Men who defaulted in the greatest game of all: Sport, conscientious objectors and military defaulters in New Zealand 1916–1923

Abstract

During the Great War most New Zealand sports bodies restricted their competitions in some way. A rhetoric against ‘sporting shirkers’ proliferated and was reinforced when the New Zealand government introduced military conscription in 1916 and adopted a trenchant attitude against any who were unwilling to serve. After the Great War the New Zealand Returned Soldier's Association (RSA) requested that regional and national sports bodies ban known conscientious objectors and military defaulters from all sporting competitions. Subsequent actions by sports bodies were largely if not wholly symbolic in that the number of conscientious objectors was small and there is scant evidence of any individual actually being removed from sporting competition. But they are nevertheless a potent expression of the nexus between sporting prowess and blood sacrifice that developed throughout the British Empire during and after the Great War. But not all followed the wishes of the RSA. Some were concerned that an onus was being put on sporting administrators to fulfil a role that was the responsibility of the government, while militant trade unionists took exception to such punitive treatment of those who had had the courage to stand by their convictions.