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Play The Game

(By “Service”)

We, as railwaymen, are face to face with ever growing road competition and competition which may mean a great deal to us in the way of less business, perhaps less wages. We are faced with a situation which is found to be acute and only our loyal co-operation and team work will enable the men at the helm to pull through. Therefore, we must put our heart and soul into the work and “play the game” for the good of the Service.

Let us consider the incentive, the mainspring which must actuate a body of men who would make good. The men in the railway are sometimes called upon to do things infinitely more difficult than anything civilian life can put forward, without hope of reward, financial or otherwise. Sometimes they make good; sometimes they fail. Why? Of what does the soul of the railways consist?

To express it in a single word or a phrase is well-nigh impossible; the nearest approach one can make is to say that it is the desire to “play the game.”

The first great principle involved, therefore, is the principle of “playing for the side.” The Railways are just a team—a team of men who are training for a certain work. The harder the work the harder the training, and in our work the stakes are more business for the railways. In cricket, in football, unless a player is prepared to sacrifice his chance of individual glory on occasion that his side may benefit, he is not worth his place in the team. The whole soul of sport is “playing for the side”; a feeling of pleasure and pride in your individual achievement because it helps the team.

Unselfishness is one of the great essentials. The selfish player can never feel the soul of sport. With him his performance is all that matters Everyone knows the selfish three-quarter, the man who will not pass while he sees even the faintest chance of getting over the line himself though the man next to him has a clear run in. When he does pass it is generally too late. To the spectators it has been a brilliant run, a fine attempt, a very near thing, but the players know it was just selfishness. The good captain, the good leader, replaces him by a less brilliant, less spectacular, less selfish player, because, to the good leader, it is only the side that counts.

It is this ideal of unselfishness, of team work in the highest sense, which a man must follow before he can be of value to his side in any game; it is the religion which a railwayman must learn before he can give of his best. Like all religions it helps the man who has acquired it, when he feels the need of something outside himself to help him, when he has reached the breaking point and can stand no longer alone. It is a religion of to-day, to a certain extent, perhaps, a material religion invented by men for men, yet I venture to think it takes its believer a little nearer to the heart of things than he would have reached by any other means.