In the spring of 1915, interviewed by a London football editor, he explained how Dulwich had built up its great football reputation. Much of the success he attributed to the system of training.
We do not divide the school into so many "houses," as they do elsewhere, but into "games." We have no fewer than eight senior games, which means eight groups of players, about thirty in each group; and these are selected so that boys of about the same age and weight will meet each other. When we have arranged our games, one of the Colours--1st XV men--is told off to coach. Sometimes we play as many as nine XV's in one day. With the first team we practise what are called "set-pieces." One day we will take the forwards, get the scrum properly formed, practise hooking, heeling and screwing. We have devoted a lot of attention to wheeling. We also practise hand-to-hand passing among the forwards.
My son held that brain as well as muscle was needed in athletics. "Rugby football," he wrote, "tends more and more to become an ideal combination of scientific actions. Haphazard, clumsy battering is useless. Your footballer has to be a thinking and a reasoning factor." He believed that games properly played are invaluable as a training in character. "They make," he wrote, "not only for courage and unselfishness, but also for clean living: a sportsman dare not indulge in excesses."
Nobody could have found greater happiness in a game of football than did Paul Jones. He revelled in a hard-fought match and seemed impervious to knocks and bruises. One of his merits as a captain was that he never lost heart; he would fight doggedly to the last, even against adverse conditions. He knew, too, how to adapt his tactics skilfully to varying conditions of play. It was an intoxicating moment after a victory, for the boys would sweep into the field of play and carry the captain in triumph shoulder-high from the arena. In public-school football no animosities are left, no matter how keenly contested the game. Victor and vanquished dine together after the match, the best of friends, and the home team escort their visitors to the railway station. How well I recollect Paul coming home on Saturday evenings about eight o'clock after a victorious match; his firm, quick step, and the eager joy that shone in his face! His mother and I often watched the games at Dulwich, and he would go over every phase of the play with us, inviting comments and contributing his own. He was always severe in his condemnation of anything in the shape of "gallery play," his constant maxim being that the player should subordinate himself entirely to the side. It was his conviction that unselfishness was stimulated by football. The amateur athlete, who forgot himself in the team of which he was a part, and who played and worked hard for the honour of the game, and without thought of personal advantage or reward, was the god of his idolatry. Fond as he was of sport, and highly as he appreciated it as a discipline for character, he held that the cult of athletics could be overdone, and that to make a business of what should only be a pastime was a grave blunder. In an essay which he wrote on "Sport," he characterises the professional athlete as a man who is engaged "in the vilest of trades." "Life," he wrote, "is made up of varied interests, and man has serious work to do in the world. Excess in sport--or in anything else--puts the notes of the great common chord of life out of harmony."