Sport Between ‘Play’ and ‘System’

Modern sport, though not wholly a British invention, very largely is so. It is one of Britain’s most important gifts to the modern world. But it is also representative of a whole social system, and sport in Britain has always been intimately connected to British social and political life. It is a powerful marker, of which the ‘amateur tradition’ and apparent class exclusiveness are the two most obvious marks. I argue, however, that Britain did not differ much from other comparable countries, except that its class exclusiveness was exaggerated, partly because it was more openly expressed and less obviously concealed. I also argue that the amateur spirit was an attempt by men to preserve the notion of ‘play’ as against the sporting ‘system’ which they themselves had created.

The Two-Party system in Britain

In 1951 97 per cent of British voters voted either Conservative or Labour and that figure remained more or less constant until the late 1960s. Thereafter, however, it began to decline while third or fourth parties won an increasing share of the popular vote. In this essay I suggest why this might have been so, as the social and economic basis of the two-party system began to decay. In the elections of 2017, however, at least in England, the two major parties won 87 per cent of the vote—the highest since 1970. I argue that this was a result of an almost accidental and unexpected confluence of events which produced a different kind of two-party politics—more fluid and unpredictable.

J.M. Keynes as Sociologist

This chapter is concerned with J.M. Keynes’s analysis of the rentier, the ‘functionless investor’ in Britain (and Europe) in the interwar years. Even though Keynes had no coherent idea of who the rentier was, he was central to Keynes’s economics and to his political sociology. The rentier was also essential to Keynes’s political-economic account of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Hence, Keynes was forced to a view that while the rentier remained unchained society would be based upon conflicting interests and social tensions. Such a view undermined Keynes’s original allegiances to the kind of Liberalism associated with the former Liberal prime minister, H.H. Asquith, and the argument Keynes sometimes presented, that economic policy was determined by an intellectual muddle, not warring interests. Asquithian Liberalism, however, depended on notions of political agreement and social harmony and that was, in practice, not something Keynes ever believed characterized modern capitalism.

Undoing Stereotypes

This chapter is an attempt to understand Britain’s political culture by comparing it with the political culture of Australia, a country which was (and is) very similar, but which differs in several important ways. It was (and still is) argued that Australia is a more open and democratic society than Britain; and that is something widely believed in both countries. The chapter argues that that was probably true before the First World War—though easily exaggerated—but much less true after the First World War. That war, I believe, had very different consequences for Australia than for Britain—and in Australia they were significantly more damaging. It becomes much more difficult to argue that after 1918 Australia, in fact, was more democratic than Britain or Britain was less democratic than Australia—a conclusion that probably is counter-intuitive and something the Australians might find hard to believe..

The Triumph of the Medical Hero

A.J. Cronin’s novel, The Citadel, was one of the best-selling novels of the interwar years. It was a medical novel about the career of a young doctor, with markedly political and social themes. It was also thought to be the almost perfect example of the ‘middlebrow’ novel. The purpose of this chapter is to suggest reasons why it was so popular before 1939, but also why Cronin was unable to write similarly successful novels after 1945. The answer, I argue, is that it was largely dependent upon a form of democracy which was undermined by the Second World War.

Introduction and Acknowledgements

It is difficult for any historian to capture the whole historical experience of a country—in this case Britain—in a narrative history: either too much has to be left out or too much has to be put in. On the other hand, it is hard not to do it that way. It is made more difficult for a historian like myself, who has a comparatively wide range of interests and who believes that these interests have a common core, nevertheless to convince the reader that they do. The aim of this book is to present a number of detailed studies of particular problems from which wider generalizations about modern British history can be made. This collection of essays, ...

Sport as Religion and Emotion

We frequently speak of sport as a religion and that sporting loyalties are religious. This chapter asks what exactly this means and suggests that it partly depends on how we define religion. The chapter argues that the definitions of religion and sport as religion overlap—something that common sense would support. The chapter attempts to define more closely sport as religion by looking at those sporting disasters which excited an apparently ‘religious’ response—two In Britain, one in Italy, one in Germany, and one in Australia—and compare them with similar events which did not seem to evoke a similar response. It offers explanations for this and what they tell us about sport as religion and about sporting emotions. It also argues that religion in sport is a product of sporting culture, not sport as such.

A Story of His Time

Harold Nicolson was an MP from 1935–45 and an exceptionally interesting and revealing commentator on modern British politics. He regarded his political career as a failure, as in some ways it was, but that failure markedly influenced his view of politics, and in particular his attitude to political democracy and its relationship to the ‘educated class’, and especially to Liberalism. Here he had much in common with Keynes; they both had very problematic views of the ‘educated class’ and both struggled with the decline of Asquithian Liberalism—recognizing it as inevitable but to be regretted. Both men eventually gave their political loyalties to Labour, but with little enthusiasm.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter is divided into five sub-sections. That on the First World War argues that Britain’s experience of the war was comparatively benign, in so far as this was possible; a perhaps surprising and counter-intuitive conclusion. I have used the study of Keynes’s attitude to the rentier to consider more widely the political economy of interwar Britain. The ‘Decay of Industrial Society’ looks at the political and social consequences of Britain’s decline as an industrial economy: a decline fundamental to Britain’s history after the Second World War. ‘A Whole Social System’ argues for the significance of sport not only as part of popular life but also as fully representative of the wider connections of Britain’s social and political life. Finally, in ‘What Kind of Democracy’, I suggest how these together helped shape the kind of democracy that emerged in Britain in the twentieth century.