and Fairbairn House.

The captain of the Hayes team was Minnesotan George C. Mayhew; his younger brother, Howard, was also on the roster. The two brothers had come to England with their father, George Skaats Mayhew, to help set up a factory in Hayes to manufacture Mayhew Snr’s patented ‘compo-board’, a type of fibreboard used in construction. George Snr died in 1905, but the brothers remained in England for another two years, in part to calm the nerves of the factory’s British investors (alas, to no avail, as the company was declared bankrupt in the autumn of 1907).[28]

It would be tempting, therefore, to characterise Hayes as a company team. However, the only other Hayes player I have been able to identify is Alfred Purssord, who was a milkman by trade. Added to this, in 1907, Hayes became affiliated with Brentford F.C. and was rechristened Brentford Baseball Club. So, a more likely explanation is that the Mayhew brothers had thrown their support behind a local initiative to start a team, perhaps originating with workers in their factory, but not affiliated with it. For the first year of its existence as Brentford, it would continue to field the same players as the Hayes team, including both Mayhew brothers; although, interestingly, William Jarman also pitched for the team in an exhibition game early in 1907. By 1908, it would be playing in the top tier of the BBA with a new roster of ‘Americans’ taken over from the disbanded Fulham team. However, it folded at the end of that season.  In 1910, a new Brentford baseball team emerged with Benjamin L Pyper, the Chicagoan member of the Nondescripts team, as its president.[29]

All that I have been able to find out about Erith is that the chairman of the London League, Charles King, had some kind of connection to it—representing it at a meeting of the BBA in March 1907. King was associated with Woolwich Arsenal F.C., and as well as being the chairman of the London League, he was also the sponsor of the King Cup, which was awarded to the league’s winning team. Erith and Woolwich are both south of the Thames and just a few miles from each other; it seems likely, although this must be speculation, that the Erith Baseball Team was King’s pet project that he ran parallel to the two teams that Woolwich Arsenal F.C. ran in the area, drawing upon much of the same pool of players. It disbanded at the end of the 1907 season.[30]

Heinz, as the name suggests, was a company team, and, like the Kodak team and many other company teams that we have discussed and will discuss in this series, formed of employees of the British arm of an American company, in this case, of course, the H.J. Heinz Company of 57 Varieties fame. The H.J. Heinz Company opened its first London office in the 1890s and began manufacturing its products in the UK in 1905, following its takeover of the Batty & Company Pickles site at Peckham.[31] We have a team list for the 1907 season Heinz team, and we can link at least one of the players, William Frederick Ebbetts, with the manufacture of pickles, so it is safe to associate the Heinz team with the Peckham site and describe it as a blue-collar factory team.[32]

Alas, Heinz disbanded in early 1908, after only two years, although its captain, H. Freeman, would go on to captain a new team, the Crescent, for the 1908 London League season; he would also become its honorary secretary (he was already hon. secretary of the London League). The Crescent recruited its players from the Brentford area, which is where Heinz played its games, and can be thought of as a second-tier Brentford team—Brentford having climbed from the second tier (London League) to the first tier (British League) by 1908. Freeman’s association with the running of the London League and the founding of the Crescent suggests that he may have been the driving force behind the founding of the Heinz team, too. In a slightly bizarre sidenote, in December 1907, Freeman would join with Nelson Cook and William Kelly (the Nondescripts captain) in an attempt to launch a British Basketball Association (nothing seems to have come of it).[33] Crescent was in existence for only the 1908 season.

And finally, we have Fairbairn House. We are lucky to have as a rare surviving artifact from this period in baseball in Great Britain a postcard showing the Fairbairn House baseball team as it was in the 1908 season, with the names of the players written in hand on the back (see images in the gallery at the end of this article). A comparison of that roster with reports of games from the 1907 season shows that the team remained relatively unchanged across both seasons, and a closer examination of the players can serve as a guide to the type of player that not just Fairbairn House but also the other teams in the BBA’s second tier attracted.[34]

Top Row: W. Howe, J. Corbett, H. Smallwood, B. Austin, F.R. Jones (Scorer). Middle Row: F. Willing, W. Roach, W. Harris, M. Body, J. Harris. Bottom Row: A. Baugh, J. King, H. Willing.[35]

The captain of the 1908 Fairbairn House baseball team was Bill Harris (1883–1962), company secretary of an Iron and Steel Merchant and son of a school caretaker. He was a stalwart of Fairbairn House, going on to become its secretary and treasurer in later years, and also played in its football team when younger. Interestingly, he never married.[36] He represented Fairbairn House at the March 1907 BBA meeting at which Charles King represented Erith. His younger brother, Jim Harris, was also in the team and also turned out for the Fairbairn House cricket team; he was an electrician. Both brothers would play for the baseball team until at least the close of the 1909 season, by which time, Bill Harris had become part of the organising council of the BBA. There was another pair of brothers on the team, too, Fred and Harry Willing, shipwright and apprentice coppersmith, respectively. Harry Willing would later emigrate to New Zealand. Jack Corbett was a labourer at a chemical works, as was Arthur Baugh, possibly the same company; Baugh was another of Fairbairn House’s cricketers. Harry Smallwood was a fitter’s mate. Bill Roach was a clerk for the P & O Company. Jack King was, like Jim Harris, an electrician. Martin Body was a clerk at the docks. Alas, I have no information on B. Austin. With the exception of Harry Willing, who was just 15, all the players were in their early- to mid-twenties.[37]

As can be seen, these men represented a cross-section of blue-collar workers, just the type of men that the university settlements were established to help [to help themselves] through the provision of facilities for mental and physical recreation. Although I have no definite information on this, it is probable that all these men had been members of the Fairbairn House Boys’ Club when younger, and continued their association with the settlement into adulthood because of their evident love of sport. Just as evident is that these are exactly the players that the BBA hoped would one day move into its top tier—particularly 15-year-old Harry Willing. Fairbairn House was an incubator for Association Football, and it was the sort of institution that the BBA was looking to become an incubator for the top tier of baseball in Great Britain, too, in line with the BBA’s mission statement to become a complement to Association Football.

Thanks to its internal drivers for wanting to continue to play baseball, Fairbairn House would long outlast any of the other teams that played in the London League’s inaugural 1906 season; indeed, it would be one of the few teams of either tier to weather the storm that would ultimately lead to the BBA’s downfall. The issue would, once again, be professionalism; however, this would only arise after the BBA went through a different crisis: how it was perceived by the country that had given birth to the game.

Well, the game over here is really strange, and I don't know just what to say about it. […] We played a corking good 6 to 5 game not long ago, and the spectators didn't have any use for it at all. […] Following our game, came the reserve team, which ended with a score, something like 52 to 38, filled with hard hitting, all sorts of running, and innumerable errors. This game was just what the people wanted, and they had a great time.[38]

Ted Everett was an American in London; it seems unlikely that he ever intended a letter he wrote to a friend back in Buffalo, New York, to ever find its way into a Buffalo newspaper. He certainly didn’t intend for a Briton in New York to send a clipping of the article to the editor of The Sporting Life back in England, excerpts of which the paper duly published under the headline ‘American View of English Play and Players’ on 5 July 1907. Everett immediately dashed off a second letter, this time to The Sporting Life, explaining himself and the seemingly worst of what he had written in his original letter (his reference to spectators being ‘yellow hammers’, for example), which the paper published on 10 July 1907. However, the damage was done: the BBA had become a laughing stock in baseball’s home and everyone in England knew it.

Although I know of no evidence of a direct connection between the drastic change in the ratio of imported to homegrown players in the 1908 BBA season and the fallout from the Everett letter, there is no denying that the net effect was a 1908 season that more closely resembled a season of American baseball than either of two seasons that had gone before it (whether spectators liked it or not).

This alteration in the ratio was achieved (if that is the right word) in part by a retrenchment of the London League, which had ballooned to 10 teams in the 1907 season, but was back down to 5 for 1908: Fairbairn House, Clapton Orient Reserves, Crescent (replacing Heinz), new team West Ham, and Woolwich Arsenal—not the reserve team, the former top-tier team dropped down to the second tier (replaced in the top tier by Crystal Palace).[39] In the 1907 season, every team in the top tier had fielded a reserve team in the London League; only Clapton Orient did in the 1908 season. It should be noted that this was almost certainly because the effort had proved financially unsustainable—there just weren’t enough paying spectators to cover the costs of that many teams—rather than embarrassment on the BBA’s behalf over the high scores in the reserves games, as highlighted by Everett. However, it did change the character of the BBA from 1907 to 1908.

The other aspect of the change in the ratio between imported players and homegrown players was the hiring of more players directly from America. This was so noticeable that the new team in the top tier, Crystal Palace, which often fielded a full team of imported players, was referred to in the press as simply the ‘Americans’.[40] As we’ve seen, the 1908 iteration of the Brentford team was also seen as dominated by American players. The British press, ever ready to heap scorn on any ‘Yankee enterprise’, was contemptuous of the BBA having to resort to bringing in professionals and was quick to blow its own trumpet when Crystal Palace lost its way in the 1908 Challenge Cup competition after some of its key players returned to the States before the end of the season.[41]

Game scores duly came down—with their even being a shut-out in one game (Clapton Orient versus Leyton, 23 May 1908; the final result was 16–0 in Clapton’s favour; Clapton’s pitcher was C.B. Franks)[42]—but so did attendances, much to the joy of the British press. This was a disaster for the finances of the BBA, with the result that the organisation limped into 1909, making one last attempt at reinvention.

BASEBALL: PROPOSED REORGANISATION OF THE GAME IN ENGLAND. At a meeting held at the Charterhouse Hotel on Friday evening it was decided to reorganise the game of baseball in England, and a further meeting to carry out the resolution will be held at the same place on Thursday, March 18. It is expected that an effort will be made to secure stronger representation of the amateur element.[43]

If the news coming out of the BBA wasn’t already enough of an admission of the source of falling attendances at its games, there were also reports in the press like this, from one month after that March 1909 Charterhouse Hotel meeting:

Clapham Common has become the hunting ground for the net-ballers […] The game is purely local so far, though Fulham and Clapton Orient are beginning to give the game a trial. But it must be kept out of professional hands if it is to live. That is why base-ball was killed in London.[44]

Gone for the 1909 season were the imported Americans; and so, noticeable by their absence were Crystal Palace and Brentford—the ‘American’ teams of the previous season. Thus, the 1909 British League was reduced to four teams: Clapton Orient, Leyton, Nondescripts, and new team Woolwich. The latter is not to be confused with the defunct Woolwich Arsenal baseball team; this new Woolwich team was backed by American businessman W.E. Leigh of the Western Electric Company, who was also its player–captain.[45]

Joining Fairbairn House in the second tier for the 1909 season was returning team West Ham and new teams Custom House and Clapton. Just as with Woolwich Arsenal/Woolwich, the latter team should not be confused with Clapton Orient; it may have been a replacement for the Clapton Orient Reserves of previous seasons, no longer affiliated with the football club. Custom House is near neighbours with Woolwich on the south bank of the Thames, and the team with that name may well have been another team to rise out of the ashes of the demise of Woolwich Arsenal.[46]

Thus, in the space of three years, the BBA had gone from 15 teams to 10 teams to 8. The writing truly was on the wall and the 1909 season was the last organised by the BBA. The following January would see the creation of a new national association under an old name, the National Baseball Association (NBA), albeit containing some of the same officers as the later iterations of the BBA.[47] That this was a new association as opposed to the same association under a new/old name, is clear from the language used at its inaugural meeting in March 1910, when it was decided ‘to establish a more clearly defined constitution than that on which the old association was based’. Neither J.A. McWeeney nor Nelson P. Cook, the founders of the BBA, was involved. Cook had returned to the United States at the end of 1909; McWeeney’s involvement with the BBA seems to have ended in 1908.[48] One name of note among the returning officers was John G. Lee.

John Gibson Lee (1886–1918) was born in France to English parents. His father, Smetham Lee, moved to the US in 1890, the family following him 5 years later, settling in New York State. They stayed until at least 1900, but sometime after the turn of the century, they moved back to England, when Smetham Lee became a company director. While working as a stockbroker’s secretary, John G. Lee turned out for Tottenham Hotspur F.C., which was where he received his introduction to the BBA (in 1907). He played two seasons for the Spurs baseball team and then pitched for the Clapton Orient first team in the 1909 and 1910 seasons. His brother Louis Smetham Lee also played baseball in the BBA— the brothers squared off against each other in the 1909 Challenge Cup final, J.G. playing for Clapton Orient, L.S. playing for Leyton. Later, John Gibson Lee would be a major figure in attempts to keep interest in baseball alive in London, particularly during the First World War. He died in December 1918, aged just 32, a victim of the Spanish flu.[49]

(Added as a caveat to the above biographical sketch: I must acknowledge here that there is photographic evidence of one of the Lee brothers still being involved in baseball in London in 1922—the nose is very distinctive—and this has always been supposed to be J. G. Lee based on the context; I think it is Louis, but the existence of the photo and the existing attribution should be acknowledged here.[50])

Although the NBA would oversee at least two more seasons of baseball in London, a period that would culminate in the 1911 Challenge Cup final between Leyton and a reconstituted Crystal Palace, an event captured by the newsreel cameras, the oldest known baseball film footage outside of North America,[51] by 1912, the game was no longer deemed worthy of attention by the London press, evidence of a further decline in attendances, and, given subsequent events, discussed below, it seems likely that the NBA was wound up for a second time at the close of the 1911 season.

Just as significantly, for this article, Fairbairn House was not one of the teams who signed up for the only league that the NBA operated, the British League, making 1909 its last season in this iteration of American baseball in London.[52] This does not mean that the team stopped playing baseball, of course, just no longer at an organised competitive level. It would be another 27 years before it would next field a baseball team in a competitive league in London—a story I will cover in Part Two of this series.

There would be a further attempt to revive a British Baseball League in 1914, led by John G. Lee and backed by Nelson Crane, amongst others. It was said to be funded by Americans in London. This description, speaking to a new organisation, is strong evidence that the NBA had met its [second] demise sometime not long after the close of the 1911 season. In the event, other than a single exhibition game against a team of U.S. Navy cadets, the attempt came to nothing, forestalled by the outbreak of the First World War.[53]

There would be baseball played during the war, including a league—organised once again by John G. Lee, amongst others[54]—that would last until 1919 and lead to a renewed interest in American baseball in London; however, this effort would be in its early years sustained by military veterans, and, thus, is outside the scope of this series. Instead, the next significant development in the connection between baseball in Great Britain and the world of work would be the evolution of the baseball section of the Mansfield House University Settlement’s sister settlement in Splott, Cardiff. And it is there that I will begin Part Two of this series.

American baseball’s promoters in Great Britain had from the start extolled the virtues of the game as recreation for the physically active and the actively employed. This led to its adoption by not only business owners but also organisations promoting physical recreation for working men and women. With internal policies and priorities driving their adoption and retention of the game that were independent of the wax and wane of interest in the game beyond their gates, these were the entities that would prove most able to weather the storm of indifference from the British public that doomed these early efforts. Both Francis Ley’s Derby and the Fairbairn House baseball section long outlasted the teams alongside which they began their baseball journeys in 1890 and 1906, respectively. The precedent had been set.

Jamie Barras, June 2025.

Notes

[1] ‘Baseball: Kodak Start With Win’, Harrow Observer, 2 May 1963.

[2] 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.

[3] Gelber, see Note 2 above.

[4] Quoted by Gelber, see Note 2 above.

[5] Hughes and Muscular Christianity: William E. Winn, ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays and the Development of ‘Muscular Christianity.’ Church History, 196, 29, no. 1, 64–73. https://doi.org/10.2307/3161617; National Physical Recreation Society: ‘National Physical Recreation Society’, The British Medical Journal, 1886, 1, no. 1329, 1178–79. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25268323; accessed 9 June 2025.

[6] From 1892, there was an English code as well as an American code in use in Great Britain, the former having its origins in the game of rounders revived as a sport for adults in Liverpool in the 1880s. I discuss the differences—and civil war—between the English and American codes here: https://www.ishilearn.com/diamond-lives-intolerance, accessed 11 June 2025.

[7] https://extrainningsbaseball.wordpress.com/2024/12/24/british-baseball-hall-fame-2024/, accessed 10 June 2025.

[8] Newton Crane, ‘Baseball’ (London, UK: George Bell & Sons, 1891), 3.

[9] ‘Baseball Match in Derby’, Derby Daily Telegraph, 5 May 1890.

[10] The story of Ley’s baseball team is told in various places, most notably by Joe Gray: Joe Gray, ‘What About the Villa?’ and ‘Nine Aces and a Joker’, Fineleaf Editions, 2010 and 2012, respectively. These and further works that at least touch on this early period are listed at: https://www.projectcobb.org.uk/research.html, accessed 19 January 2025. The Gray books can be downloaded from the latter website.

[11] This is the version of the story told by Ley: ‘Derby Baseball Club’, Derby Mercury, 4 September 1895.

[12] Derby as national champions: https://www.projectcobb.org.uk/national_champions.html, accessed 19 May 2025; Ley as chairman of NBA: ‘London Baseball Association’, Manchester Courier, 26 February 1895. 1900 is the last year that “National Baseball Association” appears as a term in the British press, before, that is, its revival as the name of a new organisation in the 1910. See https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/, accessed 21 Mary 2025, and ‘National Baseball Association’, Daily News (London), 21 January 1910.

[13] The story of the London Baseball Association as told by its founder can be found here: R G Knowles and Richard Morton, ‘Baseball’, (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1896), available at archive.org: https://archive.org/download/baseball_202409/Baseball.pdf, accessed 9 January 2025. See also: https://www.ishilearn.com/diamond-lives-behind-the-mask and https://www.ishilearn.com/diamond-lives-words-and-music, accessed 9 June 2025.

[14] Lionel F. Ellis, ‘Toynbee Hall and the University Settlements’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 1948, 96, no. 4762, 167–78. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41363547, accessed 9 June 2025.

[15] For the English code, see Note 6 above. A photograph of the men and women of the Splott University Settlement Baseball Club can be found here: ‘Splott University Settlement Baseball Club’, Western Mail, 11 May 1928.

[16] ‘Baseball Notes’, Ealing Gazette and West Middlesex Observer, 7 September 1907.

[17] Jack Leslie and Fairbairn House: ‘Afternoon Boxing at Stadium Club’, Evening News (London), 8 October 1940. Thames Ironworks/West Ham and Fairbairn House: ‘Mansfield House Work: Golden Jubilee of Famous Local Settlement’, West Ham and South Essex Mail, 19 May 1939. The source that refers to Thames Ironworks fielding a baseball team is: Josh Chetwynd and Brian A Belton, ‘British Baseball and the West Ham Club’ (London: McFarland and Company, 2007), 20.

[18] ‘Baseball at Woolwich’, Illustrated London Dramatic and Sporting News, 26 May 1906. There are photographs of the two teams in the special 1906 English Edition of the Spalding Guide; see Note 19 below.

[19] J.A. McWeeney, ‘Baseball from an English Point of View’, 1906 special English edition of Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guide, ed. Henry Chadwick (London: British Sports Publishing Company, 1906), 57.

[20] The names of the first members of the council of what became known as the National Baseball League of Great Britain were widely reported; see, for example, ‘A Baseball Association’, Derby Daily Telegraph, 10 October 1889. For descriptions of the teams in the league alongside Derby, see Note 10 above, first reference.

[21] Biographical details for Cook can be assembled from 1) an interview he gave to an American journalist in London in 1908: Ernest L. Heitkamp, ‘Yankee Fan Makes England “Play Ball”’, Sunday Star (Washington, D.C.), 12 April 1908; 2) 1880 US Federal Census, Mount Holly, Rutland, Vermont division, entry for Nelson P Cook; 3) Marriage Entry for Nelson P Cook, 1902, England and Wales, Marriage Registration Index, 1837-2005; 4) https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/184165046/nelson-pingrey-cook; 5) SS Invernia, passenger list entry for Nelson Pingrey Cook and family, 30 November 1909, Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at Boston, Massachusetts, 1891-1943. ancestry.co.uk, Ancesty.com Inc Operations, accessed 13 June 2025. The report of his arrest in Berlin can be read here: ‘All Over the State’, Burlington weekly free press (Burlington, Vt), 10 December 1891.

[22] Biographical details for McWeeney inc. employment can be assembled from the entries for John A McWeeney/John Aloysius McWeeney, in the 1891, 1901, and 1911 England Censuses, ancestry.co.uk, Ancesty.com Inc Operations, accessed 13 June 2025. See also the details that McWeeney himself provides in his contribution to the following book: S. Bloomer, J.T. Robertson, J. Kirwan, J. Ashcroft, W. Bull, A. Common, A. McCombie, J. Cameron and "McW." Ed. by J.A. McWeeney, ‘How to play "soccer"’ (London: British Sports Publishing Company, 1907), 106, 113. The story about studying for the priesthood, etc., comes from ‘Base Ball in England’, Gazette, 1 January 1907. As a songwriter: ‘Advertisements and Notices’, Music Hall and Theatre Review, 12 June 1896. Playing baseball for the LBA: ‘Baseball’, Boxing World and Mirror of Life, 4 August 1897.

[23] The line of reasoning for making the BBA what it was is laid out by McWeeney in his Spalding Guide article; see Note 19 above. A broad overview of the story of the British Baseball Association is told by Daniel Bloyce: Daniel Bloyce, ‘A Very Peculiar Practice: The London Baseball League, 1906-1911.’ NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture, 2006, 14, 118–128. Cook ignored McWeeney’s role in form in an BBA in the interview he gave in 1908, see Note 21 above, first reference.

[24] I base the statement that the league had no formal name on the fact that there is no mention of a ‘British League’ until 1907; throughout 1906, reports instead simply refer to baseball in London when discussing the top-tier teams. Interestingly, 1906 reports do mention a ‘London league’ and teams winning points (two points for a win) when referring the second tier, which would, by 1907, be more formally identified as the London League: ‘Baseball’, Uxbridge and West Drayton Gazette, 21 July 1906. As an aside, the manager of the Woolwich Arsenal baseball team was Phil Kelso, manager of the football team. Kelso would remain known for his love of the game for the next twenty years: ‘Baseball in the London District’, Nottingham Daily Express, 14 June 1906; Globe, 17 January 1920.

[25] Andrew Taylor of the Folkestone Baseball Chronicle Facebook page has researched extensively the careers of Jarman and Marsh: https://www.facebook.com/FolkestoneBaseball/, accessed 12 June 2025.

[26] For the problem with Jarman being in the league, see Note 19 above, page 58. The 1906 proposed England v. America game: ‘Baseball’, Eastern Counties’ Times, 13 July 1906; 1907 game: ‘Baseball: England v America’, Sporting Life, 10 July 1907. There is a list of players in the 1906 season who are either American or learned their baseball in America here: ‘Baseball “Catching On” in England’, Daily Star (Washington, D.C.), 10 June 1906.

[27] There is a team list for the Nondescripts here: ‘Baseball’, Daily News (London), 23 June 1906. The full names and occupations for at least some of the team members can be divined from census information, aided by the fact that many of the players have multiple initials and less common surnames and the team was based in Ilford; ancestry.co.uk, Ancestry.com Inc. Operations, accessed 10 June 2025. The club’s officials are given in: ‘Nondescript Baseball Club’, Daily News (London), 17 October 1906. Plum Warner as honorary member: Birmingham Daily Gazette, 22 May 1906. Actor Fred Wright Jnr playing for the team: ‘Arsenal Shine at Baseball’ Daily News (London), 28 May 1906. See also the list of American-born players in the league, Note 26 above, final reference. Information on William Kelly can be found at: ‘”Billy” Kelly Captain of London Nine’, New York Times, 31 October 1906. Tommy Burns playing for the team: ‘Baseball Season Starts’, Morning Leader, 18 May 1908.

[28] ‘Death of Mr G.S. Mayhew’, Ealing Gazette and West Middlesex Observer, 26 August 1905. George Skaats Mayhew is the name given by Mayhew senior on his patent applications (see, for example, US794874A); the names and ages of his sons can be worked out from the entry for George S Mayhew, manufacturer of compo-board, in the 1895 Minnesota State Census, Minneapolis division, ancestry.co.uk, Ancestry.com Inc. Operations, accessed 11 June 2025. Company bankruptcy, October 1907: ‘Law Notices’, Morning Advertiser, 23 October 1907. Somewhat bizarrely, people unconnected with the Mayhew concern launched a new company with the same name (Mayhew Compo-Board Company) at the moment the real company was being wound up, seemingly to fleece investors. The matter ended in a court case two years later: ‘An Unfortunate Company: Mayhew Compo-Board Ltd’, Heywood Advertiser, 28 May 1909.

[29] Hayes team list: ‘Baseball’, Uxbridge and West Drayton Gazette, 21 July 1906; Hayes becomes Brentford: See Note 16 above; Brentford team list: ‘Baseball’, Middlesex County Times, 18 May 1907. Jarman pitching for Hayes/Brentford: ‘Baseball’, West Middlesex Gazette, 30 March 1907. New Brentford roster for 1908 and team being ‘Americans’ and basically just the old Fulham side: ‘Baseball’, Leytonstone Express and Independent, 13 June 1908. Brentford defunct 1909: ‘Baseball: New Club for Woolwich’, Kentish Independent, 30 April 1909. Pyper as president of new club 1910: ‘Brentford Baseball Club’, Acton Gazette, 8 April 1910. A programme for a game in the 1908 season showing Brentford’s new roster can be seen at Project Cobb: https://www.projectcobb.org.uk/artefacts/1908_Orient_vs_Brentford.jpg, accessed 11June 2025.

[30] Charles King speaks on behalf of Erith at a March 1907 meeting organized by the BBA to promote its forthcoming 1907 season: ‘Baseball Progress’, Hanwell Gazette, 2 March 1907; King as chairman of the London League and sponsor of the King Cup: ‘Baseball’, Kentish Independent, 26 July 1907.

[31] https://www.hatads.org.uk/catalogue/43/h-j-heinz--co-ltd/heinz.aspx, accessed 10 June 2025.

[32] Heinz team list: Middlesex Chronicle, 11 May 1907. William Frederick Ebbetts: 1911 England Census entry, Brentford district, ancestry.co.uk, Ancestry.com Inc. Operations, accessed 10 June 2025.

[33]Information on the Crescent: ‘Football Notes’, Richmond and Twickenham Times, 2 May 1908. Freeman, Cook, and Kelly and the British Basketball Association: ‘A Basketball Association’, Daily News (London), 4 December 1907.

[34] Postcard: author’s own collection. Rosters for 1906 and 1907 seasons: Sporting Life, 18 May 1907.

[35] Names on the back of the postcard, Note 32 above, first reference.

[36] In common with only 1 in 10 men in England in this period: R. Schoen and J. Baj, ‘Twentieth-Century Cohort Marriage and Divorce in England and Wales’, Population Studies, 1984, 38, 439–49. https://doi.org/10.2307/2174133, accessed 10 June 2025.

[37] The identities of the 1908 Fairbairn House team I have assembled from the 1901 and 1911 England Censuses for the Canning Town district, the location of Fairbairn House, and surrounding districts using a median birth year for potential candidates of 1884±5 years, supported by, for example, the probate record for Bill Harris (William Edward Harris)’s 1962 will, ancestry.co.uk, Ancestry.com Inc. Operations, accessed 9 June 2025. For Bill Harris as secretary and treasurer of Fairbairn House, see: ‘In Memory of Bill’, Evening News (London), 26 June 1964. For Baugh and two Harris brothers in the FB cricket team, see: ‘Cricket’, Grays and Tilbury Gazette, 29 June 1901; for one of the Harris brothers in the FB football team, see: ‘London Junior Cup Competition (Second Round), Eastern Counties’ Times, 2 November 1901.Both Harris brothers in the 1909 Fairbairn House baseball team: ‘Baseball’, Greenwich and Deptford Observer, 2 July 1909. Bill Harris (‘W. Harris’), secretary of the 1909 organising committee of the BBA: ‘Baseball: British Baseball Association‘, Sporting Life, 2 April 1909.

[38] ‘Baseball: An American On English Play and Players’, Sporting Life, 5 July 1907. The article is said to be quotes from a letter sent by ‘Ted Everett’ of Buffalo, New York, to a friend in the US and subsequently printed in a Buffalo newspaper. Everett wrote a letter to Sporting Life a few days later to explain himself, which was published under the same headline: ‘An American On English Play and Players’, Sporting Life, 10 July 1907.

[39] See league tables here: ‘Baseball, Sporting Life, 8 June 1908.

[40] ‘Baseball’, Leytonstone Express and Independent, 16 May 1908. It has to be said that ‘pitcher’, the baseball correspondent for the Leytonstone Express, was very keen to extoll the ‘English’ make up of the Leyton team compared to the ‘American’ make up of its main rivals—to an almost xenophobic degree. That these views aligned with the views of William Jarman, the British-born pitcher for Leyton, would appear not to be a coincidence.

[41] Daniel Bloyce covers press coverage of the BBA in his article; See Note 21 above, second reference.

[42] ‘Baseball: Clapton Orient’s Feat’, Sporting Life, 25 May 1908. C.B. Franks, pitcher for Clapton Orient in its 1908 season: see roster in programme at Project Cobb: https://www.projectcobb.org.uk/artefacts/1908_Orient_vs_Tottenham.jpg, accessed 11 June 2025.

[43] ‘Baseball’, Sporting Life, 8 March 1909.

[44] South London Press, 9 April 1909.

[45] ‘Baseball’, Woolwich Herald, 30 April 1909.

[46] ‘Baseball’, Kentish Independent, 28 May 1909.

[47] See Note 12 above, second reference.

[48] ‘Baseball: The National Association’, Sporting Life, 21 January 1910. McWeeney was not a member of the 1909 committee of the BBA, see Note 37, final reference.

[49] The life and career of John Gibson Lee can be assembled from Census records, aided by the knowledge that he had a brother L.S. Lee, who also played baseball. See 1900 US Federal Census, Nassau division, entry for Smetham Lee; 1911 England Census, Prittlewell district, entry for John Smetham Lee (which shows he had a brother called Louis Smetham Lee); Death notice: ‘Deaths’, Middlesex County Times, 23 November 1918. See also: https://extrainningsbaseball.wordpress.com/2021/12/31/bbhof2021/ (I believe the year of death for Lee is wrong in the latter), accessed 12 June 2025. The Lee brothers faced of against each other in the 1909 Challenge up final, J.G. Lee for Clapton Orient, L.S. Lee for Leyton, see teams lists here: ‘Baseball’, Sporting Life, 13 August 1909; match report here: ‘Baseball Notes’, Leytonstone Express and Advertiser, 21 August 1909.

[50] Thanks to Andrew Taylor of the Folkestone Baseball Chronicle Facebook page for pointing this out to me.

[51] As reported by Andrew Taylor, Folkestone Baseball Chronicle, 19 August 2021,

https://www.facebook.com/FolkestoneBaseball/posts/pfbid04yTx4cVNAoaxRGk75TwXdpeWzLkLLAwRn8hiYMRUzdG98ioHLzihdZW6sSEE5DWHl, accessed 11 June 2025.

[52] A caveat must be added here: the British press only reported on one league in 1910 and 1911; and while this probably means there was only one league, it remains possible that there was also a second-tier league that was just not reported on in the British press.

[53] ‘Baseball’, Western Mail, 28 July 1914.

[54] See Note 49 above, third reference.