I don’t think E M Forster had much interest in sport. He does, however, in his novel “The Longest Journey” kill off one of his characters by having him “smashed-up” in a football game – rugby football, I assume.
That novel was published in 1907. The next year, the outstanding Scottish three-quarter K G Macleod retired from rugby at his father’s request. He was only twenty. His elder brother had been seriously injured, smashed-up you might say, in a match. Evidently, their father thought the game too dangerous. K G Macleod, scorer of a famous try when Scotland beat South Africa in 1906, turned to presumably less dangerous games; he played cricket for Lancashire and football for Manchester City. Unlike his brother who died very young, he lived to be seventy-nine.
We have been made more aware of the dangers of sport, especially contact sport, in recent years. Only this week we learned that Sir Bobby Charlton and Roy Laidlaw, scrumhalf for Scotland and the Lions, have been diagnosed as suffering from dementia. Laidlaw at the rather early age of sixty-seven. Then obituaries of Charlton’s Manchester United and England team-mate Nobby Stiles revealed that he had also succumbed to dementia in his later years.
