Conclusion

The Conclusion sums up and looks tentatively forward. By 1960, competitive sport was a vital and irreplaceable part of modern life. The older understanding of ‘sport’ as fun or showing off had lost some of its meaning. For most British history, the heroes had been military or naval, often posthumous. By the 1930s, they were increasingly sporting. From the 1950s, they were increasingly female and, from the 1960s, with the advent of television, they were increasingly seen as ‘personalities’ or ‘celebrities’ rather than heroes or champions. This experience was not unique to the British. All twentieth-century nation-states raised competitive sport as the mark of their success, nowhere more so than the Modern Olympiad, revived in 1896. In our own day, the commercialization of elite sport threatens to unhinge it from its roots in everyday life. But away from the glamour and the money, this sporting life still goes deeper than the agencies of the state and mass media. Although the meanings of sport have shifted, the shift has not been absolute, with no sharp divide between the traditional and the modern. The sporting life remains closely connected to liberty, to heart, to custom and practice, to a sense of belonging and to the bonds of friendship.

New Moral Worlds

Chapter 6 brings the history of modern sport and the modern school together. In the Uppingham School Archives there’s a photograph of the school cricket team gathered round its ambitious and reforming headmaster Rev. Edward Thring. At this moment (1858) Thring was involved in painful disputes with these boys, trivial struggles that confirmed in his mind if not theirs the need to build a network of powerful schools committed to reforming the character of elite young men. He and his brother headmasters spent their lives reinventing these so called ‘public’ schools as new moral worlds. Chapter 6 looks also at the Girls Public Day School Company (1872) and its work towards the proper education of middle-class young women. Sport and gender was vital to both campaigns although how vital rather depended on the extent to which girls won a new independent voice and the boys retained their old one. Public schools were seen by their inventors as new moral worlds but they could be new immoral worlds as well. Or, to put it another way, the schools were reconfigured as closed institutions deliberately designed to influence the character and behaviour of the young. By the beginning of the twentieth century the leading public schools were seen as uniquely successful enterprises, obsessed with the athletic body, significant and forceful in the definition of what a ‘school’ should be, stately and beautiful, and surrounded almost by definition by playing fields. A new set of national icons had been created.

Land of Liberty

Chapter 1 describes the gentry’s love of fox-hunting and how important it was to their self-image as riders and rulers. It opens by going out with Minna and Algernon Burnaby of The Quorn in 1909. Along the way, it unpicks the complex relationship between fox-hunting and land management, fox-hunting and county networks, and fox-hunting and the wider and inter-connected roles of Master of Fox Hounds and Tory grandee. From the aristocracy down to the minor gentry, devotion to horse and hound was almost a calling. To be able to ride well and look good mattered, and loaned authority. The middle and working class hardly came near a horse, except for work. Leicestershire as the prime ornament of English fox-hunting features strongly in the chapter, as does the part equestrianism played in how the landed class saw their role as English freeborn men and women. Chapter 1 also considers the part riding and hunting played in the liberation (or non-liberation depending on how you look at it) of uppity class young women.

Introduction

In this Introduction the author outlines his reasons for writing about sport in England and the difficulties he found researching it. ‘Sport’ can mean so much and so little. ‘Sport’ is so various it resists definition. The author explains how he stopped looking for a theory and came to embrace the difference and enjoy the detail, trying to situate himself inside the sporting experience rather than outside it. Above all the author recommends sport in England as essentially an expression of liberty and belonging.

Bloods

Chapter 7 gets away from the school side of things to the boys’ and girls’ side. Bloods’ is an old word for a certain kind of aristocratic young man taken up by the public schools to mean a leading man of fashion, or a captain of sport, or both. It never applied to girls but it is quite clear that there were sporty girls who could take the daring part and all girls’ schools, like all boys’ schools, were periodically rocked over what to wear and the best way to wear it. Sport was the main inspiration for fashion, and sporting fashion was the key to the true standing of a ‘Blood’. In all these things, schools had to negotiate with their pupils. The extent to which they were able to do so determined the sort of school it was and the boys and girls side of things led, first in the 1920s and again in the 1960s, to the creation of the modern university as a place where students enjoyed boarding-house life and the liberty to play and have fun. Chapter 7 also describes the crisis in elite masculinity in the 1850s, a crisis over military failure but also to do with perceived failings in the character and personality of elite young men. Sport was never far away from this crisis, both as the cause and the solution.

Home

Chapter 5 sees the parish as a platform for belonging, and sport and custom as celebrations of that belonging. It opens with Edwin Butterworth, a well-connected journalist working for Edward Baines, the radical newspaper owner, who was writing a history of Lancashire. Charged in 1835 with surveying a county deep in the throes of industrialization, and keen to establish the state of ‘Customs, Habits, &c’, Butterworth’s findings do not show the sudden death of parochial custom any more than they show the rising up of a great new factory system. Instead, they show parochial culture dying in some places but flourishing (and changing) in others. The chapter goes on to look more widely at how this old parochial culture had bound people to their sense of place—what the old Poor Law called ‘settlement’. At the same time the chapter notes how from the 1830s to the 1880s, the welfare functions that had underpinned settlement were being removed and given to quasi-national bodies. Apart from Church of England clergy who were not quite insiders or outsiders, the parish had insiders who were enemies as well. Primitive Methodists were anti-sport and counter-parochial for all of the nineteenth century. They brought disruption with a new kind of belonging.

Custom

Chapter 4 looks at ‘custom’ from the point of view of the Poor who by and large saw it as a vital part of who they were and where they lived. Between 1833 and 1840 the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’ sought to ban the annual bull-running in the Lincolnshire market town of Stamford. The rougher end of Stamford, including the magistrates’ bench, resisted. The nicer end stayed neutral, at least in public. Metropolitan liberals, meanwhile, pressed for a ban with the powerful backing of the Home Office, the NSPCA, and a young Queen. The issue was finally resolved by a court judgment backed by Dragoons and detachments of the Metropolitan Police who finally stopped the running in 1840. On the face of it, this was a simple matter of whether to torture or not to torture a bull. But the chapter takes Stamfordians at their word in their claim that the sport was an ancient custom, that custom was part of the constitution, and that the constitution was a vital part of their identity as free men and women (women featured prominently). Custom and practice was ingrained in the everyday lives of the people. ‘Being the People’ at festivals and fairs was a political as well as a sporting performance with a strong physical presence and plenty of showing off.

Moderns

Chapter 8 examines the zeal for Association Football as the game moderns play. It starts by leaving the playing fields of Eton to describe an altogether different sort of sporting life on the streets of industrial Britain. Jack London remarked in People of the Abyss (1902) that a whole new sub race had grown up there, ‘the pavement people’ he called them, and although he doesn’t mention it, they were playing football far more than they were suffering from racial degeneration. For many working-class boys, football was a passion, their first craze, like rock n’ roll it was a way of feeling free in another otherwise hostile environment. Football for the workers was released by the factory acts in 1853 and by the 1880s it was an integral part of ‘the weekend’—a consumer economy that ushered in a new kind of urban life. Boys played football almost anytime anywhere. The chapter asks why the girls wouldn’t, or couldn’t. In the 1960s Arthur Hopcraft said football was ‘inherent in the people’ and so it was. Along with cinema, dancing, and popular music, it created new liberties and belongings. England won the World Cup in 1966. This was the pinnacle of footballing achievement by a class and a country that had given the world its favourite sport. Very soon after however, British football was in the doldrums, and it was violence that seemed inherent now.

‘Bottom’

Chapter 3 explores the violent world of prize-fighting in London and New York. It starts with a fight in a field in Hampshire in 1860. A lot of people have come down on the train from London to see a young Irish American hard man called John Heenan take on the considerably older, and smaller, English champion Tom Sayers. The fight is serious, not fraudulent, but ends in farce, paving the way for a sport already in decline to be over and done with by the end of the century. The chapter spreads out from Sayers Heenan to take on the part prize-fighters played in a plebeian way of seeing the English in their history. The ‘Fancy’, so-called, saw themselves as keepers of the boxing constitution. The ‘Bloods’, so called, saw themselves as defenders of the country’s honour. No sport aroused as much popular excitement. Boxing was a literary subject too. It developed a way of speaking all of its own and, in essay and metaphor, fighters’ unique ability to fight fair (no knives) under rules while giving and taking no quarter (‘Bottom’) either in battle or the ring, were highly prized expressions of liberty. The chapter ends with the Queensberry Rules and the birth of modern boxing as a mainly Anglo-American affair, now performed in theatres not fields.

Bonny Moor Hen

Chapter 2 looks at poor men’s hunting. Poor men went hunting too, only their masters call it poaching and, under the game laws, they could transport you for it. This chapter starts with events in the northern Pennines between 1797 and 1822 when poachers went toe to toe with game keepers over the right to take ‘The Bonny Moor Hen’. The Bishop of Durham and a conglomerate of landowners claimed the red grouse for themselves and built up an army of keepers to defend their right. Local people saw it the other way. Up on the moors, opinions seemed not to apply either way. It was more a question of what you could take and who you could defy. Chapter 2 includes the so-called ‘Battle of Stanhope’ recorded in song and story. There were two such battles in Weardale, one in October 1818 and the other in the December, when leadminers rescued comrades after a gun battles with the constables. The whole of the county magistracy were up in arms over these humiliations, literally so, and called in the Hussars. Leadminers thought they lived in a land of liberty and took game accordingly. Landowners thought the same. The chapter considers how eighteenth-century sporting art featured horses and hounds and parkland not simply as ‘pictures of record’ but ideal expression of the landed class’ right to possess and command.