A Cultural History of Sport in the Age of Industry [1 ed.] 9781350024045, 9781350024106

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
SERIES PREFACE
Introduction
SPORTING HEROES: AN ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
SPORT AND CULTURAL CHANGE IN THE INDUSTRIAL AGE
SPORT AND CULTURAL HISTORY
SOURCES FOR THE STUDY OF SPORT
GENDER
CONCLUSION
CHAPTER ONE The Purpose of Sport
LEISURE AS RESPITE
SPORT FOR THE PURPOSE OF SOCIAL STRATIFICATION
SPORT IN THE SERVICE OF SCIENCE
SPORT AND GENDER DESIGNATION
SPORT AND THE FEMALE QUEST FOR INDEPENDENCE
SPORT AS A PROFESSION
SPORT AS SOCIAL CONTROL
SPORT AND THE PROMOTION OF NATIONALISM
SPORT AND RELIGIOUS PROSELYTISM
COMMERCIALIZATION
CONCLUSION
CHAPTER TWO Sporting Time andSporting Space
SPORTS AND GAMES IN THE “SPARE-TIME SPECTRUM
SOCIAL BORDERS AND BONDS
OUTDOOR SPORTS
SPORTS, GAMES, AND PHYSICAL EXERCISES IN EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND FOR THE NATION STATE
PATTERNS OF PHYSICAL EDUCATION
GYMNASTICS AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION AT SCHOOLS
OLYMPIC PERSPECTIVES
CONCLUSION
CHAPTER THREE Products, Training, and Technology
INTRODUCTION
COMMODIFICATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP
MANUFACTURING AND RETAILING
INVENTION AND INNOVATION
FACILITIES—PRIVATE AND PUBLIC PROVISION
PLAYING DIFFERENTLY
CLUBS AND ASSOCIATIONS
PEDAGOGY, TRAINING AND PERFORMANCE TECHNOLOGIES
CONCLUSION
CHAPTER FOUR Rules and Order
RESPECTABILITY: A FINAL DESTINATION?
FALSE STARTS
WHO WRITES THE STORY?
KIT
GENDERING THE RULES
THE FRONTIER
RULES FOR A NEW NATION
CONCLUSION
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
CHAPTER FIVE Conflict and Accommodation
MODERNITY’S CULTURES AND MODERN SPORT
SPORTING (CAPITALIST) MODERNITY
CONTESTED PURITANISM
COLONIALISM, SPORT AND BODY CULTURES
CONCLUSION
CHAPTER SIX Inclusion, Exclusion, and Segregation
THE COERCIVE SHAPING OF INCLUSION
EXCLUSION AND SEGREGATION
RACE AND ETHNICITY
GENDER
CONCLUSION
CHAPTER SEVEN Minds, Bodies, and Identities
EMOTION, EROTICISM AND PAIN
ATTITUDES AND BELIEFS
CREATING IDENTITIES
CHAPTER EIGHT Representation
TRADITIONAL GAMES
HUNTING AND ANGLING
EQUESTRIAN SPORTS
BOXERS, WRESTLERS, FENCERS
RUNNING AND SWIMMING
LAWN SPORTS
ON THE WATER
TEAM SPORTS
WINTER SPORTS
TECHNOLOGICAL SPORTS
CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX

Citation preview

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT VOLUME 5

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A Cultural History of Sport General Editors: Wray Vamplew, John McClelland, and Mark Dyreson Volume 1 A Cultural History of Sport in Antiquity Edited by Paul Christesen and Charles Stocking Volume 2 A Cultural History of Sport in the Medieval Age Edited by Noel Fallows Volume 3 A Cultural History of Sport in the Renaissance Edited by Alessandro Arcangeli Volume 4 A Cultural History of Sport in the Age of Enlightenment Edited by Rebekka von Mallinckrodt Volume 5 A Cultural History of Sport in the Age of Industry Edited by Mike Huggins Volume 6 A Cultural History of Sport in the Modern Age Edited by Steven Riess

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A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT

IN THE AGE OF INDUSTRY Edited by Mike Huggins

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021 Mike Huggins has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. Series design by Raven Design Cover image: Christmas postcard of a football match, 1892 © Bridgeman Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-2404-5 Set: 978-1-3500-2410-6 Series: The Cultural Histories Series Typeset by Refinecatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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SERIES PREFACE

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Introduction Mike Huggins

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1 The Purpose of Sport Gerald R. Gems

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2 Sporting Time and Sporting Space Michael Krüger

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3 Products, Training, and Technology Dave Day

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4 Rules and Order Matthew L. McDowell

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5 Conflict and Accommodation Malcolm MacLean

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6 Inclusion, Exclusion, and Segregation Roberta J. Park and Mike Huggins

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7 Minds, Bodies, and Identities Wray Vamplew

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CONTENTS

8 Representation Allen Guttmann

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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INDEX

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ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION 0.1 0.2

0.3 0.4 0.5

“After the Derby”, The Day’s Doings, May 27, 1871 (author’s collection). Line drawing of Archer, frontispiece of Autobiographies of the Three Archers, by A. Cheltonian (Cheltenham: S.H. Brookes, 1885). Archer in Hasting’s colours, frontispiece of The Life of Fred Archer by E. M. Humphris (London: Hutchinson, 1923). W. G. Grace, English cricketer, courtesy of Getty images. Boxer Tom Cribb, Staffordshire pottery work, courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon collection.

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6 9 21 29

CHAPTER 1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4

1.5

Miss Annie S. Peck, mountaineer, courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Boxer Jack Johnson and trainers in camp, c. 1910, courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Three women golfers c.1890, courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. The Great International Caledonian Games, held at Jones Wood, New York City, July 1, 1867, courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Thomas Hughes (1822–96), author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays and Tom Brown at Oxford, courtesy of Prints and Photographs, Library of Congress.

35 43 46

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ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER 2 2.1 2.2

2.3 2.4

Franz Kruger (1787–1857), The Racecourse at Berlin, author’s collection. The moment when the expedition of the English alpinist Edward Whymper returned from its first ascent of the Matterhorn and four of the team were swept to their death, Gustav Dore, author’s collection. Physical Education class in a small Swiss village, author’s collection. Caricature of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852), the father of gymnastics in Germany.

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CHAPTER 3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5

Kennington Oval cycle race, 1892, courtesy of Getty Images. Croquet players c. 1866, courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Dublin University Athletic Sports, courtesy of Getty Images. Robert Cruikshank (1789–1856), A Visit to the Fives Court, 1822, courtesy of Getty Images. Activities in a London gymnasium, c. 1830, courtesy of Getty Images.

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CHAPTER 4 4.1

4.2

4.3 4.4 4.5

Baseball Follows the Flag: an indication of what A.G. Spalding, publisher of baseball’s rules, considered to be the origins of sporting culture, (A. G. Spalding baseball collection), courtesy of New York Public Library. Croquet Match on the Shore. Engraving by William Hollidge after a painting by Helen Allingham (1848–1926), from The Illustrated London News, August 5, 1871, courtesy of Getty Images. Playing netball at the Myrdle Street Girls School, Stepney, London, 1908, courtesy of Getty Images. James Naismith, the creator of the first rules for basketball, courtesy of Getty images. Men from the Mohawk Nation at Kahnawake (Caughnawaga) who were the Canadian lacrosse champions in 1869, courtesy of Library and Archives Canada/Lee Pritzker collection//c001959.

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107 110 112

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ILLUSTRATIONS

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CHAPTER 5 5.1 5.2 5.3

5.4 5.5

Canadian teams competing in Lacrosse, courtesy of Getty Images. “Golf, The Drive”, Harper’s Weekly, December 11, 1897, courtesy of Getty Images. Piece of sheet music published in 1907 showing black baseball players playing a game in front of a church, and male and female black fans, courtesy of Getty Images. A mass Turnfest in 1898 in Hamburg, courtesy of Getty Images. Aboriginal cricketers’ tour of England, 1868, courtesy of Getty Images.

122 130

131 133 137

CHAPTER 6 6.1 6.2 6.3

6.4

6.5

YMCA gymnasium, early 20th century, courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. USA international tennis players, 1895, courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Gaelic football team from Leitrim, Ireland, in 1914, courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. African-American baseball players from Morris Brown College, c. 1899, courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. F. C. Turner, The Berkeley Hunt, 1842, including one woman riding side-saddle, courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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CHAPTER 7 7.1 7.2 7.3

7.4 7.5

Female swimmer emerges from Lake George, New York, 1916, courtesy of Getty Images. Staged bicycle crash, c. 1910, courtesy of Getty Images. Men from the Horwich Railway Mechanics Institute play at the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railways Cricket Ground, courtesy of Getty Images. A fight between British boxers Harry Broome and Tom Paddock, 1855, courtesy of Getty Images. Exercise class, Buckingham Street School, Islington, London, 1906. A physical training drill in the playground,

167 168

172 178

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ILLUSTRATIONS

with girls with legs raised backwards and arms stretched sideways, courtesy of Getty Images.

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CHAPTER 8 8.1

John Singleton Copley, Richard Heber (1782), courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art. 8.2 Gustav Courbet, The Quarry (La Curée) (1856), courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Henry Lillie Pierce Fund. 8.3 George Bellows, Polo at Lakewood, courtesy of the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus Art Association Purchase. 8.4 George Bellows, Stag at Sharkey’s (1909), © The Cleveland Museum of Art, Hinman B. Burlbut Collection. 8.5 Winslow Homer, Croquet Scene (1866), courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago, Friends of American Art Collection, Goodman Fund, 1942.35. 8.6 William Powell Frith, The Fair Toxophilites (1872), courtesy of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, Exeter, Devon, UK/Bridgeman Images. 8.7 John Lavery, The Rally (1916), courtesy of the CSG CIC Glasgow Museums and Library Collections. 8.8 Thomas Eakins, John Biglin in a Single Scull (1874), courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery. 8.9 Henri Rousseau, The Football Players (1908), courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. 8.10 Thomas Eakins, Baseball Players Practicing (1875), Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design. 8.11 Lyonel Feininger, The Bicycle Race (1912), courtesy of the 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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201 203 205 209 212

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SERIES PREFACE

A Cultural History of Sport is a six-volume series reviewing the evolution of both the internal practices of sport from remote Antiquity to the present and the ways and degrees to which sport has reflected—and been integrated into— contemporary cultural criteria. All of the volumes are constructed in the same pattern, with an initial chapter outlining the purposes of sport during the time frame to which the volume is devoted. Seven chapters, each written by a specialist of the period, then deal in turn with time and space, equipment and technology, rules and order, conflict and accommodation, inclusion and segregation, athletes and identities, and representation. The reader therefore has the choice between synchronic and diachronic approaches, between concentrating on the diverse facets of sport in a single historical period, and exploring one or more of those facets as they evolved over time and became concretized in the practices and relations of the twenty-first century. The six volumes cover the topic as follows: Volume 1: A Cultural History of Sport in Antiquity (600 BCE –500 CE ) Volume 2: A Cultural History of Sport in the Middle Ages (500–1450) Volume 3: A Cultural History of Sport in the Early Modern Period (1450–1650) Volume 4: A Cultural History of Sport in the Age of Enlightenment (1650–1800) Volume 5: A Cultural History of Sport in the Age of Industry (1800–1920) Volume 6: A Cultural History of Sport in the Modern Age (1920–present) General Editors: Wray Vamplew, Emeritus Professor of Sports History, University of Stirling, UK, and Global Professorial Fellow, University of Edinburgh, UK John McClelland, Professor Emeritus of French Literature and Sport History, University of Toronto, Canada. Mark Dyreson, Professor of Kinesiology, Affiliate Professor of History, and Director of Research and Educational Programs for the Center for the Study of Sports and Society, Pennsylvania State University, USA xi

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Introduction MIKE HUGGINS

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were critical for sport. Some earlier sports were radically altered and many so-called “modern” sports were invented and codified. The institutionalization of sport accelerated and demand for sport grew rapidly. It became a major cultural form, a key structure of feeling, and an increasingly formalized and globalized phenomenon. Simultaneously the period saw the emergence of modern market economies with their associated upheavals; a diminution of religious belief and a slow move towards secularization (although the Protestant antagonism to “nonproductive play” retained some support in parts of the USA, Britain and elsewhere); growing urbanization; a significant increase in press power; and a strong emphasis on commercialism. While demands were placed by industrial forms of production on work and time patterns, most workers saw a gradual increase in leisure access. Sport’s sheer popularity and growing centrality in many industrializing countries have made it of real interest to cultural historians. More people than before experienced a greater variety of sport, sometimes participating at grassroots level, sometimes becoming involved in its organization, and sometimes watching the emerging forms of commercialized and often professional sport. Cultural analysis of sport’s history through the industrial age sets events in contexts and explores the processes through which sports were culturally constructed and contested. Such studies encompass the practices, representations, beliefs and languages that gave meaning to social groups’ shared sporting ways of life. Cultural approaches challenge widely held myths of sport, and potentially address a wide range of themes such as cultural memory, cultural change and continuity, visual and material culture, texts, images and reception, the ethnographic 1

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analysis of behavior and values of sub-groups, the commodification of sports culture, fandom, spatial organization, and the history of the sporting body. In society, sporting culture has been a powerful force, not always tied to economic and social structures, though always in a context of power relationships. For the cultural historian, sports’ meanings are inseparable from the varied contemporary ways sport was represented to people of the time, and the determining impact this could have on people’s lives. Sometimes sport’s representations allowed diverse forms of cultural meanings and knowledge, although groups with power, privilege and prestige might try to close off their expression. One of the many mainstream methodologies shedding light on sport’s cultural history has been to focus on micro-studies of particular, sometimes apparently trivial events, and provide readings of their broader meanings. By attempting to capture the essence of “lived experience” this can show something larger about the culture. Clifford Geertz, for example, analyzed the meanings and “thick descriptions” of Balinese cockfighting and the “deep play” associated with it, treating them as “interpretative texts”, a “philosophical drama”, and a story that the Balinese “tell themselves about themselves”. Geertz (1973: 89) saw culture as “a system of inherited conceptions” expressed in symbolic form, by which people “communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life”. He recognized that because cultural practices have multiple levels of meaning, the real challenge for historians was to provide “thick description”, conveying these levels without over-imposing their own perspectives, and with a regard for individual subjectivity. Wider popular interest has often focused on “sporting heroes”, especially those coming from a less-privileged background to achieve success. The cultural historian Richard Hoggart described them as “modified modern counterparts to the heroes of saga”, combining great sporting gifts with constant application (Hoggart 2009/1992: 89). As nineteenth-century sports became spectacles the media increasingly emphasized sports stars’ cultures and practices, and their significance to wider communities as cultural icons. Such heroes were collectively constructed by the crowds watching them, by the journalists writing about them, and by the complex ways in which their own actions, abilities and character impinged on the public.

SPORTING HEROES: AN ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE Before broadening out this introduction it seems a potentially useful way to begin with an example of this approach: a more detailed micro-“story” which bears the stamp of some significant larger cultural themes. It focuses on the famous nineteenth-century English jockey Fred Archer (1857–1886), set within an illustrative broader cultural context. The symbolic representations

INTRODUCTION

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surrounding Archer offer an insight into the close relationship between sport, sporting celebrity and wider culture during this period. His textual, visual and material representations and cultural meanings, alongside a narrative supported by analysis and evidence, are highly relevant to cultural historians’ concerns. This story provides initial links with broader cultural history approaches to sport, whilst recognizing the inevitability of relative, conditional and ideologically-loaded authorial shaping through its selective choices of representations. It engages with symbolic meaning at many levels: the struggles for and limitations on power by Parliament and racing’s ruling body, the Jockey Club; the imposition of bodily discipline by jockeys; the ways in which gender and affective relationships shaped sporting life; the sporting injuries and other pressures competitors faced; the shaping of meaning by the media; the centrality of gambling to many sports; and the importance of sporting memory. On a fine, bright summer Wednesday afternoon in late May, 1880, in the grassy paddock at Epsom Racecourse, the champion jockey Fred Archer climbed onto his thoroughbred mount “Bend Or”. The horse’s name was a deliberatelychosen signifier of the childhood nickname of the horse’s owner, the hugely wealthy Duke of Westminster, which in turn linked to his coat of arms. The race was the Epsom “Derby”, the leading classic English horse race, given high meaning and status by its common description as “the blue riband” of the flatracing world, lending its name to many other global great races. By taking part, Archer was also portrayed by the media as defending his status against other leading jockeys. There to watch were the rich and powerful, including the Prince of Wales, other members of the Royal Family, many of the titled elite and Members of Parliament. The press emphasized the meeting as a “great gathering”, a “vast multitude”, attracting hundreds of thousands of cross-class onlookers from across Britain, the Empire and beyond, some paying for grandstand places, others freely watching on the open spaces round the course. Excursion trains arrived all morning crammed with passengers. For the spectators the race’s representations offered multiple meanings. The race was sometimes portrayed as being part of an “annual carnival”, with its abandonment of normal social conventions, bringing all classes together, seeing, socializing and being seen, alongside uninhibited enjoyment of drinking, gambling and other less respectable behavior. Sometimes its London connections were stressed. It was the “annual carnival of cockneydom, the best and bravest holiday of the year” (Newcastle Guardian, May 30, 1868). Descriptors might imply a pseudo-religious, customary pilgrimage-like connection. The Illustrated London News (May 24, 1879), for example, noted that for its readers, “custom demands their annual pilgrimage to Epsom”. For others, it was perceived as a major commercial event, making substantial profits for the grandstand company, the railway companies, hotels and innkeepers, stables, and providers of food, drink, transport, betting and other facilities.

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The media process of constructing possible future narratives of the 1880 Derby began soon after the Derby nominations were published in 1878, when the horses entered were only unridden yearlings. Sporting newspapers began discussing the breeding and potential engagements of leading horses from the late winter of 1879 onwards, reporting their training form, and constructing possible future racing narratives. Each year, the Derby required multiple media representations to demonstrate its significance. For many the big question was whether Archer would win. The daily, regional and sporting newspapers built up huge anticipation, raising questions and constructing possible scenarios. Twenty-five days before the race, the muscles of Archer’s right arm were badly lacerated when he was savaged by a bad-tempered mount. Possible reasons for the accident were explored, and linked to earlier patterns of behavior shown by Archer and the horse. Archer would have to ride with a pad on his hand and a piece of iron down the length of his arm to support it. Moreover, he gained weight after his accident, and would have to shed fourteen pounds (6.4 kg) in the week before the Derby to make the weight, living off virtually no food and drink, taking laxatives and using a Turkish bath to sweat weight off. Journalists reminded readers that Archer’s nickname was “the tin-man”, clearly symbolizing his fondness for “tin”, slang for money. Archer sweated hard, though emotionally he was suggested to be a wreck. This stimulated betting fever further. Some gamblers still backed Archer’s horse. Others shifted their allegiance. The Derby’s meanings also incorporated clear elements of cultural contestation. The Derby race always provoked huge media interest not just throughout Britain, but more globally via electric telegraph communication. Coverage privileged the views of those who supported racing, though these never spoke for all of Britain. The regularly reported high-stakes informed betting by insiders was a marginal pursuit. But there was wider betting interest from two directions: a legal middle-class credit betting market carried out with bookmakers by post or telegraph, and the large working-class betting market, composed of many small cash bets made illegally with off-course bookmakers. Yet racing was not enjoyed by all. Some aspects of racing in the later nineteenth century attracted opposition dominated by the attitudes, views and beliefs of more “respectable” groups of social reformers, Protestant evangelicals and others who evinced strong disapproval of racing’s association with gambling, drinking, mistreatment of racehorses, racecourse “bad” behavior and other apparent evils (Huggins 2000: 204–228). The day before the race, the House of Commons in the British Parliament voted as usual to adjourn for “Derby Day” with a vote of 285 for the adjournment but 115 opposed. The parliamentary debates involved an occasionally heated and sometimes witty and humorous cultural exchange of views about its meanings, the people it attracted, its national sporting significance and the role

INTRODUCTION

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of betting. Most Tory party members strongly supported the motion, claiming the Derby as “the people’s race”. The main opposition came from within the governing Liberal party, many of whose members strongly opposed betting. But Liberals were divided. More than half of the nineteen runners were owned by prominent members of the Liberal party, while Prime Minister William Gladstone portrayed horse racing as a noble, national and manly pastime. Most British newspapers covered the lead-up, the race and the aftermath in detail. Comic papers such as Punch, Fun, and Judy offered jokes, puns and other witticisms. Punch provided material such as “The Derby in a Nutshell” and “A Few Racy Proverbs”. The correspondents and tipsters of sports newspapers created an elaborate scaffolding of possible race chances, betting odds and outcomes. Many mediated Archer’s skill and expertise and created possible narratives. Even the louche, drunken celebrations or consolations back in London after the race, a key cultural feature, were annually featured in the press throughout the century. The huge crowd, informally segregated by class and income in enclosed grandstands or on the open course, waited impatiently until the race began.

FIGURE 0.1: “After the Derby”, The Day’s Doings, May 27, 1871 (author’s collection).

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As the horses made the turn towards the finish Archer was shut in, riding almost on the rail. Then his horse began to overhaul the favorite, “Robert the Devil”. A hundred yards before the winning post Archer dropped his whip, which he was unable to hold properly. He was still just behind a few strides from the finish. According to the columnist “Vigilant” it was impossible to “say from the stand who had won” and tremendous excitement prevailed (The Sportsman, May 27, 1880). The judge decided that Archer had forced his horse onward to win. Subsequent media reportage presented a classic narrative of setback, difficulties and adversity overcome and eventual heroic triumph. It also illustrated the ever-increasing centrality of commercial sport, the growing celebrity attached to top professionals and the common use of statistical records to compare their success, since Archer’s racing records were regularly referenced. Archer, a slim, graceful but ruthless rider, was champion jockey each year from 1874 to 1886, and won one in three of all his races, riding over two hundred winners a year four times. He was the outstanding race rider of

FIGURE 0.2: Line drawing of Archer, frontispiece of Autobiographies of the Three Archers, by A. Cheltonian (Cheltenham: S.H. Brookes, 1885).

INTRODUCTION

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his age, earning at least £10,000 a year from his retainers, gifts and riding fees (worth approximately £908,000 in 2017 based on RPI calculations). This was a time when several other leading jockeys were earning £5,000 or more a season. On his death he left almost £70,000 plus valuable property. Then, as now, such published incomes generated cultural debate. Top jockey incomes were higher than those for “parliamentarians”, “men of letters”, “the liberal and learned professions”, and even the Lord Chancellor or Archbishop of Canterbury. To think that they were paid to “uneducated stable lads” for a sport which was “an instrument of gambling” was seen by some as wrong (London Evening Standard, October 12, 1886). In 1883 Archer married Nellie Dawson, a trainer’s daughter. His fame ensured special trains were laid on to the wedding, and large crowds attended. Demand for souvenirs was huge. Even the hooves and skin of the bullock roasted for the event were converted into snuffboxes, inkstands and other items (Bury and Norwich Post, February 5, 1883). Archer had a substantial house of upper-middle class quality built in three acres of land at Newmarket. But Archer died young, and his tragic end attracted major media coverage. In January 1884 the young couple had lost their first child, a baby boy. Nellie became pregnant again, but died shortly after giving birth to a daughter. Archer struggled after losing the support his wife had provided. Reportedly, he was distraught. There were concerns for his sanity. Through 1885 he continued to ride relatively successfully but, in the spring of 1886, stories circulated of growing problems. He had less success in picking rides. His betting, commonplace amongst jockeys though they were supposedly banned from doing so by the Jockey Club, which claimed the power to control leading flat racing, was becoming much less successful. He struggled to keep his weight down. There were even accusations circulating that he might be trying to make betting gains by deliberately losing. He was increasingly depressed. In October 1886, riding a leading Newmarket betting handicap, he weighed in a pound overweight and in a desperate finish lost by a head. He caught a fever, which turned to typhoid fever on his return home. Emotionally disturbed and under heavy strain, he shot himself with a revolver. In death, as in life, Archer’s own voice was hugely difficult to hear. All leading jockeys were reluctant to give press interviews, because of the danger of letting slip stable secrets. He left no note. At the inquest, his last conversations were filtered and interpreted through a series of other voices: those of friends, his sister, a nurse, his groom, and the surgeon, and then further problematically filtered through media reports. The coroner took pains to check that Archer had not “suffered any great losses in betting”, before guiding the jury towards a verdict that Archer’s death was caused by temporary insanity caused by typhoid fever, thus allowing him a Christian burial (Newmarket Journal, November 13, 1886).

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Amongst a wider public some met his death with shock and a sense of almost personal loss. Archer’s epitaph was told variously in verse and in columns of press coverage. The multiple narratives associated with Archer’s flawed, fragile last season and his tragic death shaped his subsequent image: simultaneously a hero and an antihero. His story rapidly became part of people’s personal narratives and entered collective memory and sporting consciousness (Huggins 2011). This cultural and social memory was fostered by the specialist sports press, sportswriters and commercial producers of various material commemorative goods. Huge crowds attended his funeral, lining the street to see the cortege and about forty carriages of mourners, packing the church and attending the internment. The crowd was better-behaved than at many celebrity funerals, though this should be read in the context of power-relations within a town dominated by elite trainers and wealthy owners. Business premises were shut, blinds and curtains were drawn, and expensive floral wreathes, crosses and other tributes were sent by many leading owners and racing men, including the Duke of Westminster, the Prince of Wales and others from Ireland, France and America, another indication of his contemporary cultural significance. A floral tribute in the form of a broken column of white lilies and ivy signified the cutting short of a life. Hundreds of sightseers made a symbolic pilgrimage to the tomb in subsequent days. Another signifier, his gravestone, also inscribed with the epitaphs of his wife and child, emphasized religious faith. Its crucifix shape associated his death with Christ’s sacrifice. Its texts referred to Archer’s “sacred memory”, and that “in the midst of life we are in death”, rather than mentioning his earthly successes or how he died. Commercially-motivated producers in Britain and beyond cashed in with merchandized sports-related commemorative material for public consumption. Madame Tussaud’s waxworks in London immediately produced his likeness. Contemporary visual media including portrait lithographs, photographs, horse brasses and even copies of his childhood apprentice jockey indentures (signed at eleven years old) were all advertised in the days and weeks after his death. This created a form of fragmented immortality and aided his future veneration, increasingly fixing his cultural memory and mythology, and constructing remembrances of the joys the jockey had brought through his successes. People clearly found some cultural imperative to collect and display these symbolic links to past celebrity. Thereafter Archer was often celebrated and mythologized in nationalistic cultural memory as “the greatest of all English jockeys”. Key elements of his story were repeated, copied, altered and reshaped over time. Multiple references to him continued long after his death and are still found occasionally in the modern national and local press (e.g., The Independent, November 8, 1998;

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Daily Telegraph, December 28, 2003; Newmarket Journal, April 8, 2016). Biographies have been written (e.g., Humphris 1923; Murray 2003) and his life has continued to be explored in adult and children’s literature (Tanner 2010; Peyton 2014). Scholarly work on nineteenth-century secular relics has shown how material mementoes have both an “ability to originate narrative” and “contain lingerings of the lost self ” (Lutz 2015: 1, 15). This emphasis on the material culture of death, linked to the cult of the heroic sporting individual, was a cultural characteristic of the Victorian age. In this age of digital and public history, British museum and heritage sites now seek to place the cultural heroes of the past in their wider context or critically examine popular myths. So, Archer’s racing life is still being reimagined in museums, on websites and other modern media. The National Heritage Centre for Horseracing and Sporting Art displays several Archer-associated items, including the actual revolver which he used, a commemorative plate, a clay bust, and a painting of Archer mounted on another

FIGURE 0.3: Archer in Hasting’s colours, frontispiece of The Life of Fred Archer by E. M. Humphris (London: Hutchinson, 1923).

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winning horse. Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum has an oil painting by Edward Henson and two watercolors featuring Archer, two posthumous prints, one of which shows Archer’s ghost riding across Newmarket Heath, several silk pictures showing Archer on horseback or in one of his patrons” colors; two clay pipes with his portrait; and a ceramic plate showing his portrait with a list of his achievements. There are modern plaques associated with his life on buildings at Cheltenham and Newmarket. Even this short narrative conveys a clear sense of what was still the “national sport” in 1880s Britain. Racing was the key betting sport. It attracted larger crowds than cricket, and far more interest than soccer. It shows how one of its leading practitioners was mediated in literary, visual and material form. It also introduces aspects of the eight overarching and broad themes which will be covered in following chapters. Many believed that for Archer one key sporting purpose was making money. The racecourse was one kind of sporting space. Archer’s success relied on training, and maintenance of his racing weight. The Jockey Club, under whose rules and order Archer ran, tried unsuccessfully to stop jockeys betting. Racing and its associated betting engendered conflict, debate and accommodation, whilst the Epsom heath course was socially zoned and segregated. Archer’s own identity was tied in to racing celebrity but also to risk and a certain type of embodiment, and his life was represented in a variety of ways through textual and material objects. Having introduced, briefly, some key aspects of a cultural approach, the rest of this chapter develops the field in more detail, touching in passing on the definitional problematics of the terms “cultural history”, “sport” and “age of industry”. It begins with an exploration of the way sport changed over the period, the extent of its links with processes of industrialization and urbanization, and some of the cultural debates that it raised associated with topics such as modernization, social class, amateurism/professionalism, sporting loyalties and imperialism. It then moves on to explore the ways in which the cultural history of sport during this period has been approached, its challenging of long-held myths, and some of the key sources used by cultural historians, which can appear in linguistic, visual and material forms. A section on gender reminds readers that sport between 1800 and 1920 was still a site of male power and gendered participation, and that women’s involvement is still largely understudied.

SPORT AND CULTURAL CHANGE IN THE INDUSTRIAL AGE Although for the purposes of this series this book covers the long nineteenth century from 1800 to 1920 “The Age of Industry” is a blanket term. The industrialization process had a complex chronology, with much variation in its

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take-up within and between countries and its beginnings variously found from the eighteenth century up to the mid-nineteenth century. Even then sport was found in most societies, often but not always competitive, and involving physical exertion, skill and often an element of chance in the result. It provided emotional satisfactions, stirred passions and excited imaginations. It provided sports’ followers with a range of meaningful pleasures. Sport’s transformations during the industrial age are clearly shown linguistically in the way the meanings of the word “sport” as used in the English language shifted and evolved in popular discourse. The term’s changes were closely tied to place, time, space, people, ritual and economic circumstances. To take Britain as an example, up to the 1840s the terms “sport” and “sporting” were usually textually applied to more upper and middle-class activities such as horse racing and what were the highly participatory “field sports” of the countryside, not expected to be watched by large numbers of spectators: deer, fox, hare and otter hunting; wild-fowl and game bird shooting; and fishing, though there were occasional references to “aquatic sports”, including yachting and regattas, which gathered wider public interest. The “good sport” to be found was the pleasure of engaging in such activities, while the phrase “sporting estates” signaled ownership of land offering such pleasures. “Sporting intelligence” reports in newspapers often referred to horse racing and its associated betting, or to hunting. “Sporting characters” were those extrovertly involved in such activities. In early nineteenth-century Britain there were growing numbers of spectators at the occasional major events wagered on by the elite, from cricket and pugilism to annual race meetings or regattas (Harvey 2005). There were also many more spontaneous, localized and parochial sports held in small towns and villages, often linked to fairs. These more “traditional sports” varied from region to region, but all had a strong degree of organization and widely-accepted rules. Male working-class participants competed in these local events. The best competitors sometimes issued and accepted sporting challenges for money stakes in sports such as boxing, footraces or wrestling. Such activities were still rarely described in newspapers as sport, rather as “manly games” or “healthy recreations”. Participant village and small urban events were largely plebeian, festive, customary, traditional and recreational. Though they exhibited complexity and variety, they were often embedded in a paternalistic, still largely agrarian society. More major events were watched occasionally, in a context of limited free time and income, and the expense of travel. The sporting spaces used for sport were often free to access, and as likely to be rural as urban. Unenclosed moorland, meadows and downs were often exploited for horse racing, hunting or hare coursing, and sometimes for cricket. The elite could use their estates. Roads might be used for pedestrian races or long bowling, rivers or the sea for rowing.

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In the early nineteenth century some formerly popular sports were coming under threat, or fading though changes in fashion or lack of local elite financial support. In Britain cockfighting, which still preserved some cross-class support in parts of northern and eastern England in 1800, was coming under attack from evangelical clergy, social reformers and the self-styled respectable, and was banned under an 1835 Cruelty to Animals Act, though it did not entirely disappear. Bullbaiting had disappeared from much of England by 1800 but was retained as part of wakes festivities in the east Midlands. By then it was generating increased local controversy variously focusing on its cruelty, its place in tradition, liberty, crowd behavior and occupation of urban streets. It slowly lost support, and attempts to continue it, largely by urban manual workers, were faced down by the local forces of law and order (Griffin 2005). Though the chronology of the “industrial age” has long suffered problems of definition, it is nevertheless clear that industrialization and urbanization took wider hold through the nineteenth century, most especially in Britain, America, Europe and Australasia, usually combining population growth, technological change, and a shift to new energy sources and use. People moved to towns for better job opportunities. Water, coal and steam power stimulated technological breakthroughs which stimulated inter alia the factory production of textiles, the iron industry, canals, bridges, and railways, steamboats and new forms of urban infrastructure transport. Rapidly advancing factory growth regulated industrial life and separated work from leisure. More sedentary routines were sometimes offset by engagement in sport. The same period saw the rise of more commercial, less localized and less fragmented sporting forms. As industrialization grew, many predominantly agrarian rural societies gradually became more urban and industrial. The USA, for example, was primarily a rural, agricultural nation until the 1860s, though industrialization using power-driven machinery had made some progress in the northern states. It gradually took off after the Civil War, though in contrast to Britain, Federal and state governments played an important role in initial financing of risky ventures. By 1900 the USA was the leading industrial nation and rivalling Britain in terms of sporting success. Many Canadian sports likewise were able to take advantage of the processes of urbanization, industrialization, and technological innovation (Metcalfe 1987; Kidd 1996). Industrialization in Western Europe, and especially in France, followed the British lead. France had a stronger role for the state, incentivizing technological progress and doing more to protect labor. In industrialized countries, civic cultures and urban identities flourished. Crucially for sport, urban workers who stayed healthy could enjoy regular work and correspondingly steadier “real” wages, an improved lifestyle and longer life expectancy. They were more able to maintain control over their limited leisure life. Rapidly expanding towns attracted large numbers of young

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male migrants, a ready potential market for sport. Such changes encouraged both the retailing and consumption of sport in urban and suburban locations. Some contemporary sporting journalists attempted to link sport quite explicitly to aspects of industrialization. In America, for example, Walter Camp (1869–1925), the football player, coach and sportswriter sometimes described as the “Father of American Football” tried to portray the game as symbolizing “the hierarchically structured, efficiently run industrial corporation” (Oriard 1993: 37). Camp saw college football as playing a role in training future industrial and commercial leaders, giving them a basis in discipline, tactical strategy. Such connections can be overdrawn. Simple economic explanations of sport’s rise are problematical, and the extent to which it was the major causal factor is easy to exaggerate. As the previous volume in this series shows, many athletic activities were already displaying significant characteristics of modern sport such as codification, specialization, sporting equipment, architecture and sports advertising in the previous three centuries. As Wray Vamplew (2016d: 342) has recently pointed out, “the role of industrialization is too often taken as a chronological correlation without the causal relationship being fully specified”. Industrialization was not universal, sweeping, and all-pervasive. It was limited, diverse, and regionally confined. Even in 1851, in Britain, agriculture and domestic servitude were still more significant than industrial employment, and over 75 percent of industrial workers were in non-mechanized industry (Vamplew 1988: 42). Industrialization and the transformation of sport were interdependent trends within macrotransformations taking place in larger societies. Historical revisionism now suggests that there was no single industrial revolution and that while industrialization was accompanied by cultural changes, some radical, there were large elements of continuity with the earlier period. In parts of England (especially London and industrial Lancashire), south Wales and lowland Scotland, the middle years of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a more recognizable modern, more achievement-oriented and commercial sporting culture. Though there was no clear break with the past, from around the later 1830s physical contests were increasingly described as “sports” or “athletic sports”, the latter a term rising in its appearances in books of the period up to c. 1900. The term “sport” slowly shifted to include games or competitive activities involving exertion largely played by young men in outdoor urban locations. There was an acceleration of the pre-existing expansion of the commercial leisure industry, often driven by small-scale capitalist entrepreneurs such as publicans. Across the western world new or modified forms of spectator sports emerged, with more widely-applied codified rules, more standardized pitches, and calendared and timed events. In America, for example, according to Mel

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Adelman (1981) the first “modern” sport was harness racing, emerging from the 1830s onwards and attracting large crowds. In the 1870s, America’s most popular stadium sport was probably pedestrianism, with celebrated white men, then immigrants, black men and some women making money walking in circles on dirt tracks for six days for prizes and endorsements. The word “sport” took on a slowly rising trajectory in texts up to the 1880s and 1890s, demonstrating its growing popularity, before it levelled off, variously stressing its role in entertainment, training, commercialism, health or pride in identity. Such changes in part reflected changes in societal attitude, but crucially too such changes of use contributed to and helped to shape people’s sporting practices. The many modernized sports such as swimming, athletics, cycling, lawn bowling, cricket, football, golf or rowing took on far more organized form. Most importantly, they now flourished in ever-increasing numbers of urban and suburban sports clubs which stressed the social aspects of sport. Sport’s scale and increasingly patterned regularities grew more rapidly from the later nineteenth century onwards, first in Britain and the USA, but rapidly spreading to Canada, continental Europe and beyond. In Britain, hard-working artisans on piece work around the mid-century might stop work on Saturday afternoons and return on Tuesday, enjoying sports on what they called “Saint Monday”. But increasingly Saturday afternoons became key times for sporting spectatorship, since Protestants avoided Sunday leisure. Especially from the 1850s onwards, many sports became ever-increasingly institutionalized, codified and commercialized, and took on national and even international competition. By the 1880s league competition was being introduced, first in the USA, then in Britain. In almost every country, sports clubs were increasingly created, rules were codified, and groups and individuals battled for control in a context of extant relationships of power. This meant that sports assumed diverse cultural meanings and expressions in different contexts, with changes coming unevenly and incompletely in different societies in Europe, North America and elsewhere. By 1920 sport had become a significant cultural activity that mattered to millions of people. Though the chronology of these changes has been debated, the second half of the nineteenth century had seen what was sometimes described as either “the birth of modern sport” or a global sporting “revolution”. Even so, as Neil Tranter (1998) shows, such notions are problematical, with uneven patterns of change and significant elements of continuity with earlier forms of sport. More people now lived in large towns and conurbations. Increased urbanization affected the spaces available to play sport, shifting it from earlier common land, town moors and open spaces, to enclosed grounds round public houses and inns, to public parks, or commercial stadia, tracks, grounds, courses and the many new purpose-built sports buildings: the cricket pavilions,

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swimming baths, club houses, racquets and tennis courts, and the racing, rugby or football grandstands which were a feature of the age. Each country had team sports which became dominant and created hegemonic forms of sports culture: baseball, American football and basketball in the USA; cricket, football and rugby in England; Gaelic games in southern Ireland; or cricket in India and Pakistan. In Germany and Sweden there were other forms of physical culture: the outdoor athletics of the German Turnen and the rhythmic movements and body culture of Swedish Ling gymnastics. As the widespread application of steam power increased productivity, employers slowly conceded to demands to lessen the working week for their labor force and pay them higher wages, initially in the textile industries. In Britain the industrial working week slowly shrank from six days towards a newly-created weekend increasingly giving Saturday afternoons as well as Sundays free from work from the late 1870s. Artisans outside the factory system had often taken Mondays off by working harder the rest of the week, and enjoyed sporting activities then, but the new industrial changes meant increased time for leisure, and higher disposable income for many in the middle and working classes. This had more major consequences, helping create a mass Saturday afternoon market for spectator sport. Industrialization, new forms of capitalism, urbanization and population growth created a consumer culture that new commercial forms of sport catered for, assisted by mass-market forms of advertising. Competition drove the industrial revolution. It also drove sport. Increased wealth and free time encouraged sports teams to play more regularly. Increased spending power fostered sufficient demand to allow commercial gate-money sports to develop, as well as accelerating an already existing interest in gambling on sports results and extending the betting market. Industrialization’s impact on transport systems also brought changes to sport. Better-off spectators had always travelled to watch sports, but as railways began to link major towns, this further integrated the supply and demand side. Leading players and sports teams began to travel further to play stronger opposition or to win more substantial prize money. In 1869 the Cincinnati Red Stockings gained national media coverage from their sporting tour on the new transcontinental railroad, which also raised their performance standards. Travel also encouraged the already growing move towards increased rulestandardization. In Canada the building of the Grand Trunk Railway in the 1850s and 1860s enabled prestigious McGill University’s ice hockey teams to compete in leagues in Quebec, Ontario, and the USA by the 1870s and this allowed some of its players to have a major impact on rule changes. With growing numbers of middle-class occupational groups in towns, their amateur activities also had more opportunities to develop. Sports such as golf or tennis increasingly became popular, and sports were increasingly perceived

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by the respectable middle classes in Britain, America and parts of Europe as useful for health, recreation, and character-building rather than excessive competition and financial gain. Sport supposedly taught moral virtues. In Britain and parts of Ireland a better-educated elite largely drove the spread of amateur rugby and soccer through the 1870s and early 1880s. But as leading sides sought for wider success in the increasingly popular cup competitions, which attracted larger urban crowds, and took on more working-class players, the two games had to choose between amateurism and professionalism and took different directions. At the same time the slow rise in real wages allowed the slightly better-off to purchase a range of increasingly mass-produced sporting equipment from bicycles to tennis racquets (Holt 2006). As sports moved from early phases of proto-modernity and were fashioned and refashioned to assume more modern forms this created what some historians called the “sportification” of physical culture (e.g., Guilianotti 2005: 20). This chronology of increased overall standardization of sports, which allowed comparisons to be made, varied from place to place and from sport to sport, as sports began to develop and increasingly link together key elements such as meritocratic competition, formal rules controlled more centrally, standardization of equipment and facilities, specialization and the division of labor, professionalization, more concern for statistical data to measure performance, the increased pursuit of sporting records, increased commercialization and the widespread availability of expert public information about sport (Guttmann 1978). By the end of the nineteenth century management committees and governing bodies at local, national, continental or even global levels were to be found in almost all the leading “modern” sports. Sociologists Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning (1986) presented the changes as “sportization”, a “civilizing” process of self-discipline and avoidance of violence that saw an increasing emphasis on “rational recreation” and stricter sporting rules in Britain and America, and the emergence of bureaucratic rule-generating governing bodies. Amateur sports organizations, schools and municipal parks and even many trade unions promoted these rational “civilizing” sports. These new approaches spread their attractions globally, reaching out to transnational and colonial cultures, as more powerful industrial nations oriented themselves to other individuals, groups, regions and countries. Sport played a key role in “cultural imperialism”, especially by the later nineteenth century, a period sometimes seen as the “age of empire”. Sport was often exploited as a soft form of “cultural power”, variously impacting on culturally diverse societies. British cultural influence was strong in its colonies and areas with informal cultural relationships such as Argentina (Huggins 2004: 219–40). Britain’s military, administrators, educators, missionaries, merchants and traders, and colonists more generally were often powerful publicists, propagandists, and proselytizers of sport (Huggins 2004). Many were imbued

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with a sense of imperial destiny, ethnocentric certainty, social Darwinism and arrogant notions of racial superiority. Pseudo-scientific ideas of race were exploited to rationalize their hegemony. Cricket, rugby, soccer and other sports were used as moral tools to spread Britain’s civilization, culture and imperial power whether locals wanted them or not. They provided a cultural bond and potent symbol of British power. Political, economic, educational and cultural dimensions ensured that during these cultural encounters, British sports often became accepted by important sections of local populations, especially collaborating elites. Other imperial nations also tried to spread their sports. Over the period international competition became commonplace: teams toured overseas, boxers, rowers, yachtsmen, and cyclists took on the world. Some sportsmen found employment in other countries to pass on their expertise. Indigenous games survived but in many places indigenous peoples were excluded from colonially-encouraged games by complex combinations of racism, class antagonisms and disparities of wealth. Cultural shifts and colonial responses varied, from adoption to adaptation, counter-currents, resistance or rejection. The same sports gained different meanings in different cultural contexts. Attempts to introduce baseball in Britain, for example, in 1874 and 1888–9, were sometimes dismissed by the British press as “rounders made wearisome” (Huggins 2004: 244). Over time, in most places there was increasing resistance to taking on colonial games on colonial terms. In Ireland the Gaelic Athletic Association attempted to create and consolidate an imagined Irish nationalist identity, dismissing soccer as “the garrison game” of an occupying power, and excluding any British participation (Cronin 1999), though its power to impose this varied from county to county. In Australia the idea of the cricket “test match” in 1877 also stemmed from the six Australian colonies’ desire to embarrass and ultimately defeat the MCC sides. Cricket flourished only briefly in Canada, thanks mainly to its proximity to the USA’s cultural power and sporting influence. In New Zealand, while cricket largely continued to reflect British social and cultural values, rugby asserted nationalism and challenged British dominance (Ryan 2004). The USA constructed its own “national pastimes”, variously defined, as sport began to shape conceptions of American cultural identities and interpretations of other cultures, most especially resistance to British hegemony (Dyreson and Schultz 2015). During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans sought to export their games, more successfully in those areas where cultural interplay was closer, as in Japan and East Asia, the Philippines, the South Pacific, Hawaii, and the Caribbean, with attempts to extend this to Europe and beyond as in the case of Spalding’s baseball tours (Gems 2006). Scottish immigrants in the 1850s encouraged Caledonian games, but German and Slavic nationalistic attempts to promote gymnastics struggled because of a refusal to compromise with modern sports.

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Contemporaries viewed and represented the new industrial age in different ways. It had a complex relationship with “modernity”, but a profound impact on class, culture and politics in all countries, although short-term effects on sports were not always positive. The radical changes, the continuous social and cultural transformations, created new anxieties and uncertainties. Sport might reaffirm traditional values, community relations and power relationships, or function as an instrument of social change. Complex and contradictory social tensions of class, gender or race formed part of sporting relationships in all countries. Widespread debate about themes related to sport included the place of gambling, the extent of commercialization and the importance of amateurism. Sports such as horse racing, pedestrianism or boxing attracted very substantial cross-class betting, both at events and in the wider betting market, yet in Britain only credit betting was legal. Widely popular off-course, illegal cash-betting, whether in London or New York, proved almost impossible to police effectively, despite reformers’ efforts. (Huggins 2004). There were other debates about the development of less violent codes of conduct and rules. From the 1870s onwards, in both England and America there were regular press and medical debates about the injuries and violence of football forms (Park 2001). Arguments between “modernizers” and those wanting to retain older forms were fought across many sports. The new forms of sport which emerged were sometimes characterized by hybridity and the reinvention and transformation of earlier forms. In terms of football for example, in the 1840s there were still pre-existing highly localized games with their own rules, as well as rules which drew on those found in England’s elite “public” (private) schools, most especially those at Eton, Harrow and Rugby, where sport was becoming used in the mid-Victorian period as a way of controlling boys’ behavior and building character. More modern defining features of rugby and association football (soccer) were just beginning to emerge, with no formal division. Though the English Football Association (FA) was formed in 1863, drawing in part on earlier public-school forms, and stressed a kicking game, its initially “top down” largely middle-class membership was generally confined to London and surrounding counties. The slightly different Association rules in Scotland and around Sheffield in Yorkshire both affected the ways in which FA rules then developed. Elsewhere in Britain distinctions were still often blurred and unclear, and though some games emphasized kicking and others handling there were large areas of similarity. Initial Rugby rules accepted kicking with the feet along with handling. Rugby School’s rules were dominant even before the formation of the Rugby Football Union (RFU) in 1873 and throughout its growth in popularity during the 1870s. From the 1870s onwards soccer quickly developed more cultural importance in the lives of people and communities, a popularity fed by the press. Soccer clubs sprang up everywhere, from educational and religious institutions to public houses and workplaces. For commercially-

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oriented urban clubs, their fortunes were sometimes closely linked to the fortunes of a town’s industry. As McDowell (2013) has shown, in his study of early Scottish football, patronage from benefactors, brewers and employers was often crucial. They donated money, found jobs for players, allowed time off from work and found grounds on which to play football. Much of this linked to activist forms of Presbyterian popular culture, discriminating against Irish immigrants and Catholicism, and intolerant ethno-religious bigotry and defiance sometimes generated local antagonisms, as that between Rangers and Celtic in Glasgow. From the 1890s onwards soccer’s global popularity expanded rapidly, and by 1930 it was passionately followed by millions not just in Britain but across the globe. In Ireland rugby sides began to emerge in the early 1870s and a few association sides in the later 1870s. In 1885 this drew a response from Irish nationalists. The supposedly native form of “Gaelic” football stood in conscious competition to the two “imported” English games (Cronin 1999). In Australia the Australian Football Rules were initially codified as early as 1859. Professional sportsmen, playing a sport at a high level, increased their popularity throughout the nineteenth century (Huggins 2004: 167–190). Professional cricket sides earned a good living touring towns and seaside resorts regularly in England in the 1850s. The growing numbers of what was coming to be a better-off middle class, especially those from the emerging professions, also wanted to become involved in sport. But different middle-class groups had rather different sporting agendas. More “amateur” sportsmen attached moral attitudes to games. They emphasized not the winning of money but character-building factors such as hard work, self-discipline, manliness, leadership, teamworking and new, more “moral” forms of fair play. This invention of “amateurism” was a partial response to urban and industrial pressures. It was itself a contested notion, full of complexities and ambiguities, leading to on-going battles. Some, wanting a more commercialized approach to popular sport, were prepared to accept professionalism. Those stressing an amateur, non-commercial approach to sportsmanship wanted sporting participation to be undertaken for its own sake. Some sports were reformulated in new guise, as more “rational recreation” hoping to create a more orderly, productive society, especially where the new sports were dominated by groups within the middle classes such as the service professions. Some churchmen attempted to use sport to foster what they termed “Muscular Christianity”. Others strongly opposed church involvement in sport. In Britain many of the new governing bodies emerging from the 1860s onwards moved from the earlier cash prizes offered to victorious athletes towards honorary and symbolic prizes, especially in sports such as golf, tennis or athletics. As new regulatory bodies for sport began to develop, their administrators often clung to an ideology of strict “amateurism”, including the

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word in organizational titles, as in the Amateur Swimming Association or the Amateur Athletic Association. Leading committee members of such amateur bodies, often from the upper-middle classes, claimed a moral authority for their exercise of power, and tried to make it appear natural and thus legitimate. Their newly-created structures sometimes had rules that deliberately excluded those working-class men whose work might give them any advantage in terms of strength and skill. Amateurism’s ideals were taken up when the International Olympic Committee, white, male and wealthy, was set up in 1894 and revived the Olympics in 1896 in Athens, working hard to control and shape an enormously powerful myth of amateurism (Llewellyn and Gleaves 2016). Internationally athletics continued to regard itself as an amateur sport, where competitors could be banned from competition for accepting money. The International Association of Athletics Federation was established in 1913 to organize the sporting regulations of amateur athletics worldwide. Rules about amateurism were often as much social as economic. Sport’s contested space could generate resistance or the formation of more inclusive, more commercially-oriented organizations sometimes prepared to accept professionals. In America, the National Association of Baseball Players, strongest in the north-eastern part of the United States, allowed clubs to be professional as early as 1869. In England, while both rugby and association clubs accepted the need to pay “legitimate” expenses, there were major divisions about whether players could be paid to play, compensated for time lost from their work, or should stay fully amateur. While southern English clubs largely supported amateurism, in the midlands and northwest, by the late 1870s good players from elsewhere were being imported to clubs and found work. From c. 1879 there was a rapid increase in illegal payments by some clubs. By 1885 the English FA’s pioneer administrators were sufficiently pressured, largely by some of its northern and midland members, to allow professionalism. By contrast, the RFU, dominated by its southern clubs, held firm for amateurism, even though some northern clubs were paying players. In 1895 some northern clubs split away to allow compensation to be paid for time off work, and created a new organization, the Northern Rugby Union, which took a more commercial approach. This internal split and continuing internal debate afterwards within rugby allowed the association game to become England’s national winter game in subsequent decades. Then too, amateurism could be merely a matter of lip service. In sports like county and international cricket, played over several days, or touring football sides, some amateurs were not rich enough to meet the costs of “pure amateurism”. Hence the apparent hypocrisy of cricketer W. G. Grace and many others taking huge “expenses” or being found sinecure jobs to allow them to play whilst retaining amateur status (Birley 1999).

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FIGURE 0.4: W. G. Grace, English cricketer, courtesy of Getty images.

When sports were purely amateur spectators were rarely of concern. As standards of performance improved, attendance at sports rose and a more commercial attitude began to be taken, crowds became more involved in their spectatorship. The later nineteenth century was a crucial period globally for sport, one where its cultural diffusion, appropriation and exchanges accelerated rapidly, and urban spectators were becoming more enthusiastic and even fanatical in support. Support became linked to urban identity. On Saturday May 9, 1885 two leading English soccer clubs, Aston Villa and Preston North End, played at Villa’s Birmingham ground in front of 5,000 spectators. There was still no league system, but crowds at such “friendly” matches were growing. Soccer was still supposedly an amateur sport, despite much concealed semiprofessionalism. Many middle-class club administrators wished it to stay so, but the England FA’s formal acceptance of professionalism was only two months away. The match was important to both sets of fans, but Preston won easily. At the final whistle an estimated 2,000 disappointed home fans invaded the pitch, taking the defeat very badly. By this time the local press was actively constructing the

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meaning of such matches, and what people understood of sporting events was often shaped by the way they were represented. Though more negatively reported in the Birmingham press, all descriptions agreed that there was rioting, and physical attacks on all the Preston players. They were prevented from leaving, mobbed with bottles and stones, kicked, struck and poked at with sticks and umbrellas, with much noise, yells, hoots and shouting. Eventually the players escaped on a waggonette, pursued by the crowd. Many reports emphasized the shock of “respectable” spectators at the “disgraceful”, “ruffianly and cowardly” behavior of the “disreputable” crowd, using the language of class. The perpetrators were supposedly “howling roughs”, “a gang of blackguards” (Preston Herald, May 13, 1885; Midland Athletic Star, May 9, 1885). There was concern amongst Birmingham’s football leadership that the football reputation of the district would be ruined, and that clubs of any standing would refuse to meet its teams. Such reports showed how soccer, like other sports at this period, was experiencing cultural struggles for ascendancy and power over sport’s future direction. Sport’s ownership, core values and the meaning of competition and winning were all debated by a growing range of interest groups, who variously co-existed, competed, negotiated or collaborated.

SPORT AND CULTURAL HISTORY In recent decades the words “culture” and “cultural history” have increasingly been included in the titles of high-quality, lengthy books focused on sports’ history. Early examples drew on social history before utilizing more interdisciplinary perspectives and approaches often described as the “cultural turn” (Cook 2012). At its macro level cultural history helps us understand a period in its entirety, recognizing its changing cultural practices and the ways in which people at various levels of society communicated their values, thought and experience of sport. There is, however, as Cook and Glickman (2008: 4) have observed, no single “fixed or finished method for doing cultural history”. Cultural historians recognize it as contested terrain, with diverse theories, interpretations and approaches. Peter Burke, for example, saw it as expanding historical practice through the exploitation of the social and cultural theories of writers such as Foucault, Bourdieu, Geertz or Gramsci and showed that its proponents have largely stressed the symbolic and its interpretation (Burke 2014; Burke 2012). Most historians accept that social and cultural histories are strongly linked and as such “not mutually exclusive but critically engaged” (Handley, McWilliam and Noakes 2018: iii). Historians of sport have shown a keen interest in the forces that have conferred meaning on sporting life, the power structures that variously encouraged, permitted, and suppressed them and in the way sport has played a part in the experiences and identities of players, officials, spectators

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and those less attracted or opposed to it. There is widespread recognition that even for historians, the past is often read through the lens of present concerns. Use of the term “culture” itself has varied. The word has changed its meanings and cultural traditions (Abercrombie, Hill and Turner 2000: 83) over time, constantly transforming and adapting to new circumstances even when what it is and what it is meant to be are still not exactly defined. Some cultural historians use the term more narrowly to refer to the supposedly “higher” artistic expressions of a civilization or the larger matrix of commercial institutions and structures in which artistic forms are produced and consumed. Some have used the term more broadly to refer to the social or institutional spheres in which collective forms of meaning are made, enforced, and contested, and the shared features that bind people together in a community. For some historians of sport, the recognition of associations between sports and societal beliefs, customs, practices, structures, organizations, values and ideals has encouraged more interdisciplinary ways of studying sport, exploiting insights and approaches from anthropology, ethnography and linguistics. An early example here was the incorporation of social anthropology into a study of athleticism in Victorian public schools (Mangan 1981). As historians of sport have increasingly adopted cultural history approaches, the shift of interest has begun to turn towards discourse, exploring “texts” that could be read and culture to be deconstructed and decoded in the context of power, its dynamics and exercise. These offer a range of possible realities upon which historians construct their narratives. This has created more interest in the ways in which different groups and cultures have used sporting language, discourse, narratives, behaviors, symbols and other texts in ways which allowed them “to create traditions, embody values, propagate ideas and nurture institutions” (Booth 2004: 105). Part of this approach has been to seek out the social practices through which sport was disseminated, experienced and interpreted, and to explore representations and the meanings of events, themes and topics. These represented and physically embodied the values, attitudes and self-image of the wider sporting population. They gave meaning to sporting social life: constructing communities, conveying the various cultural struggles within sport and the diversity of local practices, shaping gender or aiding sporting commercialism. During the industrial age sport itself was constructed, framed and memorialized by the stories told about it, represented and transmitted in ways which helped shape social structures and social practices. In recent years historians of sport have begun to debate the nature, objectives, assumptions, and methods of presentation of sport history in its various empirical, constructivist and deconstructive forms (e.g., Pope 1997; Booth 2005) and consider culture more deeply, sometimes engaging with symbols and their interpretation or the meanings of cultural practices. Recent studies (e.g.,

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Hughson, Inglis and Free 2005; Schirato 2007; Hughson 2009), employ a range of theoretical approaches from cultural materialism to cultural politics. This broader cultural turn from c. 1990 has excited an increasing interest in the culture of sport as a source for insights and understandings about the ways people made sense of the worlds they inhabited, and a search for what Holt (1990: 2) called the “motives, pleasures, and values enshrined in the daily round of play”. Such intellectual shifts have slowly moved “culture” to the forefront of sports history. Elliott Gorn (1985) explored the layered and changing meanings of prizefighting bareknuckle boxing in nineteenth-century America, its rites of violence, values and social relationships and place in working-class culture, and its links with manhood and masculinity, class and ethnicity. Alan Metcalfe’s study of the place of sport in nineteenth-century Northumberland mining communities was concerned to establish the “meaning of the game to the miners” and the “role it played in their lives” (Metcalfe 2006). Sport has generated a rich tapestry of mythological and symbolic narratives whether speaking about athletes and sportsmen like Archer and metaphorically referring to notions of sacrifice or using machine analogies, or claiming group, gender, place or other forms of identity. Origin stories have been shared, written and rewritten, invented and reinvented, changed, restructured, or misappropriated to meet the needs of new audiences and social groups and younger generations. Cultural historians have been to the fore in challenging some of the many widely-accepted narratives and interpretations of sport: exploring the reasons they were created; the role of nostalgia and invented traditions in their construction; the purposes they served; and why they persisted. Almost all nineteenth-century sports slowly assumed later key myths of their origins, cultural practices, events and notions that were zealously guarded, often created for nationalistic or class reasons, and usually unchallenged. Often these focused on a supposedly “great man”, whose work was used by journalists and sport’s administrators to illustrate a “good story” rather than any historical “truth” (Wagg 2011: 2). Irish football writers often claimed soccer was introduced to Ireland in Belfast in 1878 by John McAlery, even though there were earlier association sides in the mid-1870s, and others were involved in its introduction (Moore 2017). The Rugby Union World Cup is still named after William Webb Ellis, the schoolboy who allegedly invented rugby football at Rugby School in 1823 by handling the ball, even though the story first surfaced after his death, and was only widely publicized in 1895 when rugby was under attack by those in northern industrial towns and cities wanting to pay working players for lost time. In part the story allowed Rugby School to reassert its historical status. Its early head teacher, Thomas Arnold, was often associated with rugby too, thanks to the novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays, despite there being no historical evidence

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of his interest in games. This illustrates the way narratives change meanings over time. In 1895 such stories helped establish a solid middle-class lineage for rugby and helped more exclusively middle-class sides in their battle for control (Collins 2006: 5–6). The origins of Australian Rules football are likewise still a matter of culturallysignificant controversy in Australia, variously claimed as linked to Aboriginal culture, the Gaelic football of Irish immigrants, or English football traditions (Collins 2011). Such claims demonstrate the way power relationships, notions of knowledge production and reliance on written rather than oral evidence can be matters of strong debate. Baseball was supposedly invented by Abner Doubleday, later a Civil War general, in the village of Cooperstown, New York, which still houses the Baseball Hall of Fame, a claim still omnipresent despite strong arguments from historians for its derivation from the English game of rounders and the discovery of antecedent games (Block 2005). Many such myths have been tied to the exploration of identities and selfrepresentations. In New Zealand, rugby union’s popular mythology has been linked to claimed national characteristics such as egalitarianism, ingenuity and pragmatism (Ryan 2005a: 9). A good deal of recent sports history has been preoccupied with these questions of meaning and identity, seeing identities such as class or gender not as fixed, but as cultural constructions that produce ideas “about who we are, and arise out of living and interacting in society” (Hill 2011: 52). Sport stimulated identities at multiple levels, all capable of generating powerful emotions. This encouraged interest in competitions since athletes and teams might represent identities territorially related at levels from local, town and city, region to nation, as well as identities based on gender, class, ethnicity, religion or age group. Some like social class are very evident in the sources, while by contrast there was often an archival silence about race and ethnicity. An academic study of the first black footballer in Britain was subtitled “The Absence of Memory” (Vasili 1997). Sport offered escape from work, with identities shaped with elements of cultural choice rather than through economic necessity, so class has been downplayed by cultural historians as new forms of identity were asserted. Identities were unstable, constructed and reshaped over time, but sport’s importance in aiding the construction of national identities in the nineteenth century has been noted. According to Sklaroff (2015: 42), no area of popular culture was as central to the making of American identity as sports. In France, in terms of national identity, skiing in France before 1914 was promoted as a way of disseminating and internalizing national identity amongst its mountain populations (Morales 2013). It also had a vibrant associational cycling culture. In Germany, Turnen, the conservative German gymnastics movement, played a role in nation building, especially during the 1860s, in a variety of contexts: clubs and schools, education more generally and in politics (Krüger 1996).

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SOURCES FOR THE STUDY OF SPORT During the nineteenth century, popular written representations of sport proliferated, and are important for any meaningful cultural analysis. They include newspapers, comics and magazines, fiction and non-fiction texts, and official records produced by governments, corporations and sporting organizations. Sporting media provided the language, judgement and symbols that shaped readers’ actions and mind-set. Increasingly, as they became cheaper, they became a cross-class, widely-shared cultural product, though some still differentiated their perceived audience in terms of conventional distinctions of rank and status. They set out to create and shape sport in the minds of contemporaries, as well as reflecting contemporary changes in sport. The sporting press played a key role, contributing to, rather than just reporting, local perceptions and understandings of sporting culture. Within the new industrial market economies newspapers could sometimes be another instrument of hegemonic control. At other times they reflected a more populist voice from below. Newspapers contributed greatly to the collective construction of knowledge about particular sports, and could impede or encourage a sport’s growth from a recreational activity towards becoming a more major sports spectacle. Studies of American football and baseball have demonstrated clearly how instrumental the popular sporting press was in shaping their early image. Oriard (1993) has shown in his study of early American football how these newspaper interactions and dialogues with readers created a range of dominant narratives. These could be read in different ways, and offered multiple and sometimes conflicting ideas. There was an intricate link between the way college football became seen as a populist commercial entertainment form and its press coverage. Sport was covered in daily and evening newspapers, weekly papers and the sporting press in reporters’ evaluative descriptions and rhetorical tools as well as in editorials, readers’ correspondence and sports advertising. Reportage covered regular details of sporting contests, interviews, speeches and club and organizational meetings, in attempts to boost circulation. Reporters might privilege particular sports, linking them to their dominant set of values, to masculinity, gender, class or racial attitudes. From around the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the extent to which fans and the wider public could “own” particular sports, sport’s core values and the place of competition and winning were all increasingly debated in editorials and correspondence columns. Some people clung to older notions of sport as a form of less competitive social recreation. Others chose to boost the newer more highly competitive and/or commercial sports. Some encouraged gambling sports such as pugilism, pedestrianism or racing. Some stressed physical strength and aggression, others strategy, skill and a more “scientific” approach. The

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stories they told created, consolidated and evoked sporting life for readers, offering multiple readings to the historian (Hill 2006), though how they were actually received by contemporaries is less clear. The nineteenth century saw a steady global emergence of a specialist sporting press, soon boosted by steam power and the rapid telegraphic transmission of news. The expensive metropolitan weekly Bell’s Life in London, first published in 1822, focused largely on horse racing and hunting. In Australia its name was ritually referenced by Bell’s Life in Sydney (1845), Bell’s Life in Victoria and Sporting Chronicle (1857), and Bell’s Life in Adelaide (1861). America’s first major sporting newspaper, Spirit of the Times: A Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature and the Stage, aimed at an elite readership, was the most popular weekly in the USA by 1839 and gained a west-coast competitor, California Spirit of the Times in 1854. In Britain, the 1853 abolition of advertisement taxes and 1855 repeal of stamp duty immediately saw reductions in newspaper prices. Demand and circulation grew, fostered by a number of factors: rail transport enabled rapid conveyance of news and encouraged more sports spectatorship; a steady improvement in living standards and disposable incomes gave many free time to play and watch growing numbers of sports and sporting events; increased educational opportunities and rising literacy rates encouraged reading; and the new electric telegraph provided results and short reports more rapidly. Le Sport pioneered sports journalism in France in 1854. In the 1860s in Britain and America new, cheaper newspapers entered the market, initially covering a number of sports, and later becoming more specialized, with reports that increasingly allowed readers to imaginatively reconstruct the event through the use of hyperbole, sensation, more colorful and dramatic language and sometimes visual engravings. Press agencies grew up to help circulate reports. By the 1890s more regional newspapers began specializing in sport. Birmingham for example, in the English midlands, had the Sports Argus and the Sporting Star, and reports were increasingly seen through the prism of popular culture. Historians are beginning to exploit literature, both novels and non-fiction, to enrich and shed light on the period (Bandy 2016). Fictional narratives in particular open new lines of enquiry, offering fresh perspectives and judgements through their construction of scenarios, situations, and dramas. Cultural texts exploiting literature are still relatively rare. They include a study by Gillespie (2008) of nineteenth-century big-game hunting and exploration in Canada, drawing on cultural studies, literary criticism, authorship and cultural geography, and an analysis by Bateman (2009) of the ways in which nineteenth-century texts like Pycroft’s The Cricket Field (1851) produced and reproduced ideas of national and imperial British culture. Alongside written texts there has been a developing field of enquiry into visual representations of sport as important constituent components of culture

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(Huggins and O’Mahony 2011). Sport as a cultural phenomenon has often been a visual experience, helping to shape subjectivity and behavior. Variously exploited as media illustration, entertainment, pedagogy, or status or aesthetic markers, such material might cater for cultural notions of particular identities. The sporting gaze was transformed by prints, posters, paintings, and sporting content in theatres and music hall. The rise of sport developed in parallel with the emergence of photography and film as key image-making media and was boosted by the new cinematic “dream palaces”. Paintings too were loaded with symbolical significance, as Huggins (2013) showed in his analysis of William Frith’s selective, satirical and apparently socially realistic painting of Derby Day, constructed from personal observation, photographs, and large numbers of studio groupings and portraits. In the later nineteenth century and early twentieth century, some painters placed increased emphasis on idealized male bodies, utilizing iconography based on classical Greek antiquity, encouraging an association of sport with the civilized past, as in the case of early Olympic posters and images (Timmers 2008). Engravings and photographs for more working-class readers were more focused on celebrity and the drama of competitive sporting spectacle. The earliest photographers immediately embraced sport to encourage sales (O’Mahony 2018). Across the world, a common cultural trope became the staged team photograph, a possible expression of fraternity, class, status, gender, race, localism, collectivity or national unity. Players were briefly captured in often respectable, tranquil repose, providing a contrast with their vitality, aggression and physicality. As exposure times shortened, magazines and newspapers included sport action shots. From the 1880s cigarette manufacturers first in the USA and then in Europe began including cigarette cards, with a picture on the obverse and explanatory text on the reverse, to encourage sales, and sport was soon a central theme. Their topics around 1900 included (inter alia) “champions of sport”, “sports of all nations”, “heroes of sport”, “captains” and “sporting terms”, as well as sets focusing on particular sports, especially soccer in Britain, and baseball in America, often exploiting the promotional power of celebrity. Film was in its infancy in the late 1890s but early actuality local film footage often allowed filmgoers to see themselves in crowds at sporting events (Russell 2004). As film’s popularity grew sporting films increasingly had cross-class appeal, ensuring sport took firmer hold on the wider population. Material objects, the built environment that shaped sport and culture, and topics such as heritage and renewal, museum display, and sports memorialization are beginning to attract attention (Borish and Phillips 2012), alongside business histories of commercial manufacturers or sellers of sports clothing and equipment such as Gamage’s, the London sport and athletic outfitters (Biddle-Perry 2014). Costume is of growing interest, since dress codes, fashion and design exemplify cultural codes. Women’s dress codes for sport often focused on

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FIGURE 0.5: Boxer Tom Cribb, Staffordshire pottery work, courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon collection.

female modesty rather than comfort when in public contexts, though in America and Britain “rational dress” began to be used by some in the later nineteenth century for activities such as croquet, tennis, cycling, swimming and gymnastics (Warner 2006). There has been growing interest in aspects of sport, urban space and the built environment as in the English Heritage Series Played in Britain. Power relationships were often crucial, since sporting architecture and design were used to control and regulate admission and behavior in terms of class, gender and race.

GENDER For much of its history the reporting of sport has been focused on men. Sport played its part in the cultural politics of gender. But in any cultural history of the nineteenth century women’s growing involvement in sport has an important place. The language of sport still played a major role in constructing and

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perpetuating gender inequality, giving women less coverage and treating them differently. Sports were largely male rituals. Gender, sex and sexuality all helped to inform women’s sporting spectatorship and participation. Women still lived largely within patriarchal authority and a set of expectations which structured their lives within families and communities, which meant that women’s experiences of sport varied with class, location, age, religion, race and other contextual variables (Hargreaves 1994). Cultural historians recognize the body as a site of power and display, and during the later nineteenth century gendered sport was sometimes viewed through the lens of health and the body’s appearance. Understandings of bodies were always socially constructed, with individual sporting bodies linked to others in systems of negotiation and power. From a cultural perspective, for the ever-growing numbers of professional middle and lower-middle class men in sedentary indoor occupations in Britain and America, participation in strenuous sport in the outdoors provided recreation, changing their bodies and giving them a language of “manliness” through which their bodies could speak alongside a new form of cultural capital. The creation and reproduction of gender identity, especially masculine gender identity, were processes deeply embedded in sport at this time. So as women slowly gained more opportunities to enjoy exercising, watching and playing sport they were often forced to struggle against male attitudes centered round the cultural politics of gender and sexuality, from restrictive societal beliefs about physical ability to opposition from official male sporting organizations. Women’s actual participation, sweating and muscularity was no longer seen by middle-class urban males as having a positive (heterosexual) payoff, in enhancing their desirability. Women in Britain and east-coast America faced restricting and controlling pressure, from conservative medical discourse, eugenicists and psychologists, to do only “moderate” exercise, supposedly within their capacity, in the belief that this would avoid damage to their reproductive functions (Vertinsky 1990). Even so, health and exercise contributed to women’s emancipation in the late nineteenth century. As Jean Williams (2014: 2) pointed out, “we cannot really understand the history of sport . . . without looking at the prominent ways women have wrought its culture”. Sports became an more important element in mid-Victorian middleclass women’s leisure activities, as a minority, often socially well-connected, began to participate in a growing range of more often individualist sports, from angling to archery, cricket to croquet, or skating to swimming, despite the constrictions of clothing and the male antagonisms and anxieties which placed constraints on suburban club membership or times of participation. First in equestrian sports such as hunting, where women participated in increasing numbers in Britain and the Empire, riding astride rather than side-saddle, and then in cycling, women began revolutionizing older ideals of femininity. Fewer

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women played sport competitively, and team games for women were slow to emerge. Attempts to play football in Britain found few sympathizers though in the 1890s, as women’s roles came under pressure to be redefined, the middleclass British Ladies Football Club played touring games in 1895 and 1896 (Lee 2008). Industrial capitalism and attendant changes in the nature of men’s work and women’s expanding public roles created a “crisis in masculinity” as gender attitudes began to change. In the shipbuilding town of Sunderland, as women increasingly demanded to be allowed to play hockey on the men’s pitch at Ashbrooke, the captain of the men’s team ironically wrote: A great future is before the game, for when the establishment of the reign of the New Woman is accomplished, and when our cricket and football fields are devoted to the exclusive use of the gentle tyrants of the coming day, a few faithful men will be found still playing the game of Hockey, and keeping green the memory of that bygone day when man was free! —Squance 1895:107 Girls’ private schools began to emulate boys’ private schools by including physical education and outdoor team games like hockey or lacrosse in the curriculum, but with more moderate forms of exercise (McCrone 1988). As adults, a few women were beginning to become involved in more commercial forms of sport, earning money from their skills. By the later nineteenth century, for example there were professional female swimmers in Britain and America offering swimming as spectacle: stunts and performances in endurance events, exhibitions and races in sea and swimming baths, displays of ornamental swimming skills in music hall tanks, as well as teaching swimming in femaleonly classes (Bier 2011; Day 2012).

CONCLUSION By the early twentieth century, sport had been largely transformed. The new forms of sport had written, often complex rules, which created the structures of play and administration, and attempted to impose standards of behavior and sportsmanship. Sports were played far more regularly, often at the weekend, with fixture lists widely known, some still “friendly” but others in structured competition, often in the form of leagues and/or cups, which were regionally and nationally based. Such competition attracted large numbers of spectators. The following essays each pick up on a cultural theme and together provide an overview and an introduction to the growing body of scholarship. As will be seen most authors, like sports historians more generally, have tried to avoid making over-hard and fast distinctions between the social and the cultural.

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The essays in this collection are organized in a thematic way, accepting some measure of overlap in content, and this means that topics such as amateurism are addressed from several different perspectives. All the authors made their own choices about how to interpret their theme and which examples to include in support of their interpretation, albeit only too aware, as with sport itself, that choices about inclusion are also choices about exclusion. Jerry Gems introduces the many purposes of sport which affected how sport was played and watched. Michael Krüger explores the changing nature of sporting time and sporting space through the nineteenth and early twentieth century. David Day explores sporting products, the need for training and the impact of technology. The control and regulation of sport changed rapidly over the period and Matthew McDowell examines the nature of rules and order. As Malcolm McLean shows, sport generated conflict but forced a level of cultural accommodation, while in a closely related chapter, Roberta Park and Mike Huggins show that while some sports were more inclusive, there were often attempts at exclusion and segregation. Wray Vamplew shows how sport could shape identities at a range of levels, but also shaped mental and embodied approaches. Finally, shifting from popular culture to high culture, Allen Guttmann explores artistic and literary representations of sport.

CHAPTER ONE

The Purpose of Sport GERALD R. GEMS

During the industrial age the practice of sport fulfilled several objectives as it assumed modern characteristics, as Allen Guttmann notes in his seminal work, From Ritual to Record (1978). Guttmann stated that modern sport was rational, secular, bureaucratic, quantified, and specialized. Melvin Adelman later added the component of commercialization (Adelman 1986). Sport assumed more diverse and individualistic meanings and purpose: a form of play and recreation, a means to health, fitness, and socialization, or an association with racial, ethnic, gender, social class, and cultural identity (Gems, Borish, Pfister 2017). Particular forms of sport projected local, regional, and national identities, and proved to be instrumental in the imperial campaigns of British, European, and American governments (Mangan 1985; Mangan and Ritchie 2004; Gems 2006; Gems 2017).

LEISURE AS RESPITE European nobility and the growing entrepreneurial class of employers largely controlled their own leisure. Public baths had served hygienic and religious purposes in the ancient civilizations of Asia, India, Greece, and Rome, and gentry later traveled to hot springs and seaside beaches for therapeutic relief. By the nineteenth century such locations began to evolve into tourism resorts and even the working classes could enjoy public baths by mid-century in England. Festivals and county fairs engaged all classes in communal activities; but increasing urbanization offered alternative forms of commercialized entertainment. Sport provided more active forms of leisure and the nobility, with their country estates, had long enjoyed equestrianism, fox hunts, and 33

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horse racing. Polo originated in Asia, but British military officers in India brought the game to their homeland by the 1860s and it soon became popular among the aristocracy. By the latter nineteenth century upper-class men and women also tested their skills from archery to lawn tennis; while the laboring classes, whose leisure was largely restricted to a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, continued to engage in hunting and fishing for sustenance and the raucous football games that had been customary for centuries. Other pastimes, such as bowling, continued to revolve around pub culture, where men sought solace for their arduous lives (Whorton 1982; Uminowicz 1984). In the overcrowded cities of the United States the creation of public parks served the practical purpose of an artificial firebreak; but also offered a space for community leisure practices. Picnics, games, and races ensued in a festive atmosphere; but as labor relations between employers and employees became embroiled in the latter decades of the century, the public spaces became sites for the rifle practice of workers’ militias. Armed conflict erupted in American cities as police supported the interests of employers in confronting striking laborers with consequent deaths on both sides. The Industrial Workers of the World organized in Chicago in 1905 and violence became a trademark of their crusade for workers’ rights (Gems 1997). Urban playgrounds were constructed for the safety of largely immigrant children, which soon served assimilation purposes to acculturate ethnic youth through the inculcation of American sports and games taught by trained supervisors. In the parks, playgrounds, and schools, teachers and coaches taught the capitalistic value of competition, the democratic values of teamwork and cooperation, and respect for authority as referees regulated game play in informal contests and organized interscholastic athletics (Gems 1997). Whereas the European aristocracy repaired to their country estates for solace, men and women of means in the eastern United States sought spiritual regeneration in the wilderness. The Adirondack Mountains of New York became a desired destination as early as the 1830s, and the vast continent continued to provide exploratory ventures, hunting, camping, and fishing sojourns throughout the remainder of the century (Terrie 1978). For some adventurers, enjoyment meant the conquest of nature. Europeans recorded the first ascent of Mt. Blanc, the highest peak on the continent as early as 1786. When Marie Paradis became the first woman to succeed at the task in 1808, followed by Henriette d’Angeville in 1838, women also joined the competition. English climbers formed the Alpine Club in London in 1857, and conquered the Matterhorn in 1865. Americans climbed Pike’s Peak in the Rocky Mountains as early as 1820 and Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the Sierra Nevada range, in 1873. They formed their own Appalachian Mountain Club in 1876. Among its original members, Fannie Bullock Workman and Annie Smith Peck emerged as rivals for mountaineering accolades, with Workman achieving a women’s altitude record in the Himalayas.

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FIGURE 1.1: Miss Annie S. Peck, mountaineer, courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

By the end of the nineteenth century alpinists had climbed the highest peaks in Europe, Africa, and South America. Mt. McKinley (now known as Denali in Alaska), the tallest mountain in North America was scaled in 1913. The quest for such laurels spawned an early form of sport tourism. While the wealthy had the means to pursue such activities, the burgeoning middle class relied on pastimes closer to home. Cricket evolved from a long

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history of ball and stick games with its own governing body in the Marylebone Cricket Club established in 1787. The first County teams were founded by 1839 and county championships established by 1890 in the homeland and similar competitions ensued throughout the British Empire thereafter. The length of games required extended leisure time, something unavailable to the working class. The opportunities for gambling on the sport had appeal for the nobility, who had the time and money to wager on outcomes, which led to player and team sponsorship. British soldiers and colonists spread the game throughout the Empire; where it eventually became a means for indigenous peoples to challenge the precepts of Social Darwinism and racial superiority (Nauright, Cobley, and Wiggins 2014). Cricket, however, lost favor to the game of baseball in both Canada and the United States. By the mid-nineteenth century baseball had become the national sport in America as white-collar workers found enough leisure hours to form clubs and organize matches. During the American Civil War (1861– 1865) soldiers played baseball during their respite from battle and brought the game back to their locales after cessation of the hostilities, spreading it throughout the country. Henry Chadwick, a British-born New York sportswriter, greatly popularized the American game by the use of the box score and compiling players’ batting averages that presaged the modern fascination with analytics. The quantification of the game and its myriad numerical possibilities lent itself to wagering on team and individual players’ outcomes and accomplishments or lack thereof. Gambling on baseball was endemic despite the attempts of league administrators to banish the practice. In 1919 the World Series, the American professional baseball championship, was marred by the Black Sox scandal, in which members of the favored Chicago White Sox team accepted bribes from gamblers to purposely lose. The ensuing backlash resulted in a civil trial and the origin of the commissioner system that now governs professional sports leagues. Horse racing had long been a favorite leisure pastime, largely due to the potential for gambling. Horse racing carried regional pride when sectional factions challenged each other to the North-South races starting in 1823. Southerners bred their horses for speed, while northerners favored endurance, and even the US Congress shut down to witness the spectacles as huge sums of money were wagered on the outcomes. In that sense sport served the purpose of a surrogate for war until political differences over slavery finally erupted in real combat. Despite Progressive Era reformers’ attempts to ban gambling on horse racing as a moral vice in the latter nineteenth century, the wealthy simply moved their gambling activities to golf at their private country clubs. The working class perceived their wagering as not unlike the upper classes’ gambling in the stock market. They circumvented such impositions at boxing matches by waging their pugilistic combats at “private clubs,” to which each “member”

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paid his dues at the door to witness the “exhibition” of fisticuffs (Adelman 1986, Struna 1981, Gems, 2014).

SPORT FOR THE PURPOSE OF SOCIAL STRATIFICATION The industrial revolution and its capitalist ideology reinforced the large economic gap between nobility and the peasantry in Europe; but it also allowed for the growth of a growing middle class of employers, entrepreneurs, and professionals. Likewise, in the United States during the Gilded Age (1870– 1890) millionaires increased tenfold, and marked their social status with ostentatious displays of wealth. They rationalized the inequality of riches in Darwinian terms as “the survival of the fittest.” Sport proved to be a means of drawing distinctions between social hierarchies and a vehicle to achieve greater social and cultural capital. Among the nobility horse ownership and horse racing symbolized ascribed social rank. The care and feeding of horses, particularly thoroughbreds used for racing, required large sums of money and a host of employees, servants, and assorted others. The owners of successful racing horses basked in their glory as well as their winnings, affording them a measure of both fame and fortune. Such social distinctions became blurred in the American colonies, where the importation of thoroughbreds began in the eighteenth century, allowing for the development of new breeds and new forms of racing. Quarter horses ran only a quarter mile or less, a mere sprint by traditional standards. The Morgan horse, another distinctive American breed, served as a workhorse during the week, but proved versatile enough to distinguish itself as a harness racer on weekends. Such developments provided the means for farmers and other horse owners to gain a greater measure of prestige. Horse owners thus raised their social capital, while those engaged as caretakers, trainers, and jockeys emanated from the lower classes or slaves in the American South. Even the latter might win greater acceptance and financial security in the aftermath of the American Civil War. The end of slavery allowed the freedmen to negotiate payment for their skills. One of them, Isaac Murphy, became the premier jockey in the United States in the latter nineteenth century, winning the famed Kentucky Derby three times and the American Derby four times. His earnings, as much as $20,000 per year, placed him solidly in the middle class. Murphy’s expertise paved the way for other African-American jockeys, such as Willie Simms and Jimmy Winkfield, who dominated American racing at the turn of the twentieth century. Such successes brought greater recognition to Black athletes and challenged notions of racial superiority (McDaniels 2013). Horse racing also helped to define social status in the construction and uses of racetracks. The wealthy formed racing clubs and built tracks for the

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enjoyment of their pastime. The United States differed from the British social hierarchy in that it allowed for greater social mobility. John Morrissey, an Irish immigrant, used his physical prowess to gain the American boxing championship in 1853 and won considerable sums defending his title thereafter, enabling him to open gambling casinos and he joined a group of wealthy financiers to build the Saratoga Racetrack in 1863. Morrissey parlayed his wealth and political connections to become an American congressman and a New York senator, a symbol of the belief in American meritocracy (Gems 2014). Racetracks were the showplace of wealth and social status. Common folk were allowed entry to the track and might place their bets; but were banned from the clubhouse, which was reserved for members only. In both Europe and America, the upper classes traveled to the racetracks in elaborate coaches, dressed in their finery, to be seen and admired by middle class aspirants and the lower classes in what sociologist Thorstein Veblen termed a public display of “conspicuous consumption” (Veblen 1899). The upper classes might also make such displays at their private golf clubs, which required immense amounts of land to construct. The exclusiveness of golf, however, gradually diminished after the construction of a public golf course in New York City in 1898, providing for greater inclusion of the middle class. Working-class youth might even obtain entry into the hallowed grounds by serving as caddies. In one of the most storied events in golf history, Francis Ouimet, a twenty-one-year-old working-class American amateur who had learned the game in such a manner, won the 1913 U.S. Open accompanied by a ten-year-old caddie, when he defeated Harry Vardon and Ted Ray, two top British professionals, in a playoff. Professional golf violated the amateur standards of the European aristocracy; but proved a means for skilled players of the lower classes to earn substantial sums of money and raise their social and economic capital. Yachting offered no such pretensions. It began and largely remains a sport of the wealthy. Originally intended as pleasure boating, a leisurely activity of the nobility, the pastime evolved into a competition as owners challenged each other to races. Through the nineteenth century growing numbers of Britain’s “royal” yacht clubs offered prestige and facilities to their rich members. In the nineteenth century British settlers on the plains of Kansas established their own yacht clubs on local lakes to distinguish themselves from the American farmers. A wealthy Boston merchant, George Crowninshield, launched Cleopatra’s Barge, the most noteworthy American yacht, in 1816. The following year Crowninshield defeated European yachtsmen in a series of races, but succumbed to a heart attack soon after. The New York Yacht Club was not founded until 1844 under the auspices of John Cox Stevens, who would initiate the America’s Cup races in 1851. While the upper class engaged in yachting, the laborers

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developed their own form of aquatic sport. By mid-century the plebeian men and women who shuttled goods from ship to shore began racing their work boats in competitions for cash prizes, a sport that attracted the interests of wealthier youth in the colleges. In England, Oxford and Cambridge first competed in 1829. Their American counterparts, Harvard and Yale, joined in their first regatta in 1852 (Gems, Borish, and Pfister 2017; Woodhouse 1980). The American collegians retained the British concept of amateurism which reinforced the social class divisions of the European aristocracy. The upper classes maintained an exclusionary sense of honor and decorum, unwilling to embarrass peers, and eschewing any competition with the working class, who presumably did not share their social graces. When an American socialite, James Gordon Bennett, Jr., editor of the New York Herald and an avid sportsman, greatly offended his fiancée’s family with his drunken and boorish behavior, he faced ostracism that resulted in his exile to Paris. Bennett later returned to establish the Westchester Polo Club in New York and the Newport Casino tennis club in Rhode Island. Sport provided a means of reconciliation. The formation of athletic clubs with restrictive memberships enabled patrons to distinguish themselves from lesser folk. The New York Athletic Club (NYAC), established in 1868 by local socialites, was modeled on the London Athletic Club, founded five years earlier. Both adhered to British amateur ideals that prohibited competition for prize money or those that accepted payment for physical skills, which included most working-class occupations. Such clubs assumed the stature of governing bodies for amateur sport in their respective countries. The NYAC sponsored national championships in several sports; and remained a bastion of WASP males for most of its history, excluding women, blacks, and Jews. In 1888 William B. Curtis, one of the founders of the NYAC, organized the Amateur Athletic Union, which acted as arbiter for international amateur sport in the United States (Wettan and Willis 1976). Other elite clubs confined themselves to particular sports, such as tennis, golf, or polo. The Newport Casino Tennis Club catered to the wealthy families of the American East, who built their palatial “summer cottages” in the area. The growing middle class, unable to secure admittance to such clubs, formed their own. With the advent of the cycling craze in the latter decades if the nineteenth century the middle class formed similar clubs to pursue cycle touring. The composition of the membership included males and females, and cycling greatly changed the courtship patterns of the Victorian era by providing a means for unchaperoned and public leisure activity (Harmond 1971). The game of cricket carried particular class values that promoted an upperclass ideology throughout the British Empire. It continued to maintain such attributes in America, especially in Philadelphia, until the turn of the twentieth century (Jable, 1991). Most Americans, however, found the permutation of baseball more suitable to their democratic ideology. While middle-class clubs

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predominated in the early years of development, with the appearance of the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players in 1871 civic pride and winning took precedence and required the inclusion of the best athletes regardless of social class background. By 1869 the businessmen of Cincinnati had already hired the first fully professional baseball team to market the economic power of their city. Star baseball players sold their services to the highest bidder until team owners colluded to limit wages by agreeing to insert reserve clauses in players’ contracts. Such stipulations reserved a player to one team with no ability to seek better pay and conditions elsewhere. Team owners seeking to promote a middle-class WASP image of propriety to attract patrons with expendable income also enforced temperance pledges from their players. Mike “King” Kelly, the star player of his era and a fan favorite of the Chicago team, was nevertheless sold to Boston for the grand sum of $10,000 after the 1886 season when he refused to adhere to such guidelines that threatened his own sense of masculinity. Like the “wage slaves” of the industrial plants who unionized and confronted ownership, Kelly joined other players in forming their own short-lived professional league in 1890 based on socialist principles. It could not compete with the better financed corporate powers of the National League. Still, Honus Wagner, the son of German immigrants, quit his job in a coal mine that paid $3.50 per week to earn as much as $10,000 in 1908 as a professional baseball player in Pittsburgh (Gems and Pfister 2009; Ohl 2002). Baseball thus provided a greater local and national identity to cities and an enhanced ethnic identity to its cast of multicultural players. Violations of the amateur code, however, could be severely punished. When the Amateur Athletic Union discovered that Jim Thorpe, winner of both the pentathlon and the decathlon at the 1912 Olympics, had played baseball for a few dollars during previous summers, he was stripped of his medals and stricken from the record books. Thorpe made his living as a professional baseball and football player thereafter. In England, soccer served the same purpose for working-class youths who adopted the game. Once the Football Association legalized professionalism in 1885 skilled players could sell their talents. A professional league was formed in 1888, and like baseball in the United States, civic pride spurred the rapid growth of professional teams. By 1906 forty clubs entered teams in the professional league, offering the means to augment one’s income. Boxing remained the one sport relegated to the working class. In England boxers had emanated from the ranks of laborers. Boxing required the physical dominance of an opponent and arguments were often settled by physical confrontations which established a measure of social order in working class communities. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu maintained that social class determined one’s habitus, or worldview, which entailed a predisposition to view and react in a certain way. The working class, without economic and

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cultural capital to establish social status, relied on its physicality to assert themselves; hence, the attraction to sport (Bourdieu, 1972). By the eighteenth century commercialized fights involving both men and women were featured in London. Gambling became an important component of such well-advertised confrontations and the nobility became ardent supporters and even sponsors of such affairs. The sport spread to the American colonies and took hold in France after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Boxing matches had few restrictions and drew large numbers of spectators that crossed all class lines to witness the carnage. The brutality of such encounters might be measured by the 1842 grudge match between Thomas McCoy and Christopher Lilly that lasted nearly three hours and resulted in the death of McCoy. The London Prize Ring Rules of 1838 were designed to alleviate such results by banning butting, gouging, scratching, kicking, biting, and encasing hard objects in one’s fists. The Marquis of Queensberry rules, published in 1867, introduced padded gloves and timed rounds with a rest interval between rounds; but the savagery continued in clandestine bouts even after civic governments banned the activity. With the imperial efforts of the European nations as well as the United States by the end of the nineteenth century, military forces spread the sport around the globe, producing an international labor force for the professional ranks by 1920 (Gems, 2014).

SPORT IN THE SERVICE OF SCIENCE Boxing offered a primary means to test scientific and pseudo-scientific notions of racial superiority. With the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, and its explication of evolutionary theory, scholars began to adopt and adapt such ideas to human beings in a movement known as Social Darwinism to justify the “survival of the fittest.” Italian physician Cesare Lambroso and Italian sociologist Enrico Ferri even claimed that criminal characteristics were inherited and could be detected by physiognomy, an examination of one’s physical features and the size and shape of one’s skull. Herbert Spencer, an eminent English philosopher, proved to be an ardent proponent of Social Darwinism. WASPs assumed that they rested at the top of the racial pyramid and rationalized their imperial ventures as “the white man’s burden” to bring education, culture, and religion to less civilized peoples of the world. Sport might serve as an educational tool in that process (Gems, 2013). In Europe the Germans, Danes, Swedes, and French each developed their own systems of gymnastics to train the body, while in the United States Dudley Sargent, a Harvard educator, developed weight lifting machines to build muscular strength. Sargent also utilized anthropometry to prescribe remedies for the lack of health and fitness. Eadweard Muybridge, an English photographer, specialized in motion studies of both animals and humans, particularly athletes.

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His work influenced the fields of both sport and art, and film studies remain an integral feature of athletic instruction today. Throughout the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries scientists engaged in the new science of anthropology, measuring bodies and developing categorizations and norms, from which they could compare a variety of racial groups. Sport became a primary means to test the capabilities of human bodies via the performance of physical skills. To that end scientists and coaches viewed the body as a machine that might be improved. They experimented with the various types of fuel for such engines, using meat or vegetarian diets, employing training tables and practice regimens, and the use of drugs and stimulants to improve performance. Throughout the nineteenth century pedestrians, rowers, cyclists, and track stars tested the limits of human endurance. In 1893 American boxers Jack Burke and Andy Bowen fought 109 rounds, despite the fact that Burke had broken his right hand in the 49th round. After more than seven hours of combat the referee declared the affair “no contest.” In England, a number of cyclists trained by “Choppy” Warburton died under his care (allegedly by doping); while the trainers of Tom Hicks, winner of the 1904 Olympic marathon administered strychnine and brandy to him during the race (Moore, 2017). Among the most bizarre of such studies occurred at the 1904 Olympics, run in conjunction with the world’s fair in St. Louis. James E. Sullivan, head of the American Amateur Athletic Union, and W J McGee, president of the American Anthropological Association, collaborated to stage the Anthropology Days, a test of the physical capabilities of various ethnic and racial groups on display at the fair. They had them compete in athletic events as well as a mud fight and a greased pole climb; and measured their scores against those of the white Olympians to validate white supremacy. Competitors were denied practice sessions and clearly misunderstood the intent and purpose of the events. One sprinter who had been in the lead stopped to wait for a friend, while another ducked under the finish tape. Other disinterested participants simply dropped their implements in the weight throw, which the judges duly measured as an attempt. Most events were “won” by Native American Indians who had been exposed to such sports and games in the government boarding schools that tried to impose whiteness on them. Nevertheless, the judges assessed the meager marks and compared them to the results of the Olympic athletes as proof of white superiority (Brownell, 2008). The belief in white racial supremacy had come into question in the sport of boxing. John L. Sullivan, king of the heavyweights, refused to fight any blacks, thereby maintaining the symbolic title in white hands. In 1891 James J. Corbett had fought a draw with Peter Jackson, a black heavyweight from the West Indies, in a grueling sixty round battle. After Corbett defeated Sullivan for the heavyweight title in 1892, he, too, enforced the color ban. George Dixon, a

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FIGURE 1.2: Boxer Jack Johnson and trainers in camp, c. 1910, courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

black Canadian had thoroughly thrashed Jack Skelly, his white opponent for the featherweight title on the same card as the Corbett-Sullivan battle, much to the chagrin of southern whites; but the lighter weight classes did not carry the same symbolism as the heavyweight class that represented the biggest and toughest man in the world (Gems, 2014). Whites continued to hold that title and that perception until 1908 when such ideology unraveled in the person of Jack Johnson. When Jim Jeffries retired as the undefeated heavyweight champion in 1905, Tommy Burns, a Canadian, eventually claimed the crown and set off on a world tour to maximize his earnings. Jack Johnson, considered to be the black champion, followed him to Australia in 1908, where Burns agreed to fight him in exchange for a huge purse. Johnson destroyed the white fighter and then drew the ire of whites for his many relationships, including marriages with white women, as he continually challenged the segregation and miscegenation norms of the era. In 1910 he even defeated the seemingly invincible Jim Jeffries, who came out of retirement to assert white dominance. Johnson continued to torment whites for the next five years as he defeated every “white hope” sent to reclaim the title for white supremacy. Johnson fled the country after the federal government charged him with violating the White

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Slave Traffic Act. He lost his title to Jess Willard in Cuba in 1915 in a mysterious bout. He returned to the United States in 1920, served a year in prison, and was never again permitted to fight for a championship; but his dominance in the ring instilled racial pride among African-Americans and upended the notion of white superiority (Gems, 2006).

SPORT AND GENDER DESIGNATION Throughout the period under study the words “sport” or “fancy” referred to a member of the homosocial bachelor subculture that frequented saloons, brothels, pool halls, and sporting events to define their masculinity. Cockfights, dogfights, ratting, and boxing matches provided violent amusement. By the end of the nineteenth century baseball fans in America, known as “cranks” also joined such male fraternities, which Benedict Anderson termed “imagined communities” (Anderson, 1983). Sport was assumed to be an exclusively male activity. Men had traditionally used sport to assert their dominance in public displays of courage and physical prowess. Throughout the early years of the nineteenth century men fought duels to claim or reclaim their honor, and some American leaders met their death in such a fashion, including Alexander Hamilton and Stephen Decatur. Andrew Jackson, the American president from 1829 to 1837, engaged in numerous duels (Wyatt-Brown 1982). On the American frontier men asserted their physicality by rough and tumble wrestling, a no-holds barred version in which any male could announce a public challenge. Instead of weapons men sharpened their finger nails to knife-like points, the better to gouge an opponent’s eyes. A traveler stated that it is by no means uncommon to meet with those who have lost an eye in combat, and there are men who pride themselves upon the dexterity with which they can scoop one out . . . But what is worse than all, these wretches in their combat endeavor in their utmost to tear out each other’s testicles. —Altherr 1997: 127 The author claimed to have seen four or five bedridden men in Maryland and Virginia suffering from such a loss. Another visitor to Pennsylvania stated that every evening a gang assembled at the numerous taverns to drink, tell stories, and fight. When they had become half drunk, they were noisy and quarrelsome, gouging out the eyes was one of their barbarous practices, and nearly one third of the German population had but one eye. I saw one day a horse with one eye, carrying on his back the husband, wife, and child, each with only one eye. —Altherr 1997: 138

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By the late nineteenth century American football served as a surrogate for the actual carnage of war, producing deaths and serious injuries on an annual basis. For young men football became a means to prove their courage, their toughness, and their masculinity in the absence of war. Caspar Whitney, the most prominent American sports journalist of the late nineteenth century, described football as a “mimic battlefield, on which players reconnoiter, skirmish, advance, attack, and retreat in good order” (Whitney 1892: 496). Another writer opined that “sport is merely artificial work, artificial adventure, artificial colonizing, artificial war” (Collier 1898: 384). Progressive reformers tried to legislate a ban on violent sports without success. In more genteel locales competitive sport might serve to establish one’s masculinity; but even that male sanctuary became endangered as women began to challenge men in pedestrian and cycling races. By the latter decades of the nineteenth century women even engaged in boxing matches and appeared in vaudeville shows as weightlifters, whose feats of strength surpassed those of the vast majority of men. Women even conquered nature with equal aplomb, scaling some of the highest mountains in the world by the turn of the twentieth century. At the 1896 Olympic Games two women even ran the marathon course despite officially being barred by the organizers. In the 1900 Games they competed in several sports and by 1908 Lottie Dod exemplified the versatile female athlete, winning the Wimbledon singles title in tennis five times, the British amateur golf championship, capturing a silver medal in archery at the Olympic Games, and winning a place on the national field hockey squad. Such athletes thoroughly disproved the notion of women as the “weaker sex” (Gems, Borish, and Pfister 2017).

SPORT AND THE FEMALE QUEST FOR INDEPENDENCE Such vivacious, independent, and intrepid “new women” transgressed upon the male sphere, and their quest extended beyond sport as they campaigned for suffrage rights. Emily Davison, a British suffragette, drew attention to the cause when she stepped in front of a charging horse at the Epsom Derby in 1913. Other women, less drastic in their endeavor, were no longer content with the traditional domestic roles of wife, mother, and cook. They began attending colleges and universities, clamored for property and political rights, and greater control over their lives. Sport accorded greater leisure opportunities and participation in more active sports spawned dress reform. Women could compete in such passive sports as archery in a full length hoop or bustle skirt; but more active racket sports, the introduction of women’s basketball in 1892, physical education classes in the schools, and women’s

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FIGURE 1.3: Three women golfers c.1890, courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

soccer in England brought a wholesale change in leisure attire and a transition from the corsets of the Victorian era that accentuated gender differences. Female cyclists even started wearing pants, much to the chagrin of many males. For such adventurous women sport provided a means to test and challenge cultural norms.

SPORT AS A PROFESSION The professionalization of sports had even greater impact on working class males, providing a means to additional income and greater control over their labor, which was lost in the industrial process. Players on industrial teams might only work a half day and practice or compete for the company team in the remainder of their workday. Both players and co-workers might augment their meager salaries by betting on the outcome of their competitions. Some even took control of their own fortunes as boxers or baseball players in America. The Roseland Eclipse baseball team started as a youth club sponsored by local neighborhood businesses in Chicago. Team members scavenged wood and chicken wire to build their own stadium, which allowed them to charge admission to their games. By 1914 their star player, Henry Penn, was offered contracts by four professional teams, but declined each with the explanation that he was already making more money as a semipro than they were offering for his services and he did not have to leave his family (Gems 1997). Bowling, too, offered opportunities for gambling and remuneration with cash prizes offered in tournaments sponsored by local newspapers. Other

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star bowlers enjoyed the sponsorship of equipment manufacturers, who hired them as traveling all-star teams to advertise their wares. For such professional or semiprofessional athletes, sport offered a preferred means of livelihood consistent with the physical prowess so admired within the working-class habitus.

SPORT AS SOCIAL CONTROL Employers eventually developed the means to socially control the leisure time of their employees. They built model towns in England, Germany, and France to house their workers; but George Pullman’s version, built in 1880 south of the bustling metropolis of Chicago, served as a social experiment in America. In order to alleviate workers’ absenteeism and drinking, his town offered a wealth of athletic facilities to keep workers busy during their leisure time. Employees were not allowed in the lone bar in the company hotel, as Pullman intended to inculcate the middle-class values of thrift, sobriety, and work discipline and the athletic spectacles provided free publicity for his enterprise in the local newspapers. Unfortunately for Pullman, the economic depression of 1894 resulted in a massive labor strike when the owner reduced employees’ wages, but not their rents and fees for community services (Pesavento 1982). Employers’ attempts to control workers’ leisure extended into the twentieth century. With the outbreak of World War I British women had to assume traditional male roles as factory workers, which subverted traditional gender roles, and moralists feared their income and leisure pursuits would affect their virtue. Sports, primarily soccer teams sponsored by employers and YMCA recreation programs, offered a more wholesome activity. The English women’s soccer team of the Dick, Kerr Company achieved a level of celebrity as their matches raised money for the war effort while consuming the females’ leisure time in healthy physical activity. Sport also became a primary means of acculturating and assimilating the hordes of immigrants that traveled to the United States from 1880 to 1920. In addition to the industrial recreation programs, social reformers made a concerted effort to Americanize ethnic children. They invoked a three-step process by enacting child labor laws, which removed children from the labor process. They then passed mandatory education legislation that forced the children into schools, where teachers could instill the American value system. Physical education provided the final step, where even those who could not speak English might learn the tenets of Americanism through sport. Sport taught competition, the basis for the capitalist economy. Team games required cooperation, leadership, and self-sacrifice for the good of the whole, the principles of democracy. Finally, sport taught respect for authority in the person of a referee, a matter of great importance to employers who valued a docile

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workforce (Gems 1997; Pruter 2013). In a country composed of immigrants, the schools became an essential vehicle for assimilation. Sport might also become a means of resistance and retaliation for groups who felt oppressed. Many sports produced ethnic, racial, or working-class athletes who served as heroic figures for their constituencies and marked their level of social acceptance or social mobility within the culture. Within the sport of boxing a succession of immigrant groups marked such ascendance as the Irish, Jews, Italians, blacks, and Hispanics counted their successive champions.

SPORT AND THE PROMOTION OF NATIONALISM The British public-school system had already invoked sports and games as a means to inculcate in boys the character-building qualities necessary to the administration and leadership of its global empire (Mangan 1985). The Napoleonic Wars of the first two decades of the nineteenth century fostered a greater sense of nationalism in Europe. In Germany, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, a German educator, established turnvereins, ostensibly gymnastic clubs, but clandestinely nationalistic and militaristic organizations to reclaim the fatherland from French conquest. Similar clubs, known as sokols, gained prominence in Czechoslovakia in 1862, and the Polish falcon clubs formed after the failed uprising against the Russian czar in 1863–1864. Scots had practiced their Highland Games for centuries; but Scottish immigrants to the United States resurrected the activities to maintain their own culture as early as 1836. Scots formed a Caledonian Club in Boston in 1853. Like the Scots, the Irish, desirous of independence from England, founded the separatist Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in 1884 to promote the Celtic sports of hurling, Gaelic football, and handball. English nationals and anyone who played English sports and games were banned from membership. The GAA was closely aligned with the independence movement, and its members participated in the Easter Uprising of 1916 and other militant battles until securing autonomy for Ireland in 1921 (Redmond 1971; Polidoro 2000; Rader 2004). Sport provided the means for some nationalistic sentiments to be contested in surrogate wars. As early as 1804 a former American slave, Bill Richmond traveled to England as a boxer, losing to the local champion, Tom Cribb, a year later. Richmond’s protégé, another former American slave, Tom Molineaux, arrived in 1809 to challenge Cribb. The combatants fought two brutal encounters, the second witnessed by a crowd of 20,000, and Cribb proved successful in both, retaining the pugilistic laurels for England (Gems 2014). International competitions continued throughout the remainder of the century. A Canadian cricket team traveled to New York in 1844, defeating an American contingent before thousands of spectators and widespread gambling

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FIGURE 1.4: The Great International Caledonian Games, held at Jones Wood, New York City, July 1, 1867, courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

that secured imperial pride. John Cox Stevens, an American sportsman and founder of the New York Yacht Club in 1844, challenged and defeated eighteen British rivals in 1851 in a sailing race that initiated the America’s Cup series, which the Americans continued to dominate over the next century. England reestablished its rowing prominence when the crew from Oxford University prevailed over the Americans from Harvard in the Thames River regatta of 1869 (Kirsch 1992). Test cricket matches between England and Australia began in 1877, and cricket served to extend British cultural influences throughout the empire, particularly in India, South Africa, and the Caribbean (James 1963; Mangan and Ritchie 2004). Rivalries continued in individual sports as Lon Myers, the top American track star of the 1880s, ran against the British champion Walter George in a series of races over the decade (Gems, Borish, and Pfister 2017). The Americans, like the British, utilized sport to promote their own cultural values in their imperial quests. The American military forces and its Christian missionaries, most notably those of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) spread baseball, basketball, and volleyball throughout Asia, Central America, and the Caribbean region throughout the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Gems 2006; Gems 2016).

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The American-British rivalry only increased as the United States’ economical production surpassed that of Great Britain at the end of the nineteenth century and the American government contended with the monarchy for global political leadership. The inauguration of the modern Olympic Games in 1896 provided a contested venue for cultural comparisons. The surrogate athletic battle reached a peak at the 1908 Olympic Games in London. Ralph Rose, the IrishAmerican flag bearer in the opening parade, reputedly refused to dip the national standard to King Edward VII, and American confrontations with the British officials ensued throughout the events. In the 400-meter race the British officials claimed a foul when their runner finished third behind two Americans, and required that the race be run again. The Americans refused and the British awarded the win to their compatriot. In the marathon race Italian Dorando Pietri entered the stadium first, but collapsed. When an American, Johnny Hayes, appeared the British officials twice helped Pietri to his feet and across the finish line before Hayes could claim the victory, whose protest ultimately gained the gold medal (Gems, Borish, and Pfister 2017). Despite the denials of athletic idealists, the Olympic Games would continue to be embroiled in political issues throughout the remainder of the century.

SPORT AND RELIGIOUS PROSELYTISM Sport served not only political motives, but religious ones as well. As early as the 1830s Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister, embarked on a campaign that linked vegetarianism to morality. Graham espoused the vital force theory, which postulated that alcohol and improper diet damaged the body and led to immoral behavior. The Graham cracker resulted as a remedy to such dysfunction and a means to offset the lustful urges seemingly produced by more stimulating foods. The Muscular Christianity movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries utilized sport as a means to proselytize and to counteract the perception of the feminization of culture. The movement emanated from the novels of Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes in England, which portrayed the ideal man as robust in both moral and physical health, and was promoted by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a Unitarian minister, in the United States. Foremost among such missionaries the YMCA took root in London in 1844, and appeared in Boston by 1851. In the latter decades of the century YMCA administrators found some success in attracting young men to their services by offering gymnasiums and sports as an alternative to the saloon. In the United States the YMCA trained athletes as coaches and physical education instructors to deliver the message of Christianity on a global scale. YMCA instructors invented the games of basketball and volleyball in the 1890s and spread such sport forms around the world in their missionary efforts. The linkage of sport and Christianity dominated the colonial efforts of Anglos thereafter (Putney 2001).

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FIGURE 1.5: Thomas Hughes (1822–96), author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays and Tom Brown at Oxford, courtesy of Prints and Photographs, Library of Congress.

Throughout the British Empire administrators and the military ardently spread soccer and cricket across the dominion, intending to impart particular class, cultural, and religious values in the process. The education of those perceived to be less civilized was deemed to be “the white man’s burden.” Likewise, in the wake of the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States acquired its own colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and assumed a similar mission of Christianizing their newfound charges, despite the fact that many of them had been wards of the Spanish for more than three centuries and baptized as Catholics.

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Josiah Strong, a Congregationalist minister and influential author, claimed that Anglo-Saxons professed the “purest Christianity and the highest civilization” and were therefore “divinely commissioned to be . . . (their) brother’s keeper” (Pratt 1959: 5). The Congressional Record, January 9, 1900, recorded American senator Albert Beveridge declaring the exceptional role of the United States. We will not repudiate our duty in the Orient. We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustees under God, of the civilization of the world. And we will move forward to our work, not howling out regrets like slaves whipped to their burden, but with gratitude to a task worthy of our strength, and thanksgiving to Almighty God that has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world. The Anglos considered Asia to be particularly fertile ground for conversion and the Protestant denominations divided up territories among themselves and soon established schools to preach and teach “Muscular Christianity.” China, however, proved problematic, as Chinese aristocrats viewed sport as a form of physical labor, and sent their servants to the physical education classes. The few Chinese who did convert to Christianity were deemed traitors by their countrymen, who rose up in the nationalist Boxer Rebellion of 1900, killing converts and foreigners until a multinational force of Europeans and Americans came to their rescue (Gems 2006). Japan, more receptive to the adoption of western technology, education, and industrialization, quickly modernized during the Meiji period (1852–1912). Japan, too, largely rejected Christianity; but adopted and adapted western sport forms, particularly the American game of baseball. Much to the chagrin of the Americans, the Japanese excelled at the game, often beating the foreigners in a series of exchange matches over several decades of contestation (Gems 2006). The Americans established a comprehensive athletic program in the Philippines during their nearly half-century of rule that even surpassed the physical education programs in the United States. Interscholastic competition and national championships were largely organized by the YMCA, which transformed the Manila Carnival, previously a business showcase, into a regional athletic festival modeled on the Olympic Games. The inclusion of Japanese and Chinese teams in the endeavor channeled Filipino nationalistic sentiments into the surrogate athletic war while insurgent forces battled the Americans for full independence. While the Americans succeeded militarily, they largely failed in their religious endeavors. The widespread influence of the YMCA in educational matters fostered a Catholic backlash that coopted Protestant efforts in the islands (Gems 2016). In the United States the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization established in 1882, began sponsoring athletic programs to counter the YMCA’s

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influence. By the turn of the century Catholics administered their own sports leagues and the Catholic Youth Organization would eventually become the largest athletic league in the world. Similarly, Jews established settlement houses in the cities to meet the needs of the multitude of Jewish immigrants fleeing the pogroms in Europe from 1880–1920. The Chicago Hebrew Institute offered the best sports facilities in the city and produced championship teams in several sports. The rental of its facilities to non-Jews and the incorporation of its athletes in the local athletic competitions aided Jewish assimilation to the mainstream society (Gems 1997).

COMMERCIALIZATION The professionalization of soccer in 1885 spurred the English Football League in 1888 and the necessity of playing and paying the best players required clubs to build stadiums and charge patrons for the privilege of observing the games. While Europeans wrestled with the commercialized aspects of professional sport, Americans had less qualms in the adaptations of sport for business and profit. In 1852 a railroad company enticed the rowing clubs of Harvard and Yale to compete for a pair of silver-mounted oars at a resort on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. The advertising for the first intercollegiate athletic competition drew crowds of interested onlookers, which earned a handsome profit for the railroad company that transported them in an early example of sports marketing (Kirsch 1992). Commercialized sport assumed greater proportions after the American Civil War with the establishment of the National Baseball League in 1876 and the consequent civic rivalries that drew fans to enclosed stadiums. Even the amateur players of the American colleges drew large crowds to their football games, holding the championship matches in New York on Thanksgiving, a holiday, to maximize the number of spectators. Winning teams brought pride and status to college campuses and coaches who could produce such results were paid handsomely. In 1892 the new University of Chicago enticed Amos Alonzo Stagg, a star player at Yale, to become head of its physical culture department and incorporate the students’ athletic clubs, and their profits, under the administration of the school. Stagg sponsored basketball tournaments and track and field competitions to identify the best athletes and recruit them to his school. Other schools soon adopted the Chicago strategy. Glenn “Pop” Warner, the coach at the Carlisle Indian School, even kept his graduated students on campus as workers, so that he could use them in athletic competitions. Athletes were rewarded with better food, sleeping quarters, cash, and clothing. In 1901 the Yale athletic association enticed twenty-seven-year-old James Hogan with an offer that included not

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only free tuition, room and board, but a Caribbean vacation, and a share of the profits of the sale of programs at school baseball games, as well as a commission on all cigarettes sold in the city (Gems 2000). Amidst the worst economic depression in American history in 1893, the football championship game between Princeton and Yale in New York attracted 40,000 fans, even at the cost of $15 for a seat and $150 for a box seat. Private carriages for transport cost $20, reserved a year in advance. The game itself was preceded by a four-hour parade. Alumni came to witness the spectacle from across the nation and to bet thousands of dollars on the outcome. In order to maximize its profits Harvard University built its own concrete stadium to seat 40,000 in 1903. A year later, Harvard enjoyed a $50,000 surplus for its football budget, which proved to be the most profitable program at the school. The University of Chicago’s football receipts amounted to more than $42,000, enough to fund all other sports programs by 1906. Yale, the pre-eminent football power in the 1890s, allegedly surpassed $100,000 in that decade (Gems 2000). The American national sport of baseball had already prospered under the guidance of Albert Spalding, head of the professional National League. Spalding had not only succeeded in establishing the league on a firm financial footing; he also founded his own sporting goods company, which benefitted from his name recognition. Spalding offered a range of baseball products, but soon diversified to include a wide variety of sporting goods, which he manufactured, marketed, and promoted. He did so by means of a mail order catalog that reached national proportions; sponsoring traveling all-star teams that extolled his products, and even embarking on a global baseball tour in 1888–1889 that Henry Chadwick declared to be “the greatest event in the history of athletic sports” (Levine 1984, 99). Such efforts brought Spalding wealth, celebrity, and national prominence as he championed American sports and games. The commercial success of baseball, America’s national game, resulted in a second professional league in 1901 and a short-lived third professional league from 1914–1915. Competition for players produced a top salary of $10,000 by 1908 and $20,000 by 1916. With the advent of radio, television, and the internet the commercialization of sports would increase exponentially, as professional players became millionaires and owners became billionaires; while college athletes still claim amateur status.

CONCLUSION The age of industry transformed sport and culture over the course of the nineteenth century. The revolution of logistics, largely fostered by the implementation of steam power, produced a more extensive and faster transport network on the land, seas, and eventually in the air. Such developments allowed

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athletes and teams to extend their competitions to a global scale. Transport and communication were greatly aided by the development of new technologies such as the telegraph, telephone, and radio that relayed results almost instantaneously. Commercialized sporting enterprises benefitted by the expansion of world trade, as evidenced by the efforts of the Spalding Sporting Goods Company and the global challengers that populated the ranks of professional boxers. Such advances in technology, mechanization, and science ushered in the era of modern sport as a business (Berghoff 2008). In the process of commercial and sporting exchange the Anglo powers spread their economic, societal, and cultural values throughout the world as sport became a nationalistic enterprise. The global United Kingdom largely maintained its adherence to class culture and its inherent amateur ideology. The games ethic preached in its public schools became the essence of colonial leadership, and its overseas empire retained its allegiance to the monarchy. The United States embarked upon its own colonial ventures that espoused its belief in democracy, and the WASP values of work ethic, meritocracy, and respect for authority. Its divergent sport forms and sporting endeavors reinforced its ethnocentric beliefs in American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny. As sports assimilated both indigenous and migrant ethnic groups, they also offered the ability to adapt sport forms to their own cultures and provided the means to challenge and even defeat the colonizers at their own games. Even within the established Victorian gender order, women utilized sport as a new means of expression, liberation, and a quest for greater human rights. The volatile mixture of sport and technology in the age of industry produced massive change across cultures throughout the world. While sport still retained individual incentives such as personal health, fitness, and socialization, over the course of the nineteenth century it had also been repurposed by a variety of groups to assert ethnic, racial, gender, and national identities. Politicians and statesmen employed sport as a means to assimilate and acculturate immigrants and colonized peoples. Religious leaders, too, utilized sport as a means to attract and convert nonbelievers. Sport became a big business and a global enterprise far removed from the limited purposes of the preceding era. Throughout the era sport became a means to both include and exclude particular groups in a continual process of social change and cultural evolution.

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CHAPTER TWO

Sporting Time and Sporting Space MICHAEL KR Ü GER

In 1980 the historian and cultural anthropologist Henning Eichberg subtitled his article on sport during the nineteenth century as the “Genesis of an Industrial Mode of Behavior” (Eichberg 1980). He argued that during or since the age of industrialization, societal changes meant that playing games, doing sports and exercises were much more than mere fun, and were representative of the way people moved and behaved. This behavior he described as “Leistung, Spannung, Geschwindigkeit”—“achievement, excitement, speed”. Eichberg’s interpretation of his studies of sport, dance and exercises during that period was that the two processes of sportization and industrialization were part of the same configuration of culture and society. People’s way of life changed fundamentally compared to former times; everything had become faster, stronger and higher, as the Olympic motto “citius—altius—fortius” expressed. Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the Olympic Movement, had mentioned this at the end of the Olympic congress at the Sorbonne/Paris in 1894, when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was founded and decided to hold the first Olympic Games of modern times at Athens in 1896 (Coubertin 1894: 2). The motto can be seen both as a transformation of Homer’s guiding theme of the IIliad and Odyssey “Always to be first and better than the others”, and as the spirit of capitalism, essential for the industrialization process. Whereas in ancient times, the idea of Agon (the term for contests in Ancient Greek) was dominated by direct competition between man and man, achievements in the industrial age are measured and recorded in space and time: inches or centimeters, grams or 57

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pounds, seconds, points, scores and goals. Sporting activities and contests take place at specific spaces and places, from sports and gym halls and stadiums to the Alps, where Alpinists conquer the highest mountains. Achievement, excitement and speed characterized the industrial age and the phenomenon of modern sport. The “beauty of speed” was glorified by the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti (1876–1944) in his “futuristic manifest” of 1909, which founded a unique artistic and cultural movement of the twentieth century (Marinetti 1909). In his essay on locomotion in history, the French poet LouisOctave Uzanne (1851–1931) praised the speed fever that would characterize the present and the future. His colleague Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) wrote a book entitled “La 628-E8”—the license plate of a car. He compared humans with racing machines and considered human life as an infinite racetrack. In every sense, the Olympic motto was the sporting equivalent of the futuristic manifest for fine arts and culture. The beauty of speed was reflected in running athletes, horse races, motor racing, high-speed trains and other phenomena of the age of speed and its cultural manifestations. Cultural history is based on the idea that historical time and space are socially constructed (Rojek 2012; Gunn 2014). Related to body culture, this paradigm includes various social and linguistic constructions, referring to how to move and behave bodily and how to understand these processes. Sport was the linguistic term for defining the social construction of a dominant pattern of body culture, including its specific perception of time, and the use of space during or since the age of industry, first introduced in Britain and Europe, and then spreading throughout the globe. People of the pre-industrial ages produced less specific societally-defined times and spaces for sports, games, and exercises. There was, at least for the majority of people, neither a need for nor an opportunity to take part in sports and games in times and spaces of their own and for their own sake, though some sociologists have discerned a decrease in bodily aggression over the long course of the civilizing process (Elias et al. 2009; see also Pinker, 2011). Spare time and a certain level of wealth are a necessary basis for modern sports. New, industrialized methods of production in larger workshops or factories, combined with markets allowing higher levels of free trade in capitalist economy, had major consequences for people’s way of life and standard of living. Liberalism included not only the free trade of goods, but of workers too (Hobsbawm 2015). Since the age of Enlightenment and the French Revolution, various forms of debt servitude were abolished step by step in Europe. People became free, left their villages and moved to industrial areas hoping for higher wages and more leisure time. However, at the beginning of the industrialization process in England, these expectations were initially disappointed. By contrast, the industrial production of goods indeed led to massive prosperity and financial capital, but only for a small class of capitalists.

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However, the processes of industrialization and sportization did not start at the same time in every country, not even in Europe. The “take-off ” occurred first in England and spread throughout Europe, the Commonwealth and the US, and finally, the rest of the world. In England, the “transition from traditional to modern sports took place (. . .) much earlier than in the rest of Europe”, argued Allen Guttmann (2004: 69). In England, as factory chimneys smoked, more formal spaces for sports and games were laid down. Other European countries followed, namely Germany and France, Italy and Spain, the Northern and Eastern parts of Europe, including Russia, most certainly the US, the nations of the British Commonwealth, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and the Asian continent. By the twentieth century, the more or less industrialized and sportized nations of the world were involved with or even united in the Olympic movement. In parallel, the sporting process was continued at different times by national, European, and finally Olympic organizations, in clubs, at schools, in armies, more or less formally in everyday life and culture, and at higher levels of performance and achievement at sporting festivals, competitions, tournaments, cups, races and regattas. Gym and sporting halls were built, stadiums and swimming halls, training centers, pitches and racecourses, and even natural sites were modified artificially in order to enhance the conditions for skiing, climbing, and sailing. In consequence, the Alps, for example, became a space for tourism and sports, more of a huge adventure playground than true “nature”, and thus rather similar to national parks in the US. A relevant consequence of the industrial age for the everyday life of the people was the distinction between work time and leisure time. Sports, games, and exercises became major activities of the so-called “spare-time spectrum” (Elias and Dunning 1993: 91–125). People had a stronger sense of time and gained new forms of holiday, such as the British Bank Holidays. The spare-time spectrum grew, as varied and complex as the work-time spectrum, from routines like household, catering and body care to private, religious and cultural activities, and leisure activities like gathering, gambling, play and games (Elias and Dunning 1993: 96–98). Holidays and tourism became a feature of the industrial age for an increasing proportion of the population. Travel by discoverers, adventurers or members of the privileged upper classes like the British gentlemen in former times, was very different from the phenomenon of mass tourism, when both members of the middle classes and later workers and their families of the industrialized regions of the world acquired free time and earned enough money to spend holiday time abroad, including doing sports and games (Hinch and Higham 2004; Ritchie and Adair 2004; Huggins 2013; Schwark 2016). Geographical spaces in general and sporting spaces specifically, are social constructions. Landscapes become cultural spaces through human work

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(including their mere concepts) and interests, and they become what John Bale (2001) called “sportscapes” by doing sports and games. In addition, through exercises, games and sports in “sportscapes”, social and moral competences or skills could be taught, such as discipline, order and precision, leading to strength and achievement, communication and team spirit. These abilities were equally useful for sport, efficient industrial production, effective administration, military strength and for the process of nation building. These arguments were used to legitimize exercises, drills, sports and games at schools in all industrialized nation states in Europe (see van Dalen and Bennett 1971; McIntosh et al. 1957; Krüger 2005; Krüger and Hofmann 2015). Independent of the varied paces of both processes of nation building and industrialization in Europe and worldwide, it is possible to distinguish between two general categories of sporting times and sporting spaces. First, there are sports and games in the “spare-time spectrum” of industrialized modern nation states. A consequence of widening the spare-time spectrum for the crowd was the enlargement and differentiation of sportscapes: golf courses, swimming pools, parks, ski resorts, wilderness trails, sports halls and stadiums. Second, sports, games, and exercises, including drills, took place in educational institutions, not just in schools, colleges and universities, but also in armies and security services or police education, meeting the needs of the nation state, for physical recreation, disease prevention and support for public healthcare systems. Public spaces enlarged their spectrum with functionalized sportscapes; schools were equipped with gyms and pools. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Olympic Games, including their idea of Olympism, created a new space and time of amateur sports on its own. The beginning of the modern Olympics was simultaneously the start of a new age of sports in the twentieth century. Sports, games and physical education during that period of nationalism and industrialism were additionally both part and object of political action and reflection. On the one hand, sports and games contributed to various forms of national identity and what Elias (1988, 1990) called “we-feelings”. On the other hand, physical education, games, and exercises were used as a means of national education by the nation states. Turnen in Germany played this role during the process of nation building, although not only in Germany but basically in every young nation state of the nineteenth century, specific forms of educational gymnastics, essentially in Sweden and Denmark, were socially invented and popularized by schools and clubs.

SPORTS AND GAMES IN THE “SPARE-TIME SPECTRUM” During the industrial age, “traditional games and pastimes either became modern or they became marginal”, argues Guttmann (2004: 68). Football is a

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telling example of the shift of a traditional game to a modern sporting one, and its development illustrates the sportization process during the industrial age in England (Dunning, 1975). Initially, football was a “rough folk” game played by the lower classes since medieval times, mostly at feasts. Richard Holt calls these “old ways of playing” compared to new, modern ways of sport and games (Holt 1990: 12–74). Such folk games were familiar in various peoples and cultures of Europe. Examples included soule in France and calcio in Italy (Bredekamp and Valenti 1995; Veyrin 1975). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, expensive public schools were not in fact for the “public”, but for the sons of the landowning upper classes and rapidly-rising industrial and commercial upper middle classes. The power and wealth of this class was rooted originally in land ownership, but later and increasingly in businesses, including industrial ownership and production. In addition, the gentry provided the officer class in the army and navy, and generally dominated society and politics. They were also the most powerful and decisive class of the British Empire. Step by step, games became crucial for the educational concept of the public schools and later, for the British school system in general. The teachers and headmasters encouraged the pupils’ games for their effect on character formation. Pupils were not to play on the fields of the farmers, but on limited pitches close to the school or within the school boundaries. This rule that the pitch had to be located close to the school was also a precondition when German gymnastics was introduced as a compulsory activity at schools in Germany from the 1860s (Krüger 1996: 411). Both the time and space of pupils’ games were defined step by step, by means of rules, a characteristic of the sporting process. The terms sport, sports and sporting games themselves imply the creation of a separate body and games culture that is different from old ways of playing. Hacking (fouling) was not allowed. The number of players and the duration of the game were fixed beforehand. The pupils were initially responsible for “law and order” during the game. Finally, in Rugby, the first “Laws of Football as Played at Rugby School” were laid down in writing in 1845 (Dunning 1975: 133–135). Football and later, sports and athletics in general, became a crucial educational concept for better discipline, characterbuilding and preparation for the lives of “Christian gentlemen”. At public schools, colleges, and universities a “cult of athleticism” was fostered from the second half of the nineteenth century, with sports and games becoming part of the compulsory curricula. Achievements in sports were often respected by school authorities more than marks in the standard subjects, as critics of this “cult of athleticism” regretted and lamented (McIntosh 1979: 64–70). The concept of “Muscular Christianity” was specifically adopted and even evangelized by the YMCA, the Christian Youth organization, founded in 1844 by George Williams in London. The YMCA and its concept of Muscular

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Christianity spread across to Europe and in the following years to Asia, the nations of the Commonwealth and then became dominant in the USA. There, the YMCA expanded to become the largest youth organization in the country for sports, games and exercises out of school, providing new sporting spaces. The organization built youth hostels worldwide, and gym halls for sports and games. James Naismith, a sports teacher of the YMCA in Springfield/ Massachusetts, invented new sporting games, especially basketball and volleyball, which he thought accorded with Christian morality and notions of fair play. In Asia, officials of the YMCA initiated the Asian Games which later became part of the Olympic movement (Eddy 1944; Rains 2009; Hübner 2015; Hübner 2015). The development of football and soccer in England and abroad seems to exemplify the sports process in which the roots of football are defined by traditional folk games. Some were adapted by the upper classes like rugby and football at Rugby, Eton and other educational institutions, by the sons of the wealthy and ruling classes in Britain. These students promoted the modern sporting games of football in various forms by founding clubs and associations. Some of them, like Arnold F. Hills, an old Harrovian, heir and managing director of the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company, brought football back to its folk-like roots. He motivated thousands of workers and dockers at West Ham to take up sports, games, and exercises. Along with social reforms, savings and profit-sharing schemes, he supported the foundations of workers clubs and workers sports clubs. From these beginnings in 1900, the West Ham Football Club Company developed into one of the major football clubs of the proletarian sites of Britain (Korr 1986). However, it should be borne in mind, that there were numerous folk games which were not (at all) or rather reluctantly included in the sports process, like those at the Scottish Highland Games or at the World Games, which are festivals of non or at least less sportized sports and games. The Highland Games were by no means original, authentic folk games. Rather, they can be considered as “invented traditions” with respect to Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) in an attempt to resist the civilizing constraints of the sports and industrializing process. They invented an alternative, non-sporting sportscape. One of the main reasons for the success of football, as the most popular sporting game in the world since the age of industry, was its definition of playing times and spaces which correlated with the working time and spare-time spectrum of the working people. Factory work was ruled by clocks and watches and strict time management. Similar to schools where pupils were educated in lessons, usually limited to 45 or 60 minutes, industrial work and breaks were also defined in sequences. By contrast to the original ways of playing football, modern football was limited in time and space, currently exactly 90 minutes, divided into two 45-minute halves. In the centers of industrial cities such as

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London, Liverpool, Birmingham, or Dortmund and Gelsenkirchen, the latter being centers of the industrial Rhine-Ruhr area, the footballers and their fans moved into the stadiums. These stadiums were located between the residential areas of the working population and factories, and thus easy to reach in order to watch the football matches on the weekend (Reid, 1994, 1996). Initially, the space between players and spectators was by no means strictly separated, unlike what we experience today. There were not even seats, only standing room. Fans stood right on the edge of the pitch. The new stadia, like Hampden Park in Glasgow, Wembley in London were meticulously organized venues for mass events, mostly sporting, to enable leisure time for the masses to be both exciting and safe (Bockrath 2011; Sheard et al. 2005).

SOCIAL BORDERS AND BONDS Regarding sports and games, two developments were significant for the industrial age. First, the genesis of a new social class of industrial workers or proletarians, including a unique identity of “we-feeling” and creating a specific workers’ sport culture. The novels of Charles Dickens, especially Oliver Twist, most colorfully represent this world of the poor and deprived (Dickens 2010). The social movement of workers and worker sport corresponded with Marxist and socialist ideas. Simultaneously, however, members of the working class attempted to participate in sports and games of the higher and even upper classes. Second, the upper classes tried to preserve their power and exclusivity by various means. One way was the preference for exclusive and expensive sports like horse riding, sailing, winter sports or motor sports for the newly-rich. In contrast to the working class, their playing and sports facilities were not restricted to weekends and pitches in the neighborhood. They could play and do sports essentially at any time in any space. Typically, seemingly endless cricket matches, extensive golf tournaments, sailing regattas and riding in the countryside were favored privileges of wealthy amateurs. Hignell (2013) describes cricket as a game played by the upper classes everywhere and at any time, in the British Empire, except when it was raining. They consistently attempted to retain their exclusive times and spaces for their sports. Veblen (1899) analyzed and commented sarcastically on this “leisure class” and their penchant or preference for sports. Workers and the bourgeoisie usually used space as spectators at sporting events, mostly of professional sports like boxing and cycling, or football matches in the arenas of the industrialized metropoles, the Midlands in England or the Rhine-Ruhr area, the cradle of the German industrialization. The German workers’ sport movement was one of the best organized and the largest worker sport organizations in Europe, and strongly influenced by

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FIGURE 2.1: Franz Kruger (1787–1857), The Racecourse at Berlin, author’s collection.

socialist political ideas and parties, especially the Socialist Democratic Party and its precursors. It wanted its own sports spaces as did the national and liberal Turner clubs and educational clubs for workers (Arbeiter-Bildungsvereine), founded by social reformers and by the socialist thinker and politician Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864), first speaker of the ADAV, the General German Worker Club, founded in 1863 (Grebing 1981). These socialist worker clubs included educational programs such as gymnastics and body education. The aim was to encourage the workers to look after their own unique “capital”, which was indeed their body, health and strength, for both men and women of the working class. Lassalle and his fans worked pragmatically for the improvement of the working and living conditions of the working class. Systematic bodily exercises contributed to better health and strength for work, education in hygiene and dietetics was to prevent disease, and not least play and games in the fresh air were part of spending their rather brief leisure time in a healthy manner (Ueberhorst 1973; Nitsch and Peiffer, 1995). The desire for separation and segregation seemed to prevail at both ends of the social spectrum, the nobles and wealthy on the one side, and the workers on the other. However, for many sports and their developments, the borders

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and boundaries were fluid and permeable. Sports in a narrower sense are for their own sake, and not limited to a particular social class, sex, religion, nation or ideology. Football remains football and swimming remains swimming, no matter who plays or swims, and irrespective of the political or religious ideology to which the sporting person adheres.

OUTDOOR SPORTS Modern sport during the industrial age is first and foremost a phenomenon of urbanization. Sport sites and sport clubs, independent of their social bonds, developed in urban settings (Holt 1990: 135–202). Regarding the German context, Nielsen’s (2002) study is the most compelling in showing this strong link between sportization and urbanization. However, industrialization and urbanization provoked an opposing effect, with some people wishing to get away from the cities, away from civilization, away from modern technology, and instead, back to nature and authentic experience. The study of Kay and Vamplew (2002) confirms this reference to outdoor sports by the British upper middle class, which ran somewhat counter to the realities of the British climate. Various societal movements in Europe at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, like those of the naturists, vegetarians, natural reformers, or the outdoor and boy scout movements, indicate the general critical trend towards modern culture and civilization and consequently back to nature (Baden-Powell and Bleeser 2005; for the German context of the so-called Lebensreformbewegung, see Wedemeyer-Kolwe 2017). The development of modern tourism was part of this civilized longing for natural roots. Whereas in former times, unknown areas or parts of the world were explored for economic, scientific or aesthetic reasons, the conquest of natural spaces in the industrial age occurred in a more sporting spirit. Walking, climbing, skiing, sailing, swimming in lakes and rivers for fun and for their own sake, or competing to be the first to the top of the highest mountains, characterized the relationship of the modern, civilized and sporting man to nature. Nature was looked upon as a challenge to be explored and conquered for the sake of pleasure or to test the limits of human endurance. Whereas indigenous people like the Japanese or the Masai had avoided climbing their holy mountains Fudschijama and Kilimandscharo, European adventurers had no such reservations and were the first at the top. They did not respect the mountains as holy, but as an invitation or challenge. The first “Alpine Club” was founded in London in 1857 by wealthy gentlemen (Alpine Club 2018). They walked and climbed in the Alps for sport. Further Alpine Clubs in European countries followed, in 1862 the Austrian, and in 1869 the German Alpine Club which joined in 1873, and which remain up to the present, the largest Alpine sports and touristic organizations.

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Alpine sports, including skiing and other winter sports like bobsleighing and various ice sports were not limited to a small group of wealthy gentlemen, but became mass phenomena. Consequently, as tourism, an essential service sector of the modern capitalist economy, developed internationally, special products were needed and produced industrially, clothes for walking and climbing, equipment for skiing, ice sports, bobsleighing and so on. Better clothes and equipment enabled greater sporting achievements, higher und more difficult mountains could be climbed, steep slopes could be skied, and the sporting spirit for better, higher, stronger, faster could all be satisfied in winter sport, by means of longer distances in ski jumping, faster runs in high-speed bob runs, exciting and action-filled ice hockey games and aesthetically appealing ice performances.

FIGURE 2.2: The moment when the expedition of the English alpinist Edward Whymper returned from its first ascent of the Matterhorn and four of the team were swept to their death, Gustav Dore, author’s collection.

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SPORTS, GAMES, AND PHYSICAL EXERCISES IN EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND FOR THE NATION STATE The distinction between sports in the spare-time spectrum, sports as professional and top level or high performance, and physical education at schools or in general at public educational institutions, now appears taken for granted. But initially, sports and games were not as highly differentiated. In the pre-modern era, bodily play, exercises and amusements were less diversified and less (clearly) separated into specific sporting, leisure and educational times and spaces, as is the case today. Sports, games and exercises at schools, whether in specific lessons or in periods for play and leisure in full-time schools, are an invention of modern, industrialized societies and had an educational impact. Educational aims, through or by sports and games, were, by contrast, not in opposition to sports for fun and for their own sake during spare time, or to earn a living through sports and games or by betting high stakes for sports contests. The Olympic movement as a worldwide organization of sports for their own sake, propagated its activities as a means of education for a better world, an educational idea born at the end of the nineteenth century which flourished in the early twentieth, which was an invention based on tradition during both the age of industry and of nationalism/internationalism. Olympism ideas combined nationalism and national identity with the internationalism and universalism of sports. The “long nineteenth century” was not only the industrial age and of nationalism, but included that of education as well (Kocka et al. 2014). Modern industrialized nation states needed educated citizens on various levels, including craftsmen and workers for the developing industry, managers for that industry, trade and the financial economy, officials for the state administration and politics, officers and soldiers in the national armies, and finally academics and teachers for schools and universities—to mention only the most relevant sectors of society and the economy of modern nation states. A founder of the German and indeed European concept of modern physical education, Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths (1759–1839) used a characteristic sentence in his work “Gymnastics for Youth” (1793), which typified this double function of gymnastics—and is a linguistic metonym for physical activity, sports and games—during and since the industrial age when he argued that “Gymnastik ist Arbeit im Gewande jugendlicher Freude” i.e., gymnastics is work in the guise of youthful joy and happiness. By doing gymnastics, boys and girls had fun, but from the perspective of educators, they were actually preparing for work and a healthy life. They did not even realize that they were being educated and learning essential competences for both their individual lives and the needs of the economy, state and society.

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After the French Revolution, the intellectual, and the social, economic and political conditions were preparing the governing bodies of the developing industrialized nation states to give time to physical education, sports and games in their national agendas. Every European nation state, including the US introduced physical education as part and parcel of their educational systems since the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, step by step, in a more or less compulsory manner, at first for boys and young men, more or less later for girls and young women at schools and universities, finally in the Kindergarten as well and at the other end of the life-span for adults, for older and truly aged people (McIntosh et al. 1957; Spears et al. 1988; Krüger 2005, vol. 2). Educational organizations and institutions wanted to reserve additional periods and additional spaces, gymnastics halls and playgrounds for physical education, recreation, games and sports. In general, sports education programs have long been implemented in various educational and social institutions, at first at conventional schools, and consequently in further educational institutions, including those of social pedagogy, hygiene, and rehabilitation. This process of implementing systematic concepts of physical education through physical activity, movement, sports and games is by no means complete, but now includes, apart from traditional school education, further public institutions of education, social pedagogy and hygiene, and various target audiences. Physical education became a fundamental element of modern bio-politics, as Michel Foucault characterized this tendency of modern nation states since the age of Enlightenment. This process is common to both democratic welfare states and authoritarian ones, including modern dictatorships of the twentieth century like that of the Hitler regime in Germany or the communist states during the Cold War area, especially the USSR (Foucault and Rabinow 1984).

PATTERNS OF PHYSICAL EDUCATION Considered from today ’s perspective, two main models of sport, within a very broad range of meaning, can be identified. First, there is the English model of competitive and fair sports and games rooted in the publicschool system, which spread throughout the world. Second, there is the German, or more generally, the continental European concept of physical education and systematic exercises or drills at schools, which also spread throughout schools and educational institutions all over the world, including those of armies and police forces. German and Swedish gymnastics represent this general concept of physical education, modified according to the specific needs and conditions of each individual nation state. Since the twentieth century, modern nation states also claim to be welfare states, including health systems. Sports, games and physical education were used for national body

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politics and became elements of the political and educational agenda of nation states. The English or British model of competitive sports and games dominated the educational concepts of sports organizations beyond educational institutions of nation states. This culminated in the idea of Olympism, which is by no means a concept of state politics, but of non-governmental sports organizations based on civil societies. The IOC at the apex of the Olympic movement is a nongovernmental organization which acts worldwide, and is very large and very wealthy. The crucial ideal is that sports, games and athletic competitions can only develop their educational and ethical power if uninfluenced by state politics, and practiced for their own sake by free and independent sportsmen and -women. However, this English model of public-school sports and games was in fact idealized and nationalized for the purposes of the British Empire. The skills and competences—character-building—that pupils and students can learn by playing fair sports and games for their own sake were essential “to teach Englishmen to govern others and to control themselves”, as the Clarendon Commission stated in 1864, after the approval of the public schools or by the government. The commission recommended that the Public Schools express “their love of healthy sports and exercise” (The Clarendon Commission, cited by Holt 1990: 76). The continental concept of systematic physical education and exercises, including health education, became by contrast, dominant in public institutions, especially schools, and subsequently institutions of public and social health. Physical education at schools is mostly compulsory today, a consequence of the introduction of systematic PE lessons since the nineteenth century. The German example seems to exemplify this general process of schoolization of physical education, sports and games.

GYMNASTICS AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION AT SCHOOLS Since the 1860s, the bifurcation of German gymnastics into physical education at schools was initiated both as a compulsory means and subject of general education on the one hand, and bourgeois Turner clubs on the other. In spite of strong interdependencies between or elements of physical culture, they developed in different ways. The one moved towards didactical and methodical implementations of teaching and learning gymnastics, sports, and physical education, and the other towards free, non-governmental gymnastics and sports clubs as elements of a civil society—mostly according to the interests and politics of the nation state, but sometimes and in some respects, also opposed to state and government. The first physical education at schools, aimed at

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FIGURE 2.3: Physical Education class in a small Swiss village, author’s collection.

educating by means of physical activities including drills, gymnastics, sports and games, and the second, games and exercises in clubs, organized gymnastics, sports, and games principally for their own sake, more or less aware of the fact that sports and games can and should function pedagogically. However, physical education at schools is principally respected by the state and has to operate in accordance with state laws. Both processes of the schoolization and sportization of gymnastics are still in progress. Schoolteachers and educators for physical education were always needed and educated by teacher education programs at teacher training colleges. The content, didactics and methods of physical education and how exactly to teach this new subject at schools had to be developed step by step. Competitions and achievement were less crucial, and the priority was rather the education of body control and discipline according to the educational needs and expectations of the nation states of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Books and curricula were written, explaining how to educate in gymnastics systematically. In Germany, GutsMuths and Jahn stood at the beginning of a strong tradition of systematic concepts of physical education. In Sweden, Per Henrik Ling (1776–1839) followed by creating a Swedish concept of gymnastics. He became director of the Swedish Gymnastiska Centralinstitutet of Stockholm in 1813, a central institution for training Swedish physical educators at schools and in the army. The Ling system of gymnastics and physical education was based on the scientific knowledge of physiology and anatomy. The exercises and drills described and explained in his books aimed at better health and fitness for the

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FIGURE 2.4: Caricature of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852), the father of gymnastics in Germany.

youth and in general for the total population, most certainly including girls and women. The work of Ling and his Central Institute of Gymnastics became very influential. In Britain, a first attempt to establish German gymnastics according to the ideal of Jahn and his concept of Turnen at the Hasenheide in Berlin in fresh air failed. Karl Völker (1796–1884) a contemporary scholar of Jahn, had to go into exile in Switzerland and afterwards to London, due to the prosecution of (alleged) demagogues like Jahn and others, by the Prussians and the Austrians, led by their Chancellor Klemens of Metternich (1776–1859). Völker opened a gymnastics facility, similar to the Hasenheide, close to London’s Regent’s Park in 1825, and another next to the Primrose Hill Gymnasium in 1827. However, after a successful start, these open-air facilities were closed due to decreasing interest and because of the rainy London weather (Krüger 2011). Some years later, attempts to establish gymnastics and physical education for girls were more successful. However, physical education for girls was taught in accordance with the Swedish concept, and not with the German system of

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Turnen or German gymnastics. Madame Martina Bergman-Österberg (1849–1915) was the central person for this mode of Swedish Gymnastics for girls. The Dartford College in Kent (GB) and the Springfield College in Massachusetts (USA) became the most famous institutions and specialized spaces for women’s PE teachers (Mangan and Park 2015). By contrast, British boys did “manly”, outdoor sports and games. In that respect, sportscapes are also gendered spaces. The physician Mathias Roth (1818–1891) publicized the work of Ling and Rothstein in England. He was a pioneer in terms of introducing Swedish Gymnastics at elementary schools (Rothstein and Roth 1853). According to Peter McIntosh, Swedish Gymnastics including physical training, calisthenics and military drill, became the second major tradition of physical culture in England, in addition to that of games and sports, which he calls “indigenous” English, whereas “gymnastics (. . .) were of foreign extraction” (McIntosh 1968: 11). Systematic physical exercises and drills were introduced mainly at the new secondary schools in England following the Balfour Education Act of 1902. In addition, there was the work of the English physician and physical educator Archibald Maclaren. He criticized the dominance of games in English physical education and called for systematic health education at schools rather through physical exercises and drills (Maclaren, 1869). Physicians and army officers were very interested in changing the traditional British concept of physical education through sports and games to a more systematic education through recreational physical exercises and drills. The Swedish gymnastic system was even adopted by the Prussians, including a serious dispute between the representatives of the German Turners on the one hand and the Prussian representatives of a scientifically-based concept of physical education at schools, according to Ling and his German adjutant Major Rothstein (1810–1865), on the other. This Prussian argument over the parallel bars occurred in the early 1860s. The parallel bars symbolized the concept of German gymnastics, because this facility was invented by Jahn himself as a German Turngerät—an apparatus of indigenous German gymnastics. The parallel bars were rejected by Rothstein, who denounced German gymnastics as harmful and unhealthy. By contrast, in common with physicians, he favored healthy and “rational” Swedish exercises including simple facilities like ladders and Swedish wall bars—creations of Ling and his successors. Finally, the German Turners were successful, at least at first glance. German gymnastics was formally accepted as a canonic means of physical education at schools in Prussia, and step by step in other countries of the federal German empire. However, the success was something of a Pyrrhic victory. The Prussian system of physical education and gymnastics reflected less (or not at all) the spirit of free Turnerism according to the traditions of the 1848 Turners and American Turners, and a more formal system of exercises and drills, being

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perceived as rather stupid and annoying for the majority of the pupils who preferred to play games, especially football, and training sports since the end of the nineteenth century. A reform of the traditional system of gymnastics towards more games, outdoor activities and open-air athletics was strongly supported by both sportsmen and educators. One of them was Konrad Koch (1846–1911) of Braunschweig, a philologist of old languages and teacher of gymnastics, who founded the first school football club for the pupils at his gymnasium. For him, English football was compatible with German gymnastics. In his essay Die Geschichte des Fußball im Altertum und in der Neuzeit (the history of football in ancient and modern times) he argued that football was not an English invention, but was universal. Due to the popularity of the game among the young Germans, he concluded his scholarly piece on football with a quotation from the father of German gymnastics, Friedrich Ludwig, and the assertion that Jahn, if he had known that game, would have accepted it as a Turnspiel, a game of gymnastics, among others like fistball or Schlagball (Koch 1895; Oberschelp 2010; Krüger 2013). In consequence, similar to England, in the German Empire, two forms of physical education were established at schools and practiced in clubs or Vereinen. The first entailed systematic exercises and traditional German gymnastics, and the second, sports and games; both contributed meaningfully to physical education. The introduction of compulsory physical education lessons at schools, colleges and universities had sustainable effects on the role and status of sports in a wider sense in industrialized modern nation states and their societies.

OLYMPIC PERSPECTIVES Sports and exercises found a common institutional space and specially allocated times in the modern Olympics. At the end of the industrial age, and by no means coincidentally, the international Olympic movement succeeded in gaining a leading position in subsuming both processes of free sports and games for fun on the one hand, and physical exercises for better performance on the other. Olympism slowly became the new “religion” of modern sports and games, administered by the non-governmental IOC. Modern Olympic Games united both the spirit of the new age of dynamic sports—citius, altius, fortius— and the needs of strong nation states to create national identity and national pride through competing national teams at the international Olympic Games. From the beginning, the Olympics were not limited to one space or location as was the case in Ancient Olympia. Rather, modern Olympics take place every four years at various cities of the world. The modern Olympics defined its own geography, as Coubertin had pointed out, calling it a sporting or “athletic geography” (Coubertin 2000: 590). Whereas at the beginning of the age of

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modern Olympics, the Games had been part of Expos as in Paris (1900) and Saint Louis (1904) (see Roche, 2000), since the London Games of 1908, the Olympics invented sportscapes and sport-times of their own. The modern Olympics also established a new rhythm of sports events, following the ancient ideal. According to the Olympic ideology, the Games celebrate the rise of a new generation of youth (young men) in a strict rhythm of every four years. The sporting times of Olympism connected the past with the present and the future, and simultaneously defined a constant rhythm of sporting events. Modern Olympic Games created international sporting times and sporting spaces by communicating the universal culture of modern sports. Additionally, the concept of Olympic amateur sport satisfied the desire for exclusivity of the sporting upper classes. This kind of Olympic sports both accorded with the habitus of gentlemen and with the spirit of speed and progress of modern times. Finally, Olympism was and still is an educational idea legitimized by the legacy of ancient traditions. The first Olympic Games of modern times took place in Athens/ Greece in 1896. Pierre de Coubertin, a French nobleman, is usually looked upon as the inventor of this new modern tradition with its respect of antiquity. However, he was not alone. At that time, many educated people of various European nations like Great Britain, France, Greece, and last but not least Germany, were full of respect and enthusiasm for another time—classic Greek antiquity. For them, this period seemed to be the apex of both humanity and humanism, as well as of cultural development. In modern times, on the eve of the twentieth century, looking back at Greek antiquity was expected to provide the appropriate orientation for the future. Coubertin had argued that Olympic Games in modern times should be no more than a revival of the ancient Olympic Games, formerly religious ceremonies including athletic contests. In 1894, when Coubertin had invited some influential gentlemen from Europe and the United States of America to a congress on amateur sport, at the top of the agenda was this: “On the opportunity to reinstall Olympic Games”. He used the Greek terms Olympic, athletic, and gymnastic, in order to ennoble modern sports with classic culture. He also distinguished between such modern sports as athletics, gymnastics, swimming, rowing, and horse riding, which seemed to parallel classic disciplines in antiquity, and others, like ball games, which were not part of the classic tradition of athletics and agonistics. As in antiquity, the single male athlete contesting in athletic competitions was to be the star or idol of modern Olympics. In 1894, the Paris Congress marked the birth of the modern Olympic Games, its organizations and institutions, and a new, Olympic ideal of modern sport around the world. The first president, Dimitrios Vikelas, organized the first Games in Athens, while Coubertin was both the IOC’s guiding spirit and “general manager”. At first and in general, the main purpose of the IOC was to organize

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Olympic Games with a four-year-rhythm—like the Olympians in antiquity—but by contrast, not always at the same place, but in various different cities of the world. Consequently, the president of the IOC was usually the organizer of the next Games. Meanwhile, the IOC developed into the very powerful and wealthy “world government of sport” (Rittberger and Boekle 1997). In 1896, just before the Athens Games, Coubertin published an article in the second edition of the official journal Revue Olympique defining Olympism, or, as he wrote, the “essence of our critical endeavor”. He explained: Our idea to revive such an institution which had been forgotten for many centuries, is the following (. . .). The relevance of athletics is growing year by year. Its role in modern times seems to be as relevant and sustainable as in ancient times. In addition, athletics acquired modern characteristics. It is international and democratic, which means adapted to the ideas and needs of the present. However, today as well as in the past, its effects may be healthy or harmful, depending on the use of athletics and the way we perform sports and athletics. Athletics can produce noble as well as base excitement and emotions; it may develop a sense of honor and altruism, as well as egoism and greed (mammonism). Sports and athletics can be fair or foul, both functionalized to secure peace and to prepare for war. —Coubertin 1996: 27 Coubertin was aware of the fact that sport and athletics were not morally useful and worthy in their own right, but only through the appropriate educational interventions and structures. Modern sport ought to be used as a means of education. Accordingly, Olympic sport could contribute to a better and more human education in the interests of peace and harmony. Sport and athletics in modern times should be exercised fairly, respectfully, in a constructive partnership with others, and in a harmony of body, mind, and will. Coubertin respected these characteristics, typical of modern, “democratic societies”, adding that “noble emotions, culturing a spirit of honor and altruism, fair play, male strength and peace are the main needs of modern democratic societies, irrespective of whether they are republican or monarchic”. After some initial difficulties, Olympism was established during the early decades of the twentieth century. The games of Stockholm in 1912 marked the breakthrough of modern Olympism, uniting all relevant developments and elements of modern sports since the industrial age.

CONCLUSION By 1914, the processes of sportization and the teaching of sports and physical education were well developed. The “civilized” (in the empirical sense of

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Norbert Elias’ theory of the process of civilization) nation states established a culture of sports and games, including sporting infrastructures like clubs, stadiums, gym and sport halls, festivals, regattas, tournaments, leagues and so on. Their educational institutions had introduced concepts of systematic physical education that were more or less compulsory for male pupils and students, though mostly not yet for girls, and taught by increasingly professionalized trainers, coaches, and even academic educators. The beginning of more scientific and academic interest in sports and physical education was part of this process of teaching and sportization. The various developments with respect to both sporting times and spaces in the industrial age took two main directions and yield one dialectical conclusion: First, sports and games formed part and parcel of the spare-time spectrum of the increasing population of the industrializing nations in Europe and the socalled civilized world. Sports and games became a substantial element of their general and body culture, but certainly relative to specific social groups. Many English sports and games were limited to a single class. However, social borders became more and more permeable in the industrial age. Second, physical education became part of the processes of nation building. The industrial age was simultaneously the age of nationalism. Education assisted this process of building strong nation states. Processes of sportization and formal teaching of sports, games and physical activities developed differently in various nations and regions, according to the respective pace of their temporal development. However, and similar to the Hegelian concept of a dialectical process, they culminated in the creation of the modern Olympic Games, looking both back and forward in time. The Olympic Games are the most conspicuous proof that the early twentieth century could indeed begin a century of sport.

CHAPTER THREE

Products, Training, and Technology DAVE DAY

INTRODUCTION There was no clear break with the past in the leisure activities of most of the population in nineteenth-century Britain, which witnessed an acceleration of a pre-existing tendency towards an expansion of the commercial leisure industry, invariably driven by small-scale capitalist entrepreneurs. From the 1840s onwards, popular culture was transformed as leisure activities were repackaged to accommodate a growing population and an expanding urban, industrialized environment (Golby and Purdue 1999: 120). The need for stable, punctual, sober, and disciplined workers became important for manufacturers and the Factory Acts established rationally organized clear divisions between work time and leisure time (Justman and Gradstein 1999: 118–119). In eighteenth-century Manchester, hours in the hand-spinning factories had fluctuated with seasonal demands and the availability of raw materials, so workers had continued to mix leisure with work, but owners, recognizing the substantial fixed costs associated with running a factory, were enforcing multi-shift work and a strict 75-hour week in mechanized factories by around 1820 (Huberman 1995). Old habits persisted however. An observer noted of employees in the Staffordshire potteries in 1843 that they “work by the piece; however much there may be on hand to accomplish they seldom or ever work after Saturday noon, and often not before the following Tuesday or Wednesday morning” (Pike 1966: 197). Twenty-five years later, one artisan, highlighting that some of the working population still adhered to their old traditions, recorded that “the sporting 77

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Saint Mondayites take . . . greatest interest in ... amateur [sports] ones of which they themselves are the promoters, and in which eminent members of their own body are the principals” (Wright 1867). Over the course of the century, several social and technological innovations facilitated new patterns of leisure for the masses. Municipal and private initiatives provided more spaces for urban relaxation and play while industrial legislation and trade-union activism caused real wages to rise and reduced the working week, resulting in a Saturday half-holiday for many employees. Emergent efficient and cheap means of intracity transport, facilitated by rapid developments in steam technology, allowed workers to travel more widely. Other technological developments included improved printing press equipment and techniques, such as the use of the newly-invented typewriter, sewing machines that produced uniforms and equipment, pneumatic tires for bicycles, the application of new rubber-making techniques to golf balls and footballs, and the use of steel for bicycle frames, golf-shafts, and the construction of stadia (Baker 1979: 80, 83). Operating alongside these innovations was a commercial imperative that stimulated an expansion of the popular press, seaside resorts, music halls, and professional sport, which itself generated a significant increase in spectatorship (Vamplew 1982: 549–550). While these initiatives created the context for mass leisure in Britain, they did not determine its character. Unlike their counterparts in America and France, where unique histories, demographics, and social structures produced different patterns of leisure, late-Victorian Britons experienced a complex blend of paternalism and competitive enterprise as social emulation existed alongside social exclusiveness (Baker 1979: 80). The veneration of the amateur sportsman encouraged the middle classes to privatize their leisure pursuits to avoid fraternizing with the lower classes while simultaneously adopting an ethos of “Muscular Christianity”, which assumed that sport developed self-discipline and team spirit. Although the playing of the same sports by all classes was believed to be a way of achieving class harmony, considerable social zoning occurred and mixed-sex sports like tennis, hockey, golf, and badminton, remained the preserve of the middle classes until well into the twentieth century, while it was only when a secondhand trade emerged in the early 1900s that most lower middle- and workingclass men and women could participate in cycling (Golby and Purdue 1999: 79, 120, 170).

COMMODIFICATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP Much has been made of the impact of the railways on sport from the 1840s, but extensive travel had been part of elite sport for many years. Devonshire wrestler Abraham Cann was travelling as far afield as London and Leeds in the 1820s in pursuit of competition while champion jockey Tommy Lye travelled some

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6,000 miles, mainly by horse and coach, as early as 1839 in pursuit of his 173 races (Huggins and Tolson 2001). Many thousands could be found at wrestling contests in early nineteenth-century Cumbria and around 30,000 spectators attended the Langan–Spring prizefight near Worcester in January 1824 (Hurley 2002: 137). Nevertheless, the railways revolutionized sport, not merely by widening the catchment area for spectators but also in enabling participants to compete nationally, which itself led to the organization of regional and national tournaments and leagues. The late 1840s and 1850s witnessed the development of touring professional cricket teams, beginning with William Clarke’s first All England XI, which attracted large crowds, while the easier transport of horses and racegoers resulted in racing becoming a genuinely national sport. By 1900, many railway companies, following their success in organizing seaside excursions, were prepared to provide Sunday anglers’ trains for any association ready to guarantee 300 passengers (Lowerson 1984). Spectator sport was stimulated further as more people became able to pay for leisure activities following real wage rises after the 1840s, enabling spectators to afford travel, betting and refreshment costs, and to do so more frequently. There was a significant increase in spectatorship, with up to 80,000 attending major race meetings by the 1890s, and commercialized spectator sport for the mass market expanded as entrepreneurs and sports club executives enclosed grounds, built stadia and charged gate-money. Expansion was facilitated by a significant growth in the urban population, providing a concentrated market for entrepreneurs, and by the Saturday half-day legislation. Sports and leisure providers adopted an industrial approach by providing competitive and attractive fixtures, investing in ground facilities, utilizing emerging technology, organizing events more effectively, improving crowd control, and introducing leagues in team sports. The character and structure of sports were altered to attract more spectators with sprints, two-year-old and handicap racing becoming dominant features in horse racing, rugby splitting into two distinct versions, and some soccer clubs being voted out of the Football League because they were unable to produce enough gate revenue. There was also a growth in sports professionalism. By 1910, there were over 200 first-class professional cricketers, plus several hundred county ground staff and league professionals, some 400 jockeys and apprentices were engaged in horse racing, and there were 6,800 registered soccer professionals, although many were part-timers (Vamplew 1982, 1988). Commercialization was contested, however, and the middle-class amateur sportsmen of the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods were not slow in voicing their disapproval. Although their opposition to professionalism was in part based on fears that enthusiasm for the game for its own sake would be lost, it was also based on the association of amateurism with higher social status. Even though national sports developed in which all classes were involved, with teams

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being supported by a wide cross-section of society, match results appearing in newspapers, and sporting celebrities acclaimed because of their ability not because of their social background, discernible differences between the classes survived. The middle classes generally preferred to be private and domestic in their leisure life and decorous in their behavior, while the working classes were typically more public, gregarious and rowdy. As these differences gradually dissipated, a leisure culture emerged in which spectator sports homogenized many regional and social distinctions and stimulated the development of a range of peripheral industries such as manufacturing and retailing.

MANUFACTURING AND RETAILING Bailey (1987) argued that the advent of mass leisure in the context of suburbanization created opportunities for consumer agency for those whose engagement with technological and mercantile advance at work and at home placed them at the front line of modernity. The mid-nineteenth century retail scene was transformed in Britain by 1900 as the number of stores grew from around 1500 in 1880 to 11,645. Specialized grocers like Liptons or Home and Colonial, shoe shops like Freeman Hardy & Willis, chemists like Boots, tailors like Hepworths, and newspaper and book stores like W. H. Smith expanded significantly as did the availability of sporting goods for sportsmen and sportswomen. Hardy (1990: 73, 82) described this in nineteenth-century America as a three-stage process, one that resonates with parallel developments in Britain. Before 1860, players wore a modified form of everyday clothing and most sporting equipment was handcrafted. The period 1860 to 1880 saw exponential growth as entrepreneurs recognized that sport and sporting goods could expand beyond the artisanal trade, while the third period after 1880 was characterized by mass investment and intense competition between rival manufacturers and retailers trying to claim a share of a rapidly expanding market. By that stage, industrialization and social transformation had produced a whole new occupational stratum and a concomitant customer base that generated new opportunities for petit bourgeois entrepreneurship. An upsurge of popular interest in sports and leisure in the late-Victorian period proved a particularly fruitful avenue of entrepreneurial innovation for all manner of sporting clothing, accessories, equipment and novelties (Levitt 1986: 204). British sportsmen such as cricketer John Lillywhite traded on their reputation and set up small establishments manufacturing and selling their own bats or golf clubs. Lillywhite opened a shop on Haymarket in 1863 selling cricket gear, and other indoor and outdoor sporting requisites, at a premium price to attract the social elite. This commercial model was then adopted by London’s high-end department stores, which incorporated small specialist sports and leisure departments. Gamage’s, a department store specializing in sports and outdoor

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leisure goods, grew rapidly from its origins as a small hosiery shop in 1878, then through the firm’s rapid expansion in the “bicycle boom” of the 1880s and 1890s so that by the early twentieth century, the store was a household name in Southern England, renowned for its affordable sporting goods. This trajectory was driven by the commercial opportunities offered by the need to provide a new kind of distinctively masculine form of shopping environment. Walter Gamage, the store’s founder, had been quick to recognize the increasing ideological salience of sport and leisure as the embodiment of fashionable modernity for young urban male consumers. The identification of a lucrative emerging hosiery sector and then rapid expansion into sporting goods proved a particularly apposite strategy for attracting a flourishing male clerical class that constituted the shop’s primary consumer base. Sport was a key factor in repositioning male consumers as individuals whose sexual and class identities could be expressed through appropriate forms of fashionable consumption (Biddle-Perry 2014: 295–297, 303). Similarly, Heffernan (2017) has explored how Eddie O’Callaghan, an Irish bicycle and physical culture retailer operating in fin de siècle Ireland, who traded in physical culture equipment between 1898 to 1906, drew on ideas of gender, strength and health in a bid to attract customers.

INVENTION AND INNOVATION Gamage’s appeal was built on the considerable social cachet attached to sporting participation, especially the opportunities for status recognition that cycling offered in the later nineteenth century when the activity emerged as a fashionable pursuit for an urban elite and the upper-class cyclist became the embodiment of masculine modernity (Norcliffe 2001: 32). New technology proved to be a key factor. Pierre Lallement took out a patent for the first two-wheeled velocipede in 1866 and subsequent developments in the sport demonstrate a constant sequence of technological change and consumer reaction. The safety bicycle, whose chain-driven rear wheel gradually became identical in size to the front wheel, was made practicable by John Kemp Starley in 1885, and John Boyd Dunlop’s pneumatic tire was introduced in 1888. This was superior to tires of solid rubber and, although he had many competitors, most of the pneumatic tires sold during the next decade were Dunlops. With its increasingly sophisticated tires, gears, and other accessories, the diamond-frame safety bicycle with its cross bar that could be lowered to accommodate women, was recognizably modern and efficient, enabling cycling to become suitable to both sexes and most ages. Gamage’s began selling safety bicycles under the store’s own label at a highly competitive price, and actively promoted a range of cut price, fashionable cycling clothing and footwear. A “Gamage” bicycle and a “Referee” suit rapidly became synonymous with both the shop and the figure of the young suburban club cyclist (Biddle-Perry 2014: 299).

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By the 1890s, there were approximately 1.5 million cyclists and over 31,000 cycle makers, while most popular newspapers had regular cycling correspondents and cycling magazines had become an important feature of an expanding popular specialist press. Cycling manuals and guidebooks proliferated, while Thomas Cook’s promotion of continental bicycle tours was quickly copied by other firms. National cycle shows became major events and membership of the Cyclists’ Touring Club (founded in 1878), which catered especially for the titled, the fashionable, and the professional and business classes, rose to 60,449 in 1899. By early 1898, it was estimated that there were over 2,000 cycling clubs in Britain, 300 in London alone. Cycling not only had a social impact but also influenced economic life, especially in the West Midlands, where an industry was established using improved technology, including cheap steel, weldless tubular frames, and standardized parts. After a cycle boom in 1895, large cycle and accessory companies became much more numerous. Export of cycles and parts reached nearly £2 million in 1896, and British companies resisted American and German competition to dominate the world market before World War I. Cycle production stimulated the creation of a large and efficient machine tool industry and the industry provided much of the skilled manpower, machinery and parts, and capital that enabled several manufacturers to subsequently produce motor vehicles (Rubinstein 1977: 47–71, 51–58).

FIGURE 3.1: Kennington Oval cycle race, 1892, courtesy of Getty Images.

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While cycling was the most visible embodiment of the symbiotic relationship between a cultural activity, technological innovation and commercial developments, it was by no means singular. In many ways, swimming epitomized the way in which technology, innovation and entertainment were entwined in the development of Victorian and Edwardian sport. The expansion in municipal baths facilities was important, as were entrepreneurial swimming “professors” who experimented with technique, creating faster strokes such as the Trudgen and the front crawl, and performance technologies, such as the use of oxygen, as well as developing equipment. Boynton crossed the Channel using a form of rubber canoe, Ward developed a rubber suit for swimming in the sea, and authors proposed the use of “plates”, swim paddles, to aid performance. Crystal tanks filled with water enabled aquatic performers to display their skills in music halls and theatres while circus rings and arenas were flooded to provide suitable environments (Day 2016, 2015, 2011). In billiards, Edwin Kentfield, the generally acknowledged champion, and John Thurston, who supplied him with his equipment, improved playing conditions in the 1830s by introducing tables of slate beds with rubber cushions, covered with a finer baize (Wymer 1949: 231). In 1863, American James L. Plimpton designed roller skates with four small boxwood wheels cushioned by rubber pads that enabled skaters to take advantage of the force of gravity and keep their balance while performing intricate figures. The subsequent invention of ball bearing wheels in 1884 helped popularize the sport and London’s Olympic Hall was built as a roller-skating rink (Brasch 1986). John Jaques promoted croquet in England and began to manufacture equipment, including a wooden mallet. Croquet became a national pastime for both sexes and by the turn of the century, Jaques had several rivals, among them F. H. Avers of Aldergate, Slazenger in Cannon Street, and The Eclectic and Anglo-American Manufacturing Co. Ltd. of Putney. Although versions of table tennis began as parlor games, commercial interests soon started to produce custom-made equipment and rivalry between manufacturers stimulated the game. American firm, Parker Bros. of Salem, Massachusetts, developed “Indoor Tennis” and exported their sets to England, where Hamley Bros., of London, marketed them under the tradename Ping-Pong. Meanwhile, other English companies, such as Ayres Ltd. (who advertised the sport as “The Miniature Indoor Lawn Tennis”), had patented their own equipment under titles such as Gossima, Whiff Whaff, and Flim Flam (Brasch 1986). Technological innovations were important in the development of lawn tennis which was hampered by the lack of a suitable ball until vulcanization was developed by Charles Goodyear in 1839. Another important factor was the invention of the lawn mower around the middle of the century by Alexander Shanks and Thomas Green (Cooper 2004: 104). Turner (2016: 474) highlights how the tennis shoe became a popular, widely available commodity in late-

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Victorian Britain, promoted in the leisure press, and sold to both sexes in a variety of retail environments. Valued for symbolic and physically practical reasons, footwear, as with other forms of sportswear, created and communicated new masculine ideals. Clothing was also a way of declaring one’s sporting status as an amateur. Day and Oldfield (2015) have demonstrated how late nineteenthcentury amateur track and field athletes clothed their bodies in a way that distinguished themselves from their professional pedestrian predecessors. This “university costume” comprised drawers made from thin merino or silk, reaching to the knees and held around the waist by a broad elastic band. The jersey was normally made of the same material. In running events, thin shoes made from French calf, “and fitting the foot like a kid glove when laced up”, were worn with chamois leather socks, just covering the toes but not reaching above the top of the shoe. For sports clothing manufacturers, the introduction of this standardized form of dress had a useful commercial benefit in that suppliers could now sell multiple rather than single items.

FACILITIES—PRIVATE AND PUBLIC PROVISION While equipment and clothing were important social markers, participants needed suitable venues in which to display their purchases. Field sports remained a form of conspicuous recreation and the popularity of angling increased, partly because it was cheaper and more accessible than hunting, coursing or shooting. Falconry, however, found it difficult to compete with alternatives at a time when technological innovation and changes in the environment made it harder to pursue and functionally less relevant (Grassby 1997). In shooting, servants had thrown potatoes and small turnips into the air for target practice in the early 1800s but, later on, “trappers” would release pigeons or glass balls on command. In 1890, the Inanimate Bird Shooting Association was formed, and glass balls were gradually replaced by American clay targets that more easily resembled a bird in flight (Smith 2004). In Argyllshire, a wide range of social groups competed in glass ball shooting, for prizes and medals or in sweepstakes, but in clearly defined classes including, in 1881, gamekeepers; amateurs with gun licenses; and all comers including fishermen. Traditional practices remained important in activities such as this, and, despite significant changes in the societal context, there was a continuity with age old traditions of the patronization of local recreation by the gentry (Jackson 1998), although things were changing in urban and industrial environments. In the North-East, colliery owners, officials and the professional classes were all directly involved in both the promotion and suppression of sports, dependent on whether or not they fell within the boundaries of “rational recreation” (Metcalfe 1995). Of all the social groups which expanded with the structural shifts in the lateVictorian economy, clerks were by far the most numerous and important

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(Anderson 1977: 113). Heller’s analysis (2008) of the growth of staff sports clubs and associations evidences how financial institutions and new bureaucracies such as the London County Council and the Civil Service used the provision of sporting amenities, in conjunction with a wider package of welfare benefits, to generate a sense of commitment, loyalty and fellowship among this group of workers. Several industrial employers also saw sport as having a utilitarian function and sponsored works teams as a means of reducing labor turnover by creating loyalty to the firm and increasing productivity by keeping workers fit. Pilkingtons, the glass-makers, were running a cricket team in the 1860s and several works teams were operating by the end of the century. George Cadbury devoted resources at his Bourneville factory to the health of his employees with the aim of enabling them to produce the supreme economic value of quick, clean work through the speed of hand coupled with accuracy of eye. He believed that these worker qualities made the business pay. There was a wellequipped covered swimming baths for women and four women, fully qualified in the Swedish system of physical education, were employed to teach swimming, games and drill. For girls and boys up to the age of eighteen a certain amount of physical education was compulsory and two half-hours of compulsory instruction per week for girls were devoted to Swedish drill, swimming and life-saving, conducted on a “thoroughly scientific basis”. In 1903, the first professional cricket coach was appointed and a second joined a year later (Bromhead 2000). At Port Sunlight, the village was constantly expanded to house all the workers necessary for the smooth running of the factory. The first public buildings came in 1892 in the form of a shop and Gladstone Hall, which hosted the dramatic society, choir, minstrel troupe, and chemistry club. A gymnasium was added in 1902, alongside an open-air swimming pool, and an auditorium in 1903. Elsewhere, it was the commercial entrepreneur who provided facilities and support with the hope of generating a financial return as when Spiers and Pond, operators of a Melbourne restaurant, organized the All England Eleven cricket tour to Australia in 1861–62 (Frost 2002: 55–56), by which time specialized commercial running areas had become well established. There was the “Hounslow inclosure-ground” in 1818, the “extensive inclosure” at Kilmersdon, near Bath, in 1821, the “prepared ground” near Daventry in 1825, the twomile circle at Ashted Park, and Sheffield’s Hyde Park Ground was operating by the mid-1830s, while a running track was laid out at Lords in 1837 (Brailsford 1999: 204). By the mid-nineteenth century, most major urban centers had similar well-appointed pedestrian grounds, which staged championships over distances from sprints up to ten miles, each with its own trophy, championship belt or cup, while racetracks and cricket grounds had grandstands. Owners had a stake in maintaining order and discipline to protect their facilities and paying spectators (Guttmann 1985), although middle-class entrepreneurs, keen to

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profit from the new mass market, often undermined attempts to “civilize” the working class and wean it away from drink, sport and popular culture (Lowerson 1984). One artisan noted in 1867 that “The shrines at which the sporting section of the Saint Mondayites principally sacrifice” were the running grounds situated in the suburbs of London and in the larger manufacturing towns, where the amusements consisted of races ranging from eighty yards to five miles, wrestling matches, and pugilistic benefits to which several “brilliant stars of the ring show up in conjunction with pedestrians and wrestlers” (Wright 1867). In the 1870s, enclosed commercial sporting grounds were opened in Northumberland and these became central venues for sporting activity (Metcalfe 1995). Vamplew (2018) suggests that profit-maximization was not necessarily the aim of everyone who invested in the sports industry. While boxing promoters and some thoroughbred owners were concerned with direct financial returns, others sought profits more indirectly. Alongside the businessmen who patronized works teams as part of their welfare policies, there were the cycle manufacturers who advertised their wares by sponsoring meetings and riders while builders, caterers and sports outfitters invested in football clubs with the hope of obtaining contracts. Other football shareholders included members of the drink trade who hoped that supporters would frequent their public houses, while transport enterprises connected to prominent facilities in the expectation of benefitting from sports passenger traffic, and the press provided free publicity for sports events in the hope of attracting readers. Other investors had different priorities and some upper-class and middle-class expenditure, such as the maintenance of shooting estates or owning racehorses, can be viewed as conspicuous consumption. Some members of the middle class purchased social exclusivity as members of golf clubs while others subsidized cricket teams purely for reasons of civic or regional pride or invested in municipal facilities and sponsored teams as part of their mission to connect with the working class.

PLAYING DIFFERENTLY Some recreations, sports and institutions were able to move up and down the social scale. Pedestrianism and rowing, low pastimes of the masses in the first half of the nineteenth century, became ‘with modifications’ acceptable to the university man by its end. Developing sports like golf and lawn tennis, however, were specific to the upper and middle classes and were played within clubs whose membership was carefully monitored. In sports accessible to all classes, internal divisions were maintained by the organization of, for example, Old Boys’ clubs, which retained their school day connections and only played socially acceptable opponents. However, exclusivity could be maintained only with difficulty, because, as sports became national and leagues and cups

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proliferated, the desire to win and the need to attract ability and skill could militate against social divisions. Despite the efforts of middle-class philanthropists, the lower orders continued to approach their games differently. To them, winning, and an uncritical support of the home side, were more important than “playing the game”, while drinking and gambling remained more popular than rational recreations, reflecting long-held traditions of working-class engagement with sport. Rowing competitions on the Tyne, involved races varying from individual challenge matches, with stakes ranging from £5 to £100, to championships where professional oarsmen, watched on occasions by crowds numbering 100,000, competed for prizes from £200 to £1,000 (Golby and Purdue 1999: 65, 78–79). Horse racing and prizefighting contests were, similarly, inseparable from betting and followers of sport were always prepared “to settle all matters of opinion by offering to lay or take long odds referring to ‘lumping it on’ or ‘going a raker’ when they have backed their fancy for five shillings, and regarding themselves as daring speculators when they have ‘put the pot on’ ” (Wright, 1867). Partly because of this addiction to gambling, the honesty of contests diminished from about 1820 onwards and, in prizefighting, things were so bad that the sport virtually disappeared as it increasingly came under pressure from the values associated with evangelicalism and respectability (Waterhouse 2002). Owing to the large sums of money involved, an easily-manipulated handicap system, and the absence of a central governing body, pedestrianism almost encouraged deceit and cheating was integral to most sports and activities of the period. Strongman Wolff, “the Rock of Luxemburg”, who performed around 1814, apparently lifted phony weights while rowing witnessed the withdrawal of amateur oarsman from the traditional culture surrounding the sport because of concerns over professional attitudes. Although the elite attended the first professional sculling championships in 1831, they soon emphasized pleasure over competition and the professional watermen who had coached, coxed and dictated tactics in public school and university rowing clubs began to be regarded with suspicion. Fouling, subsequently described as “watermen’s rules”, was initially an integral part of the sport but, as elite clubs moved to exclusivity, watermen were gradually withdrawn, first from the boats and then from their coaching jobs (Wigglesworth 1992: 43, 65, 118, 185, 186). Women taking part in sport found themselves subject to male stereotypical ideals of female personal conduct and successful female athletes such as pedestriennes were often portrayed as having questionable reputations (Shaulis 1999). Women’s cycling was consistently attacked as indecent and middle-class females who played golf or tennis initially faced opposition, although these increasingly became acceptable social activities. During the late nineteenth century, golf clubs provided opportunities for healthful exercise, socializing and business, and established new patterns of leisure, land use and sociability, for

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FIGURE 3.2: Croquet players c. 1866, courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

women as well as men (Griffiths 2016). Women could often exploit men’s notions of double standards. In horse racing, for example, women often got men to place bets for them, perhaps receiving the winnings in the form of a pair of gloves, but not having to pay out on a losing bet. The numerous accusations of female cheating at mixed sports suggest that women could get away with cheating more easily (Huggins 2016: 194). In croquet, some women could abandon their passive role and dominate or indeed humiliate men, mixing flirting with tantrums, wrangling and vociferous argument (Sterngass 1998).

CLUBS AND ASSOCIATIONS Part of the solution to cheating was the rationalization of sport through clubs and associations. The search for order in prizefighting included the formation of the Pugilistic Club in 1814 to create “a regular fund for the support of gymnastic exercises”. The primary goal was to prevent boxers from selling

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fights through establishing an organization which funded purses centrally. The club reduced the influence of individual patrons and set a trend for the organization of sports, but it never assumed the functions or the social status of similar bodies (Krzemienski 2004: 173–174). These included the All England Croquet Club, meant to be “analogous to, and perhaps of similar benefit to croquet as the Marylebone Club is to cricket”, formed in 1868, and the National Skating Association, created in 1879 to foster roller skating (Brasch 1986). The emergence of centralized National Governing Bodies like these was one of the significant features of late nineteenth-century sport and at least fifteen sports were being organized on a national scale by 1890. Characteristic of the amateur bodies that sprang up in the 1880s, such as the Amateur Athletic Association, the Amateur Boxing Association, the Amateur Rowing Association, the Amateur Swimming Association, and the Lawn Tennis Association, was their view that monetary recompense of athletes was a corrupting influence. In addition, because their founders were public school and university men, members of the liberal professions and serving officers (groups characterized by affluence and leisure time) their regulations inevitably favored their peers and marginalized other classes. The transition between pedestrianism and track and field athletics illustrates some of the key aspects of the evolution of sports in this period. In the nineteenth-century England, pedestrianism, one of the most popular spectator sports because of its gambling potential, involved long-distance feats of walking, in which “peds” would set themselves the task of performing a stated feat in a given number of hours or days, or competitive races against other runners, which took place at holiday times, often on unenclosed land. A thriving competitive pedestrian culture surrounded regular events taking place in major conurbations like London and Manchester over distances ranging from short sprints to ten miles or more. Competitors trained hard, often in stables of athletes working under the eye of professional coaches, and the rewards could be substantial, especially if judicious betting strategies were employed (Day 2014). They were accompanied by innovations in timing, with specialist watchmakers providing accurate watches, increasing accuracy in the measurement of distances, and the professional preparation of racing surfaces. While supporters came primarily from the working classes, aristocrats sometimes formed their own exclusive clubs and associations. One of the five designated nucleus clubs and the most prestigious amateur club, the Royal Athletic Club, whose subscribers included members of European royalty, withdrew from the Athletic Association in 1872 over the issue of awarding prizes and a few weeks later the Association folded (Goulstone 1999). The professional middle class gradually assumed control of the sport and formed the Amateur Athletic Association in 1880 to regulate the excesses of the professional sport by enforcing their amateur values, including abolishing

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FIGURE 3.3: Dublin University Athletic Sports, courtesy of Getty Images.

gambling and eliminating cheating. From that point, the sport changed both in the way it was structured and in who participated, particularly at elite levels where the “University” athlete became the norm (Day and Oldfield 2015). As modern sport forms crystallized, the institutional boundaries around them tightened, and provision for the privileged classes stressed exclusivity, often within private clubs. Most major race meetings had their race clubs, of which the Jockey Club and Bibury Club in England, the Dublin Turf Club, or the Royal Caledonian Hunt Club in Scotland, were the most socially elite and respectable (Huggins 2016: 194). London clubs included the Isthmian Club, which advertised itself in 1882 as a social club for gentlemen interested in rowing and other sports, gentlemen being defined as having been “educated at one of the Universities or at one of the Public Schools” or who were serving as an officer in the army or navy. The Whitehall Club, for 700 members, was founded in February 1904, catering especially for cricket, football, golf, lacrosse, yachting, and rowing. Not all clubs were exclusively male. Queen’s Club was established in 1886, specializing in tennis, cricket, and rackets, and it retained a cycling instructor to give lessons to “Members and Ladies introduced by them” using club machines on their own private running track (Tomlinson 2003: 1582–1583).

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PEDAGOGY, TRAINING AND PERFORMANCE TECHNOLOGIES Between 1800 and 1835, Parliament debated eleven bills on cruelty to animals, and in 1835 finally passed a Cruelty to Animals Act proscribing bear-baiting, bull-running, and cockfights. While these events continued clandestinely in both urban and rural locations, working-class gambling increasingly focused on human rather than animal sports, apart from horse racing. By the 1820s, training for sporting contests had become an accepted and expected part of participants’ preparations. Training took contestants from their usual routines, normally for around two months, and put them under the control of professional trainers, who imposed strict regimes to bring athletes to peak competitive condition. When “in training”, the contestants lived with their mentors, who dictated and supervised every aspect of their daily lives (Day 2012). Aside from the effectiveness of the training, Barclay’s successful completion of a challenge to cover 1,000 miles in 1,000 hours for 1,000 guineas in 1809 had emphasized how important planning was to successful athletic performance. Trial runs in the Highlands had identified potential issues such as the structure of the challenge itself, the appropriate clothing, the requisite medical support, and the need for planned recovery. The challenge also confirmed how sport and leisure were increasingly becoming intertwined with technological developments, Barclay having had seven gas lamps erected about 100 yards apart and set up on poles on either side of the course (Radford 2001). In the early nineteenth century, John Jackson, Champion of the Prize Ring in 1795, took rooms in Bond Street, from where, in conjunction with Harry D’Angelo, then running his family’s well-established and socially exclusive fencing academy, he gave lessons on the art of self-defense six days a week to all the fashionable elite. Along with Manton’s shooting gallery, Jackson’s training rooms became an important male sporting venue (Rendell 1998: 117), remaining the focal point for the exchange of information on prizefighting, horse racing, cricket, and pedestrianism, until he retired in 1824. The Fancy also arranged demonstration bouts of sparring using gloves, or “mufflers”, at the Fives Court in Little St Martin’s Street, which accommodated up to 1,000 spectators (Radford 2001: 60). Jackson controlled the venue and, like most promoters, trained his own fighters, including Jem Belcher, Bill Richmond, and Dutch Sam. Other sites of training were the back rooms of inns, often owned by members of the sporting fraternity. Bill Warr, the ex-prizefighter who kept the One Tun Tavern in London, was considered a good trainer for any sport, as well as being a successful teacher of boxing. Bill Neat had his training quarters above The Angel in Marlborough, (Hurley 2002: 39–40, 97–98) and “Little Tim’s Crib”, the Angel Inn at Kitts End, near Barnet, was another popular training headquarters in the 1820s (Gee 1998: 68–69, 87).

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FIGURE 3.4: Robert Cruikshank (1789–1856), A Visit to the Fives Court, 1822, courtesy of Getty Images.

Training programs reflected the science of the day. Medical science had progressed by the early Victorian years and there was a greater awareness of hygienic needs, a concern for public health, and recognition of the need for fresh air and exercise. Muscle-powered engines operated in prisons, for example, and parliamentary commissions repeatedly endorsed the beneficial effects on the health of inmates by providing aerobic exercise (Vogel 2002). Bleeding was customary medical practice and often adopted to treat fighters, with mixed results. In 1823, Bill Hall was “out” for twenty-five minutes and after being bled twice he showed no ill effects but, after fighting for more than an hour in 1820, Winkworth died the day after being bled (Hurley 2002: 97). Sports training also drew on contemporary medical and scientific understanding in the structuring of training to accommodate four essential elements; purging, a process which cleaned out the system before the training started; sweating, which got rid of fat; diet, the cornerstone of training; and exercise, normally involving daily runs and walks totalling between twenty and twenty-four miles. Training necessitated a highly regimented, limited, and specific diet, consisting

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largely of undercooked red meat, dry bread, and stale beer, while avoiding “watery” foods such as fish, vegetables, and fruit. Fluid intake was strictly limited to three pints of old beer. Sweating removed wastes and enhanced the working of the skin, both functions contributing to improved wind. Judging the sweating process was difficult since too much sweating, too late, weakened the athlete while not enough, done too soon, left him overweight and breathless. Those in training ran a weekly “four-mile sweat” dressed in flannels, immediately followed by drinking sweating liquors and being covered with many layers of bedding to hasten perspiration. Finally, they were rubbed dry with coarse towelling to promote the action of skin pores because it was thought that if the skin did not perspire adequately, more loading was placed on the lungs to the detriment of wind, so the skin needed to be kept clean for it to perform its excretory function. The constipation frequently experienced in training was credited to the efficient way wastes were removed by perspiration. This basic training regime was adapted and employed by trainers across all sports (Day 2012). While fitness training reflected the need to remain active for long hours, skills acquisition mirrored the increasing complexity of production in an industrializing society (Mewett 2002). One of the reasons for the lack of popularity of pugilism among the rising middle-classes was that it remained focused on exhaustion and surrender while other sports changed their emphasis from sheer spectacle and conquest to a more respectable focus on fair and equal competition. Technical ability became more important, while finesse in play became more admired, and it was noted in 1811 that higher standards of play in cricket had been achieved by the employment of skilled coaches. Grantham Club players, for example, had been trained by Nottingham “professors” and Leicester players by a Mr. Howard from the Marylebone Club (Brailsford 1999: 163, 213). The first coaching manual had been published in 1816, and, by 1824, professionals William Fennex and John Sparkes, had been engaged to coach at Darnal by George Steer, the first proprietor of the ground. By the 1830s, the formation of new clubs in the rapidly developing urban industrial towns throughout Lancashire and Yorkshire had created further coaching opportunities. Tom Marsden had been engaged by the Manchester Club, “to bowl at them and give them instructions in the art of cricket” by 1833 and, in 1836, he was coaching the Burnley Club, while James Dearman was similarly employed by the Rochdale club from 1839 to 1842 and Joseph Crossland was engaged by Todmorden at the end of the next decade (Light 2005: 65–66). Over time, the middle classes utilized scientific advances and technological innovations to make sport a more socially acceptable activity. At the start of the nineteenth century, the muscular bodies of some pugilists, such as Bill Richmond and Tom Spring (Hurley 2002: 41), had been used as artists’ models and the paintings of Jackson in the Royal Academy had encouraged a growing

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preoccupation with the physical appearance of the male body. Increasingly, though, the sportive body of the early nineteenth century no longer matched the aesthetic or functional preferences of the classes that mattered. The corporeal bodies of prizefighters and the displays of excess in physical accomplishments such as long-distance pedestrianism, combined with raucousness that accompanied these and other sporting events, proved unacceptable to the professional middle classes who rejected them as being unsuited to the new social setting and concomitant cultural mores. As a result, popular cultural practices were reshaped through a rewriting of rules for acceptable forms of corporeal practice. The sporting body became tamed, contained, remade, and sculptured into a more acceptable form (Tomlinson 2003: 1577–1583), resulting in the emergence of a new ideal, the “University athlete”. The Victorian obsession with measuring body parts and body type to determine aptitude, intelligence and personality traits was reflected in the application of anthropometric techniques to determine the “fitness for purpose” of the athletic body (Vertinsky 2002). Physical educationalist Archibald Maclaren (1866) published data on height, weight and chest girth, and expressed concern about the uneven development found among athletes dedicated to one sport, reflecting a growing belief that body symmetry implied both physiological and spiritual fitness. The ideal of a symmetrically appropriate body became a feature of the middle-class athlete and Holt has suggested that the aesthetics of amateurism revived a Classical ideal of human proportion, “balancing height, weight, muscle development and mobility” (Holt 2006: 362–363). For Hoole (1888: 20–26), well-formed and efficient organs should be encased in a symmetrically developed body which conformed to accepted standards of height and weight, and which could tolerate climate extremes, exposure to fatigue and disease, and “the friction of professional, commercial and domestic life”. He praised the contemporary university ideal of a perfect athlete as “70 inches high and 168 lbs. in weight”, an athletic body that avoided any outward show of specialization or excessive muscularity and which contrasted with the height and weight of the professional pedestrian. The County Gentleman (November 12, 1898: 1496) argued that English bodies were no longer corpulent but had gained in height, muscle and stamina. The “pot-bellied John Bull type” had disappeared and been replaced by a sinewy, wiry type of Englishman. In the Evening Telegraph (July 25, 1903) one observer suggested that the individual and national physique had never been at a higher general standard of fitness mainly because of the principles of temperance, plain living and abundant exercise. He was presumably referring here to the middle-class body, since his contemporaries remained concerned about the state of the working-class body. It is sometimes assumed that the sporting culture was all-embracing for the middle-class male of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods but “physical

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culture”, the development and strengthening of the body by means of regular exercise, was an important part of the cultural landscape in Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth century. In Britain, physical education as a “social good” was a feature of the Muscular Christianity movement, which connected a strong body to moral character as well as ideas of racial purity that served Britain’s imperial projects (Wee 1994). These programs were accompanied by new forms of exercise equipment. In 1828, Charles Beck produced his A Treatise on Gymnasticks which included directions for dumbbell exercises, and two innovations, a “dynameometron” and a “beam”; resistance appliances specially designed to incorporate the idea of variable weight. As calisthenics exercises spread in popularity, lightweight wands and dumbbells became the two most popular implements for group exercise classes. The Indian club appeared in England when the British army incorporated Indian club training into their physical conditioning program, adopting a calisthenic exercise with light clubs rather than using heavyweight clubs for strength and muscle building. Donald Walker, author of British Manly Exercises, 1834, outlined basic exercises, as well as more complicated and vigorous club routines, and a year later he introduced the Indian scepter, a smaller version of the Indian club, in his Exercises for Ladies Calculated to Preserve and Improve Beauty (Todd 2003: 70–72). A commercial culture always operated alongside this selfimprovement agenda. Peter Ducrow, the “Flemish Hercules”, who later became proprietor of an amphitheater in Bath, appeared at Astley’s Circus in 1800 and before the Royal Family at Frogmore House, Windsor. He would balance three wagon wheels on his forehead or chin and support a platform with ten to twelve men on his hands and feet. The anatomist Dr. Bartlett told his students to go to see Andrew Ducrow perform so they could study the perfect human body and he hired Ducrow to model at his lectures (Webster 2000: 26–27, 29). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Carl Voelker, opened two Turnplatz in London, featuring exercises on horizontal and parallel bars, rope and ladder climbing and pole-vaulting across trenches (McIntosh 1987) and indoor gymnasia were established in many British cities. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the term “physical culture” came to be associated with systematized modes of training promoted by Eugen Sandow, George Hackenschmidt, Apollo (William Bankier) in England, Bernarr MacFadden and Charles Atlas in the United States, and Edmond Desbonnet in France. These men espoused a “Greek ideal” of arete (Fair 2015: 20) or personal excellence, which could be attained by programs of weight and strength training. They pioneered techniques now familiar to modern exercisers and communicated their regimes through magazines, although these pioneers of physical culture were not only strongmen, but also showmen. Theatrical spectacles, such as vaudevillian exhibitions, wrestling matches and physique competitions were another crucial medium of transmission (Chow 2015:

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FIGURE 3.5: Activities in a London gymnasium, c. 1830, courtesy of Getty Images.

33–34). Eugen Sandow, for example, started his theatrical career in 1887 and by the time he retired in 1903, the Sandow name was known internationally as a synonym for strength, health, and bodily perfection. Morais (2013) argues that Sandow utilized a three-pronged strategy to establish his personal brand, which he then leveraged to market his name and other products, including books, a magazine, health clubs, exercise equipment, and miscellaneous health products.

CONCLUSION The significant expansion in nineteenth-century sport and leisure chronicled here mirrored wider developments in society as the rationalization of the workplace and the increasing political and economic power of the middleclasses were reflected in the way leisure activities were transitioning into their modern forms. In this respect, it could be argued that sport itself underwent its own industrial revolution in this period. This was most obvious, perhaps, in the ways that emerging technologies were employed by commercial entrepreneurs to create a product for the marketplace and the subsequent rapid expansion in spectatorship at sports events. Other developments were the result of the political processes that responded to worker demands by providing clear segments of free time and the creation of structures such as clubs and associations, which created competitive frameworks and stimulated a growth in participation as well as in the numbers of professional athletes. Furthermore, a

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growing affluence resulting from a rise in disposable income, combined with a passion for consumerism, led to a significant increase in the provision of sporting goods and clothing. Alongside this industrialization of sport and leisure was a transformation in the way that the body was viewed. Part of this was the result of the emergence of the amateur ethos as the underlying principle for sports participation in the latter decades of the century. The patrimonial elite that emerged from the public schools and universities rejected the commercialization of their sport and one of the results was a change in training practices, informed more by emerging scientific knowledge than by traditional practices. The perceived excesses of professional sport were subsequently replaced by “moderation” as a central creed and one that was reinforced in participation in socially zoned clubs that avoided mixing with social inferiors. Sports and leisure activities themselves also became identifiable as socially distinctive as the professional classes participated in particular activities that reinforced their superior status, partly because of the cost required and partly because of their temporal and spatial demands.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Rules and Order MATTHEW L. McDOWELL

By the mid-nineteenth century, traditional sports were being placed under considerable economic and cultural pressure. Whilst they did not immediately break, gradually over the mid- to late-nineteenth century rules and regular competition and circuits were introduced into—or overwhelmed—earlier sporting forms, and bureaucratic bodies were created to oversee these contests. Even outside of competitive and professional arenas, new moral codes were being created which called on those who practiced “sport”, in its various permutations, to police themselves according to self-imposed rules of restraint and decorum. If anything, however, these new rules—and their enforcement— accordingly reflected old order and privilege, based as they were on unequal imaginations of class and gender, with some created—and even appropriated— on the frontiers of Empire. Few books and pieces deal solely with the origins of rules on the pitch or the field. There are some notable exceptions. Wray Vamplew (2007) has created a seven-stage schema for identifying the development of rules, based primarily on an outwardly-growing jurisdiction, from rules for one-off, one-on-one contests, towards those firmly enshrined for international sport circuits. Adrian Harvey (2011) provided a review essay on the old rules of soccer, rugby, cricket, tennis, and golf, and a more substantive chapter in his 2004 book on the origins of commercial sport in Britain during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Strictly speaking, the “development” of “modern” sporting culture is a fulcrum around which much of the historiography of sport has revolved. Allan Guttmann (2004) stressed that rules and bureaucratization played a key part in creating “modern” sport culture as it is understood in the West, a process which involved changing moral and religious values. Melvin Adelman (1986), 99

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studying the growth of sporting culture in mid-nineteenth century New York, also created a schema which examined characteristics of “pre-modern” vis-à-vis “modern” sport. Recent historians have contended that reasons for rule changes were complicated, and often also revolved around less respectable commercial imperatives, including the need to create a clean set of rules for gambling (Tranter, 1998; Harvey 2004; Vamplew, 2007; Collins, 2013). This chapter accepts the view that sport during the nineteenth century developed the way it did through some combination of economic and moral imperatives. It does not seek to create a new explanation of the rise of sporting order, deeply problematic as it is to assume a Westernized idea of “progress” with regard to global sporting culture (Clevenger 2017). It focuses less on the ins and outs of rules and regulations of club and association membership and in the application of governance on those specific issues than in the appearance of the rules on the pitch and in the field, dictated by economics, laws, discrimination, politics, and social processes and conventions. It proposes several different themes for examining the design of rules and codes and the creation of mythologies which surrounded them. In this respect, rules and codes became not just about imposing order on the pitch, but about controlling the past of certain sports, pastimes, and traditions, a process which began long before the twenty-first century.

RESPECTABILITY: A FINAL DESTINATION? Gambling was one of the crucial influences in the development of rules and codes for sport during the eighteenth century. This included sports such as horse racing, in which rules on distance, breeds of horses, participant jockeys and other categories needed to be written and often legally acknowledged by participants (Huggins 2018). Pedestrianism represented a sport which, if not created solely for the purposes of gambling, was nevertheless heavily dependent on publicans regulating the sport and creating courses for competitions (Oldfield 2014). By the twentieth century, athletics had for the most part managed to shake off its nineteenth-century image: its many Olympic-competitive disciplines represented the triumph of amateurism. However, the process of getting to that stage was tortuous. One can see this in the creation of Scottish cross-country clubs and associations. West of Scotland Harriers was dominated by members of Glasgow’s Queen’s Park FC, the amateur, middle-class standard bearers of Scottish football. Their more innovative rivals on Glasgow’s South Side were Clydesdale Harriers, largely comprised of members of Rangers FC whose members were typically employed in local shipyards. It would be Clydesdale who set the pace. The Scottish Amateur Athletic Association (SAAA), founded in 1883, was the dominant governing body for all codes of athletics, and Clydesdale dominated their tournaments to such an extent that

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the rival Scottish Cross-Country Association (SCCA) was formed in 1887 by a group of harriers based in Edinburgh. Clydesdale responded later that year by creating its own governing body, the Scottish Harriers’ Union (SHU). The main driver in the founding of the SHU was Clydesdale’s W. W. Tait, a former handicapper, who also changed the system by which team cross-country runs were scored. Tait’s new system was time-based, averaging the times of the first five men from each team to cross the finish line (Telfer 2006). This change was essentially a validation of both modern coaching techniques and elements of gambling culture, a direct challenge to Scottish cross-country’s amateur establishment. Provocations such as this, and amateur runners’ refusal to accept changes, meant that there would be no united governing body in Scottish crosscountry until 1902. Another example of this slow and ultimately uncertain transformation was boxing. Pugilism’s literary awakening came during the early nineteenth century, through the writings of Pierce Egan in the Boxiana journal (Snowdon 2013). The irony of Boxiana’s popularity, however, was that bareknuckle pugilism faced considerable pressure from the police and legal establishment (despite its cross-class, transatlantic spectator popularity). By 1870, boxing in the UK was increasingly hamstrung by the sporting media’s withdrawal of coverage, and the center of gravity and power shifted towards the United States. The eighth Marquess of Queensberry’s rules, first published in 1867, were a clear attempt to sever boxing from its formerly professional (and gambling) connections: its key rules involved making opponents wear boxing gloves, and creating threeminute rounds (Brailsford 1988). As this new code of boxing moved indoors, however, it brought the punters with it, and by the early twentieth century boxing was once again a sport which existed within the urban, transatlantic entertainment and promotions industry, managed and participated in by working-class Jewish, African-American, and Irish men. However, even by the First World War, there was still little formal global governance of the sport, and everything from different weight classifications to the jurisdiction of championship titles meant that “rules” were often subject to negotiation within individual bouts, between individual fighters and promoters (Taylor 2013). Boxing, a truly global success story in sporting terms, managed to take some of its former chaos with it into the twentieth century. Wrestling, even in the nineteenth century, essentially had a double life: one which resembled a “respectable” sport, and one which made an intentional mockery of the idea of “respectability”. Wrestling’s different styles often required different ad hoc rules: for instance, in the northwest of England, associations often came and went. Carlisle had the Carlisle and Cumberland Wrestling Association from 1809, and it was apparently here where some of the first rules on laying an opponent to the ground emerged, although there were more rules against “barneying” (the fixing of matches) than there were ones

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within the arena or ring, a distinct attempt to create a “reputable” tradition (Huggins 2001). Codification occurred fairly late in the USA as well, despite borrowing many “British” styles of wrestling. The US Amateur Athletic Union was the first to hold a national wrestling tournament in 1888, and opponents there experienced much confusion about the rules of the competition (Barnett 1978). Despite becoming a popular Olympic discipline in many countries, in the Anglophone imagination wrestling has come to mean something different: something with no rules, a “sport” which is pure entertainment, and ostensibly a critique of sporting integrity’s purism (Litherland 2014). If gambling and the very existence of wrestling were not enough to disabuse one of the notion that codified sport equaled respectability, the more controversial traditions of animal blood sports continued to exist under the watchful eye of the law. The police, the army, and the newly-created Royal Society for the Protection of Animals (RSPCA) worked to actively ban traditions such as the annual bull-run in Stamford, Lincolnshire. They succeeded in 1839, but only by asking the town’s inhabitants not to allow it. Though cockfighting had been banned in North Carolina since independence in the 1780s, a new cockfighting rule book for North Carolina and Virginia was released in 1860, prior to the start of the American Civil War. Twentieth-century sport was borne from a far earthier world than the invented traditions of neatly-codified sports would allow.

FALSE STARTS From the 1840s the invention of the telegraph and the explosion of railways laid the groundwork for dialogue on the rules of sport taking place at a faster pace than had hitherto been possible. Trains were especially significant in the creation of urban and national cultures of sport: now, athletes could play competitors from outside their own immediate localities (Vamplew 1988, 2007). However, the greater the distances, the less likely change would occur immediately, especially for sports which travelled whole continents. Railways were crucial in the creation of the Grand Caledonian Curling Club in Scotland in 1838: it was rechristened the Royal Caledonian Curling Club (RCCC) in 1843 after receiving royal patronage. In adopting uniform rules the RCCC mandated that curling stones weigh 44 pounds and granite from the small island of Ailsa Craig became the standard material from which curling stones were manufactured. This standardization effectively killed off different curling traditions which had existed in lowland Scotland’s towns (McDowell 2014b). Whilst Ailsa Craig granite would later on become a global standard, granite itself was not universally agreed upon as the correct material until towards the end of the nineteenth century. In Manitoba—where a quarter to a fifth of the population was of a Scottish background—the Granite Curling Club was

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created in 1881 out of Winnipeg’s Manitoba Curling Club, which was still using curling stones made from iron, a heavier material that made for slower matches (Mott and Allardyce 1988). Different rules on the equipment of global curling were not always standard, even forty years after Scotland’s parent organization ruled it as such. Cricket, like curling, travelled with British émigrés into other parts of its nineteenth-century empire and beyond, especially within well-to-do circles which had considerable intercourse with Britain’s school and merchant population. Within England, as the century progressed, cricket’s model of governance became heavily dependent on one exclusive body: the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC). Formed around 1787, the MCC was initially in charge of adjudicating its own rules of cricket (Birley 1999). Its influential membership roll, however, over the course of the nineteenth century ensured that by 1860 the MCC were eventually viewed as the tastemakers and de facto governing body of cricket, responsible for drawing up the rules of the game and eventually administering imperial tours from English cricketers (Bradley 1990). This was an arrangement which cricket shared with horse racing and golf (a la the Jockey Club and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club at St Andrews, respectively): one of self-appointed elites gaining control of the sport (Vamplew 2007b). However, cricket also existed beyond the British Empire; for instance, in continental Europe. “Ball games” were initially the preserve of upper middle-class men in Denmark during the late nineteenth century onwards, and the 1864 defeat of the Danes at the hands of Prussia and Austria in the Second Schleswigian War ostensibly strengthened economic ties with the UK, thus precipitating a circular movement of people, ideas, and commerce (Bonde 1996; McDowell 2014a). British railway engineers were credited with bringing cricket to Denmark at that time, but the game thrived at Sorø Akademi near Slagelse, whose students went on to form the Copenhagen Ballgame Club (Den Kjøbenhavnske Boldspilklub): in 1866, they published a rule book of cricket, The Handbook of Cricket and Longball (Haandbog I Cricket og Langbold) (longball being another ball and-stick game which was akin to both cricket and baseball) (Hansen 1990). What is now typically referred to as the Danish Football Association in the Anglophone world—Dansk Boldspil Union—literally means “Danish Ballgame Union”. When it was formed in 1889, it was the governing body of football, cricket, and lawn tennis all at once: often, members of the DBU played all three (Grønkjær and Olsen 2007). Danish cricket had little international recognition: the DBU was the sole author of the published 1899 Danish laws of cricket. Cricket may have remained an upper-class concern in continental Europe, but noting where cricket sat within the sporting hierarchy indicates subtle differences in the approach used, given the limited official contact with the MCC as the “owner” of cricket and its rules. Cricket struggled in Denmark after the turn of the century.

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WHO WRITES THE STORY? As has been hinted at already, historicizing rules becomes a means by which one controls the narrative of certain sports. Any discussion of the origins of the world’s football codes, with their differences in the use of hands, kicking and scoring, inevitably leads down the path of discussing agency in the creation of rules. Historians of football during the past two decades have addressed the thorny question of the “origins of football” debate, which attempted to discern class and occupational ownership of the shared origins of rugby, association football, Australian football, and American football across the Anglophone world. This often-complicated debate has nevertheless stimulated research into different groups’ agencies in the creation of football’s different codes (Harvey 2011; Swain 2008; Lewis 2010; Curry and Dunning 2013; Kitching 2015; Collins 2015; James and Day 2014; Hutchinson and Mitchell 2018). It is the ultimate acknowledgement that the rules of sport, even in the past tense, are still subject to interpretation and negotiation through contemporary lenses. This debate, however, was occurring in real time in the mid-nineteenth century. There was at least some sign during the 1860s that the “no hands” code was increasingly attractive for the purposes of a less rough game. Letters to the Edinburgh newspaper, The Scotsman, during these years indicate that rugby’s convoluted rules and residence within the environment of private schooling were a recipe for confusion and injury, while a letter from 1873 from “An Old Football Captain” expressed frustration with the amount of times the laws of the Rugby Union were broken during the course of “every match” he saw, believing that soccer’s simple rules allowed less of an opportunity for license: regarding the practice of “picking up” during scrimmage, “it is not too much to predict,” he stated, “that the Association game will become the favorite of football players, as it is already of bystanders” (The Scotsman, November 30, 1869; The Scotsman, November 15, 1873). At a point in time when clear “soccer” and “rugby” cultures did not exist, rules were part of an ever-increasing dialogue about what each code represented, and whether or not the codes could even be played safely (Park 2001b; Dietschy 2014). Football was not the only “educational” example of how “history” and “tradition” were often thrown together in sport’s histories. Canadian histories of ice hockey placed St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire at the center of the adoption of the “Montreal rules” of the game, which went on to become the dominant code in North America and the world. The School’s boys did so in 1895–96, but they first played some form of ice hockey as early as 1880, with a code based on an 1875 self-created rule book of field hockey. In the US Hockey Hall of Fame’s version of history, the schoolboys’ 1885 publication of new rules (themselves based on an 1883 rule book) was a seminal event in the “creation” of ice hockey. The official version of events, however, is more reflective of a false dawn: warm weather during the period 1888–95 kept

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potential outdoor rinks melted; and, when some kind of ice hockey tradition returned by 1895, it went by the name “rink polo,” with a very different set of rules. The impetus for St. Paul’s to adopt “Montreal rules” came from a group of touring Ivy League players who had recently been to Canada—as well the creation of indoor rinks: external influences thus solidified St. Paul’s ice hockey “tradition” (Hardy 1997a).

KIT Aside from railways, the rise of cheaper methods of publishing, in both the world of books and newspapers, certainly meant that rules could be communicated and agreed upon much easier. Newspapers played a critical role in continuing a dialogue on what certain sports rules were. After the American Civil War certain US publishers, most notably former baseball player and sporting equipment and apparel manufacturer Albert Spalding, scrambled to monopolize the market on guides and handbooks which purported to be the authoritative guides on sports’ rules. Rules, then, became part of sport’s marketing wars, and products and merchandise sold often came with a rule book. Hardy, Norman, and Sceery (2012) state that rules have been a crucial element in developing the brand identity of certain sports. This was particularly the case within crowded marketplaces for different sports that shared similarities: the authors use the example of the 1864 enactment of the fly rule within New York-area baseball, which allowed the sport to be distinguished from the equally-popular cricket. Who “created” the rules of baseball became intrinsically linked to marketing. Albert Spalding, the apparel manufacturer and publisher, had a financial interest in establishing a uniquely American pastime, and used “history” as a crucial aid. Through creating a committee of eminent men to investigate baseball’s true origins, he claimed that future Union Civil War general Abner Doubleday was the inventor of baseball, creating the game from scratch in a field in Cooperstown, New York in 1839 (Pope 1997). Other origin myths place the first interclub game at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1845. Written by New York’s Knickerbocker club, this placed them at the forefront of baseball’s story. Baseball, at this point still existed in close quarters with cricket, but the latter was effectively killed off in New York and elsewhere by the American Civil War (Adelman 1986). Yet another theory gives the credit to Ontarian Adam Ford, who in 1838 created a baseball field which resembled a diamond (Bouchier and Barney 1988). A Canadian origin for baseball would not have suited Spalding: but Spalding’s guide and equipment were not just successful in marketing baseball as a uniquely American product within America: in Japan, for instance, Tsuboi Gendo and Tanaka Seigyo’s well-read sporting manual Kogai Yugibo clearly based much of its content on Spalding’s Official Baseball

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FIGURE 4.1: Baseball Follows the Flag: an indication of what A.G. Spalding, publisher of baseball’s rules, considered to be the origins of sporting culture, (A. G. Spalding baseball collection), courtesy of New York Public Library.

Guide (Guthrie-Shimizu 2004). Spalding successfully sold his products in Japan, and organized a tour there with American players in 1874. Britain—which Spalding’s teams also visited in 1874—proved a much tougher sell. Within different Anglophone cultures, subtleties in the rules had very different effects. Attempts to popularize this code of baseball in England during the late nineteenth century were met with indifference, with the relative complexity of baseball’s rules negatively associating it with rounders—a popular children’s recreation in Britain, and a cousin of baseball—rather than the more established cricket (Bloyce 2005). The manufacturer/purveyors of croquet, on the other hand, had a very different agenda than simply selling nationalism. Croquet was not a popular recreation until London games manufacturer John Jaques began manufacturing balls-and-mallets sets in 1856, issuing them with brief booklets as to how to play the game; by the mid-1860s, he was also selling an indoor version, Parlor Croquet, with its own rule book. Jaques’ rules competed with a different rule book release by women’s magazine The Queen in 1862, and a guide released by novelist Mayne Reid. Reid’s version made it to America in 1863. US games manufacturer Milton Bradley’s 1867 manual enshrined the sport. Its products were seen as acceptable for women, children, couples and families.

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FIGURE 4.2: Croquet Match on the Shore. Engraving by William Hollidge after a painting by Helen Allingham (1848–1926), from The Illustrated London News, August 5, 1871, courtesy of Getty Images.

The critical reception to croquet in the UK press regarding its lack of rules was mirrored by the positive one in the US: croquet’s thin rule books ensured that it would never be a “manly”, over-commercialized nightmare associated with vice and gambling, as baseball in the 1860s was seen to fast be becoming (Lewis 1991). For the wealthy and upper middle-class women representing croquet’s target audience, croquet became a backyard arena of negotiation, the threadbare rules providing a means by which to transgress norms of women’s alleged sporting integrity: literature of the period portrays the angst of men who perceived women croquet players to rather enjoy cheating and gamesmanship (Sterngass 1998). Another sport, lawn tennis, more successfully capitalized on the gendered space created by croquet, specifically in its “mixed doubles” competitions, where negotiation between man-and-woman partners on teams stressed norms of masculinity and femininity for a growing English middle class, particularly in London’s leafier suburbs (Lake 2012). After the All England Croquet Club was formed in 1868—and its leaders began to see croquet’s rapid decline— committee member J. Hinde Hale suggested lawn tennis might replace croquet on the Club’s new grounds in Wimbledon. The “new” rules of lawn tennis were itself based on a far older game, and the All England successfully reconciled two

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sets of recently-printed rules by T. H. Gem and J. B. Perera—founders of England’s first lawn tennis club in Edgbaston, Birmingham in 1872—and Major Copton Wingfield. Against the suggestions of the MCC, the dominant tastemaking body in London sport, lawn tennis’s method of scoring was based on older traditions and a somewhat archaic vocabulary, a reaction against “racket” and other faddish sports which, ironically, croquet had once best represented (E. Wilson 2014). But “lawn tennis”, as a concept, was not universally settled upon even then. In Scotland, Andrew Graham Murray, former Conservative MP and then-president of the Scottish Lawn Tennis Association, in 1927 recalled playing tennis during the 1870s. Having first played the game at a country house in England in 1874, Murray remembered playing this new version of tennis in Edinburgh during 1874–76, whilst referring to the game as “sphairistikè” (another very similar game first introduced by Wingfield in the early 1870s), and seeing low nets installed along with square-shaped courts (rather than hourglass-shaped ones, as was required in sphairistikè) during 1876–77 (Dunedin 1927). Sphairistikè’s own odd name was the result of a corruption of the Greek adjective sphairistikós, or “belonging to the game at ball”—potentially an instance of Wingfield being too clever in assigning an ancient tradition to the sport (Gillmeister 1997). Even within what might be termed “hobbies”, activities which took on the appearance of codified sport had significant class dimensions. Model yachting was an activity, hobby, and sport whose catalogued merchandise, hardware, and codification were indelibly linked to a parallel class structure. Britain’s Model Yachting Association was created in 1884, and interclub competition during the 1880s required different kinds of rules depending on the size and specification of the model sailboats being used. However, London’s Model Yacht Sailing Association (MYSA), founded in 1876, tended to set the trends. One breakaway from the MYSA, the London Model Yacht Club (MYC) (founded in 1884), was formed by a group of “wealthy” men. Eventually, in 1897, the London became enthusiastic adopters of the Linear Rating Rule for full-sized “yachts”, which required far more specialist and intricate knowledge of craft design (Potts 1988). Model yachting, with respect to measurements, was not far removed from “real” yachting. The reason the Yacht Racing Association, precursor to the Royal Yachting Association, was created in 1876 was to settle a dispute between the Royal Thames Yacht Club and the Royal Victoria Yacht Club over different measurement systems for their boats. Their parent club, the Royal Yacht Club, since 1829 had organized competitions via the differing tonnage of boats (Fairley 1983).

GENDERING THE RULES With the different codes of football, academic debates tend to hinge on whether or not football codes (and its culture) were invented within the educational

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arena, or whether or not they were already something existing in popular culture. This is very much a debate unique to the major outdoor team sports. A Chicago man, George Hancock, had first created an indoor version of baseball to be played by members of the Farragut Club in 1887–88: this new game had a smaller field, underhand pitching, an additional infielder for one less outfielder, and allowed balls bouncing off of walls to be caught as “outs”. In the run-up to the First World War, children in Chicago took this smaller version of baseball back into the streets and outdoor lots; it eventually became known as “softball” (Cole 1990). By 1890, however, there were still no uniquely indoor sports with which to compete with “outdoor” baseball and the football codes. This left physical education teachers at a loose end when having to prescribe a winter program full of Swedish gymnastics. “Basket Ball” was invented in late 1891 at the International Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) Training School (now Springfield College) in Springfield, Massachusetts. Its inventor, the College’s physical education teacher James Naismith, went through a methodical process of trying to create a gymnasium-based, thirteen-rule team game that would have goals but would trade the ability to tackle with not allowing players to run with the ball. The ability to have larger goals was abandoned when the only “goals” the building superintendent could find were two old peach baskets, which Naismith raised above players’ heads to increase the difficulty. At the beginning of 1892, rules which Naismith published in the YMCA periodical The Triangle suggested that team sizes on the floor could vary, but his optimum number involved three defenders (including a goalkeeper), three centers, and three “offense men”. Within the YMCA system, the game attained considerable popularity, with considerable spectatorship, and soon expanded beyond the YMCA. The first professional match occurred in 1896 between teams from Brooklyn, New York and Trenton, New Jersey, with the match moved from a YMCA gym in Trenton to a local Masonic temple due to “un-Christian behavior” at matches (Myerscough 1995). The YMCA’s “Muscular Christian” elements had quickly been eclipsed. Basketball’s continuation within US (and UK) gymnasiums tells historians a great deal about the way the “creation” of sport within educational contexts was gendered. In 1895, Clara Gregory Baer, the physical education instructor at Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans, misinterpreted Naismith’s handdrawn instructions on a requested copy of his rules to mean that players could not leave certain areas of the court. This less physical game, accidentally invented by Baer in 1895 and its rules formally adopted in 1899, dovetailed with medical expectations of less rigorous sports that girls were supposed to participate in (Myerscough 1995). “Basquette”, as it was called, existed alongside women’s basketball within US girls’ schools during the 1890s. Women’s basketball (not to be confused with basketball played by women during the twenty-first century) was a modification of Naismith’s original game

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created in 1892 by Senda Berenson, the gymnastics teacher at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts: women’s basketball’s rules, which forbade snatching and batting the ball, similarly attempted to reduce the perceived physicality and “roughness” of the male game. Women’s basketball found its way to the southeast of England at Hampstead and later Dartford Colleges, under the efforts of Swedish-born physical education teacher Martina BergmanÖsterberg. As Bergman-Österberg’s students graduated and became physical education teachers, an inter-school competitive circuit was initiated. The committee of the newly-formed Ling Association of physical educators consulted a rule book of women’s basketball released by Spalding in 1901, and created bigger, football-sized balls for the sport, a shooting circle which forbade players from trying to score elsewhere on the court, and a “sleeve of net” for a basket that had hitherto been an open ring. Thus, netball was born in 1901: it became the leading “basketball” code amongst women in Commonwealth countries (Traegus 2005). Women’s lacrosse, whilst often branded as the same sport as its male counterparts, was a different sport with similar objectives but different rules: “women’s lacrosse” was “born” at St Leonard’s School in St Andrews in 1884 after physical educators from the school witnessed a “male” lacrosse match in

FIGURE 4.3: Playing netball at the Myrdle Street Girls School, Stepney, London, 1908, courtesy of Getty Images.

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Montreal in 1884; it continued to evolve differently in the twentieth century (Wiser 2014). This process took place in other sports, sometimes in schools outside of the metropole: Rothesay Academy, a residential school on the isle of Bute in the west of Scotland, served local children and boarders from further abroad. During the 1880s and 1890s, local newspapers and the school magazine detailed considerable student participation in sport within the Academy itself and at town sports days. The game of “targette”, however, was considered more popular at the Academy than cricket: in 1894, the targette club had eighty members, and enough members to have two senior teams the following years (Rothesay Academy Magazine 1894; Rothesay Academy Magazine 1895). Without explicitly indicating the game’s relationship with cricket, the scoring clearly refers to “innings”, “runs”, and “bowlers” attempting to claim “wickets” off “batters”; at sports days, girls threw “targette” balls while boys threw “cricket” balls (Rothesay Academy Magazine 1897). Other rules which make targette different from cricket are hard to indicate, and it is tough to find any other references to targette. Other such forgotten “traditions” may have been created elsewhere. The gendering of sports was not just one-way traffic: Newcomb, another sport invented by Clare Gregory Baer at the Louisiana college of the same name, is still played in US physical education classes. Newcomb was part of the curriculum at Newcomb College during the 1893–94 academic year. It was a sport remarkably similar to volleyball, created by William Morgan, the YMCA director at Holyoke, Massachusetts, in 1895: whereas in Newcomb, where players caught balls served from across a net, in volleyball players continued to spike it. Morgan may have got the idea of volleyball from Baer, given that Newcomb’s rules were well-published in physical educational circles. The assumed tradition of sport within physical educational contexts, is of different forms of sport diffusing outwards from “male” models, no matter what the reality might have been (Paul 1996). Even outside of the immediate educational sphere and into the political one, separate traditions evolved for similar sports, sometimes under the aegis of the “male” associations. This included the creation of camogie in 1904, a version of hurling devised by middle-class women based in Dublin, and administered by the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), but which featured smaller teams, a smaller pitch, less physical contact allowed, and regulation uniforms which included skirts (Brady 2007). However, once again, sometimes the significant innovations came in scoring and organization from women’s sport, most notably in the case of British golf. Golf, in general, had undergone considerable changes during the nineteenth century. Before 1898, golf balls had been made of feathers and gutta percha: the new rubber-stuffed balls by American inventor Coburn Haskell helped the

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FIGURE 4.4: James Naismith, the creator of the first rules for basketball, courtesy of Getty Images.

ball travel faster, turning golf into a much longer game, and one requiring more land; this in turn made golf clubs—charged with obtaining and maintaining the land—more expensive and increasingly less democratic (Vamplew 2004; Vamplew 2012b). Middle-class women certainly played golf, and the means by which they did this introduced two new innovations into golf. First, the Ladies Golf Union (LGU) began to organize tournaments for women to participate in, several years ahead of the organization of the similarly-minded men’s Professional Golfers’ Association in 1901 (George, Kay, and Vamplew, 2007; Vamplew 2016e). Second, and more importantly regarding the rules of the game, the LGU was the first golf body to create a national handicap for players, an idea that the Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) pilfered several years later (George, Kay, and Vamplew, 2007). It is again a warning not to assume that the gendered architecture of sport has similar foundations.

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THE FRONTIER Codification was not a unique development of the West and the “global north”. Stick-fighting in southern Africa had long developed an elaborate set of oral rules that governed competition. Some rules were enforced even by royal authority: Cetshwayo, one of the final kings of the independent Zulu kingdom, during the 1870s ordered the end of a brief practice which allowed one end of a fighting stick to be sharpened, and opponents jabbed with it (Alegi 2004). The nuances of such sports existing within Empire, however, were often ignored by European settlers: to them, codification’s colonialist and civilizing undertones were very clear. In some cases, codification and the making of rules meant appropriation from European and North American empires’ frontiers. Polo’s origins can be traced to second-century-BC Iran, and variations of the game continued throughout Asia, from Japan and Korea eastwards, to Constantinople in the west. British soldiers first encountered a version of the tradition in 1854 amongst tea-plantation workers in Manipur in India, near the border with modern-day Myanmar: some of these soldiers formed a polo club in 1859, and by 1877 polo was popular throughout British India. It would soon be imported back “home” to Britain (Chehabi and Guttmann 2002). The imposition of rules by the British on polo was a common trope of British treatments of the sport. Once numbers of players, sizes of field, and written rules were standardized, the game became disciplined and “scientific”, an improvement of a more unruly native tradition: an allegedly positive metaphor for British rule in India, and one which reinforced the values and hierarchy of the British officer class (McDevitt 2003). Lacrosse’s evolution during the nineteenth century is an even clearer illustration of how the rhetoric of colonization matched that of codification. What is now referred to as “lacrosse” was a widely-played sport throughout North America before and during European settlement, used towards various purposes amongst First Nation groups, including peacemaking, breaking political deadlock, health promotion, and preparation for military service. Many European observers likened the sport to familiar traditions—football, tennis, and shinty, for instance—whilst another European observer referred to periods of play as “innings” (Salter 1995). What had previously trained First Nation peoples in physicality was increasingly influenced by British-type codes of “gentlemanliness”: 1844 marked the first match in Canada between a settler team and a First Nations one. The first formal rules in a Montreal-based lacrosse circle of clubs (which included First Nation players) were written in 1860, but even then the numbers of players on each side could vary significantly (Morrow 1992). These rules were written by dentist William George Beers, based on an interpretation of the Mohawk version of the game tewaarathon (Wiser 2014). As the link between class and burgeoning professionalism in lacrosse was increasingly made in the 1870s, First Nations peoples were essentially excluded

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FIGURE 4.5: Men from the Mohawk Nation at Kahnawake (Caughnawaga) who were the Canadian lacrosse champions in 1869, courtesy of Library and Archives Canada/Lee Pritzker collection//c001959.

from the sport in Canada in 1880 when the National Lacrosse Association changed their name to the National Amateur Lacrosse Association, barring non-amateurs. When the rival Canadian Lacrosse Association was founded in 1887, and new innovations were introduced such as time limits on games and the use of netting on goals, the raging debates over league structures, ownership, and professionalism took place without the game’s founders, who were essentially written out of the history of the “new” institutionalized lacrosse (Morrow 1992; Kidd 1996; Howell 2001). As with polo, the codification of lacrosse was ultimately one which symbolized conquest. Settlers’ seizure of indigenous sports, however, was not an absolute at the edges of empire, and could even be a two-way street. Cricket’s introduction into Samoa in the late nineteenth century initially bore the hallmarks of a pattern seen throughout the British Empire: cricket participated in by military officers and a small, insular group of Europeans. However, unlike in other parts of the Empire, cricket came to be viewed by European missionaries with suspicion, as Samoans requisitioned cricket and turned it into kirikiti, a communal, mass-participant version of the game which used a softer ball (and thus allowed players to wear less protective equipment), sometimes involving whole villages, and might last far longer than a typical cricket match. Whilst the popularity of kirikiti symbolized, at least in part, Samoans’ negotiation with British culture, it took place largely on Samoans’ terms: European onlookers

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were puzzled and even intimidated by a uniquely English tradition seemingly removed from its intended context, and thus being rendered foreign—a feature of Samoan physical culture which sat side by side with activities such as tagati’a (dart throwing) and seuga lupe (pigeon netting) (Sacks 2017a, 2017b). Meanwhile, back in the United Kingdom’s countryside, some changes in broader physical culture were occurring largely as a counter-reaction to societal change. Modifications in the nature of rural sport in Britain were linked to control over land and enclosure acts. In Scotland, sport played a factor in the regime of land ownership that took hold after the collapse of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion through the Highland Clearances in the early nineteenth century, most notably the presence of enclosed forests for deer hunting (Jarvie and Jackson 1998). In England, from the 1770s onwards, changes in the nature of rural sport were also linked to control over land and enclosure acts from the 1770s onwards (Griffin 2005). Outside of what might be considered the arena of competitive sport, and well into the frontiers of the Western Hemisphere, “sporting pursuits” underwent self-policing of their own. The “hunter-naturalist” breed of outdoorsman emerged in the late nineteenth-century United States as a critique to forms of more destructive over-hunting. This literary class of hunter strove to adopt a code of sportsmanship which stressed commitment to landscapes and conservation. Their political influence was shown through the federal government’s adoption of more restrictive game laws. These writers, however, sometimes betrayed a love of killing animals that belies the headier aspects of conservation literature (Altherr 1978). North American hunter codes, written by white city dwellers to self-police land that had been settled upon, had dark, colonialist undertones. In Canada, aboriginal subsistence hunting posed a direct challenge to both informal conservation codes and formal game laws. (Gillespie and Wamsley 2005). From 1890 onwards, rigorous enforcement removed and excluded the indigenous Stoney peoples from Banff National Park in Alberta on the explicit grounds of conservationism, but also with a view towards using the Park’s preserved animals to drive tourist traffic (Binnema and Niemi 2006). Taming and harvesting the land, in general, was a common theme in rural Americas sport, including plowing, a sport Canadian settlers shared with the UK. The end game of plowing was to showcase masculine farming prowess with the newest technology: the means by which this was performed was through a usual competition breakdown of age groups and skill sets, but also types of equipment and qualities of soil (C. A. Wilson 2014). Codification and informal codes, then, became a means of asserting control over both urban and rural landscapes; and, once again, there were often racial and class elements to this. This was certainly the case with pato (Spanish for “duck”): a rural equestrian sport akin to a rough-and-ready version of polo, and practiced by Argentinean gauchos in Patagonia. By the 1890s, pato had been successfully

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codified, organized, and domesticated as a popular spectator sport by elite European society in Buenos Aires, a process largely reflective of a rural ranching culture in Argentina which had moved brutally to restrict the ability of gauchos to roam and work the land, as well as to recreate on it (Slatta 1986). Pato’s codification and popularity was thus a celebration of order, and the land (and its people) being tamed.

RULES FOR A NEW NATION Nationalism and the creation of “indigenous” traditions—beyond just the need to market them abroad, as had been done with baseball—were the primary impetuses behind the designs of certain sports. The Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), founded in 1884, came to set the terms by which “Irish” sport was defined. Codification was a crucial part of this process: one of the GAA’s founders, Maurice Davin, created Gaelic football from a mix of soccer and rugby, with added local traditions, including a rule which allowed men to wrestle each other away from the ball (Rouse 2015). Leaders of the GAA were certainly not just interested in inventing traditions, but in enhancing preexisting ones. The GAA’s network would be based largely on an older, churchbased system of organization which placed counties and parishes at its heart (Garnham 2004). Codification became crucial to any effort to advertise any kind of “national” sport: for a while in the mid-nineteenth century, the most popular sport in Ireland was cricket, the only sport which was codified on a national level (Reid 2012). The adoption of hurling by the GAA was not a fait accompli, as it often meant unifying various traditions of the game which existed both in Ireland and within its global diaspora. It also meant the exclusion of competing traditions, most notably the game of “hurley”, which existed at Trinity College Dublin from at least the early 1860s to 1883. Often confused within the historiography as being the same sport as hurling the hurley played at Trinity, at least in rules printed in 1869, bore far more of a resemblance to British hockey, a reflection of the more unionist, Protestant cultural and political world of Trinity’s students. On the eve of the GAA’s formation, in the autumn of 1883, GAA founder Michael Cusack initiated the Dublin Hurling Club, which played regularly in Phoenix Park. Within that year the Dublin University Hurley Club collapsed; other organizations labeled “hurley” clubs would later give their allegiance to the Irish Hockey Union, founded in 1892 (Rouse 2015). Even at this stage, however, a unified idea of what constituted hurling was not fully set. Some rules from Australian hurling made their way into the GAA’s inaugural rule book in 1884 (Bracken 2016). Regional hurling traditions within Ireland itself took several years to be subsumed into the cross-Ireland GAA, especially in the north of Ireland. In the 1880s before the creation of a county board in

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1905, north Donegal used a very different ball and stick from south Donegal; in 1892, a goal was still worth five points, changed once again to three points in 1895. Codification and enforcement, at this point, also began to restrict the numbers of players on the pitch at one time (Curran 2010). The process was similar for hurling’s Scottish cousin, shinty. Like hurling, shinty existed for many centuries before its “modern” codification. It was popular throughout Scotland and anywhere Scots went: the north of England, London, Canada, and Australia included. Canadian slang for a game of hockey during the nineteenth century was “shinny” (MacLennan 1998)—the term is still used today to denote pick-up games. Though now synonymous with the Scottish Highlands, the codification of the modern game began within Scotland’s lowland cities. In 1861, Aberdeen University’s shinty club was the first to write a constitution, and Aberdeen’s and Edinburgh University’s clubs were at the forefront of rulemaking. The Shinty Association was started in 1877, centered almost solely around Highland émigrés living in Glasgow. Its rules featured a requirement for the stopping of play and fifteen players on each team—a rule borrowed from rugby. After this Association folded, and the most dominant national shinty organization, the Camanachd Association, was founded in 1893 in Kingussie. Game time here was set at two halves of 45 minutes, and one goal counted for one point, abolishing earlier regional points systems. This version of shinty became popular both along the railways in the Scottish Highlands surrounding Inverness, as well as along the Firth of Clyde coast in Argyll (Hutchinson 2004; MacLennan 1998). However, shinty’s leading lights were heavily influenced by their Irish counterparts, especially in terms of their connection to land politics. In the twentieth century cross-code matches between shinty and hurling became a symbol of Celtic solidarity. Some matches were already taking place in the late nineteenth century: for instance, the June 1897 match between Glasgow Cowal Shinty Club and Dublin Celtic Hurling Club at the Parkhead ground of Celtic Football Club—whose supporters included many Irish and Highland migrants. The GAA’s Michael Cusack attended the return match in Ireland (Reid 1998). “Celtic”, “national” sport, thus, was very much a modern creation of the industrial era, much like its “British” counterparts, but unlike them sought to explicitly articulate a critique of the changing circumstances of the people who played it. Rules created unique sporting subcultures whilst simultaneously building bridges. Sometimes, the lack of rules was what mattered when maintaining something perceived to be a national tradition. In Norway—not yet independent from Sweden—rowing had become synonymous with regattas held on 17 May— Constitution Day—from about the 1830s onwards. The boats were used throughout the year by fishermen and others, with unregulated sizes and specifications. During the 1880s and 1890s, when what was referred to as “English rowing” (with regulated boat sizes and more rules of competition)

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began to penetrate the Norwegian upper-middle and upper classes, successful protests were made to reiterate the supremacy of what was becoming increasingly known as “national rowing” towards organizers attempting to regulate the kinds of boats used and defining who could compete (Goksøyr 1988). “English rowing” had less trouble gaining a foothold in Russiancontrolled Finland: British miles were typically used as the distance by which races would be run, including the Helsinki Rowing Club’s 1889 regatta (Sjöblom 1998).

CONCLUSION This chapter has not purported to be an exhaustive account of rules and codification in sport during the nineteenth century. However, it has highlighted some of the issues involved in attempting to pinpoint the “origins” of certain sports, along with acknowledging the motivations of the authors of codes in placing themselves, their nations, and their version of events at the heart of sports’ histories. The codes and rules of sport that brought what we might call some semblance of order to sport in the nineteenth century were hardly neutral: they represented changing societies, as well as ones attempting to re-establish some kind of status quo. In many cases, the rise of codified sport was reflective of the gender, race, and class hierarchies of the period; and, in an era where the meaning of property was changing, sport reflected new negotiations of space and territory. Nevertheless, rules also played a role in helping to delineate where transgressions on the pitch and in the court could occur, and rules written on paper, whilst purported to be set in stone, could also be negotiated. This continued debate on rules and their rhetoric is reflected in the historiography.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks is given to Danielle Peach—who graduated in 2014 from the University of Edinburgh, BSc Sport and Recreation Management program—for alerting me to the material on netball.

CHAPTER FIVE

Conflict and Accommodation MALCOLM MACLEAN

The long nineteenth century, a time of great political, social and cultural struggle and change, saw the creation of modern sport as a rationalized, commodified, institutionalized, standardized practice. To speak of this era merely as the Age of Industry is to take a narrow perspective. For most of the world this was an Age of Empire, more commonly as its unwilling objects, inseparable from the North Atlantic’s Age of Industry. The century’s changes transformed the outlook, experience, sense place in the world, and ethos and worldview for colonized, other colonial subaltern and colonizer. These were profound, and often uninvited and unwelcome, transformations of understanding. These eras—industrial and colonial—could not exist without the other; they are part of what the sociologist Gurminder Bhambra (2014) has identified as the European condition of modernity, marked by colonialism, enslavement, dispossession and appropriation, in both the industrial and colonial worlds. In the North Atlantic world, struggles over the social and cultural significance of sport centered on its financial and commercial character, on its morality and ethics, on the inclusion and exclusion of women and Black, Indigenous and people of color, and on its rational, comprehensible order. All these took place against a backdrop of and were shaped by modernity, industry and empire. The building of modernity brought about a fundamental transformation in social, cultural and political terms. It was an era that saw the embedding of capitalism as a global system: of states-as-representing-nations as orthodox; of populations as citizens with inherent rights; and of the incorporation of much 119

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of the world into exploitative imperial and colonial relations. This capitalism was as much a social and cultural system as it was economic, instituting a set of relations of production that made goods, new social and material systems including social time and space as well as new ways of making humans in a new social order. It also involved new social systems of biological, cultural and material reproduction. The modernity associated with this set of transformations since the mid-eighteenth century “is a composite of economic, political and cultural characteristics, uniting capitalism . . . legal-rational political authority . . . and technological progress—or ‘rationalization’ in its various aspects as manifest in markets, states, secularism and scientific knowledge.” (Wood 2012: 2) Aside from Allen Guttmann (1978) and Richard Gruneau (2017), there has been little systematic discussion of this tendency to rationality and modernity in sports history. Instead, historians of the era have tended to take this rationalization for granted, or have read it is evidence of a tendency to “civilization” of which sport is one of many examples. The tendency to rationalization, which in sport included most significantly agreement of common rules and ethos of play, included a profound shift in the zeitgeist as the tone of the era became dominated by notions of progress and advance. Even so, the basis of those advances was challenged by cultural and intellectual orders, one defined by reason (logic and order) and one defined by rationality (empiricist science). Sport acted as part of the emergence and securing of a zeitgeist marked by an ideology of liberalism, of emancipation, and of liberty providing for the maximization of individuals’ powers and their self-selected utility. The era built on the intellectual developments of the Age of Enlightenment as reason, rationalism and empiricism were bedded down and extended from the natural to the social world to apply also to sport and its participants, so much so that by the end of the nineteenth century popular discussions of athletes are peppered by references to their “scientific” style of play. The transformations of zeitgeist brought about by modernity resulted in profound cultural shifts as a new world required new cultural codes as meaning making and as modes for comprehension. These kinds of cultural changes tended to be felt rather than articulated. In the case of movement cultures, leisure pursuits and pastimes became controlled and regulated, ascribed with rational meanings, in days, weeks and years that take on different structures and significance, lived in ways not previously experienced, in places that in many cases did not exist before the Age of Industry/ Empire. Historians of sport tend to explore these questions of conflict and accommodation through social history—through the dynamics of social division or the machinations of economic and demographic transformation. These cultural changes are best seen as the zeitgeist, mentalités, symbols, discourse and remembering of sport and movement cultures and their links to the new institutions of modernity/coloniality—especially of nation and civil society.

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MODERNITY’S CULTURES AND MODERN SPORT Doing cultural history means investigating culture’s three principal aspects as a maker of meaning, as a provider of meaning and as the source of a shared frame of reference. These facets of culture were strained because this Age of Industry/ Empire was a fluid, shifting and disrupted world. This world was one of global population movement, both within and between territories, nations, states and empires, to the extent that many populations should be understood as nomadic. A consequence of this movement was rapid urban growth across much of Europe and mass migration within the expanding Anglophone world and across other imperial arenas. These nomadic cultures had profound impacts on those who moved, those who received and to a lesser degree those who remained. As James Clifford (1994: 303) notes, there are “overlapping and non-linear contact zones between natures and cultures: [marked by] border, travel, creolization, transculturation, hybridity and diaspora”. Nomadism meant that the Age of Industry/Empire was one where (de)localized movement, occupational, body, physical and intellectual cultures came into contact and conflict, often suddenly, abruptly and to great distress. Culture in this newly industrializing, imperializing world allowed its occupants to make new meanings in unfamiliar settings, settings that were already shaped by and shaping local and indigenous cultural relations and systems. Cultural frames also allow for and provide a shared understanding of these industrial and imperial worlds. Although most obvious in imperial and colonial settings, the extent of population relocation caused by the Age of Industry/Empire means that sport as a movement culture can be seen as doing three key things in both colony and metropolitan home. First, it acted as a form of discipline of bodies in movement, both in play and elsewhere. Second, it was a disciplined cultural practice inculcating suitable ways of being in a changing socio-cultural world. Third, it was a space where otherwise incompatible movement cultures and concepts of the body found common ground, conceptually and physically blending ways of being into shared or at least mutually comprehensible ways. Conflict and accommodation were the essence of the era’s sport and movement cultures. This nomadic era of industry and empire and the diasporas it produced within nations and across the world unsettled the cultures of those who Other and those who were Othered; the effect was the creation of new forms of representation and new forms of repression. This unsettlement essential to industrialization, colonialism and empire produced many conflicts—wars, riots, revolutions—enhancing repression. It also produced many moments when antagonistic cultural frames met and formed newly shared frames of reference. The frames incorporated growing numbers of nomads into forms of citizenship with newly localized distinctions as well as rivalries, conflicts

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FIGURE 5.1: Canadian teams competing in Lacrosse, courtesy of Getty Images.

and accommodation at least some of which were played out in sporting and physical culture arenas. Like many other forms and aspects of popular and subaltern cultures, sport and movement cultures were the sites of serious and significant disputes. These included the transformed times of English sport between 1800 and the 1880s as annual leisure calendars became weekly calendars, the appropriation of Indigenous body culture practices such as lacrosse to become symbols of Canadianness, the disrupted racial hierarchies resulting from developments such as the emergence of a distinctly Samoan version of cricket (kirikiti/kilikiti) and the presence of Indigenous and other colonial subaltern players in the top ranks of nationally representative teams and professional leagues. Not only was sport in the Age of Industry/Empire profoundly transformed, it was also the site of powerful changes, differences and distinctions. Recognizing these differences allows identification of both accommodation and conflict because it opens up the possibility of an affective engagement with both parties: those imposing power, and those in receipt of that imposition who must either accommodate or maintain the conflict in the hope of a “purer” resolution. Many of the histories of this Age of Industry have passed over the voices of powerless to silence the subaltern. Recent work, including Jeff Hill’s on the Crystal Palace (2005), Benjamin Sacks’ (2019) on kirikiti and Robert Dewey’s

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on Pacific Island rugby (2014), suggests that by asking better questions, looking differently at and for sources, or by developing empathy and understanding for those subaltern athletes their voices can be heard. Sports historians have been most effective in exploring accommodation and conflict at the level of sports organizations: the split between the Rugby Football Union and the Northern Union in 1895 was an instance of conflict. (Collins 2006) Also in England, the decision in 1871 by the powerful Sheffield Football Association to accept the weaker and less influential but socio-culturally well-connected Football Association’s rules more than doubled the size of the FA’s reach and Harvey (2005) argues saved it from fading to insignificance was an instance of accommodation. To explore these questions this chapter turns on three key tropes. The first of these is the development of modernity, marked by the regulation and institutionalization of sport even when it was riven by tensions associated with the class dynamics of capitalism. Alongside this emerging socio-economic and cultural order, modernity was also marked by the emergence of forms of nation and nationalism associated with profound tensions over sport, leisure and body and movement cultures. The second key trope is a widespread contested puritanism and an associated moral entrepreneurialism. The third is colonialism. One of the key challenges is making sense of radical cultural change. This chapter builds its analysis on two tripartite models. The first focuses on cultural practices. Its first aspect is an idealized model of sporting and movement cultures consistent with the dominant ideology of the times. Its second is the rules and laws of the formal and informal/moral practices of play including the myths of sports practice, where these myths are understood not as unauthenticated narratives but as ideology, ethos and values presented in such a way as to become the natural order of things (Barthes 1957/1963). Finally, there is the way the many, varied and assorted players and practitioners of those sports, games and movement cultures use, occupy and fill up those social, cultural and material spaces of sport. Many tensions grow from this everyday experience of sport that is in conflict with the visions of the way that the socially powerful think sport should be and the ways that they try to put that vision into practice (Lefebvre 1991). The second model helps explain the contested character of everyday experience and is related to the structures of cultural change. It holds that at any one time there is cultural practice left over from former social orders, practice associated with the dominant groups in the current cultural regime and emergent practice associated with struggles for change (Williams, 1977). There is nothing monolithic about these cultural arrangements.

SPORTING (CAPITALIST) MODERNITY The dominant culture of sport in the North Atlantic world brought together three trends. Modernity’s propensity to measure and “regularize” the social

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and economic world, the emerging class relations of industrial capitalism and a worldview placing the North Atlantic at the heart of Empire. These cultures of measurement and management are woven through the social and cultural forces creating sporting modernity. As with all grand narratives, these forces are played out differently according to local circumstances. Whereas a systems view might see the long nineteenth century as the era of the intensification and dominance of a capitalism with its specific set of class cultures and relations based around the factory and the city, this era was also the time of the extinguishment of the European peasantry as a major class grouping: across the Atlantic it saw the creation of a land-based peasantry of new migrants and the formerly enslaved, replaced in the later nineteenth century by an industrializing working class. What this means in cultural terms is that throughout the era for the mass of the North Atlantic world’s population there was a profound shift in worldview from peasant to proletarian modes of meaning making. In daily life, this meant a shift from diurnal time within annual cycles to factory time with a linear notion of order sustaining capitalist cumulative growth. It also meant the development of national railway time, for the first time imposing consistency and arguably one of the factors enhancing the notion of the nation. In sporting life, as Adrian Harvey (2004) notes of the UK, these new understandings of time marked a change from annual cyclical sporting calendars to weekly sporting calendars where recreation was built around the impositions of regular and common working days. Working-class leisure patterns, including the long-standing persistence of “Saint Monday” as a non-working day and political struggles for a five-and-a-half-day working week, point to the extent to which this imposition of factory time and weekly cycles of linear time were areas of dissent and contention. Sport changed from an association with a collective, annual cycle of regeneration where major participatory sports events were linked to the Christianized forms of seasonal changes and harvest festivals to an association with an individual and personal weekly moment of regeneration within a weekly cycle of work. This sweeping claim obscures local and occupational variations, with agricultural labor retaining a close link to annual cycles if the experience of cricket is anything to go by, and other occupations retaining a basis in craft and with it much greater autonomy (Underdown, 2001; Sissons 1998). Other industries, including the era’s rapidly growing heavy industries, much manufacturing and many of the era’s new jobs such as clerking seem to have exhibited a much more widespread weekly work and recreational cycle. Although these changes encapsulate the experience of many of the new working-class, middle- and upper-class experiences differed as did those that the era’s economic developments left beyond precarious, the marginalized, the day laborer and barely-getting-by laundress and that group once labelled lumpenproletariat. Nomadism marked by high rates of urban migration, and in many places

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emigration, is at the heart of these cultural changes because it wrenched sport and body cultures away from localized sporting practice to new settings where new spatial relations and with them new relations with the local holders of financial, cultural or social capital encouraged, if not required, new forms of recreation. British class During the first half of the nineteenth century disputes continued over the new social, spatial and cultural relations of capitalism, seen in localized popular movements along with the revolutions of 1839 and 1848 across Europe. In its efforts to control working class cultures, the local and central arms of the state sought to control and limit recreational cultures tied to annual cycles of leisure in favor of cultures of reason and rationality. In the Anglo-American world these attempts centered on blood sports and on professionalism, on bear, bull and badger baiting, on hare coursing and cockfighting and on prizefighting, sculling and pedestrianism. Here is one clear instance of sports’ rules, formal and informal/moral, creating the space for sport to be contested on class and regional grounds as a form of cultural struggle. The new working people needed to be inducted into the changing cultures of capitalism, of order and rationality complying with the requirements of factory time and the separation of work and home, of production and reproduction, part of which involved clamping down on workers’ autonomy and independent working-class culture. In some settings pre-modern sport forms such as football and lacrosse were incorporated as “folk” activities and granted acceptability with originary myths invoking a sense of nostalgic re-enactment (Parratt 2005; Poulter 2009; Downey 2018). In a more confrontational setting, attempts at control of working-class culture included cultural and political campaigns against working-class blood sports, although not those of the aristocracy and gentry even though as Griffin (2007) has shown deer were for the most part limited to deer parks meaning that their hunting was largely devoid of the sport of the chase, and fox populations had to be sustained by imports from continental Europe. Although bull, bear and badger baiting were constrained there was long-term defiance over bull-running while cockfighting went underground and dog-based urban “sports” such as the wanton slaughter of the “rat-baiters” emerged (Sante 1992: 107). Middle class moral entrepreneurs also sought to curtail working-class professional sports. During the latter half of the nineteenth century bareknuckle prizefighting lost out to the Marquis of Queensbury, pedestrianists were excluded from the Amateur Athletic Association on amateurist grounds and the Amateur Rowing Association by 1880 excluded specific river-based occupations from membership. It was not that pedestrianism and sculling were stamped out, but they were culturally marginalized as the newly amateur sports came

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to represent the nation and marked new forms of respectability in organized physical culture. The significance of these changes in Britain can be seen in the shift in language during the middle decades of the century, where the distinction between gentlemen and players was recast as a distinction between amateurs, who were by definition gentlemen, and professionals (Harvey 2004). By these shifts working-class play-for-pay was excluded from the official realm of sport, redefined during the second third of the nineteenth century as a strictly amateur pastime to become a form of moral education paradoxically set aside from the rationalizing tendencies of emerging modernity. While the physical cultures resulting from the meetings of nomadic cultures in industrial, urbanizing capitalism may have varied, as seen in Middlesbrough’s case among many (Budd 2017), one common tendency was essential to the new social and cultural order: the distinction between production and reproduction. Amid the profound changes in everyday life associated with these wider cultural, social and economic developments was a deep shift in family structure associated with the separation of home and work (the factory system) and with it an ideological justification for women’s accentuated domesticity. Despite the conceptual coherence, this separation played itself out differently in class terms. For working-class families, even with the persistence of homework, production moved from the family home to the factory while for bourgeois families the home was relocated to the newly developing suburban zones: the ideal of the male “breadwinner” and with it female cultural, social and economic dependence became the justification of both forms gendered division, leading to the myths of separate spheres and the moral entrepreneurship of respectability. In sport and leisure terms this led to deep class- and gender-based schisms, reinforced by a historiography of sport that to a large degree maintains a distinction between rational sport and irrational leisure (Daley 2003; Gruneau 2017: 80–90). The demands of women’s respectability and a double burden of labor have contributed to the removal of women from sports history. Furthermore, the sport-leisure split has contributed to the creation of sport as a masculine domain sustaining gender’s central place in the division of leisure in working-class life. Attempts to enforce feminine respectability and with it cultures of patriarchal morality in sport and leisure settings were the focus of significant conflict through such things as dress reform in cycling—a middle- and upper-class pastime for women—and in women’s football (soccer), where playing in bloomers challenged the symbolism and morality of women’s monopedalism, a tension accommodated by the continued use of long skirts over the bloomers (Lee 2008). The idea that women might have two legs, drawing attention to sex, sexuality and reproduction, was in some settings an affront to repressive forces in the culture wars of the fin de siècle period. By the end of the era there is evidence in the Anglo-American world of pressure for women’s return to

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public competitive sport as well as other sporting ventures such as women mountain climbers all of whom challenge the moralities of masculinity associated with strenuous physical culture. Around the same time in central Europe, Slavic communities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire were developing the nationalist physical culture Sokol movement that by the end of the nineteenth century included women in mass gymnastics displays (Nolte 2004). For working women this public sporting culture can be seen as having echoes of an earlier form of physical culture that involved women in a range of sporting ventures such as boxing, sculling and pedestrianism, although it is doubtful that this residual pre-industrial sporting culture ever really went away. These struggles over respectability may be seen also for upper-class women for whom changes to riding equipment and clothing mitigated the restrictions imposed by claims of excessive danger, while in some cases there were direct challenges to the concerns about respectability associated with a standard rather than sidesaddle (Munkwitz 2017). This gendering of sport and leisure associated with the separation of production and reproduction has proved persistent. Conversely, the antirationalism and anti-modernity of amateurism associated with the reshaping of sport to prioritize the disinterested middle-class dilettante had only a brief heyday before a revitalized modern commercial sporting culture emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century. Although it exercised only a brief period of dominance in practice, sporting amateurism remained the dominant ideological force and site of deep cultural struggle throughout the twentieth century. This antagonism between the amateur and commercial crossed the Anglo-American world as seen in the uncertain and unsteady growth of professional baseball leagues following its democratization in the 1850s and the mid-century commercial success of touring professional cricket teams in the UK linked to the shortened travel times brought about by the railways (Adelman 1997; Sissons 1998). The middle-class amateur ideal appeared to dominate mid-nineteenth century sporting cultures and certainly dominates the historiography of later nineteenth-century sport. But there are good reasons to believe that its ideological and cultural power through its associations with class and state institutions of great cultural capital may be overstated when it came to the everyday experience of the Age of Industry’s workers. The commercialization and financialization of sport was rapidly emerging as the new dominant sports culture in the early twentieth century, including a shift in spectatorship. For much of the Age of Industry/Empire, spectatorship might be understood as “watching people who could be me, because I too am a player”, but by World War I it had become “watching people representing the place I am from, even though I too might still be a player”. Sport became increasingly commodified as payments to play or for successful performance changed into

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the commodification of athlete labor power either through compensation for lost wages (equating the practice of sport with the practice of work-based labor) or recruitment of full-time athletes. Taken together, these conditions suggest that although the cultures and ideals of amateurism had great cultural power and resilience, they did not tally with everyday social experiences of sport (Frost 2010, 19–68; Metcalfe 2006). Racializing North America Migration and the meeting of new cultures shaped all parts of the nineteenthcentury Anglo-American world. Britain’s Age of Industry’s nomadic cultures were created mainly by internal migration associated with urbanization and the factory system. North America’s nomads were both new immigrants and internal migrants. Class and ethnic cultures from Britain and elsewhere in Europe came into dialogue and conflict with already existing colonial French and Spanish institutions as well as Indigenous peoples and after the 1860s in the USA previously enslaved peoples. This produced a reconstitution of body and movement cultures, regional and local ethnic cultures and in the cities and large parts of the country capitalist social relations and cultural forces. In urban areas sporting time changed to fit with the shift to factory time, and prioritized the working and leisure week over the working and leisure year. There were efforts to constrain working-class leisure pursuits, a gentlemanly code of amateurism, a gendered distinction based in the demarcation of production and reproduction, and by the era’s end a fully commercialized, financialized sporting culture, although there were significant differences in these changes to the game form, to sport services (and social function) and to sport products (Hardy 1997b). North American sporting cultures during the long nineteenth century shared similarities with and exhibited differences from British sporting cultures. Some of these differences were contextual as ideals of nationhood in Canada and the United States took different shapes. Canadian Anglo-French biculturalism within a broadly British Imperial frame contrasted with US distinctiveness that asserted an independent nationhood. In Canadian sporting culture this meant practices derived from British or Indigenous body and movement cultures became re-inscribed as Canadian sport to become markers of a zeitgeist concurrently national and imperial (Poulter 2009). Conversely, south of the border, modern sport was increasingly seen as part of a nativist culture, that is as distinct to and emerging from the unique circumstances of the USA. For instance, the gradual regulation of boxing through the long nineteenth century points to both conflicts and accommodation where it marked, as Gorn (1997) notes, honor but was also illegal in many jurisdictions despite being widely enjoyed by many of society’s upper echelons. Significantly, fistfighting retained

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its associations with masculinity despite the adoption of protective gear and the gradual adoption of common rules. This association of sport with manliness in the expanding North Atlantic world took on distinct characteristics marking it apart from British ideals of manliness. Crucial factors here included the association of manliness, strength, vitality, and race confidence with the frontier, and the need to prove vigor and power in the face of Europe’s old empires. Britain’s colonial power may have been sloughed off, but in the United States there remained territorial confrontations with Britain, Spain and France, with Indigenous Peoples whom it was expected “superior manliness” would exterminate, and by the final third of the nineteenth century with recently enslaved peoples. The most physically demanding of sports in many settings, especially urban ones, became the testing and developing ground of this manliness, as seen in the case of (American) football. At the end of the nineteenth century football had only a limited reach beyond college campuses, a reach enhanced by scurrilous magazines such as The National Police Gazette but also more respectable magazines, such as Harpers Weekly, all imbued with the language of manliness (Oriard 1993; Tamte 2018). A significant cultural challenge to American manliness was seen in baseball when in the 1870s Black leagues emerged and Black professional teams began touring. The politics of race in the emerging cultural codes of the USA meant that although Indigenous players could be accepted in professional baseball (Power-Beck 2004), Black professional baseball was a cultural challenge to the USA’s view itself as a White nation and the growing place of race as the marker of national purity. The USA’s continuing war with itself over race meant that in the post-emancipation era race was redefined as the criterion for exclusion of all people of African descent, no matter their status in the slavery era (Wolfe 2016: 68–81). This meant that much of the iconography of Black baseball was denying Black men-as-men their place in the national imaginary. As Brunson (2009) shows, in the immediate post-Civil War era there was a sense of accommodation aligned to the language of reconstruction, but by the 1880s there was a powerful return of imagery of the Black man as licentious buffoon and lacking the intelligence to play well: here was a shift from accommodation to exclusion as the conflict over self-image resolved itself in favor of National Whiteness. Once again, the formal and informal/moral rules of play were contested, principally through the significance of challenges centered on baseball’s lived experience. This language of race drew on European romantic myths of the nation state as the space of the race, and as a new society constructed new cultural forms to bind its population. It claimed as distinctive sports such as baseball, basketball, and a form of football that obscured its association with rugby, instead of existing sports such as cricket and soccer. The fluidity associated with this

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FIGURE 5.2: “Golf, The Drive”, Harper’s Weekly, December 11, 1897, courtesy of Getty Images.

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FIGURE 5.3: Piece of sheet music published in 1907 showing black baseball players playing a game in front of a church, and male and female black fans, courtesy of Getty Images.

sense of race and nation created the conditions of cultural conflict and accommodation around sport and body culture practices, but it was the language of race that allows historians to see links between these developments in the USA and the sporting tensions associated with Europe’s emerging nations.

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European nationhood Whereas both British and North American sporting cultures existed within a zeitgeist dominated by notions of class and of race, the European (including Britain) frame drew heavily on a romantic notion of race-as-nation. The grand moments of political turmoil in the European century—the collapse of the Bonapartist regime, the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, the Franco-Prussian War and subsequent Paris Commune—remained apart from the struggles over sport and physical culture. Yet during this era we can identify the emergence of forms of nationalism and nations where tensions over sport, leisure and body cultures were often obviously present. One form this nationalism took was the creation of a nation where there had only been a state, such as in France, where political centralism was followed by pressures towards cultural centrality and commonality. By 1900 sport was becoming a common cultural practice, sometimes becoming seen as the embodiment of the unified nation state, as in the Tour de France. Within this sense of commonality and centrality, regions developed or maintained distinctive practices. In south and south-west France, for instance, the dominance of football/soccer was mitigated by the strength in working-class communities of rugby (Dine 2001). Rugby in this region can be seen as akin to its working-class form and culture in England’s north. Efforts at accommodation of working-, middle- and upper-class rugby cultures in a common federation were more successful than in England, at least during the long nineteenth century. Suggestive of a more deep-seated cultural contest where conflict overrode accommodation was the continuing presence of Breton wrestling as a distinctive form (Phillipe 2014). Long-standing regional distinctiveness may be seen in soule, a Breton ball game, its links with carnival and festivity and the disruption as old and new cultural orders clashed (Eichberg 2018). There is little evidence here of any sort of accommodation. This French pattern of nations out of states was reversed in Italy and Germany where during the 1860s and 1870s there was the emergence of states where there had been only nations. Forces of national self-determination were also gaining strength in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Here, as in Germany, body and physical culture was a significant site of political contest. This contest is best seen in the development and trajectories of two similar forms of gymnastics-based mass movement activities—Sokol across much of Slavic central and eastern Europe, and Turnen in German-Europe. In many areas, especially the Austro-Hungarian Empire, these movements co-existed and spread into other aspects of social, cultural and civic life. When, in 1864 the Turnverein (Turnen gymnastics club) of Budweis/Budˇejovic´ in southern Bohemia offered themselves as a volunteer fire brigade they were turned down in favor of a professional service, and it was only later in 1874

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FIGURE 5.4: A mass Turnfest in 1898 in Hamburg, courtesy of Getty Images.

that the professionals were replaced by volunteers, but only, the Mayor insisted, if the service recruited from both the Turnverein and the town’s Sokol club (King 2002: 35, 53–54). The incident indicates the dynamics of cultural, social and political changes where Czech-speaking citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Bohemia and German-speaking Austrians in Bohemia were becoming respectively Czech- and German-speaking citizens of the Czechoslovak Republic. Sokol was a powerful marker of Slavic identity (Nolte 2004). Its founder is buried in the Czech national cemetery on Vyšehrad in Prague and the main Sokol hall in Zagreb is co-located amid the major cultural buildings of state, including the national museum and opera house. It was much more than a gymnastics movement; in it body and movement culture distinguish the distinctive world of a common Slavic worldview, making its role as shared source of Budweis/Budˇejovic´ firefighters an important accommodation with its rival national grouping, the Turnverein. Similarly, the Turnverein provided a site of German-ness, appealing to a romantic notion of nationhood uniting Germans scattered across many states and tapping into the spirit of German-ness that provided not only the impetus for unification up until 1861, but also for the on-going marking of German national distinctiveness in emigrant populations as seen in the extensive networks of Turnverein in the USA after refugees from

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the 1848 revolutions settled there (Hofmann 2017). Here body culture carried the cultural markers of national, often expressed as racial, identity, through both the unification of German states in 1861 and the collapse of the AustroHungarian Empire in November 1918. As well as being the markers of national identity, as the case of the Budˇejovic´/Budweis fire brigade shows they could also be the site of the mundane resolution of intra-community cultural tensions. These European cases of sport and movement cultures as markers of national zeitgeists leave to one side a key case usually seen as one where conflict remained dominant and accommodation absent: Ireland. The Gaelic Athletic Association’s ban on its members playing British sports had great symbolic power—football may have been played with a round ball, but it was played by the Gaelic rules, while the principal stick-and-ball game used the hurley, not the cricket bat. Yet, on the ground, the demarcations between the games seem less than the rigidity of the ban suggests. Football, depending on where it was played, could be Gaelic, or rugby, or the association kind, while games such as cricket were widely played in County Westmeath, the geographical center of Ireland. Hunt’s (2008) work suggests a more complex set of sporting motivations than adherence to one side or the other of the colonial divide and a less clear alignment between rhetorical adherence to a cause and the actions of those adherents in daily life. It also suggests that cultural and political conflict can, in this sporting setting, coincide with cultural and social accommodation. It is worth noting that Hunt’s deep reading of a single county has yet to be replicated leaving moot the question of Westmeath’s distinctiveness. Even so, the Irish case highlights one of the many ways during the Age of Industry sport was interwoven with religion, in this case a cultural world shaped in part by a conflict between state religions.

CONTESTED PURITANISM The persistence over the long nineteenth century of commercial and eventually commodified sport across the Euro-American world challenges the profile of moral puritanism in discussions of mid-nineteenth-century sport, in particular the significance accorded Muscular Christianity. The Muscular Christian story, the idea of sport as the performance of Godliness, is primarily one of the Protestant tendencies: social Roman Catholicism has given that denomination a different cultural trajectory. The challenge is two-fold. First, there is this narrative of the persistence of commercialized sport in practice alongside the assertion of often rigidly enforced amateurism. Second, there are the changes within nineteenth-century Christianity and the shift from faith to citizenship as a shaper of social responsibility with the growing evangelical tendencies and role of faith in personal redemption. Arguably, the emergence of Muscular Christianity in the middle of the century and its advocacy by Christian socialists

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such as Charles Kingsley can be seen as an episode in the faith’s declining social responsibility in favor of personal redemption. Matthew Millikan (2008) argues that the movement had its heyday in the USA between 1880 and 1920, noting amongst other things a decline in mainstream Protestantism and a growing evangelical base, with the effect that the care of the body became in individual practice rather than a collective congregational endeavor. Yet, paradoxically, Bruce Kidd (2008) suggests that in the absence of a clear Muscular Christian lobby or advocacy group its ideas retained power by being absorbed into Canadian sport practice—suggesting that the idea’s institutional weakness became its source of cultural power. Kidd’s case seems also to apply to Britain, suggesting an over-statement of Muscular Christianity as an organized force. Muscular Christianity’s significance in Euro-American sport is based on three factors. The first is its deployment as a cultural tool in the mid-nineteenth century Anglo-America world. Second, it was aligned in distinctive ways with the shifting class forces forging modern sport. The third is the distinctiveness of Christianity in this muscularity. The Muscular Christianity deployed by Kingsley was itself an oppositional force, culturally and conceptually aligned with the class culture of the emerging puritan bourgeoisie for whom sport became a sign of class distinction, separating them from the pecuniary interests of the working-class professional and the corruptions of the aristocratic investor and gambler. Muscular Christianity along with its cultural cousin amateurism was deployed in sport as not only a marker of distinction but of modernity as the nineteenth century’s newly codified sports were dominated by the emerging urban middle class and reformist aristocratic allies who defined the legal form of these new pastimes as well as how the game should be played morally. These new sports were not of the same moral form as older sports and pastimes woven through with commerce, gambling and corruption. It was this residual commercial culture that provided much of the cultural basis for the conflict and accommodation in sport’s cultures. This class and cultural antagonism was linked to the class realignment associated with industrial capitalism. The new bourgeois industrial class had great economic agility and as a group had greater access to liquid capital than the aristocracy whose capital was tied up in land, although for many aristocrats this capital was becoming liberated by the enclosures and by industries such as sugar and cotton, themselves dependent on colonialism and enslavement. These class realignments had profound cultural as well as social impacts and disruptions. In the world of sport these may be seen in the previously noted language shifts in the mid-nineteenth century where the distinction between professionals and gentlemen became a distinction between professionals and amateurs. Amateurism in this setting became an ideology shaping the performance of the moral entrepreneurs of mid-nineteenth century sport, where along with Muscular Christianity the issue was how the game was

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played—with restraint, with dignity and to the glory of something bigger, be that the restrained, decent middle-class life or God. As the drive to amateurism was a campaign against the corruptions of commercialism, sport’s moral entrepreneurs used a number of weapons, including Muscular Christianity, to create a sporting culture constantly in conflict with that commercialism. This was despite developments in individual sports, such as football in England and baseball in the USA, where there was both a commercialized business in conflict with these moral codes and tiers of mass participation where those codes held sway (Adelman 1987; Taylor 2008). Despite the relative decline of socially-oriented Christianity in favor of a faith system prioritizing individual redemption, as the Age of Industry passed into the twentieth century the moral code it hardwired into the ethos and culture of sport means that the ideals of the nineteenth century moral entrepreneurs have long survived their social power in the practice. Crucially, Muscular Christianity and amateurism provided a justification of sports’ role in the Age of Industry’s basis in empire and colonialism.

COLONIALISM, SPORT AND BODY CULTURES Sport served as a crucial weapon in the arsenal of imperial power both as a tool of imperial domination and as an acculturating agent. Sport was used in colonial and imperial settings as an agent of modernity and rationality, relegating Indigenous body culture practices to “pre-history”, imposing order on both space and everyday life, and providing a cultural and physical space for the colonial subaltern, including Indigenous peoples, to safely challenge and dispute colonial and imperial rule. A key factor in imperial control in the nineteenth century empires was disciplining the colonized body, seen as dangerous, licentious, and uncontrolled (McClintock 1995). Stereotypically, the Black African and Indigenous (North American and New Zealand, arguably less so Australian) bodies were seen as aggressive, threatening, powerful and in need of disciplining via “civilization” and rationality. The same set of racist and racializing stereotypes constructed East and South Asia bodies as languid, licentious, sexually dangerous through being exploitative and as such requiring disciplining through being made sporting. Accordingly, the British Empire in particular is marked by attempts to discipline and control colonized bodies through sport—be that M¯aori rugby, Indian cricket or British West Indies cricket. Similarly, we see American missionaries in China working through the YMCA to build active but disciplined, muscular and (they hoped) Christian East Asian bodies (Kuang 2016). The representation of the cultural space of physical culture was determined by rule and law makers in London or in Springfield, Massachusetts, while the disciples and moral entrepreneurs of empire sought to manage the

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FIGURE 5.5: Aboriginal cricketers’ tour of England, 1868, courtesy of Getty Images.

lived experience of sport through rational practice and cultural codes of amateurism and fair play. Sport’s use as a weapon of cultural assimilation and control became evidence of the alleged beneficence of colonialism. When Australian Aboriginal cricket players toured Britain in 1868, under settler leadership, and a predominantly M¯aori rugby team toured in 1888–89 with settler sponsorship they were seen as flawed examples of athletes, but also as “improved natives” brought into the British fold and mode (Mulvaney and Harcourt 1988; Ryan 1993). In the context of the racial hierarchies of British imperialism, Indigenous sport was often evidence of a need for further control and discipline. Yet in the USA and Canada, around the same time Indigenous sport was much more culturally contradictory, deployed as part of the residential schools agenda to “kill the Indian and save the ‘man’ ”. At the same time Indigenous peoples’ presence in commodified sports such as baseball was marginalized—almost every Indigenous baseball player was “Chief ”—and the USA’s racial order and history of cultural genocide meant that baseball was not desegregated until African-Americans (re)entered professional baseball in 1947 (Bloom 2000; Power-Beck 2004). This whitening of Indigenous athletes in the USA alongside the reinforcement of a sporting color line in the latter years of the nineteenth century are evidence of the creation of race as a cultural construct and social practice in post-Reconstruction America (Wolfe 2016).

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The lived experience of sport for the colonized and colonial subaltern highlights a deep-seated ideological tension. Sport may have acted as a means to moderate the “excess” and “licentiousness” of the colonized, including the formerly enslaved peoples of USA and Caribbean basin, but the demands of rationality and of (pseudo) “scientific” racism meant that the colonized could never slough off their alleged intellectual inferiority. In sport contexts this meant they should not lead. Colonialism’s hierarchies and the lived experience of sport may be seen in New Zealand rugby where M¯aori occupied significant positions, including as team captain for the first official nationally representative tour abroad in 1893. Yet, as they discovered when touring Britain in 1905, the status of the New Zealand game was derided as unsporting despite, and almost certainly because of, their on-field success (MacLean 2017; Ryan 2005b). Similarly, cricket-playing descendants of formerly enslaved Africans and of South Asian indentured laborers in the British West Indies were ascribed lower status, less credibility and subjected to critique, often on the basis of playing styles to which were attributed both classed and racialized characteristics (James 1963/1998; Seecharan 2006, 2009). Cultural codes and hierarchies that denigrated the abilities of the colonial subaltern were essential to the maintenance of power in a setting where white descendants of the colonial elite were the minority. The cultural practices of modernity and intellectual demands of rationality coincided with a class-linked politics of race to justify continuing colonial domination. As both James and Seecharan show, cricket lay at the center of that Caribbean zeitgeist. In addition to limited inclusion and practice-linked denigration, colonialism’s third sport-related tactic in maintaining cultural dominance was more insidious: appropriation. An excellent example of systematic appropriation may be seen in the Canadian case where Indigenous body culture practices—snowshoeing, lacrosse and hunting—were appropriated by the settler elite in such a way that two parallel transformations took place (Poulter 2009; Downey 2018). The first was primarily a cultural change where these practices were both appropriated and sportized, made modern and rational. Snowshoeing was transformed from a mode of transportation and movement to a competitive urban activity. Lacrosse had rules regularized, playing spaces determined with a drive to placelessness and the removal of ritual and religious elements. These developments were led by a middle-class, predominantly Anglo urban group that appropriated these Indigenous practices as well as rural Francophone peasant activities. This was a double movement that both defined rural French Canada as indigenous but not Indigenous—that is as practitioners of Indigenous body cultures but not “racially” indigenous and incorporated them into the emerging Canadian national order. Here was a process of appropriation that took Indigenous body culture practices, modernized them, incorporated them into settler culture through sport and in doing so excluded Indigenous peoples

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within Canada from their traditional practices that now marked the new Canadian nation. By the beginning of the twentieth century, residential schools introduced lacrosse as a means to teach whiteness/Canadianness to Indigenous children. Yet despite all this modernization and cultural change, for many Indigenous peoples these practices retained their Indigenous meanings and importance. Colonial sport was heavily imbued with and grounded in the culture of modernity and rationality as a weapon of control and acculturation. As such it was a tool in the conflict between colonizer and colonized where territorial, social, and cultural struggles marked the era, and the consequent dispossession and appropriation that underpinned emergent modernity had the goal of controlling and civilizing the “licentious, uncontrollable native”. In many settings this goal was subverted by the will and actions of the colonized, where the absence or end of armed conflict produced changed tactics of resistance where the colonized, among other things, adapted and adopted colonial body and movement cultures, while in many cases retaining their own. We see this in the way the fin de siècle Fort Shaw Indian School Girls’ Basketball team bested all comers, being declared Champions of the World at the 1904 Olympics (that was also the St. Louis Worlds’ Fair), playing a full-court, five-a-side game rather than the half-court six-a-side game designated by the women’s rules (Peavy and Smith 2008). The cultural space of colonialism highlighted the lived experience of sport as seen clearly in Samoan cricket/kirikiti (Sacks 2019). As is the case in many nineteenth-century colonies of settlement Euro-Americans brought decidedly modern movement cultures and sports. Samoa remained formally independent until 1899, although British, American and German interests were powerfully represented economically, culturally and politically. German body culture practices and leisure cultures kept the German sector aloof while British and American military, missionary and educational interests reached out to indigenous Samoans using sport as a means of engagement. By the end of the nineteenth century and British withdrawal to create a German colony in the western islands and a US colony in the east, British military personnel, teachers and missionaries had instilled an attachment to cricket, although this was more pronounced among the socially and culturally disruptive ’afakasi (mixed “race”) than those who still fitted more comfortably into an exclusively Samoan world. In a parallel move, cricket had also been profoundly adapted to become indigenized as kirikiti/kilikiti which while still recognizably cricket was a distinctively Samoan game—like cricket but not cricket. At the same time as cricket was being developed in the settler world, kirikiti/kilikiti was developing in the Indigenous world, built around a cycle of feasts and festivals grounded in the spirit of reciprocity that shapes Samoan society with adaptations of the rules and of play. While allowing cricket, the colonial regimes sought to prevent

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kirikiti because of, among other things, its effect of labor supply and because performances were held to be wasteful and excessive. Here, within the space carved out by the rules and practice of cricket, two different sports developed out of the transformations of both colonial and Indigenous worlds and the shared colonial space between them with both forms being reluctantly accepted by the American and German colonial regimes, and after 1917 kirikiti being tolerated by the New Zealand colonial state. This case, however, is distinctive in that the accommodation may be seen as an aspect of the relative cultural irrelevance of cricket to both the American and German colonial regimes, although there remained concerns about the time the games took—as both cricket and kirikiti—in the light of the efforts to build a modern, capitalist extraction colony in Samoa. At the same time, the case points to the fuzziness of cultural conflict and accommodation when enacted through body culture practices such as sport.

CONCLUSION Sport and other movement cultures are embedded in and are the products of their social world and cultural zeitgeist. As such, they encapsulate all the tensions, contradictions and antagonisms of those settings. The long nineteenth century was an era of industry and of empire, of commercialization and commodification, of emerging modernity, rationality and reason marked by social and cultural shifts in work and leisure, in concepts of time and the organization of the calendar, in nation and state and the fluid intercultural spaces of nation building be that in colonies of settlement or of extraction or in the collapsing empires of Europe, and in the emergence of the nation as frame for organizing culture and cultural practice. Crucially, the era is marked by the experience of nomads who move within or between states or to the outreaches of Empire, fleeing oppression, pogrom or famine or seeking opportunity and the expanded horizons and opportunities promised by the new and modern worlds being built in the spaces of colony and empire amid shifting cultural and social orders with new and changing forms of power based in new and intensified forms of enslavement, oppression, dispossession, alienation and appropriation. Modern sports culture, and modernity itself, grew in this world system weaving together industry and empire. Throughout this era cycles of time shifted from the annual and seasonal to the hourly, daily and weekly. The fault lines of change saw the financial world of sport become commercial as sport became a commodity that included mass participation, often in a non-commodified form, with this trend marked by a detour into a non-commercial form defined by an ideology of amateurism and a cult of “fair play” and “sportsmanship”. Modern sport’s institutionalization also shifted its form in line with the tendency to rationalization and standardization, creating a framework of laws and practices

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that were themselves disputed in practice as class, regional and colonial cultures came into conflict. The long nineteenth century saw profound changes in global socio-cultural experience. Whether brought about in the age of industry or the age of empire with their long run of residual, dominant and emergent cultures; whether played out on fault lines of class, ethnicity, gender, locality or the countless other contradictions of the era these changes and antagonisms cast and recast the lived experience of sport and with it the zeitgeist, mentalités, symbols, discourses and remembering produced by and shaping both sport and its wider context into a state of continual and continually changing conflict and accommodation. To the extent that accommodation resolved those conflicts, it did so in a manner that tended to adapt the dominant form to local conditions.

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CHAPTER SIX

Inclusion, Exclusion, and Segregation ROBERTA J. PARK AND MIKE HUGGINS

During the industrial age newspapers, journals, and books provided people with considerable (often extensive) information about many of the sports that then existed. The United States often drew upon what was occurring in Britain but created its own games such as baseball, long America’s most popular spectator sport before being outranked by gridiron football. But such print media were often most extensive in their coverage of those sports largely played and watched by better-off males of white European origin. These males’ belief in a social form of Darwinism provided a form of cultural consciousness: a strong sense of superiority, a belief in the “survival of the fittest”, because they were the most privileged. This often meant that sport in the industrial age could be an agent of superiority or subordination, of confidence or lack of confidence, of empowerment or dis-empowerment. It could bring divergent groups together, but could also stress and formalize differences, and minorities, often with fewer opportunities to excel, could be treated with little respect. So while sport might sometimes be inclusive, it could often marginalize, differentiate and exclude (Spaaij, Magee and Jeanes 2014). Social differentiation, particularly associated with gender, class and race, was a feature of most industrializing societies during the nineteenth century, and strongly influenced participation. Diversity from mainstream culture was not necessarily either valued or respected. This resulted in complex processes of unequal and often highly fraught negotiations between the dominant groups in society and others. These produced a mixture 143

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of inclusion and exclusion and almost inevitably influenced participation in those societies’ sporting activities. But because sports by their very nature were contested terrain, some talented individuals of minority background were always able to challenge the established hierarchies. Sport’s biased reportage, which included some and excluded or denigrated others, in part reflected and responded to the attitudes, discrimination and segregation found in wider society, although as we will see, at times it acted back upon it. A distinctive feature of America’s sport, for example, was the segregation of some ethnicities and races. So America’s dominant white-owned media, for example, typically largely ignored many of the achievements of African-Americans in sports (or anything else), in spite of the fact that some of them were accomplished participants. In Britain, social-class differentiation meant that high-status newspapers, including The Times, concentrated for much of the period on those sports more popular amongst the elite, such as racing or hunting. Cultural historians now have a growing interest in helping people better understand why (and for whom) exclusion rather than inclusion was so long a major aspect of many sporting events. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries social exclusion was a widespread and often painfully-felt feature of global sport. Games and sports were never entirely “fair” and open to all. They encompassed cultural, economic, social, political and religious dimensions. The meritocratic ideal of a level playing field was always illusionary thanks to unequal power relationships embedded in class, race, gender, (dis)ability, age, religion, politics and geography. All of these could have powerful effects. Where the powerful did allow more subordinate working-class or otherwise marginal groups to take part in sport, they attempted to include them only on their terms, using sport as a less obviously coercive form of domination. Sport could divert cultural minorities from political struggle as well as offering a consoling antidote to the problems of urban living. Those with substantial social and cultural capital did this in two main ways, by encouraging some forms of sport or actively discouraging others. They saw sport as affecting both the mind and the body, helping to form character or instill appropriate moral virtues. Early in the nineteenth century, in Britain, many Protestant churchmen, including Methodists and Quakers, had been opposed to those many workingclass sports which they viewed as largely inherently linked to vice, to sin, to depravity, to drink and gambling. Even the more elite sport of horse racing challenged religious sensibilities in both Britain and America, though it was able to survive. There was strong moral condemnation and social disapproval displayed of certain working-class sports associated with cruelty to animals, gambling, drinking and disreputable behavior, such as cockfighting or bullbaiting. These were culturally and politically undermined. Cockfighting was banned outright in England and Wales and in the British Overseas Territories

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with the Cruelty to Animals Act 1835, but despite a further Act in 1849 it continued underground in attenuated form. The exuberant, lively and unrestrained behavior of working-class crowds at sporting events, and the sheer enjoyment and competitive attitudes that they demonstrated was criticized too, in preaching, petitions, press articles, the formation of anti-vice organizations, parliamentary lobbying and other forms of pressure-group politics.

THE COERCIVE SHAPING OF INCLUSION For the cultural elite, their attempts to include other groups was often to sanction and approve participation in those sports which were regarded as exemplifying more respectable and “rational” recreation, with their “wholesome” amateur ideals of fair play, teamwork, sportsmanship, playing the game with good grace, and respect for authority. These, they felt, would help contain, remake, control and improve working-class sporting values, behavior and activities. Teaching them the games of their social superiors would help societal integration and social cohesion. There was a recognition that by engaging in physical activity, people gained more friends, met them more often, and became more integrated into society than people who were not physically active. Around the mid-nineteenth century, the Muscular Christianity movement began focusing on “rational recreational” movements, stressing sport’s use for spiritual and mental recreation, as a way of incorporating sporting culture into religious life. The theological debates surrounding this, well-covered in the press, made this an important strand of intellectual and cultural life (Erdozain 2010). It began in the 1850s with churchmen such as Charles Kingsley or Unitarian minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who disclaimed earlier puritanical suspicions of physical activity and proposed a new theology linking the toned religious spirit with a toned physical body. In Britain, from the 1870s, the urban churches and Protestant chapels became increasingly active in offering recreational and sporting activities for their younger attenders. They were exclusive in the sense of excluding those apparently of other faiths or none, but inclusive in class and ethnicity terms. Attracting children was seen as a way of encouraging change. Religious clubs and associations increasingly offered sport, providing gymnasia, and encouraging football and cricket teams, to distract their flock from urban “vice”. By the 1890s church discourse was shifting from religious and intellectual to physical recreations. When R. F. Horton defined the motto of the Congregationalist Guild in 1890 as “recreation, instruction, devotion-in that order” it marked a clear shift of approach by the Congregationalists (Erdozain, 2010: 188). The Guild attracted boys from seven to fourteen years, and claimed to offer “rambling clubs, cycling clubs, conversaziones, gymnasiums, speech clubs . . .

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Bible classes and social prayer meetings” (South Wales Daily News, January 21, 1890). In America, Catholic and Protestant religious organizations competed for support through rival sports and social programs. The Catholic Youth Organization, though exclusive to Catholics, was more inclusive in the sense of attracting all ethnic groups. First in Britain, and then more globally, the Young Men’s Christian Association, founded in 1844 by Methodist businessmen to provide young men with an alternative to the urban attractions of pubs, saloons and brothels, played an important role in Christian outreach. The YMCA’s goal was to ensure young men had a “healthy body, mind, and spirit”. It increasingly fostered a more worldly doctrine of salvation through recreation rather than religiosity. By the start of the twentieth century, it had developed a strategy of effectively separated organizations for spiritual and sporting/recreational purposes, and the pleasures of sporting recreation were increasingly defining the Christian mission. By then it had state-of-the-art gymnasia in Central London and Manchester. The United States started its first YMCA at Boston, Massachusetts in 1854. Its second YMCA, which opened at nearby Springfield, Massachusetts in 1855,

FIGURE 6.1: YMCA gymnasium, early 20th century, courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

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was the site where the game of basketball was later created. In 1891, Luther Halsey Gulick, MD (then in charge of the Springfield YMCA’s physical education offerings) asked James Naismith (currently teaching there) to create a game that could be played in a small indoor space during the winter. Naismith arranged to have a peach basket nailed to the railing of the balcony at each end of the room and directed two nine-player teams to attempt to toss a ball into it. A new game, basketball, quickly emerged (Grundy et al. 2014). The game was taken by the YMCA to China (Xu 2008), and also to Brazil (Guedes 2011), although in America itself the organization’s offerings were often segregated by race. In the United States, Protestant reformers set up settlement houses, community social agencies, in the industrial cities to integrate immigrants and rural migrants into their respectable version of American urban society. Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr co-founded Chicago’s Hull House in 1889. It became a model for many others, although their efforts focused solely on white European immigrants. Early offerings included classes dealing with naturalization and citizenship, cooking, mechanical drawing, gymnastics classes (for girls as well as for boys), active games, English and Civics classes, and a great deal more. The first Hull House men’s basketball team was formed in 1896; its first women’s basketball team in 1902. Another significant figure was Lillian Wald, who established New York City’s Henry Street Settlement in 1893. She soon created a playground and then a summer camp for boys and one for girls (Gems and Pfister 2009: 85). More assimilated German Jews built their own settlement houses to aid the acculturation of immigrants from Eastern Europe. Education was another way of developing inclusive approaches to sport. In Britain before 1850 sports at fee-paying public schools such as Rugby, Eton or Harrow were informal and unsupervised. Quite soon however, first in England and then across Britain, elite schoolteachers and head teachers began to introduce the twin ideologies of “athleticism” and manliness, with formal sport helping control pupil behavior. “Athleticism”, carried on through university and into adulthood, helped shape adult middle-class culture in complex and subtle ways. For its devotees, it became a sporting obsession with a global impact. Educational and sporting experiences proved powerful forces of socialization, spreading across the Empire, helping shape sporting conformity amongst the dominant classes (Mangan 1981). Athletic public-school pupils became officers, teachers, missionaries, clerics, diplomats and businessmen, taking their sports with them. For the English working classes, state provision of sport was minimal even after various Elementary Education Acts. It was usually drill or occasionally gymnastics that helped to shape pupils’ bodies, thanks to lack of space and facilities, though in urban schools some teachers organized various forms of extracurricular sport (Ndee 2010). In America the American Association for

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the Advancement of Physical Education (AAAPE) was founded in 1885 and urged State Boards of Education to include quality physical education classes in all the schools of the state. At the 1889 Boston Conference on Physical Training, Edward M. Hartwell pointed out that the need for more school-based physical education and community recreation programs was confirmed by scientific and clinical discoveries. By 1900 most states had passed education laws which emphasized physical education in schools and playgrounds, especially for children who could not speak English, but who might through sport learn American values. Competition, for example, was the basis for the capitalist economy. Sport taught pupils to respect authority, play cooperatively yet also prize individualistic performance (Gems and Pfister 2009: 86). In the early twentieth century, extracurricular competitive sport became a common feature of American high schools. In 1903 New York’s Public Schools Athletic League was founded and involved 1,040 boys, mostly elementary school students, in basketball and track and field events. It then slowly expanded into additional city-wide competitive additional sports. In 1906/07 cross-country and soccer was added, and the 1907–08 school year saw the addition of rifle marksmanship, swimming, tennis, and baseball (Jable 1984). The Playground Association of America (PAA), established in 1906, also provided opportunities for tens of thousands of girls and young women as well as boys and young men to engage in educationally-oriented sporting activities. In 1915 Henry Stoddard Curtis, holder of a doctoral degree in child psychology from Clark University and former Director of Child Study in the New York City schools, wrote extensively about the importance that educationally-oriented play could have in childhood and youth (Curtis 1917). By 1919 four hundred and twenty-three of America’s towns and cities administered nearly 4,000 supervised playgrounds and other recreational facilities, combining morality and muscles to encourage urban reform and social inclusion (Cavallo 1981). The PAA stressed that maintaining good health and teaching children and youth to become good citizens were very important goals of sporting activities (Park 2007). However, it has been suggested that the playground movement “failed to attract the majority of children and youth” (Gems and Pfister 2009: 87). Such moves towards integration into sporting culture in Britain and America had substantial elements of success, though it is important to stress the countervailing tendencies. Across the world immigrants attempted to retain their own ethnic cultures. Just as the British tried to retain their sports in their colonies, in America the Germans wanted to keep their turner gymnastics, and some Irish their hurling, in order to maintain their homeland traditions and express their national character. Relative success in retaining them was a function of relative power. In America most immigrants slowly shifted into the mainstream as they assimilated.

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EXCLUSION AND SEGREGATION Many socially-aspirant sports clubs wanted to play and compete only with the “right sort”, i.e., “gentlemen amateurs” who competed with no financial benefit, and found a number of ways of keeping themselves exclusive. In more elite clubs this could be through high-cost membership fees, but that alone was not always effective, since the newly-rich could also join. It could be through formal election of members, which allowed “the wrong sort” to be blackballed and excluded. Some elite clubs used confidential systems of references. Amongst the many more exclusive middle-class clubs “class legislation could be overt and savage” (Huggins 2004: 59). Working-class players were kept out. In part this was to avoid members having to compete with their supposed social inferiors, but in part too it was to avoid middle-class men doing more sedentary work being humiliatingly defeated by those doing more manual jobs requiring physical fitness. In Britain, though most flat and National Hunt steeplechase racing was dominated by working-class jockeys, there were some races reserved for what were termed “gentlemen riders”. Some of these had sufficient experience in the hunting field or the military to allow them to compete against professionals as well. Many claimed an amateur weight allowance whilst making money from riding, and some had reputations associated with dubious practice (Vamplew and Kay 2006). Many British rowing club regulations in the 1860s and 1870s banned all “tradesmen, laborers, artisans and working mechanics”, so that professional scullers and watermen could not take part. In athletics, the Amateur Athletic Club, formed in 1866, had an initial membership composed of army and navy officers, civil service, the bar, the universities and principal London clubs, with any other prospective members balloted. It deliberately kept out all who participated or assisted in any athletic exercises as a means of livelihood. Its 1867 rules explicitly debarred artisans, mechanics and laborers. In the urban suburbs of Britain and America, the growing numbers of middleclass croquet and rowing clubs, or golf, cycling and tennis clubs often introduced restrictive membership covenants which reinforced not only social class, but also ethnic or religious biases, such as anti-Semitism. Many clubs were highly exclusive and open only to men. Others also offered membership to women, which allowed the best women members to get involved in competition and so raise standards. The National Tennis Championships (inaugurated in 1881 and now known as the US Open) had first included matches for females in 1887. The first women’s golf tournament in the US (seven holes) took place in 1894 at what would become known as the Morris County Golf Club (located in Morristown, New Jersey), and in the same decade American amateur women’s tennis teams were competing internationally. Early team games in Britain such as soccer or rugby were not really attractive to the masses. In the 1870s and 1880s they became more open to working-class

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FIGURE 6.2: USA international tennis players, 1895, courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

competitors, but in the 1890s the rugby pendulum swung back to exclusivity. Rugby’s great split in 1895 to maintain its amateur direction was in large part an unwillingness to remain open to working-class players and allow their expenses, forcing the creation of Northern Union in opposition. Between 1900 and 1914 there were regular debates in the English sporting press as progressives and conservatives debated the future direction of cricket and rugby. Simultaneously English national teams felt increasingly threatened by the successes of often socially-inferior touring teams from overseas (Levett 2018). Both sports remained dominated administratively by those who wished to perpetuate their social leadership and keep the games at higher levels relatively socially demarked from the masses. But the more “gentleman amateur” approach operated by the British and found in middle-class contexts was less effective in the United States. It was largely ignored, for example, by the intercollegiate athletics programs that began to emerge at America’s colleges and universities after the Civil War. The country’s preoccupation with a professional approach to sports quickly

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influenced not only what would develop at colleges and universities but also at many high schools, even if not everyone agreed with what was occurring. What is thought to have been the first intercollegiate baseball contest took place on November 3, 1859 between St. John’s College (now Fordham University) and The College of St. Francis Xavier (now a high school). Interest in such events grew rapidly. Large numbers of colleges and universities began establishing teams that gained extensive attention from students, alumni, and people in local communities. The public’s interest in watching intercollegiate athletic events grew as other sports were added. Representatives from Harvard, Amherst, Brown, and Bowdoin College created the Rowing Association of American Colleges in 1870, the country’s first publicly-designated intercollegiate athletic organization (Mendenhall 1993). By 1900 intercollegiate athletics programs had become a significant part of most colleges and universities in the United States. Another way of social exclusion was through legal means. Game laws in Britain restricted shooting and fishing on private land. The Game Act of 1831 established close seasons for various game birds, made it lawful to take game only with a game license, and formalized the use of gamekeepers on landowners’ estates. Riparian policies and laws kept working-class fishermen away from access to salmon and trout-filled rivers. In Canada the sportsman’s club movement was sufficiently wealthy to lease the Atlantic salmon rivers, ensuring that Native Americans, who had fished for generations, no longer had any rights to the animal world they had previously exploited (Jessup 2006). Segregation could sometimes be self-chosen. Oppressed or minority groups formed their own clubs and organizations, or fostered their own sports. In Ireland’s divided society, sport could be used to symbolize religious, political and cultural allegiances. The introduction of Gaelic games by the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in 1884 was a deliberate effort by a largely nationalist and Roman Catholic organization to introduce in Ireland supposedly distinctively Irish cultural forms, including Gaelic football and hurling, as part of the broader process of “de-Anglicizing” Ireland. The GAA stressed its nationalist credentials across the issues of nationalism, class and religion. It stressed its openness to Irishmen of any class, and so different to the more exclusivist rules of many existing sporting bodies (Rouse 2015: 176) but banned its members from playing or attending “garrison games”, a term which associated English games with the notion of a foreign (i.e., English) military occupying force in Dublin. Such sports included cricket, polo and tennis. From 1897 restrictions on GAA membership ensured the exclusion of all members of the British army and policemen. Despite its initial attraction to exuberant Irish crowds, it lost some momentum in the early 1890s, thanks to social, economic and political changes. Sports such as rugby, soccer and cricket were able to resist its attacks and grew in popularity, though the

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FIGURE 6.3: Gaelic football team from Leitrim, Ireland, in 1914, courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

GAA gained new momentum post 1900. In south and west Ulster this nationalist revival was slow, allowing soccer to draw on a wide selection of religious affiliations for its playing and administration, with Roman Catholics heavily involved (Curran 2016). In Scotland the Catholic minority often founded their own soccer sides. The famous rivalry between “the Old Firm”, Glasgow Celtic and Rangers, was in part an example of Catholic/Protestant antipathy, although differences were fostered by both clubs for economic reasons. In Glasgow, in the 1880s and 1890s, Catholics, particularly those of Irish descent, faced discrimination and derision. So Glasgow Celtic, with its Catholic associations, attracted huge Catholic support during its period of great success. It enabled fans to wave fingers derisively at Scottish protestant society. In response Rangers, the most successful Protestant side, staunchly anti-Catholic, took on the mantle of defender of their faith (Murray 1984).

RACE AND ETHNICITY Though social discrimination was found across all racial groups, the power to exploit it was the key to its role within sport. For those groups suffering social

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discrimination, injustices within sport often reflected the larger injustices in broader society. They, and white social reformers supporting them, faced many obstacles in the struggle to gain recognition and rights through sport. Their poverty ensured that many such groups were negatively represented as primitive, ignorant and savage. At much the same time, however groups such as Native Americans or Maoris might be represented as “the noble savage”, encouraging a fascination with the exotic and strange. Where a minority proved exceptionally good at sporting physicality, such achievements could be redefined to demonstrate some other form of inferiority rather than their superiority. In New Zealand, for example, the discourse on race and white Europeans’ right to rule portrayed the Maori as physically superior, but unintelligent and savage, enabling Maoris to be channeled into sport and away from education. In America non-Whites were often treated as inferior and unassimilated into dominant American culture. For some social reformers, letting them compete against whites in sport was one way of encouraging “muscular assimilation”. This was a strategy that suggested that the achievements made by black athletes “translate to other tasks and responsibilities and thus demonstrate the readiness of African Americans for full participation in the social, economic and political life of the nation” (Miller and Wiggins 2004: 270). American indigenous people’s own games struggled to survive as they were forced onto reservations during the nineteenth century (Culin 1975). Shinny (a game comparable to ice hockey or lacrosse) and hoop and pole (shooting something at a small moving hoop) were among the many that they played. Double ball (tossing small buckskin bags by using sticks) was considered to be especially a woman’s game. In some regions, females also played their own versions of games that were popular among males. Once on reservations, Native Americans were expected to assimilate to the dominant white culture. Indian agents and the mainstream mass media often portrayed them in stereotypic ways, as “savages”, lacking discipline and direction, and lazy, deceitful and tricky. Through this period Native Americans were not recognized as full American citizens unless they fully conformed to European-American ways. Their world was shaped by discriminatory societal and political factors (including the Indian Removal Act). The 1887 Dawes Act tried to encourage Native American families to turn to farming and grazing, and restricted their hunting rights in an attempt to “civilize” them. Many whites believed that their supposed savagery was innate, and that the Indian could not be civilized. Nevertheless, there were attempts to set up boarding schools, institutes and industrial schools to provide discipline for children, sometimes in quasi-militaristic form, and teach them self-control. Sport could be used by whites as a means of socialization and assimilation, and by indigenous peoples as a means of empowerment and resistance. At Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Pennsylvania, its American football team was

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encouraged to play against white teams in the early 1890s, although players’ behavior was always intensely scrutinized on and off the field. They lacked equipment, uniforms, and their upbringing ensured they sometimes had weaker physical build and command of English. But they had raw ability. To improve their standard the school brought in young Yale graduate coaches to teach team discipline and technique. By 1896 and 1897 Carlisle were playing Yale and Harvard. These were often represented as games of Indians against whites. Journalists such as the famous coach Walter Camp provided reports that combined praise for their play with use of racially-charged imagery that referred to scalping, savagery, war-paint, and other stock phrases redolent of a Fenimore Cooper novel. The Carlisle players played with a pride in race and a wish to demonstrate their ability. By the early 1900s they were viewed as amongst the top sides in America. Though not physically as strong, they succeeded thanks to their speed, handling and passing skills, and by submitting themselves to their team ethos. Their trick plays, however, unlike those of whites, were usually described as “shifty”, “trickster” Indian moves, and there was still an assumption amongst journalists that Indians had civility to prove (Des Jardins 2015: 221–231). Amongst the leading Carlisle players was Jim Thorpe (1888–1955), a “mixed blood” Sac and Fox Indian from Oklahoma. He went on to win the decathlon and pentathlon in the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, widely admired for his sporting talents. The next year, however, Thorpe was stripped of his gold medals after it was discovered he had violated the amateur athletic code by playing minor league baseball. Contemporary comment at the time implied that medals were stripped because of his ethnicity (Buford 2010). Basketball had been introduced to girls at the Fort Shaw Indian Boarding School (near Great Falls, Montana) in 1896 by their physical culture instructor Josephine Langley. This school (and others similarly created) had been designed largely to assimilate indigenous people into the dominant culture. Basketball proved an especially useful role. The Fort Shaw Girls’ Basketball team played its first public game in 1897 and the young women’s accomplishments soon began to alter what were referred to as “anti-Indian attitudes” (Peavy and Smith 2008). Before long Fort Shaw Indian Boarding School’s superintendent received an invitation to send its Girls’ Basketball Team to the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, where their exhibition games were so popular that they were asked to remain and perform during the subsequent 1904 Olympic Games. African-American sports players also faced barriers to their sporting integration. Even today African-American sportsmen are under-represented in baseball, golf, tennis, stock car racing and a host of other national American pastimes, due to deep-rooted historical contextual and racist factors (Wiggins 2014). Conflicts over slavery (which dominated in the South) had been a major cause of the Civil War (1861–1865). As industrialism and urbanization grew in

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several of the northern states following that period, plantation agriculture remained important in much of the south, which continued to rely upon its black population to do much of the necessary work. Little was done to try to bring about better equality of opportunities for the country’s African-American population. De facto segregation divided the races in many aspects of everyday life, especially in the south, where segregation was formalized after 1896. There were only rare examples where black sportsmen could compete fairly against or alongside white men. One was horse racing, a major American sport even early in the nineteenth century. Here black jockeys, grooms and horse trainers all played a significant role. Even in the early nineteenth century when most were still slaves, the leading figures were recognized and well-respected by owners and the wider public. Owners were happy to allow them some autonomy because of their skills, enabling the best to improve their circumstances and see racing as a vehicle to “succeed in becoming a master” themselves (Mooney 2014: 64). The best became a source of pride to their communities. Following the abolition of slavery, the leading jockeys in these contests continued often to be of African-American heritage (Hotaling 1999). Thirteen of the fifteen riders in the first Kentucky Derby, held at Churchill Downs in 1875, were black. They continued to be a powerful presence in the sport until the early 1900s, but by 1920 their stature was paling. Grand displays of wealth and influence by successful black jockeys and the racism of the poor white spectators at racecourses undermined the old arrangement. The successes of black jockeys and trainers could not be safely channeled into the support of white supremacy any longer. White owners and white horsemen gradually pushed black men out of all but the bottom-most jobs in the thoroughbred world. Although African-Americans were already playing baseball on southern plantations in the pre-Civil War era, the widespread belief in white supremacy amongst sections of America’s white population meant that able AfricanAmerican players such as Moses Fleetwood Walker were barred from playing by informal agreement between clubs in the National League by the 1880s. By the later nineteenth century, still denied the right to inclusion on teams comprising the dominant professional sports leagues, it became necessary for them to create their own. To generate more commercial interest amongst spectators, loosely organized sets of professional black teams began “barnstorming”, touring large and small venues across the country, from early spring, playing white teams and black teams, wherever it was deemed profitable for their predominantly white hosts (Hogan 2014). In the winter these teams played in Florida, California, Cuba or Mexico (Peterson 1970). Accomplished sides such as the Baltimore Hannibals, Philadelphia Pythians, and Washington Mutuals were formed in northern parts of the country. When the Toledo Blue Stockings (champions in 1883 of the

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FIGURE 6.4: African-American baseball players from Morris Brown College, c. 1899, courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

then-existing Northwestern League) joined the American Association (which existed from 1882 to 1891) with the first black Major Leaguer Moses Fleetwood Walker as their catcher it was hoped that there would be more inclusion (Zang 1998). However, after one year the Blue Stockings withdrew from the Northwestern League and then disbanded. In 1890s Chicago, as black population numbers rose, African-American entrepreneurs created black independent semiprofessional teams. By the early 1900s they were encouraging the formation of black professional leagues. As these developed, they were supported and encouraged by the black press, which publicized games and celebrated players’ and teams’ achievements. American cultural historians have emphasized the importance of black entrepreneurs and the importance of these competitive games in fostering racial pride within African-American communities (Lomax 2014). Some American sports associations had only an informal ban of black professionals but most white organizations formally excluded them. The League of American Wheelmen, then the largest sporting organization in the United States added the word “White” to its membership in 1894 at its Kentucky

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convention (Ritchie, 2005). The move was most successful in the southern states, but in the more liberal eastern and mid-western states black cyclists were able to compete against white opponents. However, even the most successful black rider, Marshall “Major” Taylor, world sprint champion in 1899, and American sprint champion from 1898 to 1900 experienced intense and overt bureaucratic and physical racist opposition from some white competitors and government bodies. Chinese-Americans, now a notable percentage of the population of the United States, were present in California soon after it gained statehood in 1850. A substantial portion settled in San Francisco, where they developed their own ethnic area (Chinatown, and were soon drawing upon what was occurring there and elsewhere in the country to establish sporting activities for their growing population. Ethnic divisions forced them to create their own YMCAs. The first was opened in San Francisco in 1871. Sports were among the many activities that it soon would begin to offer. San Francisco’s Chinese YMCA held its first open-to-the-public view track and field contests at Golden Gate Park in 1920. The Yoke Choy (Disseminate Knowledge) Club was founded in 1920 to promote Christianity, music, and athletics. The Club soon had a tackle football team. The Cathay Club, which evolved from the Chinese Boys Band (established in 1911), and became involved in basketball and several other sports. Chinese youths also played on high school teams in Oakland, San Francisco, Vallejo, Salinas, Watsonville, and elsewhere. San Francisco’s Chinese YWCA (Young Women’s Christian Association) which opened in 1916 provided opportunities for girls and young women to play table tennis and badminton. It soon added other sports; basketball became especially popular. Girls’ teams called Mei Wahs (i.e., Chinese in America) were soon formed in Los Angeles and San Francisco (Zieff 2000; Park 2001a). In both Britain and America Jews faced anti-Semitic prejudice on the part of the general population. In England at the beginning of the nineteenth century pugilism (bareknuckle boxing) gave a rare but brief opportunity to Jews to become more included in sporting culture. To do so they capitalized on increased public interest fostered by Christian spectator prejudice and hostility and increased support from fellow Jews. Regular press representations often reiterated racist stereotypes and discourses, a harsh reminder that acceptance was only in terms acceptable to wider British society. Even so, they provided a foil for Christian boxers while their successes challenged assumptions about Christian superiority and stereotypes of the weak and effeminate Jew (Berkowitz and Ungar 2007). Many sports clubs in Europe and America were barred to Jews even early in the period. From the 1880s onwards in an age of rapidly increasing antiSemitism and pogroms in Eastern and Central Europe, there was a growing diaspora of Jews into Britain and America. In 1890, when leading Canadian

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figure skater Louis Rubenstein attempted to compete in an unofficial World Championship in St Petersburg as Canada’s official representative, the sponsors initially refused to allow a Jew to enter and he was harassed by the Russian police. Canadian and British diplomatic efforts finally ensured his entry (Riess 2014). After he won, the Russians later tried to deny his victory. During the nineteenth century some more assimilated upper-middle class European Jews were able to compete with those of similar rank in the broader population. Horse racing was an early example, and in Britain horse racing has been argued to have aided Jews’ entry into high society, its values and sensibilities. However, it should be noted that only the Rothschilds gained admittance to Newmarket’s elite Jockey Club, and then only because they were sufficiently anglicized, rich and socially accepted for their origins to be overlooked (Huggins 2012). In central Europe it was fencing which most attracted wealthy Jews, and they were sufficiently proficient to compete in early Olympic Games. To meet the challenges of exclusion some Jewish sporting organizations were formed. The young Zionist movement, around the turn of the century, fiercely took up the fight for the equalization of the Jewish body, wanting to see a rebalancing of emphasis from the admiration for Talmutic religious study towards a more muscular Judaism, and emphasizing exercise as part of the physical regeneration of Eastern and Central European Judaism. A growing Jewish gymnastic and sport movement was believed to help its people towards national survival. Numbers of participants were relatively small. In 1898 the Bar Kochba Jewish Gymnastics Association was formed in Berlin. In 1903 the League of Jewish Gymnasts attracted around twelve associations across German-speaking Europe. By 1914 the number had reached eighty-nine, covering about 9,300 members. From a cultural perspective it is worth noting how many of the emerging sports and gymnastic clubs had names which harked past to long-past Jewish military heroism (Maccabi, Bar Kochba, Hasmonea, Samson, Hagibor (the hero), or Hakoah (strength)) in ways that asserted cultural heritage (Brenner and Rueveni 2006). In London the Jewish Lads Brigade, founded in 1897, organized sports and moved more towards competition and achievement, and by April 1902 already had thirty-five hundred members, many with Eastern European backgrounds. In Australia nineteenth-century sport reflected attitudes towards its indigenous population. In the 1850s and 1860s Aborigines perhaps participated more freely in mainstream sport, particularly cricket, than at any other time in the nineteenth century, as Christian missions sought to civilize them via Muscular Christianity. Country sheep and cattle stations brought them into their teams because of a shortage of white players. Indeed, the first Australian cricket team to tour England, in 1868, was an Aboriginal one, though none of

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its matches were at first-class level and the captain and manager were white Australians. From the 1870s sporting interaction became increasingly restricted. Australian colonial governments, influenced by theories of Social Darwinism, began to impose laws which distanced Aboriginal people from white society including the ideology of “protectionism” which prohibited them from leaving their reserves without permission from the authorities. Those allowed to participate in white sports faced discriminatory practices. Jack Marsh, a fast bowler who played cricket for New South Wales at the turn of the century, was no-balled out of the game by cricketing officials, allegedly because of his race. A small number of Aboriginal men were enticed into professional sport where their athletic talents were exploited by white promoters for financial gain. This was most apparent in boxing and pedestrianism. Boxers were encouraged to adopt a non-defensive style of fighting which proved damaging to them but was appreciated by spectators. In pedestrianism, because of supposedly natural advantages, black professional runners were labelled in the programs as “a” for aboriginal, “h.c.” for half-caste, or “c.p.” for colored person (Vamplew 2007a).

GENDER Masculinity and femininity are both socially-constructed phenomena, with a plural, hierarchical, collective and dynamic character. Notions of particular forms of masculinity have often been associated with sport, and the vast majority of sporting practices have emerged from male physical cultures. Masculinity is always relational, and in its multiple forms is closely tied to the social construction of femininity. Definitions of sport and physical activities have often been rooted in ingrained notions of maleness and the resulting exclusion of women. There were clear expectations about women’s behavior. In 1850 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the major architect of the nineteenth century “women’s rights” movement, presciently argued that “we cannot say what the women might be physically, if the girl were allowed all the freedom of the boy in romping, swimming, climbing and playing hoop and ball”(Park 2012: 203). When the crucible of sport supposedly made men out of boys, women were often sidelined. Even when females engaged in any of the sports that then existed, little if any, attention would be given to this by the prominent media unless the reports were critical. Little attention has until recently been given by cultural historians to the more complex realities and inter-relationships of men and women in both formal and informal cultural, institutional and political frameworks of sport, and to the pastimes of working-class women more generally. Male prejudice, societal inequality and denial of opportunity meant that there was no question of women competing with men in team sports such as

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football of any sport, baseball or cricket, or sharing sports organizations with men. In the period from 1785 to 1835 women were likely to have opportunities to observe a wide range of sporting events; however, with occasional exceptions such as horseback riding (thought to benefit health), their participation in then existing sports tended to be mostly restricted because of the dominant views regarding what was, and was not, appropriate for females. Many men disapproved of women getting away from their “natural” role as wives or daughters and saw sport as making them mannish (Holliman 2003:163). Nevertheless, some did swim or engage in a few other physical activities. Working-class women had far fewer opportunities to participate in sport than their working-class male counterparts. The family and domestic demands placed upon them, lack of income and free time meant that they had much less access to sport than middle- and upper-class women. For the latter, greater involvement in the increasingly urbanized and industrialized western culture was part of the general movement for female emancipation, throwing off simplistic notions of female frailty. But it was not uniformly accepted. Not all were committed to the notion of the “New Woman” or the movement towards female emancipation. Some women held to traditional images. Arabella Kenealy condemned sports-playing schoolgirls as following “the cult of mannishness” and saw their increased muscularity as “stigmata of abnormal sex-transformation”. She was concerned that women taking exercise might reduce their ability to be mothers of men (Mangan 2006: 138). Despite such opposition, increasingly through the century upper and aspiring middle-class women began to take up sports previously confined to men. In the years between 1860 and 1914, more women than ever pursued equestrian activities, especially in Britain. Horseback riding had largely been confined to men. Initially women found the side-saddle a liberating device. They increasingly rode astride, mirroring men, and this became more acceptable and respectable. They were now able to take part in sports like fox hunting alongside men (Munkwitz 2012). Across the empire they joined in hunting, pig-sticking and polo. Through riding they gained better health, tangible command over a horse, visual power and a clear form of independence, a subtle form of emancipation. It helped redefine their social role and ideas about “proper” female behavior. Late in the century, in America and Britain, women’s sport began to flourish more widely in women’s educational institutions, away from men’s gaze. As early as 1866 students at all-female Vassar College created two baseball teams (the Laurels and the Abenakis). Although these were soon disbanded their appearance helped prompt some other schools (including Mills College, located on the West Coast) to try to emulate their approach. Senda Berenson, who had been hired to teach gymnastics (calisthenics) to young women attending allfemale Smith College, acquired knowledge of the new game and introduced it

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FIGURE 6.5: F. C. Turner, The Berkeley Hunt, 1842, including one woman riding side-saddle, courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

to her students in 1892. To dispel any arguments that basketball might be inappropriate for females she divided their court into several sections and prohibited any rough play. This, Berenson thought, would help encourage teamwork rather than “star playing”. Interest in playing the game of basketball also spread rapidly among other girls and young women. This was helped by the fact that basketball rapidly became a part of the programs of the growing numbers of YWCAs. The first intercollegiate basketball game to take place on the West Coast was played in San Francisco on April 4, 1896 by female not male students from Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. Several hundred girls and women joined the audience to watch it; the only male allowed to be present was the referee. Basketball began to attain popularity in the state of Iowa after it was introduced there in 1893. Many girls’ as well as boys’ teams were formed, and sometimes played against each other. The Iowa Girls’ State Tournament (first played in 1920) soon was attracting more spectators than was the Iowa Boys’ State Tournament. Propriety held that those for girls be taught only by female instructors, who would also be able to provide for them non-curricular sporting activities that were educationally-oriented. To help accomplish this goal the first so-called “Field Day” was held at Vassar College in 1895, with basketball and track running as its focus. By 1901 concerns about the growing professionalism of men’s intercollegiate athletics (football was the primary culprit) were prompting

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growing numbers of educational leaders (not just Harvard’s President Charles William Eliot) to call for reforms. Well-aware of such criticisms, female physical educators realized that if they tried to emulate what was occurring in men’s intercollegiate athletics it would have a negative impact upon what they had begun to create. Moreover, most realized that their primary responsibility needed to be improving the health and moral development of their students. Therefore, accommodating as many participants as possible was vital. To accomplish this, they started an extracurricular approach to sport, similar to that of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Committee on the Encouragement of Intra-Collegiate and Recreative Sports set forth in 1913 for male students, which was a greater focus upon Intramural (not Interscholastic) sports. They started end-of -semester “field days” that included several sports, not just one. They also instituted a modest number of “sportsdays” (initially named “playdays”) that involved engaging in moderate contests with female students from local colleges. Although the students did not always agree, the focus of these was to remain playing well and cooperatively, not just winning. It was an obligation of the faculty “advisor” (the term “coach” then was rarely used for school and college sports contests engaged in by females) to insist that comradeship remain a major emphasis of any competitive event. Intramural sporting activities also became the focus of the extracurricular sports programs for girls that emerged at high schools (Duncan 1929). By 1901 Lavinia Hart, writing about women’s college life, stressed the enthusiasm that young women at Vassar, Wellesley, Mt. Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, and elsewhere had for basketball, lacrosse, tennis, swimming, cycling, track and even baseball, and that the “triumph of their class colors” was important to young women even if they did not riot over an athletic victory as male students often did (Park 1991: 62). Basketball took on an important role in bringing about a greater range of sporting opportunities for girls and young women The safety bicycle (designed by an English engineer in 1876) proved to be especially important for providing growing numbers of females with opportunities to engage in competitive as well as recreational sports. It also helped them promote the image of “the independent New Woman”. The indefatigable woman’s rights advocate Susan B. Anthony believed that it had done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. Bicycle riding was a controversial act, generating much debate about female conduct and behavior. In New Zealand, for example, the “New Women” on bicycles, wearing rational dress or knickerbockers, threatened conventional male ideas, forcing women to reconcile different and sometimes opposing beliefs and attempt to create an alternative yet respectable bicycling identity (Simpson 2001). While some young women were beginning to ride bicycles or play golf or tennis, other females chose a much more physically demanding and competitive

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approach to sports. Some were good amateurs. Some copied men by becoming professional. In Britain, Agnes Beckwith, who gave entertaining swimming performances at seaside resorts and at indoor facilities was a leading personality, who also toured America and Canada in the 1880s (Day 2012). American girls did likewise. There were rowing contests the same decade. In 1884 two “muscular women” competed on New York’s Staten Island Sound. Among many other similar late nineteenth-century rowing contestants was Rosa Mosentheim, who won the ladies’ mile-and-a-half single scull race at Austin, Texas in 1895. Interest in pedestrianism (long-distance walking) had been stimulated by Edward Payson Weston’s 1861 trek from Boston to Washington, DC to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s Presidential Inauguration. Cities and towns across the country were soon reporting that numerous women as well as men were becoming contestants. The most noted late nineteenth-century female pedestrian was the English champion Ada Anderson, who arrived in the United States and undertook her first race there in December 1878 at Brooklyn’s Mozart Gardens. On February 17, 1879 Millie Reynolds began a thirty-twoday 3,000 quarter-mile walk at Boston’s Revere Hall. Exilda La Chapelle soon after completed 2,700 quarter-miles in 2,700 quarter-hours at Chicago’s Foley Theater. During the 1880s female bicyclists such as Louise Armaindo engaged in professional bicycling competitions, sometimes against male cyclists. Although events such as these sometimes received reasonably favorable reporting in the public press, they were ignored by more elite magazines such as The North American Review and The Forum. For a short period, female wrestlers and boxers also enjoyed some popularity. Hattie Stewart was said to have a right cross that compared to that of her noted male contemporary, heavyweight fighter John L. Sullivan (Park 2012). The National Police Gazette, which offered most of the information about female professional rowers, runners, and boxers, rarely discussed sports such as tennis or basketball.

CONCLUSION Throughout the Industrial Age sport served to include, exclude and segregate identifiable groups in the community and, beyond that, the nation. The excluded could be minorities such as Jews ostracized for their religious beliefs or substantial sections of the populace such as women and working-class men. Those who were included tended to be recipients of bonding social capital, playing sport alongside like-minded people who shared a common associative interest, often a particular religion, educational background or political belief. Generally, sport did not produce bridging social capital which would have brought together participants from across the socio-cultural spectrum whose

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shared interest was a particular sport. Even when “white” sports were seen as a device for civilizing indigenous populations, they were rarely used for the integration of such players into non-indigenous teams. Those excluded from mainstream participation did not necessarily reject sport or even a particular sport. Indigenous inhabitants continued to play their traditional sports and migrants brought with them the sports of their homelands, from both of which the dominant and powerful excluded themselves. Others, whether AfricanAmerican populations in North America, religious groups of various faiths in Europe or women and working-class men either side of the Atlantic played the mainstream sport.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Minds, Bodies, and Identities WRAY VAMPLEW

Sport involves both mind and body. As a dynamic activity sports performance requires bodily action but also mental awareness. The bodies and minds of those watching interact in response to that performance. This chapter explores the interplay between mind and body in sports participation and spectatorship. The first section looks at aspects of emotion in sport, focusing on eroticism and pain; the second considers how the mentalities of specific power groups in society have responded to the development of sport; and the final section examines how identities have been formed through sport.

EMOTION, EROTICISM AND PAIN Sport can excite the senses and invoke the memory: the smell of liniment in the changing room; the sound of bat hitting ball; the taste of the half-time orange; the touch of the ritual handshake before competition; and the sight of the flag fluttering on the golf green. Sport can be sexually stimulating involving both the male and female gaze. It can also be painful bringing physical injury and mental depression. Emotion Emotion represents a central element of sporting experience. What happens in sport can engage the individual psyche or inflame the psychological urges of millions. Unfortunately for the historian emotions do not come neatly organized 165

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in archival form, to show what it was like to be a bareknuckle fighter in the 1820s or a passionate baseball supporter in the 1890s. Somehow historians need to develop strategies for reading the emotional parameters of sports. They must search for new source material, perhaps in match programs, the local press, diaries, and novels, to excavate sporting sensibilities. They must sort through “an assortment of texts for the language, observations, and side notes that hint at cultures of feeling” (Klugman 2017: 310). Currently sport historians have been slow to respond to the plea of Keys (2013) to learn from the developing historical study of emotions and senses in order to gain new historical knowledge on the meaning of sport to fans and participants such as the reaction of players to injury and rehabilitation, attitudes towards risktaking, and responses to victory and defeat. Hence this chapter can only dip a toe into such aspects. Sport and Eros One emotion associated with sport goes under a variety of labels be it sexual attraction, erotic arousal or plain lust, though with the caveat that there is a difficulty in distinguishing aesthetic admiration from sexual attraction. Alas, sports historians have tended to ignore the sexual connotations of the male/ female gaze on the male/female athletic body during the nineteenth century. Perhaps there is insufficient evidence in an era in which much of the western world was still in thrall to Christian asceticism, what the Germans appropriately termed “hostility to the body” (leibfeindlicheit) (Guttmann 2002: 382). Guttmann stands as an exception to the general reticence on sexual matters by sports historians. He argues that there is an erotic aspect to sports participation and spectatorship with which sports historians have failed to come to terms, partly due to concerns with sexual politics, and allegations that scholars who study the topic have contributed to the sexualization of athletes, especially females. He produced a broad sweep survey of eroticism in sport, albeit with relatively little on the nineteenth century (Guttmann 1996). He noted a few artworks that contained an erotic element associated with sport though, apart from high culture like art (which rarely included popular sport in its portfolio), this tended to be a taboo area in any contemporary comment on sport. In 1995 Gorn and Oriard argued that “power and eroticism meet most compellingly in the athletic body”, but in the previous century the erotic was largely erased from the sporting text. Clearly overt eroticism is time and culture specific. In the Industrial Age respectable society feared that the erotic might tempt observers into the dangerous stimulus of sexual thoughts. As one Italian commentator remarked, we cannot understand a lady who capers about, turns somersaults, lifts heavy weights, handles weapons or wrestles, or even performs any exercise that

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causes her clothing to fly about . . . because even if nothing is revealed, it will awaken erotic images in those men who are present. —Chapman and Gori 2010: 1979 Contemporary morality dictated that the female sporting body should be hidden from the male gaze under long skirts which, of course often concealed their naked private parts (Phillips and Phillips 1993: 133). However, the move of women into what can be termed “movement” sports such as netball and cycling led to a demand for less-restrictive dress by some participants, though change was considered less necessary by those who played “stationary” sports like croquet, golf, archery and tennis (as played by most women). Hence “long skirts, numerous petticoats, high heels and above all tight-laced corsets long remained the sporting costume of Victorian women” (Park 1989: 16).

FIGURE 7.1: Female swimmer emerges from Lake George, New York, 1916, courtesy of Getty Images.

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All this said, there is evidence of the erotic being exploited for branding purposes by turn-of-the-century bodybuilder Eugen Sandow. Displaying his near nude body on stage differentiated him from strongmen who merely lifted weights as did the private exhibitions he offered as part of his after-show routine to women (and men) who donated to charity for the privilege (Morais 2013: 200). Injury and Stress Sport can be painful. Although we lack figures for the likelihood of accidents and injuries in any sport for the period under review, on the basis of isolated evidence it can be conjectured that bodily contact team sports like American football, boxing and its bareknuckled precursor, and equestrian sports such as hunting and horse racing were dangerous for participants. Even cricket and baseball had their fatalities. Can we imagine the pain of having one’s face cut and cut again by the brinehardened fists of a bareknuckle pugilist? The gory descriptions of prizefighters show how they felt committed to carry on through the pain barrier. Fights were not determined on points over a number of pre-determined, time-limited rounds but by exhaustion; by a failure to come up to the scratch line. It was a

FIGURE 7.2: Staged bicycle crash, c. 1910, courtesy of Getty Images.

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“bruising, bloody and sometimes murderous business” in which irreparable damage could be done to the eyes and internal organs of tired fighters incapable of properly defending themselves (Brailsford 1988: xii). Racing was an especially dangerous sport. Trying to control half a ton of horseflesh travelling at 25 miles an hour, whilst sometimes also attempting to jump obstacles, was not an activity for the faint-hearted. National Hunt riders are always just one fall away from paralysis. Fox Russell, a cross-country rider in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, recorded that I have had my fair share of accidents, and have broken ribs, collarbones, and arm, some two or three times each, and once sustained a slight concussion of the brain, but have never been seriously, that is, dangerously, injured in my life except once, when a horse rolled on me. —Russell 1896: 221 Jockeys, especially on the flat, also faced a more insidious danger; that of making the weight allocated to their horse. In 1850 the minimum weight set by the Jockey Club was a mere 4 stones and although this rose to 5 stones 7 pounds in 1875 it remained at this level until after the First World War. Few riders raced at these weights—between seven stones and eight stones would be more common—but they are an indicator that weights carried by runners on the flat could be artificially low, forcing the riders to “waste” below their natural body weight. Long periods of inadequate nutrition reduced the ability to concentrate, affected the body’s thermostatic qualities and blood flows, and depleted liver glycogen—all of which could lead to accidents and serious illness. Certainly, wasting contributed to the early deaths of leading Victorian riders Tom French, John Charlton, Tom Chaloner (all Classic winners) and John Wells, twice champion jockey (Vamplew 2016a). In most sports there were stressful anxieties associated with the pressures of performance, constant job insecurity and retirement at an early age. There was no place to hide on the sports field. Every time they played sportspersons were subject to public and professional appraisal; and often their performance depended not just on themselves but also on their team-mates and the opposition. Cricket, for example, was a team game within which the individual was often isolated, worried about his own form even in the midst of team success: some, as is clear from David Frith’s (2001) study of cricketing suicides, simply could not handle the pressure of perpetual uncertainty. Indeed, insecurity was the hallmark of a career in professional sport. It stemmed from many sources including fear of injury, loss of form, threats to jobs from newcomers, and the inevitable short shelf-life of professional sportsmen. How professional sportsmen coped with this constant pressure has not been fully researched but undoubtedly some turned to drink. Although medical

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opinion at the time often recommended alcohol as an aid to performance, for some drink became a performance-enabling mechanism. Within horse racing the low weights caused problems as the effects of alcohol were often aggravated by the lack of food: indeed, alcoholism itself could be an effect of being starved. In Victorian horse racing Bill Scott, winner of nine St. Legers, George Fordham, fourteen times champion jockey, and Tommy Loates, champion in three seasons towards the end of the century were all alcoholics (Vamplew 2016a: 394–5).

ATTITUDES AND BELIEFS Although many of the populace responded positively to the exhilaration of playing and watching sport, as with all human activity, there were those who were ambivalent towards sport while some actively opposed it. While it is important for historians to acknowledge such opposition, it has to be emphasized that it was by a minority and it was generally unsuccessful; the culture of sport was too strong. Opposition to sport in the nineteenth century rarely exhibited blanket coverage. Critics tended to focus on particular sports, on who played them, on where they were played, and on when they were played. Sports such as horse racing in which gambling played a central role drew fire on moral grounds as did blood sports, both human and animal. Indeed, brutal animal sports became outlawed as a sign of growing civilization, though hunting, with its landed gentry support, remained immune despite to hostility from several quarters including early animal activists and farmers fearful that their crops would be trampled. Here a few major groups of opponents to sport will be identified. Religion and Education Much religious opposition to sport focused on spectators and players desecrating the Christian Sabbath, designated as a holy day for worship rather than a holiday for play, though this was essentially an issue for Protestant-dominated nations and far less emotion surrounded the question in regions where the “Continental Sabbath” dominated leisure cultures. The Secretary of the Lord’s Day Observance Society maintained that acceptable activities on that day should be restricted to “public instruction, public worship, the instruction of the young, the visiting of the sick, looking after people who are in trouble and difficulty, showing acts of kindness” (Lowerson 1984: 203). Generally, the Sunday observance lobby was successful in keeping the day free from sporting activities. Any sports event that charged gate-money was legally forbidden to be held on a Sunday. However, adherents of a growing secularism saw no harm in participating in sport on the seventh day. For such middle-class sportsmen tennis courts, croquet lawns, river banks and golf courses became sites of conflict between their progressive attitudes and those of a conservative,

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reactionary clergy. By 1913 40 percent of English golf clubs had adopted Sunday play, though many of these accepted that caddies should not be employed or refreshments served on that day (Lowerson 1989: 190). Notwithstanding the Sunday debate some churchmen of both Protestant and Catholic faiths added the playing fields to their evangelical and social discipline armory of rational recreations and encouraged sport either directly by founding clubs or indirectly via physical activities within the Boys Brigade, Church Lad’s Brigade or the Young Men’s Christian Association (Huggins 2000: 16–17). Williams (1996) has scoured the local press of eight northern towns and suggested that in 1914 some 38 percent of football teams and 44 percent of cricket teams were church-based, with participation often dependent on church attendance. Early nineteenth-century educators generally held that sport was antiintellectual and should not be encouraged but, by mid-century, public schools were beginning to recognize that sport could prove a useful tool for social engineering. Considerable and compulsory physical exercise was seen as a highly effective means of inculcating valuable instrumental and educational goals: physical and moral courage, loyalty and cooperation, the capacity to act fairly and take defeat well, and the ability to command and obey (Mangan 1981: 9). In the mid-nineteenth century the Roman concept of “mens sana in corpere sano” was resurrected to form the basis of a new sporting ideology by proponents of Muscular Christianity and amateurism. It made its reappearance as the motto of the Liverpool Athletic Club in the early 1860s and became widely adopted as a rallying cry of athleticism in the English public schools. Although athleticism became the dominant public-school ethos, there were those who vainly objected to compulsory sports participation (Huggins 2004: 10–11). At university sport was a voluntary activity for undergraduates and sport was never as dominant as in the public schools. Nevertheless, there were Oxbridge critics who protested against the health risks involved in contests, to excessive competition, to taking sport over-seriously, to training for what should be recreation, to too much attention being paid to record setting, and to the misuse of resources (Bale 2014). Employers The violent human and animal sports of rural Britain, the ploughing matches and hedge-laying contests that demonstrated agricultural skills and the mob football matches played over extensive areas of land were seen as incompatible with industrial society, industrial location or industrial work patterns. The demands of industrial employers for a disciplined workforce capable of working long and regular hours throughout the year undermined the leisure calendar of the agrarian economy in which bursts of intense activity at planting, harvesting or shearing time were interspersed with long periods of irregular work. While

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industry reduced the amount of leisure time available, industrialists joined with religious evangelicals, political economists and other middle-class reformers to attempt to change workers’ attitudes to both work and leisure (Vamplew 2017a). Yet by the end of the century employers who earlier had feared the deleterious effects of sport had come to embrace its more positive values. Slowly they came to accept that regulated sport, shed of its earlier association with excessive brutality, alcohol consumption and gambling, could contribute positively to output, particularly by creating a loyal and dedicated workforce. It could bring benefits via fitness and character formation, particularly through team sports that replicated the pattern of industrial labor in demanding cooperative effort, respect for authority, and adherence to instructions. Sport became viewed as rational recreation, to be encouraged in appropriate circumstances rather than criticized. Hence around the mid-nineteenth century some firms began to offer their workers sports facilities (Vamplew 2016b). These were philanthropic, often authoritarian, paternalistic family businesses, looking for deference and dependency from the workforce. Here the provision of sport was often independent of other benefits, unlike in the next stage beginning in the 1880s when joint stock company formation, more complex managerial structures, and increased labor militancy paved the way for a switch from family-firm “caring paternalism” to formal company welfare provision.

FIGURE 7.3: Men from the Horwich Railway Mechanics Institute play at the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railways Cricket Ground, courtesy of Getty Images.

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This was offered to workers as part of long-term managerial policies beyond that of the market relationship of the wage contract. In this phase sport often came as part of a strategic welfare package along with pension schemes, savings banks and other economic benefits. As firms became bigger and production organization more complex, the workplace face-to-face contact between employer and worker was severed and, although conscientious management might offset this loss of direct contact, generally the relationship between managers and staff became more impersonal. Loyalty to the enterprise became of increased importance as new technology led to interdependent and continuous production processes in which stoppages and strikes in one department could close down a whole factory: indeed, “loyalty” became the overarching ideology at Lever Brothers, the major soap manufacturer in Britain (Griffiths 1995: 33). By the turn of the century workplace sport had spread across a range of industries and service sectors. In London by the 1890s many of the banks, railway companies, insurance firms and utility providers offered sporting facilities to their employees including grounds, club houses, boating houses and rifle ranges. Rather than being associated with excess, sport was now seen as offsetting the urban temptations of alcohol, gambling and prostitution (Heller 2008). There may have been an element of altruism in some sports provision. Dunbartonshire calico producer Alexander Wylie saw workers’ sport as a means of self-improvement maintaining that “recreation of the proper sort, following moderate work, helps to make a man inasmuch as it brings into play, and develops those faculties that would otherwise remain dormant”. Similarly, Scottish shipbuilder William Denny, echoing a public-school mantra, saw sport promoting “manliness” which he defined as “a readiness to meet any emergency frankly and courageously” (McDowell 2014c: 552–3). However these businessmen may also have shared the views of William Lever, founder of company town Port Sunlight, who was, according to his son, a “humanitarian coupled with enlightened self-interest” having a belief that a healthier and more educated labor force would also be a more productive one (Griffiths 1995: 26). Hence the provision of sports facilities did not undermine capitalist profit orientation: good business and social responsibility went hand in hand. Such ideas on welfare, productivity and profits were transnational and similar developments occurred in other countries. By 1916 at least 230 companies across the United States were providing some kind of recreation for their employees. Baseball, basketball and bowling helped acculturate immigrant workers into American life and, more generally, the sports facilities provided promoted health and company loyalty, both of which were seen as good for business (Park 2005: 37). Given that British capital and management dominated the Australian business scene before 1914 it is unsurprising that some of them transferred their welfare provision to their antipodean enterprises (Mosley 1985: 27). However, Burke (2005) has shown that many workplace teams

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began at the white-collar level and were organized by the workers themselves before spreading to lower-status occupations under the aegis of their employers. Australian business proprietors, like those elsewhere, realized that modern sport fitted new urban, industrial environments by emphasizing those features that employers wanted: discipline, loyalty, fitness and obedience. Burke (2005) also shows that in the tramways and railways of Victoria, in contrast to the British experience, the respective unions took over what had begun as an employer initiative and created an identity of interest between workers and unions. He argues that workplace football became a vital part of working-class culture in the period before World War One. Medical Opinion Over the nineteenth century attitudinal change regarding sport can be found amongst religious bodies, educational institutions and employers, but medical opinion towards the participation of women in sport remained almost implacably opposed. Although the views of the medical profession were based on the “scientific” evidence of the time, they were also rooted in social and cultural prejudice. Nineteenth-century medical orthodoxy insisted that physically woman was inferior to man: she was frailer, her skull smaller, and her muscles more delicate. Physicians saw the body as a closed system possessing a limited amount of vital force; hence energy expended in one area reduced the amount available for use elsewhere. Consequently, most physicians were insistent that women’s energy and strength should be confined to motherhood. Girls were to understand that from puberty onwards all bodily strength should be dedicated to maternity and caring for others. Gradually some physicians accepted that the small, frail and weak woman could (even should) be encouraged to become stronger, but within limits: too strong was unfeminine (Vertinsky 1987b: 258–9). Then, as Vertinsky’s (1987a) seminal article on the “eternally wounded woman” showed, there was the issue of menstruation. Here doctors led public opinion in considering periods as regularly-occurring handicaps to female sporting activity. Such a view continued well into the twentieth century. Two points are worth noting. The first is that historians have often used selective quotations to make a case without quantifying the degree of medical opposition to female sports participation. The other is that historians have discovered new sources, such as company sports archives, that suggest that more women than once thought have ignored such medical strictures. Amateur Values A major cultural development in nineteenth-century sport was that of the amateur ethos, a concept more associated with social status than economic

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rewards and one often seen by sports historians as symptomatic of a snobbish middle class trying to keep participation in some sports or sports events exclusive to themselves. Holt (2006) has broadened the concept of amateurism to encompass health and aesthetic values including the need for the growing army of sedentary clerks to become physically active. Nevertheless, the central tenet of amateurism remains a class-based one of playing sport in an appropriate manner with the right sort of people. Yet it was more than a class-based concept designed to prevent the working class playing with (and likely beating) middleclass participants; it was also a reinforcement of the work ethic, a vital cog in the wheels of capitalism. Blackledge (2001) has argued that capitalist ideology lay behind the hostility to professionalism in sport exhibited by some members of the middle class who envisaged leisure as something that should be earned. To quote Arthur Budd, a key figure in the dispute over broken-time payments that in 1895 led the Northern Union to secede from the Rugby Union, the ruling body of the sport: The answer then to those who urge that the working man ought to be compensated for the loss of time incurred by his recreations is that, if he cannot afford the leisure to play the game, he must do without it. —Blackledge 2001: 45 Towards the end of the nineteenth century a fresh debate emerged which focused on whether players should be paid for participating in sport when thousands had paid to watch them and also whether those spectators really ought to have been playing grassroots sport rather than watching elite performers. The aforementioned Budd also argued that professionalism in sport weakened work discipline: A man finds for a time that it is more remunerative to play football than to follow his regular occupation. He is induced in many cases to give up his work at an age the most important in his life for forming habits of industry . . . He has got out of the way of work, and lost valuable time in which he should have been learning a trade. —Blackledge 2001: 47 Not all the middle class held these views. Huggins (2000: 14–15) has shown that the middle class should not be considered as a uniform and unified group. There were differences in incomes and wealth, in religious and political affiliations, in residential and occupational locations, and between those in business and those in the professions. Unsurprisingly their attitudes to sport were not homogenous. Among the many strands there were those who aped the upper classes in their love of field sports; those who pursued athleticism beyond

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public school and into a lifelong participation in golf and tennis; those who promoted professionalism in pursuit of profit or kudos; and others who disliked or even detested sport. Certainly, the protocols of amateurship were breached by talented middleclass participants who wished to make their living from sport but avoid the strong working-class connotations of professionalism. If cricketers, they still wanted to share the gentleman’s changing room, travel first class to matches and dine separately from the paid player. They were accommodated by the creation of sinecure posts such as assistant county cricket secretary. At the same time, however, other middle-class capitalists saw sport as a way of making profits or gaining local kudos and accepted that the paying of performers was no worse than paying other entertainers. It was a necessary cost to offering a quality product. Except in a few sports, professionalism became widespread at the elite level thanks to promoters who were prepared to purchase the services of talented performers and sports fans who were willing to pay to see them exhibit their sporting skills. Indeed gate-money sport employing professional players became one of the entrepreneurial success stories of the late Industrial Age. Not all those involved were seeking profits (Vamplew 2018). Some were more interested in trying to win trophies and would spend accordingly, disregarding the profit incentive which is determined not just by revenue but revenue minus costs. Others were content to earn psychic income by paternalistically offering sporting entertainment to the local populace or promoting a town’s identity by investing in its elite sporting teams. Hence, in England, county cricket clubs were dependent on the distribution of revenue from international matches to keep themselves afloat; most soccer clubs were in debt; and horse racing existed only because many owners were prepared to treat it as a hobby rather than as a business (Vamplew 2012a). Other countries adopted the concept of amateurism but not necessarily the British version with its attached middle-class, non-economic value system. Whereas for the British middle-class amateur how the game was played was the most important factor, for his American counterparts it was the result (Des Jardins 2015). In Australia where, as a British colony more sympathy might have been expected for the amateurism of the mother country there was in many quarters a reaction to (and a rejection of) its class-based aspects. This was particularly true of the Australian cricketers, one of whom explained in his tour diary that he felt the English custom of separating the amateurs from the professionals was “priggish and out of place” (Laver 1905).

CREATING IDENTITIES Although where the body originated and resided can be used to determine identity as defined by others, real identity is a matter of mind, of a belief of

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what type of sportsperson you are, who you want to associate with in your sports club, or what team you feel represents you. Manliness and Masculinity Prevailing ideas of masculinity were reflected in sport at either end of the socioeconomic spectrum. Among the common folk of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century American frontier virtually unregulated brawling rituals shaped concepts of manhood and honor. Disputes were settled and even minor slights were avenged by no-holds-barred contests in which mutilation and disfigurement were emphasized, with eye-gouging and castration not infrequent occurrences (Gorn 1985). Further up the social scale, participants in American College Football at the turn of the century also used violence to demonstrate their manliness. The college game was “extremely violent, dangerous and at times brutal” (Riess 1991b: 18). Players wore little protection and there were many injuries and even fatalities, twenty-four in 1905 alone, from the vicious antagonisms that were encouraged. Des Jardins (2015) sees the football field as one of the few spaces left in the public sphere that could be designated as truly male. With the frontier closing, gone were the opportunities for living dangerously, for battling wild animals and Native American tribes, and for surviving in harsh landscapes. The manliness of the frontiersmen and the footballers was associated with courage in the face of personal violence. Other sportsmen demonstrated courage (and by implication manliness) in taking on the dangers of their chosen sport. Pugilism and horse racing were sports that demanded courage: more than in football and rugby, both of which had become more civilized with the prohibition of hacking; more than in cricket which had a hard missile but protective pads and a bat with which to defend. Racing was the supreme test of sporting courage and to get into the saddle knowing that injury was not just probable but inevitable requires bravery of a special kind (Vamplew and Kay 2006). This aspect of manliness, unlike that of the middle-class (amateur by implication) footballer, rugby player or cricketer, was not the direct product of a public-school education. No public school in the period studied offered hunting or riding, let alone racing, as an extracurricular pursuit. So where did it originate? One avenue was the military, an institution still obsessed with the horse and where the ability to travel on horseback at high speed was an admired trait. A correspondent in Bell’s Life argued that senior officers encouraged their juniors to ride in steeplechases “because it excites that courage, presence of mind and skill in horsemanship without which their glorious achievements of Balaclava and Inkermann would never have been recorded” (Cited in Seth-Smith 1966: 42).

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FIGURE 7.4: A fight between British boxers Harry Broome and Tom Paddock, 1855, courtesy of Getty Images.

The Socialization of Children Historically sporting identities have often been shaped through the socially constructed ways different generations experienced and gave meaning to sport. Different age phases were important in this construction, and sporting identity has often started to be shaped at a young age, in schooling or adolescence. Unfortunately, there has been negligible research on the role of the family in this regard. More positively there is some information on schooling, especially the British public schools, which is perhaps one reason why those institutions have often been credited with transforming British sport. School sport could provide identity for the middle class, particularly those who had attended public school where “athleticism”, as Mangan (1981) has shown, became a norm for extracurricular activity and a means of socially engineering boys into men. The value system promulgated was one of courage,

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determination, self-control, self-discipline, and controlled manliness rather than brutality. Getting your colours and representing your house or school promoted loyalty and post-school thinking was permeated by the concept of team spirit and, for some, a belief that life was an extension of the sports field. No matter where they went in the world their primary sporting loyalty would remain with the school and its old boys’ teams with perhaps a nod towards the national cricket eleven or rugby fifteen. Although this view has become conventional wisdom it has yet to be fully validated. We do not know what proportion of public schools adopted an educational policy formally encouraging the development of athleticism with its compulsory games and associated character-building. The answer may be “the vast majority” but this needs to be shown not assumed. Even if we look less quantitatively, there are still unanswered questions. As partially-closed communities, public schools were in a position to impose athleticism on their students, but we do not know whether the boys actually accepted the ramifications of the code. To what extent did they merely pay lip service and then get on with trying to win however they could? Was it compliance rather than commitment? Mangan (1981: 69) acknowledges that in the main the boys played games for enjoyment not for their moral attributes. Were they indoctrinated by osmosis? Did they accept the tenets of athleticism at all? We just do not know. Certainly, there were boys who opposed athleticism; Mangan (1981: 72; 2011) himself notes the factions at Marlborough and the variation in the perceived experiences of students at Winchester. Too many academics have simply bought into the athleticism story without considering whether the substance matched the rhetoric. Any ex-pupil sporting loyalty was less likely at the British state elementary schools which educated the bulk of the populace. The children there rarely played sport. Most physical education in the elementary schools consisted of drill (for social obedience and physical health) rather than sport. Sport in school hours was not even mentioned in the national curriculum until 1906 and, even then, it was “allowed” rather than prescribed and no funds were made available to support it. The 1909 physical education curriculum did not include the team games that were so popular in the private sector. This was presumably due to lack of space and cost and to the enduring conviction of some that games were for the middle classes and drill for the masses. Although there were a few schools sport associations formed in some large cities, there is no evidence of widespread diffusion of team games to the state schools before the outbreak of the war. What little evidence that exists on elementary school sport does not suggest that fair play and moral conduct were central to boys’ football; contrariwise any emphasis seemed to be on winning as is the fact that the few schools that played football did so in competitive leagues.

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FIGURE 7.5: Exercise class, Buckingham Street School, Islington, London, 1906. A physical training drill in the playground, with girls with legs raised backwards and arms stretched sideways, courtesy of Getty Images.

Other youngsters, such as caddies and jockeys, were socialized into sport via their employment. In mid nineteenth-century British horse racing, prior to minimum weight legislation, owners sometimes resorted to child riders in an attempt to gain an advantage. The “infant phenomenon” was legislated away by the Jockey Club’s introduction of minimum weights later in the century but there was no minimum age limit imposed. Children who wished to become jockeys faced a seven-year apprenticeship during which trainers were supposed to teach them the skills of jockeyship. Unfortunately, too many regarded apprentices simply as cheap stable labor and for most there was no future on the racetrack (Vamplew 2016b). Given the skills they acquired during their apprenticeship those who failed to make the grade might still find employment in the racing industry as stable lads. Child caddies, perhaps upwards of 20,000 boys in late Edwardian Britain, had even less chance of becoming a professional golfer or even a greenkeeper or club-maker. Unlike the budding jockeys they served no apprenticeship and learned few specific or transferable skills: caddying was a dead-end job with no prospects (Vamplew 2017b: 46–53).

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Identities of Place Sport has the ability to nurture a loyalty and with it an identity. Over the years, supporters have identified themselves with various degrees of enthusiasm to teams and clubs, but also with localities ranging from streets through towns and cities to regions and nations. Certainly, in the latter cases emigrants have often relocated their sports with them so, for example, there is the link back to the homeland of the nineteenth-century Celtic diaspora in which Caledonian Societies hosted Highland Games and Gaelic Athletic Associations organized hurling for expatriate Irishmen. Within Britain both the Scots and the Welsh took up “British” sports and attempted to demonstrate their national identities by taking on the English at soccer and rugby union respectively, but with their own brand of playing the sports. In football the Scots pioneered a passing game rather than the dribbling preferred by the English and in rugby the Welsh developed an open style of running game using talented backs in preference to the forward-dominated version of the English. In contrast Irish sporting identity was enshrined in the playing of Irish-specific sports, particularly hurling and Gaelic football, and a rejection of those emanating from mainland Britain. Indeed, the Gaelic Athletic Association, which ran Gaelic sports across Ireland, was more than just a sports organization and fully embraced Irish nationalist political ideology (Cronin 1998). Elsewhere there were British colonies which also used sport to create national identities. Many Australians had an inferiority complex vis-à-vis England due to a feeling that either they were not wanted in the mother country or had failed to make a success in life there. In Australia cricket became a litmus test to ascertain how migrants and ensuing generations had fared in an alien environment and hot climate; beating England in its national game led to fewer press references on colonial degeneration and elicited new claims that the old stock had actually improved by its grafting onto Australian soil. No longer were the antipodean colonials unsure whether they were Australians or southern hemisphere Englishmen. After the conclusion of the 1897/98 test series an editorial in the Bulletin March 19, 1898), a journal that played a significant role in the encouragement and circulation of nationalist sentiments, maintained that “this ruthless rout of English cricket will do—and has done—more to enhance the cause of Australian nationality than could ever be achieved by miles of erudite essays and impassioned appeal”. Indeed, historian Mandle (1973) has argued that the separate Australian colonies became unified on the cricket field. The victories over the English showed them the value of cooperation and lent support to the movement for federation. In both England and the United States there was a north/south rivalry in sporting matters. Horse racing became the first truly nationwide sport spectacle in the United States, particularly when a few meetings pitted horses from the

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South against northern champions as when American Eclipse beat Henry two heats to one in 1823 before a crowd of 60,000 (Vamplew 1996). In England cricket literature, particularly the local press, constructed a Yorkshire (a northern county) identity of working-class men playing hard competitive matches in semiprofessional leagues involving fierce local rivalries in contrast to a southern amateur attitude where friendly fixtures and middle-class amateur values prevailed (Stone 2008). Stone argued that the development of such cricket regional identities was influenced by the north’s “independence” from the national center of power, influence and culture; the differential impact of industrialization; the demographic of those who promoted the game at county and more local levels; and the existence of an early autonomous regional press and how it presented cricket to the local readership. Urbanization replaced the community allegiance of the village with anomie and anonymity, but this was something that could be countered by sport and its emotional stimulation. This might be one reason why workplace sport was seized on by company labor forces: with the expansion of cities and the increased size of factories men lost their “neighborhood” workmates and the workplace may have been seen as the site for playing alongside people with whom there was daily contact. Huggins (2004: 192) has noted sporting loyalties “could be complex, contested, contradictory or overlapping” covering real or imagined communities and could be used “by both minority and majority groups to assert social identity”. The notion of identity is too often studied in relation to minorities but, as Burdsey and Chappell (2001: 95) note, “we must not ignore that majorities have identities too.” The identity of minorities gains more credence from being presented as a contrast to the majority. This could add an edge to sporting contests beyond geography. Intracity rivalry in Glasgow between fans of Celtic and Rangers football clubs had overtones of sectarianism and ethnic hostility outside the catchment area of Parkhead and Ibrox, sites of their respective stadiums. There were two distinct and polarized identities: Celtic drew its support predominantly from Irish Catholics whilst Rangers was a proUnion, staunchly Protestant (read anti-Catholic) club. Some of the loyalties to the larger spatial units were to places which were often mentally-constructed “imagined communities” where the dominant perceptions had no strong basis in reality. They are what people choose or want to believe rather than the actuality. Huggins has analyzed ways in which Cumbria’s sports were used to express regional identities. He shows that some sports, notably fell-running, hailed as traditional to the region’s identity were neither deep-rooted nor exclusive to the Cumbrian counties. On the other hand, wrestling in the Cumbrian back-hold style was less of an invented tradition and “combined entertainment with the expression of local loyalties” (Huggins 2011:87). In a later article Stone (2017) showed much of the alleged

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identities in regional cricket turned out to be bogus stereotyping, especially the view that league cricket was rare in the south. Yet the belief persisted and served to reinforce traditional rivalries and prejudices. Associativity Identity and emotion can come together in sport in the professing of loyalty to an institution or a team representing a geographical area. A distinction might be drawn between the team, the overt symbol of the club in action, and the club itself which at grassroots level was more the concern of participants than spectators. For many working men loyalty and identity in sport was local, engendered by their neighborhood, public house or workplace. Around Stirling in Scotland over half the soccer teams formed between 1876 and 1895 were named after specific neighborhoods (Huggins 2004: 195); late-nineteenth century angling clubs generally had their headquarters in public houses (Lowerson 1989: 19) and in a sample of eight northern towns in 1914 around 6 percent of reported cricket and football teams were associated with workplaces (Williams 1996). When organizing themselves into institutions for the purpose of playing, sportspersons had a long tradition of “the club” to draw upon as British provincial and metropolitan life had a strong associational culture into which sport slotted relatively seamlessly. By the late eighteenth century, the club was the major sporting institution in Britain, often possessing distinctive uniforms and with most of them operating some form of restriction to ensure social homogeneity of membership (Harvey 2004). It remained the fundamental unit of sport into the nineteenth century and beyond; also coming down the social scale with independently-organized workingmen’s sports clubs making their appearance from the 1880s (Huggins 2004: 102). Participation in sport is generally a voluntary activity and joining a club can demonstrate both individual and collective identity. The uniforms of the golf, cycling or boat clubs were badges of belonging. The fundamental aspect of a sports club is that it is a collective, a members’ organization that demonstrates associativity. Indeed, an important attraction of the sports club was the feeling of commonality that it could create not just of playing sport together but from also sharing a faith, a public-school education, a workplace, a drinking venue, or a political orientation. Instrumentality—the actual promotion of sporting activity—led to the creation of clubs, but it was institutional collectivity that bound the membership together, offered group solidarity, and reinforced a sense of identity and status enhancement. Golf illustrates this well. In the London area, for example, Northwood was the club for doctors, Woking for lawyers and Sunningdale for stock exchange dealers. Golfers wanted to play with like-minded individuals and in 1913 it was claimed that “numerous golf societies are being formed

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every day by people belonging to particular classes, professions or sets” (Golf Illustrated, January 31, 1913: 140). Clubs generally served to consolidate existing collective identities: bonding social capital dominated the bridging variety (Huggins 2004: 191). In the late eighteenth century, the twelve foundation members of the Royal Caledonian Hunt Society included four dukes, three earls and three baronets (Kay 2000/01: 32), As clubs descended the socio-economic scale the same social exclusivity scenario pertained. The membership of the Alpine Club was overwhelmingly from the professional middle classes and artisan golf clubs were only for those who volunteered to undertake manual labor on the course of the parent club that sponsored them. Conviviality was a strong secondary motive for joining a sports club. Indeed, Holt has argued that it “has been at the heart of sport” (Holt 1990: 347). Kay’s examination of the Royal Caledonian Hunt’s early minute books shows “a distinct lack of enthusiasm for both the field and the turf ” in contrast to the “emphasis on drinking and dining”. In fact, there is not a reference to sport between 1801 and 1812. A wine committee was established in 1801—“good wine” the minutes recorded, “being absolutely essential for the Meetings of the Hunt”—but there was no racing committee till 1865 (Kay 2000/01: 30, 36). Socialization with other members remained a consistent feature of sports club life. In Irish cricket in the late nineteenth century military bands played every Tuesday at the North of Ireland Cricket Club in Belfast and the postmatch events on the I Zingari tour of Ireland in 1875 had “the most attractive dances, the best of music, and the best of suppers” (Reid 2012: 152). From its inception in 1888 the sporting paper, Scottish Referee, periodically included a section “The Social Circle” in which the various concerts and suppers of sports clubs were discussed. In the 1880s several of the early Scottish football clubs developed entertainment offshoots. Vale of Leven had a Dramatic Society which performed before an audience of 700 in nearby Alexandria; Rangers set up a sub-committee to establish a Literary and Musical Association; and Queens Park possessed a Musical and Dramatic Society. Most working-class angling clubs met in public houses and, as was explained to a Parliamentary Committee in 1878, “had a jollification afterward”, though the witness was careful to add “without exceeding the bounds of temperance”. Yachtsmen may have joined the Royal Cruising Club primarily for access to its navigational charts or the chance to win one of its annual awards, but it was an implicit condition of membership that they undertook “to mix with fellow members whenever they meet afloat”. One member of the Glasgow Ladies Cycling Club in 1900 was “totally unashamed” to admit that, in her view, “the great event of a ladies club run is tea” (Vamplew 2016c: 462–3). The conviviality of the dinners, dances, soirees, smokers for men, annual garden party, and concerts served to draw individuals into social relationships, creating bonding social capital via friendship and enjoyment. They could act as

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fundraisers for the clubs and, with the help of a supportive local press, assist in creating a favorable image, both in demonstrating approved respectable behavior to the outside world and in showing potential members how friendly and convivial the club was. There was, however, a danger that the image created could be detrimental to the club and the sport. Much of the conviviality centered on alcohol and sometimes behavior became over boisterous. After a match in 1878 two members of the touring Queen’s Park football team were fined a pound each by a Nottingham court for their disorderly conduct. Five years later there were complaints about “the high jinks in hotels by football teams becoming such a nuisance that something must be done to put an end to the gross misconduct which goes on”. When clubs went on tour at New Year or Easter it was alleged that “drunken orgies” often resulted and that “Lancashire hotelkeepers have a wholesale dread of Kilmarnock F. C.” (Vamplew 2016c: 462–3). Fandom Civic pride was a form of public good in which citizens of a town or region could bask in the reflected glory of a successful local sports team without necessarily having to pay to watch them, though many would. Huggins (2004: 199) notes that words such as “pride”, “glory”, “credit” and “honor” featured regularly in local and provincial press match reports. Sport helped enhance the status of urban areas. In late nineteenth-century Britain having a football team inferred you were a “proper” town. So public benefactors put money into football clubs and stadia, along with funding libraries, museums and parks, all of them symbols of civic prosperity. Across the Atlantic the St. Louis Brown Stockings, a professional baseball team, was established by a group of St. Louis businessmen, so as to compete effectively against the Chicago White Stockings who had continually beaten amateur sides from the Missouri city. After the Civil War, St. Louis lost its pre-eminent position as the major mid-continent trading center to Chicago. Hence baseball triumphs became a form of symbolic revenge and the public of St. Louis did not need to attend games to feel pride in the achievement of the city’s team (Carter: 1976). What of those who chose to go to the stadiums to watch baseball or one of the emerging football codes? Klugman (2017) has seized the opportunity offered by digitization of newspapers to explore the emotional experiences of sport watchers and gain insights into spectator cultures. He examines the “emotion of excitement” among the “barrackers” of Australian Rules football, the “cranks” of American baseball, and the sufferers of “football fever” in English soccer. These were people, not always men, who were more than just spectators: they were obsessives noted by the contemporary press for the intensity of the emotions that coalesced around them. He cites descriptions of the Boston baseball fan seemingly “under the influence of some mesmeric

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power . . . paralyzed by excitement”, of the Nottingham football supporters being “on the rack for the greater part of last Saturday afternoon, for, from their point of view, the contest must have been too close to be pleasant”, and of the Aussie Rules barracker in Melbourne who unleashed “a frenzied howl of mingled rage and pain, spiced with wounded pride and dire apprehension”. Klugman (2017: 318) also observes that the emotions experienced by these sports followers could almost become much to cope with: the metaphors of pathology found in contemporary comment, often intimate significant bodily suffering as well as joy, of the need to yell and hoot in distress as well as in triumph, and to watch as if in a trance because what is occurring seems more important at that moment than anything else. Although as yet insufficiently researched, there is some evidence—admittedly from middle-class, male, sports reporters—that female football fans in England could be fervent in their addiction to their team. It was noted that women with children in their arms at a Fleetwood Rangers match “were too excited to sit down . . . their bairns were forgotten in their interest in football” and, at Bury, when watching a match against Blackburn Rovers “even the ladies in the stand lost their decorum and went frantic with the rest”. Occasionally female enthusiasm spilled over into hostility towards the opposing team and its supporters. At the 1888 Sheffield Cup Final a female from Ecclesfield verbally abused opposition players and fans calling them “setpots” (washing bowls) and “Fenians” (Irish nationalists) and after one match in Lancashire female spectators verbally and physically assaulted the referee (Lewis, 2009). Klugman argues that if we can begin to understand the spectator culture with its attendant passions and frustrations then we might comprehend the instances of violence that sometimes accompanied spectator sport. Such violence was certainly a feature of British football before 1914, though its extent has been a major debate among sports historians and sociologists. Dunning (1984) and his sociology colleagues at the University of Leicester constructed a database of player and spectator violence, but historian Lewis (2014), criticized their attempt and suggested that in their desire to inflate the level of football hooliganism (essential to their argument of a long-term decline in violence in British society more generally) they double-counted incidents and employed a careless definition of “hooliganism” that included not only physical violence but verbal abuse and pitch encroachment. He also argued that they made speculations not supported by evidence, lacked statistical justifications of their claims, and used Leicestershire as representative of England as a whole. Whoever is the more correct it must be said that non-violent behavior was still the most typical spectator experience, even among the fervent club supporters.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Representation ALLEN GUTTMANN

In 1800, children’s games were a cultural universal, but sports were a very small part of the daily lives of much of the adult world. Royalty and titled aristocrats enjoyed a wide range of sports: for ordinary men and women, sports were seasonal. This relative unimportance of sports in the daily life of commoners meant that populist sports’ verbal and visual representations were uncommon. By 1920, daily representations of sports in all sorts of media, from naive schoolroom scribbles to sophisticated feature films, were mind-bogglingly numerous. The histories of art, literature and sport as cultural forms have long been intertwined, but their study has often been carried on separately, with few serious engagements between Literary Studies, Art History and Sports History, though a number of art histories have explored sport (e.g., Fairley 1990; Kuhnst 1996; Sumner et al. 2011; Clarke and McConkey 2014) while literary scholars sometimes provided sporting anthologies (e.g., Scannell 1996). But in recent years there has been increasing recognition of imaginative literature and art as important sporting mediators (e.g., Messenger 1981; Hill and Williams 2009; Guttmann 2011; Hughson 2015; Curto and Wines 2019). Such approaches take a broad view of “culture”, stressing the ways in which such representations mediate gender, race, class and nation. Many generalizations about this plethora of data have neglected those sporting representations more broadly referenced as “high culture”, the more sophisticated, intellectually-challenging and shared frame of reference among educated people. So this chapter focuses on verbal and visual representations with a secure place in cultural history. The verbal representations discussed appear in works of literature that are still widely read. The visual representations are displayed in museums, most of 187

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FIGURE 8.1: John Singleton Copley, Richard Heber (1782), courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art.

which are acknowledged to be among the world’s best. One advantage of the selection of works that may be called “canonical” is that readers can easily check their interpretations of what they have read and seen against the author’s.

TRADITIONAL GAMES In 1883, Prosper Mérimée (1803–1870), whose novella Carmen (1845) inspired the better-known opera by Georges Bizet (1838–1875), published a story, “La Vénus d’Ille,” that includes a game of the traditional sport jeu de

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paume (an ancestor of tennis) (Mérimée 1883: 5). The story’s eponym is an antique bronze statue of Venus unearthed in a Catalan village. Superstitious villagers shun the “idol.” The protagonist is a young man so obsessed with jeu de paume that he plays it on the morning of his wedding. During the match, he changes clothes and places the bride’s wedding ring on the statue’s finger. Afterwards, he forgets the ring. This has fatal consequences. Considering herself to be married to Alphonse, finding him in the bedroom of another woman, the jealous deity crushes him to death (Cropper 2008). Mérimée intended no generalization about sports, but Émile Zola (1840– 1902) surely did. He inserted a game of crosse into Germinal, his very long Naturalist novel contrasting the brutally-hard lives of coal miners and the irresponsible luxury of mines’ owners (Zola 1885). Crosse is a traditional game played with a wooden ball (cholette) and a bat forcefully swung to drive the ball, with each stroke, as far as possible towards a distant goal. The hours spent at crosse provide the miners with a brief break from a long, bitterly contested, mutually-ruinous strike. Zola’s protagonist, Etienne Lantier, is a socialist who leads the oppressed strikers. The protagonist of Wiltfeber—der ewige Deutsche (Wiltfeber—the Eternal German), a 1912 novel by Hermann Burte (1879–1960), is a protoNazi. Wiltfeber, a physically superior young man, is an exemplar of Germanic manhood, who defeats his village rivals in traditional völkisch sports such as spear and stone-throwing and stone-lifting (Burte 1912). Although he is erotically tempted by a dark-haired femme fatale, he shuns her and finds salvation in the arms of an athletic blonde. The novel was highly praised during the Nazi era. Nineteenth-century artists were seldom moved to depict völkisch games, but Native American stickball, from which the modern game of lacrosse evolved, was endlessly interesting to genre painters of an anthropological bent. Typical of these painters’ work is Ball Play of the Choctaw, painted by George Catlin (1796–1872) in 1846–1850. His oil shows hundreds of Indians struggling on a vast unmarked field for possession of the ball (Goodyear III 2006). George Caleb Bingham (1811–1879) was among the few canonical painters to depict the sports of the pioneers as they moved westward (and displaced the Indians commemorated by Catlin). Shooting for the Beef (1850) stresses the role of sports in transforming western settlements into communities (Clark and Guttmann 1995: 91–2). The building before which the shooters compete has a sign that identifies it as a grocery and a post office. That the contest takes place quite literally in this building’s shadow emphasizes the sport’s double role. It is a guarantee of sustenance and a basis for communication and interaction. The triangular composition, with one long, sloping side, signals order, harmony, and well-being, a peaceful statement that the wilderness had, indeed, been “subdued” with the rifles now employed in sport.

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Early in the twentieth century, Henri Matisse (1869–1954) surprised his admirers with Le Jeu de Boules (1908), a configuration of three men enjoying a traditional game better-known under its Italian name, bocce. The top third of the picture plane is a swath of blue, presumably the sky, while the lower part is a green plane, presumably a lawn or grassy field. Two of the three players are nude. The third covers his genitals with a dark red cloth.

HUNTING AND ANGLING These were probably the century’s most popular participant sports. The most cherished of the century’s fictional hunters is a middle-aged, overweight London grocer who seizes upon an unexpected offer to become the Master of a provincial Fox Hunt. John Jorrocks, the Dickensian invention of Robert Surtees (1805–1864), is a man obsessed. “Untin’ fills my thoughts by day and many a good run I have in my sleep . . . Of all sitivations under the sun, none is more enviable, more ‘onerable than that of a master of fox-‘ounds” (Surtees 1854: 89). When thrown from his horse, he remounts, with the assistance of his groom, and resumes the pursuit, which ends, more often than not, with the hounds exhausted and the fox unharmed. Jorrocks’ frequent orations are a farrago of misinformation. While praising the “ridin’ master to the Doge of Wenice,” he complains that he learned nothing from authorities such as Henry Bracken, William Taplin, and “Caveat Emptier” (Surtees 1854: 130). One can conclude from a thousand or more pages of Jorrocks’ hijinks, escapades, and malapropisms that fox-hunters are emblematic English aristocrats much emulated by their rather comical social inferiors. Hunters figure importantly in Anna Karenina (1877), the second of the two literary monuments erected by Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910). Firmly placed at the center of the novel’s moral universe, Constantine Dmitrich Levin is a complexly conflicted liberal landowner who feels earthly beatitude while swinging a scythe side by side with the very same peasants whom he is trying vainly to coax and cajole into the modern world of rationalized agriculture. For recreation and recreation, Levin camps and shoots in the snipe marshes a day’s journey from his estate (Tolstoy 2012: 521). His skill as a hunter and the simplicity of his manners contrast comically with the foppish ineptitude of his sporting companion, Anna Karenina’s brother Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky, an urbane embodiment of big-city superficiality. Their actions as hunters characterize them morally. Thomas Henry Alken (1785–1851) was perhaps foremost among a bevy of British painters who flooded the art market with depictions of hunters and anglers (Noakes 1952). His Grouse Shooting (c. 1825) is cleverly structured. The bird has been frightened into flight. The hounds are at ground level. Although about to shoot, the hunter has not quite reached the top of the hill from which the bird has ascended.

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Alken was eclipsed by the American painter William Tylee Ranney (1813– 1857). Ranney’s The Retrieve (1850) resembles a peaceful domestic scene, if one looks away from the hunters’ rifles and the row of dead birds at their feet. While Ranney stands cleaning (or recharging) his rifle, his brother, rather elegantly dressed for an excursion to the New Jersey marshes, stretches out his hand to take a retrieved bird from the mouth of an obediently-sitting dog. The tightly-organized triangular composition groups the men and their dog in a format suggesting that all three must work together if the hunt is to be successful.

FIGURE 8.2: Gustav Courbet, The Quarry (La Curée) (1856), courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Henry Lillie Pierce Fund.

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Men act in consort with nature (their dog) even when they are involved in a contest against nature (the ducks). La Curée (The Quarry), painted by Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) in 1857, is a theatrical scene. A stag hangs from a tree. A hunter leans against an adjacent tree while his seated companion, brightly dressed in a white shirt and red vest, blows a hunting horn. One of the hounds look suspiciously at the dead stag and a second hound looks at the first. Après la Chasse (After the Hunt), painted shortly thereafter, shows a redcoated hunter dangling a dead hare at which one of his dogs leaps and snaps. Another dog paws at the large pile of the hunter’s slaughtered prey. These are but the two best known of Courbet’s many hunting scenes (Tseng 2008). Active as a hunter in the Adirondacks Mountains and as a fly fisherman, the American master, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) depicted these activities in dozens of oils and watercolors, among which Huntsman and Dogs (1891) and Waterfall in the Adirondacks (1889) are prime examples. The former is neither an affirmation nor a condemnation of hunting, though other paintings engage with late nineteenth-century debates about the perils of witnessing nonhuman suffering (Ronan 2017). As the preliminary watercolor for the oil makes clear, the sober-looking young man who strides across the vast and desolate landscape is a hired guide. The dogs are his, but the pelts and antlers that he carries are destined to decorate some wealthier person’s game room. One man’s sport is another’s livelihood. Like Homer’s many other portrayals of working-class hardship and fortitude, Huntsman and Dog, was painted with a dark palette. Clad in a north-woods angler’s waterproof made-to-purpose outfit and equipped with a state-of-the-art fly rod, Homer’s fisherman straddles a log and casts his line, which describes a graceful curve against the foaming white water. The diagonals of fallen trees lead to the rapids where the fish is fighting for its life. The fisherman’s precarious position and the roil of the rushing water signal that fly fishing is a demanding sport that involves not only considerable skill but also physical discomfort and a modicum of risk.

EQUESTRIAN SPORTS Throughout our period, horse races were unquestionably the most popular spectator sport, but Tolstoy seems to have been the only major writer to focus intently on the races rather than on the fans who crowded to cheer for (and bet on) their favorites. Anna Karenina Prince Alexander Vronsky, Anna’s lover, is a passionate rider. In what is arguably the most emotionally charged scene of the entire novel, Anna looks on as Vronsky, mounted on his favorite mare, competes in a steeplechase. At the last water-jump Vronsky “made the unpardonable mistake” of dropping back in his saddle and pulling up the horse’s head (Tolstoy 2012: 180). The horse falls to the ground, struggling like

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a wounded, fluttering bird. Owing to Vronsky’s awkward movement she had dropped her hind legs and broken her back. The prince has literally destroyed his beloved mare just as he will, later in the novel, symbolically destroy Anna. Of the many writers and artists who paid more attention to the motley crowds and festive atmosphere than to the races, Charles Dickens (1812–1870) and William Powell Frith (1819–1909) stand out. Dickens marveled that “all London turned out” for Derby Day. The roads leading to the track were jammed with “barouches, phaetons, broughams, gigs, four-wheeled chaises, four-inhands, Hansom cabs, cabs of lesser note, chaise-carts, donkey-carts, tilted vans made arborescent with green boughs” (Dickens 1851: 244) Frith’s colorful panorama, Derby Day at Epsom (1856–1858), a visual counterpart to Dickens’ verbal canvas, depicted a carnival-like sports event where racing fans, gamblers, hawkers and vendors, gypsy fortunetellers, acrobats, musicians, pickpockets, idle thugs, and lost children mingled (Huggins 2013). Innumerable artists tried, mostly in vain, to transfer to canvas the image of a galloping horse. For most artists, the horse’s legs were an insuperable problem. The Derby at Epsom (1821), by Théodore Géricault (1791–1824), is a famous failure. With The Races at Longchamp (1866), Edouard Manet (1832–1883) was more successful. Viewers look into the picture frame as if they were standing directly in the path of the galloping horses. The horses’ legs are scarcely visible. Eventually, the photographic experiments of Eadweard Muybridge (1830– 1904) enabled artists to produce more realistic depictions of human and animal motion, but even before Muybridge published his stop-motion photographs, Edgar Degas (1834–1917) had established himself as painter of colorful racetrack scenes (Hornbuckle 1998). Even after he had become familiar with Muybridge’s work, Degas continued to paint scenes in which jockeys and their mounts are moving slowly or completely at rest (Boggs 1998). Unlike Frith, Degas was relatively uninterested in the spectators. An exception to this generalization is an early work entitled The Carriage Leaving the Races in the Country (1869–1872), but even here the difference from Frith is striking. It is clear from the focus on a single carriage as it departs from a nearly deserted venue that the race was a provincial event culturally as well as geographically distant from the fashionable Longchamp course in the Bois de Boulogne. Degas seems never to have sketched or painted the fast-paced scramble of a polo match, but Max Liebermann (1847–1935) and George Bellows (1882– 1925) responded to the challenge. Between 1903 and 1912, Liebermann produced ten not particularly distinguished pictures in a variety of different visual media. Bellows, on the other hand, was in top form when he exhibited Polo Crowd and Polo at Lakewood, both painted in 1910. In each of the two oils, the exquisitely-dressed spectators stand without visible emotion and quietly observe the daring, mallet-swinging players as they

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FIGURE 8.3: George Bellows, Polo at Lakewood, courtesy of the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus Art Association Purchase.

lean down from their galloping mounts to strike the small, rapidly-moving wooden ball. Quite obviously, playing and watching polo was a statement of elite status.

BOXERS, WRESTLERS, FENCERS If we exclude the hyperbolic, jargon-packed, exuberantly metaphorical, immensely influential journalism of Pierce Egan (1772–1849), the earliest canonical account of pugilism is The Fight, published by William Hazlitt (1778– 1830) in 1822. It was an account of an illegal eighteen-round bout between Bill Neate (1791–1858), “The Bristol Butcher,” and Tom “Gas-man” Hickman (1785–1822). A distinguished man of letters, Hazlitt makes it abundantly clear that he traveled to the secret location sixty miles from London in order to describe the brutal event for middle-class readers far too respectable actually to mingle with the ringside mob. After proclaiming, “A boxer . . . need not be a blackguard or a coxcomb, more than another,” Hazlitt, then proceeds vividly to describe two lower-class louts who battered each other until both were “smeared with gore, stunned, senseless, the breath beaten out of their bodies” (Hazlitt 1929: 21–2).

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Sixty years after The Fight, pugilism, repackaged as “boxing” and somewhat civilized by the Queensberry Rules of 1867, appeared in a totally different light in Cashel Byron’s Profession (1882), a cleverly paradoxical novel by George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950). The heroine is the beautiful, young, immensely wealthy, and prodigiously learned Lydia Carew. Comfortably seat on her castle lawn, engrossed in reading Goethe’s Faust (in the original), her steward informs her that a young gentleman notable for “his inveterate love of sport,” has rented her lodge (Shaw 2011: 44). Walking through her vast grounds, she is “dazzled by an apparition which she at first took to be a beautiful statue . . . His broad pectoral muscles . . . were like slabs of marble” and his short, crisp, curly hair “seemed like burnished bronze in the evening light. It came into Lydia’s mind that she had disturbed an antique god in his sylvan haunt” (Shaw 2011: 47). Initially attracted to Cashel Byron, she is horrified to discover that he is a boxer. “Society has a prejudice against you. I share it; and I cannot overcome it.” She asks, sarcastically, if he proposes “to visit my house in the intervals of battering and maiming butchers and labourers?” (Shaw 2011: 180). He proposes just that. He is proud of what he does, stoutly maintaining, at a fashionable soirée, that everyone knows the boxer Jack Randall (1794–1928) while “there isn’t one man in a million that ever heard of Beethoven” (Shaw 2011: 114). Lydia is taken aback by such brazen philistinism, but Cashel persists in his courtship. After many comic turns of the plot, he persuades her that all life is “a perpetual combat” and that he is simply more candid about the ruthlessness of his profession than artists, businessmen and legislators are about theirs (Shaw 2011: 126). Comedy is also the stock in trade of the underrated American short-story writer Charles E. Van Loan (1876–1919), an aficionado of chicanery who is charmed rather than offended by boxing’s artful dodgers. Taking the Count (1915) is every bit as good as Cashel Byron’s Profession and far better informed about the sport (Van Loan 1919). In Hazlitt’s day, most painters with Royal Academy ambitions shied away from the underworld of pugilism, but John Jackson (1778–1831) was an exception. In 1811, Jackson painted a bare-to-the-waist, ready-for-a-fight portrait of the celebrated English champion Tom Cribb (1781–1848) (Jackson’s picture is best known from George Hunt’s 1842 engraving.) While academicians hesitated, caricaturists flocked to ringside. The same year, as a favor to his journalist friend Pierce Egan, George Cruikshank (1792–1878) produced a widely-admired print of Cribb’s second battle against the Virginia-born ex-slave Tom Molineaux (1784–1818), who had beaten him a year earlier. By mid-century, a paucity of boxing images by canonical artists was no longer a problem. Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), the world’s pre-eminent painter of sports images, befriended boxers, frequented their training sessions, and attended their bouts. Among a series of boxing oils he produced in 1898–1899

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FIGURE 8.4: George Bellows, Stag at Sharkey’s (1909), © The Cleveland Museum of Art, Hinman B. Burlbut Collection.

is Salutat, a powerful example of Eakins’ fascination with the muscular male body. The placement of the boxer’s right leg, slightly behind the left, tightens the gluteus maximus of his buttocks while his raised arm brings the muscles of his back and shoulder into play. The picture is also a political statement. Its Latin title alludes to the gladiatorial games of imperial Rome and also to an image of those games by Eakins’ teacher, Jean Léon Gérôme (1824–1904). Gérome’s gladiator, a person without civic rights, looks up for a signal from his ruler. Eakins’ boxer, saluting spectators who are his political equals, proudly accepts their acknowledgment of the legitimacy of his profession (Smith 1979). In a series of pictures painted between 1909 and 1924, George Bellows, second only to Eakins in this endeavor, presented a far darker image of the sport. In Stag at Sharkey’s (1909), for instance, the boxers resemble machines rather than men. Their tensed muscles are springs releasing or about to release their kinetic energy. For once, the tired metaphor, “locked in combat,” seems appropriate. The men are so closely welded together that the blood of each spatters the face of the other, reducing it to a mere blob. Some of the spectators grimace or leer, but most are as featureless as the fighters (Haywood 1988).

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Major writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were so disinterested in wrestling that the period’s most vivid account of the sport appeared in the second volume of A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), which Marcel Proust (1871–1922) published in 1919. Proust’s hero, also named Marcel, recalls how he tried to wrest a letter from his girlfriend Gilberte, who held it tightly. “I put my arms round her neck . . . and we wrestled, locked together. I tried to pull her toward me and she resisted . . . I held her gripped between my legs like a young tree which I was trying to climb” (Proust 1934: 378). In the course of the struggle, Marcel experiences sexual orgasm and Gilberte requests that they continue to wrestle. Trust Proust to acknowledge the role of Eros in sports. Visual artists were more circumspect. Since wrestling calls more muscles into play than boxing does, visual representations of the sport are more likely to focus on the body that performs the activity rather than upon the activity per se. This is clearly the case in images of wrestlers by the French artist Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), the American George Luks (1867–1933), and the German Max Slevogt (1868–1921). In Courbet’s Les Lutteurs (1853), in Slevogt’s Die Ringerschule (1893), and in Luks’ The Wrestlers (1903), the grapplers’ muscles, strained to point of cracking, are drawn with an anatomical precision seldom seen in other sporting art. The same cannot be said of the countless sumô wrestlers commemorated by Japanese artists in woodblock prints, many of them by noted artists such as Utagawa Kunisada (1786–1865). While bulk is obvious, muscular definition is clearly not a priority. Segments of the wrestlers’ huge bodies are forcefully delineated, but the lines separate layers of fat rather than displaying the intersection of the deltoids with the pectorals. Among Kunisada’s many sumô illustrations is one showing the great yokozuna (top-ranked wrestler) Hidenoyama Raigorô (1808–1862) performing the spectacular dohyô-iri (ringentering) ceremony that was among the most important of a yokozuna’s privileges. When they tried to reproduce in marble or bronze the wrestler’s tautly twisted body, nineteenth-century sculptors tended to emulate ancient models. That the wrestlers cast in bronze by Paul Manship (1885–1966) in 1914 represent ancient Greeks is clear from their hair, but Manship’s style, influenced by Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), is just as clearly modern. Later Modernist sculptors such as Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915) and Alexander Archipenko (1887–1964) completely abandoned figuration. The former’s Lutteurs (1913) is an abstract relief of two contorted figures who cannot, without a glance at the work’s title, be identified as wrestlers. One year after Gaudier-Brzeska’s relief, Archipenko cast Boxers. The small bronze may well communicate a sense of combat. Archipenko’s alternate title was La Lutte (The Battle), but the twisted metal’s abstract shape has no visual resemblance to a boxing match.

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Since fencing with épée and sabre was enormously popular on the European continent, it is understandable that the Belgian painter Léon Phiilipet (1843– 1906) devoted his finest oil to the traditionally aristocratic sport. Schermlokaal (Fencing Hall) (1875) centers on a pair of fencers. Legs bent in the instantly recognizable stance, they are separated by a club official and surrounded by well-dressed spectators.

RUNNING AND SWIMMING Wilkie Collins (1824–1889), popular in his own time and still read today for his liberal-feminist views on England’s archaic marriage laws, is the only canonical writer to devote an entire novel, Man and Wife (1870), to the villainy of an athlete. Geoffrey Delamayn, a young aristocrat, is “a magnificent human animal, wrought up to the highest pitch of physical development” (Collins 1870: 74). He excels at every sport. His antithesis is Sir Patrick Lundie, a rational man who refuses to join in a croquet match and mocks the game’s mallets and balls as “modern substitutes for conversation” (Collins 1870: 87). Anne Sylvester, a good-hearted but naive governess employed in Sir Patrick’s household, falls in love with Geoffrey, the “apotheosis of Physical Strength,” only to discover that he is, in the language of the day, a bounder (Collins 1870: 97). He reneges on his promise to marry Anne and rushes off to London to court a wealthy widow. The story is complicated to a degree unusual even for a Victorian novel. When Sir Patrick discovers that an anachronistic oddity of Scottish law actually stipulates that Anne is legally married to the man who deserted her, Sir Patrick forces the reluctant husband to take his miserably unhappy bride home with him. Geoffrey complies and promptly plots to murder Anne. At that point, his luck runs out. He collapses at the end of a four-mile race and becomes an invalid. A stroke finishes him off just as he prepares to suffocate the wife he never wanted. Safely widowed, Anne marries Sir Patrick. The shift from Collins’ silly novel to a poem by the classical scholar A. E. Housman (1859–1836) is a move from the ridiculous to the sublime. The twenty-eight lines of “To an Athlete Dying Young” (1896) express a simple message. It is better to die in the incandescence of one’s fame than to linger in ever-darkening obscurity. Smart lad, to slip betimes away From fields where glory does not stay And early though the laurel grows It withers quicker than the rose. Eyes the shady night has shut Cannot see the record cut, And silence sounds no worse than cheers

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After earth has stopped the ears: Now you will not swell the rout Of lads that wore their honours out, Runners whom renown outran And the name died before the man. —Housman 1990: 12 Sports are what millions of coaches have claimed them to be: a metaphor for life. The most impressive poetic tribute to swimmers is “The Swimmer,” by Walt Whitman (1819–1892). He imagines a “beautiful gigantic swimmer swimming naked through the eddies of the sea,” eddies that carry the courageous giant away, dash him on the rocks, and finally bear him away, a “brave corpse” (Whitman 1855: 73) Whitman is, of course, globally renowned. The German novelist John Henry Mackay (1864–1933) is hardly known outside of Germany, where Der Schwimmer was published in 1901. Mackay’s hero, Franz Felder, when still a child has a relationship with Berlin’s lakes and rivers that can be described as erotic, ecstatic and mystic. As a young man, he swims competitively and wins the national championship. He is sexually seduced by a mysterious beauty who transforms his life until he realizes that she is robbing him of “his youth, his strength, and the freshness of his body” (Mackay 2011: 172). He spurns her and returns to swimming. Unfortunately, success is accompanied by arrogance, which alienates Franz from the men who recruited him to the club and sponsored his career. Younger swimmers begin to defeat him. When his most loyal friend attempts to comfort him, Franz repulses him. “Leave me in peace!” Left in peace, he swims and floats and allows the water to embrace him as it had when he was a child. Then, after swimming to shore and slitting an artery, he returns to the center of the lake and sinks to a melodramatic death. “The water had loved the living. The dead was nothing but a burden which it carelessly buried in its depths” (Mackay 2011: 208). Although the Canadian-born physical educator Robert Tait McKenzie (1867–1938) cast a bronze sprinter in 1902 and The Athlete in 1903, few if any canonical artists have depicted the trained bodies of competitive runners. A similar generalization holds for swimmers. For major French artists such as Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), Frédéric Bazille (1841–1870) and Georges Seurat (1859–1891), les baigneurs, standing, sitting, or lying down, were a favorite subject. The same can be said from German Impressionists such as Max Liebermann, who painted bathers but not swimmers. In this regard as in most others, Pablo Picasso (1881–1972) was a protean exception. After the obligatory beach scene, painted in 1918, he abandoned slender bathers and immortalized a pair of bulky seaside runners in La Course (1922).

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LAWN SPORTS In the 1860s, playing croquet was an ideal way for respectable young people to be together without the unwelcome protection of a postmenopausal chaperon. Accordingly, croquet figures surprisingly often in the fiction of great writers, from Leo Tolstoy to Wilkie Collins. Croquet was also a popular subject for visual artists. In 1865–1866, Winslow Homer produced a set of five oils dedicated to the game, in which gendered social interaction is surely paramount (English and English 1985). In Homer’s Croquet Players (1865) a trio of women in crinolines is engaged in play while a male-female couple converses in the distance and another man, hands in pockets, stands and observes the three players. Late afternoon sunlight falls on the women’s dresses and casts long shadows on the lawn. Croquet Scene (1866), the best and most frequently reproduced of the five croquet scenes, hints at a romantic narrative. Holding his mallet, a somberly dressed male player kneels between two brightly attired women, one in blue and the other in red and white. A third woman, in a dark dress (a chaperon?) stands close by and looks on. In a lengthy study of the croquet series, David Park Curry (1984) suggests that the kneeling man is a lover at his beloved’s feet, but the man has not removed his hat and he looks down at the ground rather than up at one or the other of the brightly-clad women, so it seems

FIGURE 8.5: Winslow Homer, Croquet Scene (1866), courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago, Friends of American Art Collection, Goodman Fund, 1942.35.

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unlikely that he is prepared to propose anything more intimate than a continuation of the game. In Croquet (1878), Homer’s French contemporary Jacques-Joseph Tissot (1836–1902) portrayed a lovely young player in an explicitly sexual pose, smiling coquettishly and holding her mallet behind her in crooked elbows so that her shoulders are pulled back and her breasts thrust provocatively forward. Homer’s proper women contrast starkly with this hoyden, which is not to

FIGURE 8.6: William Powell Frith, The Fair Toxophilites (1872), courtesy of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, Exeter, Devon, UK/Bridgeman Images.

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say that Homer’s women are unaware of future marital possibilities. In May Welland, the heroine of The Age of Innocence (1920), Edith Wharton (1862– 1937) created a sports enthusiast who loves to swim, ride, row, sail, and play tennis. May is also an archer, “a Diana just alight from the chase” (Wharton 2002: 107). The huntress goddess also appears in statues cast or carved by many sculptors, among whom the most gifted were Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907) and Alexandre-Joseph Falguière (1831–1900). No verbal or visual portrayal of an archer surpassed the gorgeously robed young women of The Fair Toxophilites (1872), painted on the lawn before their country home by their adoring father, William Powell Frith. The Symbolist painter Maurice Denis (1870–1943) recognized the possibilities of badminton as a subject. Le Jeu de Volant (1900) sets a pair of women in the middle of a lawn wooded by a stand of mauve trees. The women wear flowing gowns and wield racquets. And they are oblivious to a half dozen other women, one of whom, a kneeling nude, is calmly drying her hair. When tennis ousted croquet and archery as a venue for courtship, canonical writers, apart from Tolstoy, paid little attention. While tennis is definitely not at the moral center of Anna Karenina, there is a telling scene in which Darya Alexandrovna Oblonsky plays ineptly and quickly tires of the game. While writers hesitated, painters rushed to courtside. Highlighting the amorous potential of the sport, many painters focused on mixed doubles (Sumner et al. 2011: 47–82). Among them were the British academician John Lavery (1856–1941), whose The Rally (1885) and The Tennis Party (1885) captures the dynamism of the game, and the German Impressionist Max Liebermann, whose 1901 Tennisspieler am Meer (Seaside Tennis Players) is one of his best works. The British Impressionist Frederick Spencer Gore (1878–1914) should perhaps be added to the list, but it is uncertain whether A Game of Tennis (c. 1900) shows mixed doubles or a man versus two women. Either way the picture is a gorgeous composition in shades of green and purple reminiscent of the Fauvist Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947). There were also single-sex works such as Bonnard’s monocolor drawing, Joueuse de Tennis (c. 1920), and Gore’s Tennis, Hertingfordbury (1910), a poorly-designed image of a lone female player, racquet in hand, facing an amputated net. There is no opponent in sight. The Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff (1858–1921) perplexed viewers in a different way. Memories (1889) confronts them with the sight of seven mysterious women standing in a grassy field, gripping their racquets, and gazing everywhere except at each other. There are no women among the players who swing away in Tennis at Newport (1919), by George Bellows. Leaving behind the sordid bars hosting illegal boxing matches, the quondam “Ashcan” painter vacationed at the posh seaside resort and limned the nouveaux riches at play against the background of the

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FIGURE 8.7: John Lavery, The Rally (1916), courtesy of the CSG CIC Glasgow Museums and Library Collections.

splendid casino designed by Stanford White (1853–1956). Without exception, all these male and female tennis players, presented in a medley of different styles, are representatives of Thorstein Veblen’s leisure class. The fairways of golf courses have always offered more opportunities for business deals than for invitations to flirtation. It is no surprise that canonical writers have looked elsewhere for subjects. John Lavery’s 1919 painting, Golf Links, North Berwick, is a relatively rare example of truly accomplished pre1920 golfing art (Flannery and Leech 2004). Emphasizing the game’s place in relatively untouched nature, Lavery’s foregrounded female golfer seems tiny compared to the vast expanse of grass, sandy cliffs, ocean waves, and partlyclouded sky.

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ON THE WATER The Victorian era saw the apogee of amateur and professional rowing. Writers good and bad, mostly bad, paid attention. Thomas Hughes (1822–1896) memorialized the collegians in Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), a sequel to his immensely popular (and influential) Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Along with an insipid love story, Hughes provides a tediously moralistic account of boat races between St. Ambrose and other Oxford colleges. The narrative focus of the rowing scenes is on training. Some crew-members are emphatically lackadaisical. They skip practices on the river, frequent local inns, and consume more alcohol than they should. “You don’t suppose,” asks one of the slackers, “drinking a pint of hock to-night will make you pull any the worse this day six weeks, when the races begin, do you?” (Hughes 2011: 174). Loyal to the precepts of “Muscular Christianity,” Tom supposes just that. He overcomes the temptation to be an inebriated loser. There are several references to rowing in Collins’ Man and Wife, where the miscreant athlete Geoffrey Delamayn “pulled the stroke-oar, in a University boat-race” and went on to become an oarsman celebrated by “all England” (Collins 1870: 74). And Leo Tolstoy, ever comprehensive and inclusive, mentions but does not describe the boat races at the Petersburg Yacht Club. For Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), Claude Monet (1840–1926), and nearly every other Impressionist, Sunday boating on the Seine or its tributaries was a joie de vivre that had nothing much to do with the self-imposed physical torture experienced by participants in a rowing contest. Alfred Sisley (1839– 1899) seems at first an exception to this generalization, but his 1874 rendition of The Regatta at Molesey is a colorful panorama of blue sky, blue water, and multicolored flags within which the panting, straining oarsmen are reduced to rows of yellowish blobs. “Blobs” is the last word one would apply to rowing pictures drawn or brushed by Thomas Eakins, whose rowing pictures are so many, and of such high quality that it is painful to be forced to concentrate on only two of them. Eakins’ ludic masterpiece, Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (1871), is probably the most frequently reproduced visual treatment of nineteenth-century sports. The picture’s eponym was a champion oarsman, but he is not presented as ludic convention suggests. Balding, wearing a nondescript undershirt, squinting into the late afternoon sun, he slumps in his shell and lets his oars trail in the water. He looks over his right shoulder as if to ask, “What more do you expect of me?” For an athlete, Schmitt seems remarkably scrawny. If Schmitt is an exemplar of the “heroism of modern life,” which is how art historian Elizabeth Johns sees him, he is an untraditional hero on whose face and body are written the wear and tear of modern times (Johns 1983). Urban modernity is everywhere in the picture, explicitly in the steam locomotive approaching one of the scene’s two railroad bridges and in the

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steamboat puffing in the distance. And Schmitt’s racing shell is an implicit symbol of modernity. In contrast to the clumsy boats of the antebellum era, racing shells were constructed of several layers of varnished paper applied to a light wooden frame. The craft was equipped with iron outriggers that increased the oarsman’s leverage and a sliding seat that facilitated the smooth transfer of kinetic energy. The racing scull was, in short, as much a technological marvel as the locomotive and the steamboat. Max Schmitt is seen in middle distance. John Biglin in a Single Scull (1874), an oil that also exists in watercolor form, is a close-up. The rower leans forward in preparation for the stroke. The muscles of his left arm, leg and his jaw are rigidly flexed. The tension of his body contrasts sharply with the light blue of the sky, against which the white sails of distant boats can be seen.

FIGURE 8.8: Thomas Eakins, John Biglin in a Single Scull (1874), courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery.

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The focus on Biglin and the shell is sharp, but the play of sunlight on the water is rendered almost as it was in Impressionist boating scenes. Biglin’s reflected image seems to have dissolved and become a part of the water. This effect is repeated in the oil version of the scene, which might actually have been painted before the watercolor and then reworked. In the oil, the sky and the water are darker, which is what one expects from the medium, and the front and back of the shell no longer appear, which transforms the horizontal image into a vertical one. The reworked scene looks almost as if it were a cropped photograph. The narrowed focus makes Biglin, visually, into the human equivalent of a coiled spring. He is frozen at the instant before the fast-twitch muscle fibers of his arms, legs, and back start contracting and releasing their kinetic energy in a burst of explosive strength. It comes as no surprise that Eakins the artist was also an oarsman who often joined Max Schmitt and the Biglin brothers on the Schuylkill. That Eakins was unable to resist the lure of sailing is no surprise. Sailboats Racing on the Delaware (1874) is a study in geometry. Sails set at the same angle, small boats speed before the wind. Eakins’ geometrical design improves upon that employed by Fitz Hugh Lane (1804–1865) in 1851 when he painted the billowing triangular sails of the yacht America, which had defeated England.

TEAM SPORTS Although it is perhaps a stretch to classify Mary Russell Mitford (1787–1855) as a canonical writer, her fictional account of cricket in Our Village (1824– 1832) is quite possibly the first to appear in any nineteenth-century novel that is still read today. Mitford’s narrator was unrestrainedly enthusiastic about the game as it was then played throughout rural England. “I doubt if there be any scene in the world more animating or delightful than a cricket match . . . There was not a ten-year-old urchin, or a septuagenary woman in the parish, who did not feel an additional importance . . . in speaking of ‘our side’ ”. It was essential, however, that the contest should be a “real solid old-fashioned match between neighbouring parishes, not some newfangled contest in London or Liverpool by people who make a trade of that noble sport.” Purity of motive was uppermost in her mind. The partisanship of an election “interests in the same way, but that feeling is less pure. Money is there, and hatred, and politics, and lies” (Mitford 1841: 41–5). Five years after the final installment of Mitford’s dithyramb to village cricket, Charles Dickens (1812–1870) began the serial publication of The Pickwick Papers. In the seventh monthly installment, Samuel Pickwick and his traveling companions attend a lively match between the towns of Muggleton and Dingley Dell (Dickens 1868: 54–58). Before the first batsmen take their place, Alfred Jingle, a rogue whom Pickwick had met by accident during his travels, offers his

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unsolicited opinions. “Capital game-smart sport-fine exercise-very.” The game lives up to the obnoxious Jingle’s stenographic praise. Mr. Luffey, “the highest ornament of Dingley Dell,” bowls against Muggleton’s “redoubtable Dumkins,” (one savors the Dickensian names). The ball flew from his hand straight and swift towards the center stump of the wicket. Dumkins was on the alert. It fell upon the bat’s tip, and bounded far away over the heads of the scouts, who had just stooped low enough to let it fly over them. Muggleton scores two runs and Dingley Dell is on its way to a thumping defeat. Jingle sums up. “Capital game—well played—some strokes admirable.” He then assures the players that dinner at the Blue Lion Inn will also be admirable. “Devilish good dinner— cold, but capital—peeped into the room this morning—fowls and pies, and all that sort of thing.” If cricket matches were not like this, they should have been. As young Tom Brown approaches the end of his days at Rugby School, a team from the venerated Marylebone Cricket Club (established 1787) plays a game on the school’s grounds. The boys are charmed to see “such hard-bitten, wiry, whiskered fellows” mix with the adoring crowd (Hughes 1868: 330). Young and old caper on the grass. After the lads have won their game, the reader is shown “a strapping figure, near six feet high, with ruddy tanned face whiskers, curly brown hair, and a laughing dancing eye” (Hughes 1868: 335). He turns out to be none other than the novel’s hero, more heroic than ever after making thirty or forty runs. It is a relief to turn from such treacle to visual art. Joseph Mallord William Turner (1790–1851) seems an unlikely painter to have done a cricket scene, but he did a watercolor, Cricket on the Goodwin Sands (1828–1830). The indistinct figures stand, crouch, or sit on colorless sand while, in the distance, indistinct ships sit on a narrow band of light blue. It is unlikely that Turner meant the image as a finished work. It does, however, suggest that the game was not beneath his dignity. In 1905, an academician, Albert Chevallier Taylor (1862–1925) portrayed a very determined William Gilbert Grace (1848–1915) about to swing his bat. Taylor is best remembered, however, not for his portrait of the game’s greatest player, but rather for Kent vs. Lancashire at Canterbury (1907), a large oil (114 cm x 226.5 cm) commissioned by the Kent County Cricket Club to commemorate its first county championship. The competently executed commission, which shows the entire team at play, became a part of the Marylebone Cricket Club’s collection of cricket art. The rules of the three most widely played forms of modern football were codified during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Since association football, commonly known as “soccer,” has attracted far more players and spectators than its rivals, one might expect canonical writers and artists to have produced numerous verbal and visual representations of the game. They seem not to have done so, at least not before the 1920s. Whatever their reasons, with

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one notable exception, they abandoned the game to the sportswriters and lithographic illustrators of the periodical press. The exception was the Futurist painter Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916). Inspired by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), who urged writers and artists to document the dizzily-swift pace of change in technology-driven society, Boccioni sought in Dinamismo di un Footballer (1913) to represent the “dynamic” movements of a soccer player. The problem with the abstract work is that it suggests chaos rather than velocità. It was not soccer but an early form of rugby football that Tom Brown played. Shortly after Brown arrives at Rugby School, he hears that football is a rough game. “Why, there’s been two collarbones broken this half, and a dozen fellows lamed. And last year a fellow had his leg broken” (Hughes 1868: 92). When his house assembles to take on the rest of the school, Tom is troubled. “You don’t mean to say that those fifty or sixty boys in white trousers, many of them quite small, are going to play that huge mass opposite?” (Hughes 1868: 96). Tom is assured that they intend just that. In the last minutes of the game, which is described in great detail, Tom enters the game and is badly injured. When the players who have fallen upon him rise or are dragged away, Tom is discovered, a motionless body. His schoolmates, except for the incorrigibly wicked Harry Flashman, conclude, “Well, he is a plucky youngster, and will make a player” (Hughes 1868: 106). He does indeed become a player, of rugby and every other sport known to the Victorian schoolmaster. And, more importantly, he becomes a good Christian, praying humbly that “we can come to the knowledge of Him, in whom alone the love, and the tenderness, and the purity, and the strength, and the courage, and the wisdom . . . dwell for ever and ever in perfect fullness” (Hughes 1868: 360). The book is canonical in the sense that it is still widely read, but its literary merits are miniscule. Rugby has also done better than soccer when it comes to visual art. Les Joueurs de Football (1908) by the naïf French painter Henri Rousseau (1844– 1910) is a literally fantastic image of the game. There are four players. Two black-mustached men in blue-and-white striped uniforms, the colors of le Racing-Club de France (founded 1882), are prancing across an improbably narrow, tree-lined field. One of the two has his arms raised towards a ball that floats above him. An opposing player, in orange and yellow stripes, reaches for the man with the ball while his teammate looks one with an enigmatic smile. No sign here of the danger that initially daunted young Tom Brown. A mere four years after Rousseau’s naive masterpiece, the Cubist painter Robert Delaunay (1885–1941), inspired by a newspaper photograph of a rugby match, painted L’Équipe de Cardiff, which sets the players of the Cardiff rugby team against a background of a Ferris Wheel, the Eifel Tower, and a billboard advertisement for the French airplane manufacturer Astra. It is difficult to

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FIGURE 8.9: Henri Rousseau, The Football Players (1908), courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

determine if the rectangular shape hovering above the billboard is an airplane, but the rugby players are a definitely a part of the modern urban landscape. In Rugby (1917), Delaunay’s more radically abstract Cubist colleague, André Lhote (1885–1962), reduced the game to a set of geometrical forms within which emerge a pair of faces, an arm, a detached hand, and some stockinged ankles. The gridiron game, a rationalized adaptation of rugby, was the subject of an inspired drawing by Charles Dana Gibson (1867–1944) and a dispirited oil by Frederick Remington (1861–1909). Gibson’s comic illustration, The Coming Game: Yale versus Vassar (1896), shows some fiercely determined Vassar women closing in on a frightened ball carrier from Yale (his left sleeve has already been torn away.) Remington’s Touchdown: Yale vs Princeton (1890) is geometrically simple: the upper triangle contains a long gray line of mostly undifferentiated spectators; the lower triangle has five players awkwardly engaged in scoring or defending against a touchdown. Taken together, Gibson’s drawing and Remington’s painting testify to the outsize role of football at elite colleges.

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On April 9, 1889, speaking at a banquet in Delmonico’s steakhouse in New York, Mark Twain (1835–1910) welcomed home the baseball players whom sporting goods entrepreneur Albert Goodwill Spalding (1849–1915) had escorted around the world to introduce American baseball to those parts of the world as yet unblessed by the sport. Twain was charmed by the thought of an exhibition game played in Hawaii. Baseball, which is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century! One cannot realize it, the place and the fact are so incongruous; it’s like interrupting a funeral with a circus. —Fatout 1976: 244 Ten months later, in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), Twain once again exploited comic incongruity by including baseball, along with the telegraph, the telephone, and the steam locomotive, in the array of modern inventions that his protagonist was introducing into Arthurian England. The players refused to play without their armor, which caused a good deal of trouble. Being ball-proof, they never skipped out of the way, but stood still and took the result; when a Bessemer was at the bat and a ball hit him, it would bound a hundred and fifty yards, sometimes. And when a man was running, and threw himself on his stomach to slide to his base, it was like an iron-clad coming into port. —Twain 1889: 473 Differences in social status were also a problem. The players were knights; the umpire was a commoner. “The umpire’s first decision was usually his last; they broke him in two with a bat.” For Twain, baseball was an expression of egalitarian democracy as well as a symbol of modernity. Ringold Wilmer “Ring” Lardner (1885–1933) looked with a satirical eye at many aspects of American life, but his undisputed masterpiece was You Know Me Al (1916), an epistolary novel about an absurdly naive baseball pitcher. Jack Keefe is eager to keep his friend Al Blanchard informed about his (Jack’s) comic misadventures in both the minor and the major leagues. The comedy, which is seldom subtle, derives in part from Jack’s language, which is markedly ungrammatical. In addition, malapropisms, such as “serious” for “series”, abound. Comedy comes also from the egregious flaws in Jack’s character. He is boastful and cowardly. About a teammate he says, “The first time he opens his clam [mouth] to me I will haul off and bust him on in the

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jaw,” but he never follows through with his threats. He always has an excuse for his poor performance on the mound. When his manager blames him for losing a game, he whines. “I had a sore arm when I was warming up and Callahan [the team’s manager] should never ought to of sent me in there.” He is selfish, miserly, and deceitful. Finally, he is oblivious to sarcasm. He describes to Al what the notoriously tight-fisted Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey (1859–1931) said in response to Jack’s demand for a three-thousand-dollar salary. “He says ‘Don’t you want the office furniture too?’ Then he says ‘I thought you was a young ball-player and I didn’t know you wanted to buy my park’ ” (Lardner 2014: np.). Lardner’s humor is appropriate to newspaper sketches, but it can quickly wear thin. Baseball players were, on the whole, poorly educated, but they were not buffoons. Better examples of baseball fiction were to come. Born in Brattleboro, Vermont, trained in Paris at the École des BeauxArts, strongly influenced by the Barbizon painter Jean-François Millet (1814– 1875), William Morris Hunt (1824, 1879) attempted, in 1874, to evoke a quintessentially American scene. In The Baseball Players, two men in dark suits and large yellow hats stand a great distance from a third, less formally attired men (or boy). One of the man holds a bat, but nothing about the picture suggests baseball. The houses in the background and the groves of trees might have been painted by any one of several Barbizon painters and the muted colors resemble the light in Millet’s Angelus (1859) rather than the more vivid hues of a New England afternoon. A year after Hunt’s unsatisfactory oil, Eakins produced Baseball Players Practicing, a watercolor-over-charcoal-on-paper image that stands, even in its unfinished form, as one of the finest representations of the game. To a friend from his art-student days in Paris, Eakins remarked that the batter and the catcher were members of the Philadelphia Athletics. He added that the “moment is just after the batter has taken his bat, before the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand.” Art historians analyzing the difference between Eakins’ preliminary sketches and the completed watercolor have noticed that the spectators in the stand have been pushed back into the middle distance. In addition, “Eakins narrowed the diagonal base paths to make them appear less broad and assertive” (Kirkpatrick 2006: 162). These alterations are less important, from the perspective of a sports historian, than the fact that the grandstand, the bleachers, and the base paths are there at all. They proclaim that the ballpark is a special kind of space culturally separate from all the other spaces of the players’ and the spectators’ daily lives. Time is also important. Eakins’ professionals, working at other men’s play, can take advantage of the bright sunlight of early afternoon. Finally, the men stand differently from other men. They exist in a ludic world apart from that of ordinary life.

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FIGURE 8.10: Thomas Eakins, Baseball Players Practicing (1875), Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design.

WINTER SPORTS Skaters and skiers appear in countless fictional accounts of life in Europe and North America, just as they do in countless works of European and North American art, but not as participants in winter sports as contests. For the years 1800 to 1920, two exceptions come to mind. The first of them, by the Dutch painter Nicolaas Baur (1736–1817), is dedicated to a women’s race: Schaatswedstrijd voor vrouwen op de Stadsgracht in Leeuwarden (Women’s Skating Race on Leeuwarden’s City Canal). This lively 1810 scene is reminiscent of seventeenth-century Dutch skating scenes by Hendrik Averkamp (1585–1634). Hundreds of spectators in heavy winter coats, some standing, some seated on a hillside, and one seated on the icy branch of a tall tree, have lined both sides of lanes swept clear of snow as two women, nearly tied, reach the goal. The winner seems to have skidded to a stop, while the skater-up is still bent over in full stride. Since 1892, when skiing as a sport was in its infancy, Olso’s Holmenkall Hill has been the venue for championships. The Munich-educated Norwegian

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painter Erik Wrenskiold (1855–1938) was known, among other things, for an 1893 portrait of Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930), the first man to traverse the island of Greenland on cross-country skis. Werenskiold’s 1907 oil, entitled simply Holemnkollen, places the viewer at the bottom of the slope, looking up towards the top of the hill. Some spectators line the sides of the skiing area, but most are crowded below behind a Norwegian flag that seems to be the symbolic center of the nationalistic canvas.

TECHNOLOGICAL SPORTS Bicycle races were wildly popular events in the 1880s, when Mark Twain sent Hank Morgan back to Arthurian England. Towards the end of A Connecticut Yankee, Sir Lancelot leads five hundred madly-pedaling cyclists from Camelot to London, arriving just in time to save Arthur from execution by townsmen who refuse to believe that the vagabond they had arrested is actually their ruler in disguise. The race from the court to the scaffold is not, however, a sports event. The first canonical writer to exploit the excitement of a cycling race was the German dramatist Georg Kaiser (1878–1945). His experimental play, Von Morgens bis Mitternachts (From Morning to Midnight) (1918), includes a tumultuous scene set in a Sportpalast during a six-day race. The contest is an appropriate symbol of what Kaiser perceived to be modernity’s madness. The two-man teams, riding on a circular track, push themselves to limits of human endurance, competing to be the first to arrive at the point from which they started. Modernist artists were quicker than writers to take cyclists as their subjects (Vere 2018: 15–46). To hold a swiftly-moving cyclist fast in two-dimensional space was a challenge accepted by the Futurists Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) and Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956). The Italian painter’s Dinamismo di un Ciclista (1913) is a non-figurational swirl of colors that somehow give the viewer a sense of motion. The American painter was even more successful. The four figures of Bicycle Race (1912), crouched over their handlebars, have forward direction as well as speed. Their abstract angularity parallels the angularity of the bicycles’ frames and contrasts to the roundness of the whirring wheels, whose spokes have disappeared. The figures are featureless, as interchangeable as the parts of their bicycles. Like densely packed Tour de France contestants, identifiable by what they wear rather than by whom they are, Feininger’s cyclists resemble one another so closely that they are individualized only by differences in color. Jean Metzinger (1883–1956), a French painter and Cubist theorist, preached better than he practiced. Au Vélodrôme (c. 1914) is an odd combination of the figurative and the abstract. The cyclist is clearly outlined and colorfully clad,

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FIGURE 8.11: Lyonel Feininger, The Bicycle Race (1912), courtesy of the 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

but through his transparent head and shoulders we can see the stands full of spectators. During these banner years for cyclists as sujets, Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962), the Russian-born avant-garde painter, sculptor, and stage designer, contributed Cyclist (1913), in which a clearly discernible man may or may not be racing down a street full of advertisements. The cobblestones over which he rides pose a considerable impediment. That Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) was entranced by the Moulin Rouge is common knowledge; that he did an 1896 lithograph of un automobiliste is not. The begoggled driver seems quite grim, as if it were his first time at the wheel. It is difficult to interpret Dinamismo di un Automobile (1911), by the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo (1885–1947), but he seems to have arranged his abstract shapes so that the pointed ones are pushing through an already bent abstract representation of the sound barrier. Italian artists’ enthusiasm for speed culminated in 1915 with a series of airplane paintings by the not-quite-canonical Mario Sironi (1885–1961). His images are less vivid, less abstract, and less impressive than Robert Delaunay’s in Hommage à Blériot (1914). Five years earlier, Louis Blériot (1872–1936)

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won the race to be the first aviator to fly across the English Channel. Delaunay’s commemoration shows the airplane aloft above the Eifel Tower and above a collection of multicolored circles occupying some four-fifths of the canvas.

CONCLUSION That many, but by no means all, canonical writers and artists recognized the cultural importance of sports is undeniable. Their interpretations of that recognition run the evaluative gamut from Thomas Eakins’ implicit affirmations of sports to Wilkie Collins’ explicit condemnation of them. That Eakins was a painter and Collins a novelist may be significant. The canonical painters and sculptors of the period seem, on the whole, to have been motivated by aesthetic rather than by ethical considerations. Shapes and colors mattered more than cultural implications. The authors of the period’s canonical literary works seem, on the other hand, more likely to have approached sports as social critics. For them, sports symbolized modernity, which they extolled (e.g., Mark Twain) or feared (Georg Kaiser). Whether or not this tentative visual-versus-verbal generalization holds for other historical periods remains an unanswered question.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Dave Day is Professor of Sports History at Manchester Metropolitan University where he researches the biographies of sports coaches and the development of training practices. His publications include Professionals, Amateurs and Performance: Sports Coaching in England, 1789–1914 (2012) and A History of Sports Coaching in Britain (2016). Gerald R. Gems is a past president of the North American Society for Sport History and a Fulbright Scholar. He is the author of more than 250 publications, including twenty books. He was awarded the Routledge Prize for Scholarship in 2016. Allen Guttmann, Professor of English and American Studies at Amherst College (Massachusetts), is the author of eleven books of sports history, including the influential From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports (Colombia University Press, 1978), and Sports and American Art from Benjamin West to Andy Warhol (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). Mike Huggins is Emeritus Professor of Cultural History at the University of Cumbria. His many books include, most recently, Horse Racing and British Society in the Long Eighteenth Century (Boydell, 2018) and the edited collection, with Rob Hess, Match Fixing and Sport: Historical Perspectives (Routledge, 2019). Dr Michael Krüger is Professor of Sport Pedagogy at the Institute of Sport and Exercise Sciences of the Westfälische Wilhelms-University in Münster, Germany. He is author of numerous books, textbooks and articles in national and international journals on the history of physical education, gymnastics, play, games and sports. 241

242

CONTRIBUTORS

Dr Malcolm MacLean has published widely on colonial and postcolonial sporting identities, gender issues, and the historical and sociological aspects of sport, exercise and play’. Dr Matthew L. McDowell is a lecturer in sport policy, management, and international development at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of A Cultural History of Association Football in Scotland, 1865–1902 (Edwin Mellen Press, 2013). Roberta J. Park (1931–2018) was a former professor in and chair of the Department of PE at the University of California, Berkeley. Her seminal work on the history of health, exercise and PE has attracted many awards. Wray Vamplew is Emeritus Professor of Sports History at the University of Stirling and Global Professorial Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Author or editor of 34 books, he has also published 148 articles and book chapters as well as over 100 other publications.

INDEX

The letter f following an entry indicates a page that includes a figure. A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) (Proust, Marcel) 197 AAAPE (American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education) 147–8 Aboriginal Australians 158–9 accommodation 120, 121, 122, 132–3, 141 colonialism 140 achievement 57–8, 61 Addams, Jane 147 Adelman, Melvin 33, 99–100 advertising 86 aesthetics 93–4 Africa 113 African-American sports players 154–7 Age of Innocence, The (Wharton, Edith) 202 agriculture 171 alcohol 170, 184, 185, 204 Alken, Thomas Henry 190 Grouse Shooting 190 All England Croquet Club 89, 107 Alpine Clubs 34, 65, 184 Alpine sports 66 Alps, the 59 Amateur Athletic Association 89–90 Amateur Athletic Club 149

Amateur Athletic Union 39, 40 amateur sport 15–16, 19–20, 40, 127–8, 174–6 associations 89–90 athletics 89–90, 100–1 clothing 84 “gentleman amateurs” 149–50 lacrosse 113–14 Muscular Christianity 135–6 Olympic Games 74 social class 39, 125–6, 174–6 America 12, 13–14, 16, 17, 55, 128–31 African-American sports players 154–7 amateur sport 176 athletics 39, 53–4 baseball. See baseball basketball. See basketball boxing 24, 37 Chinese-Americans 157 climbing 34–5f colonialism 136–7, 139–40 cricket 39, 139–40 croquet 107 education 147–8 employers 173 exceptionalism 52 football 26, 44, 54, 129, 153–4, 177 frontier, the 44, 115, 129, 177, 189 golf 38 243

244

hockey 104 horse racing 36, 37 hunting 115 ice hockey 104–5 identity 25 immigration 47–8, 148 imperialism 49, 51–2 intercollegiate programs 150–1, 161–2 labor relations 34 masculinity 44, 129 media, the 27 nationhood 128 Native American Indians 42, 113, 153–4 north/south rivalry 181–2 plowing 115 public parks 34 race 153, 154–7 rivalry with Britain 50 science 41 segregation 144, 155, 156–7 social class 37–40 tennis 39 Turnverein 133–4 wilderness 34, 115–16, 129, 177 wrestling 44 YMCA 62 American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education (AAAPE) 147–8 Americanization 47–8 America’s Cup 49 analytics 16, 36 Anderson, Ada 163 Angelus (Millet, Jean-François) 211 d’Angeville, Henriette 34 angling 84, 151, 183, 184, 192 animal sports 91, 102 badger baiting 125 bear-baiting 91, 125 bull-running 91, 102, 125 bullbaiting 12, 125, 144 cockfighting 2, 12, 91, 102, 125, 144–5 deer hunting 115 dog-based 125 game laws 151 hare coursing 125 opposition to 170 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy, Leo) 190, 192–3, 202

INDEX

Anthony, Susan B. 162 anthropology 42 Anthropology Days 42 anti-Semitism 157–8 Appalachian Mountain Club 34 appropriation 138–9 Après la Chasse (After the Hunt) (Courbet, Gustave) 192 aquatic sports 11, 204–6 see also rowing and yachting boating 204 sculling 125 swimming 83, 163, 199 Archer, Fred 2–10 archery 201f, 202 Archipenko, Alexander 197 Boxers/La Lutte (The Battle) 197 Argentina 115–16 Armaindo, Louise 163 Arnold, Thomas 24–5 art 28, 93–4, 187–8f, 215 angling 192 archery 201f, 202 aviation 214–15 badminton 202 baseball 211–12f boating 204 boxing 93, 195–6 cricket 207 croquet 200f–1 cycling 213–14f equestrian sports 28, 193–4f fencing 198 games 189–90 golf 203 gridiron football 209 hunting 190–2 media, the 28 modernity 204–5 motoring 214 paintings 28 rowing 204–6 rugby 208–9f running 199 skating 212 skiing 212–13 soccer 207–8 sumô wrestling 197 swimming 199 tennis 202–3f

INDEX

urbanization 204–5 wrestling 197 yachting 206 Asia 52, 62, 136 association football. See soccer associativity 183–5 Athlete, The (McKenzie, Robert Tait) 199 Athletic Association 89 athleticism, cult of 61, 147, 171, 178–9 athletics 20 see also Olympic Games American education system 53–4 as amateur sport 100–1 art 199 associations/clubs 89–90f, 100–1 commercialization 85–6 doping 42 exclusion 149 facilities 85 literature 198–9 nationalism 49, 50 planning 91 rules 100–1 sculpture 199 women 161–2 athletics clubs 39 attitudes 170–6 Au Vélodrôme (Metzinger, Jean) 213–14 Australia 17, 173–4 Aborigines 158–9 amateur sport 176 cricket 176 football 19, 25 media, the 27 national identity 181 race 158–9 Austro-Hungarian Empire 127, 132–3 L’Automobiliste (Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri) 214 aviation 214–15 Ayres Ltd. 83 badger baiting 125 badminton 202 Baer, Clara Gregory 109, 111 Bale, John 60 Balinese cockfighting 2 Ball Play of the Choctaw (Catlin, George) 189 Bar Kochba Jewish Gymnastics Association 158

245

Barclay, Robert 91 bareknuckle boxing 24, 101, 125, 157, 168–9 see also pugilism baseball 17, 20, 25, 26, 36 African-American players 155–6f art 211–12f civic pride 185 commercialization 53, 54 fans 44 indigenous players 137 indoor 109 intercollegiate 151 Japan 52 literature 210–11 masculinity 129 origins of 105 professional 46, 127, 185 race 129, 131f, 137 rules 105–6f social class 39–40 Spalding, Albert Goodwill 54, 105–6, 210 Twain, Mark 210 women 160 Baseball Players, The (Hunt, William Morris) 211 Baseball Players Practicing (Eakins, Thomas) 211–12f basketball 109–10, 139, 147 race 154 women 109–10, 139, 161 basquette 109 Bateman, Anthony 27 Baur, Nicolaas Schaatswedstrijd voor vrouwen op de Stadsgracht in Leeuwarden (Women’s Skating Race on Leeuwarden’s City Canal) 212 Bazille, Frédéric 199 bear-baiting 91, 125 Beck, Charles Treatise on Gymnasticks, A 94 Beckwith, Agnes 163 Beers, William George 113 beliefs 170–6 Bellows, George 202–3 Polo at Lakewood 193–4f Polo Crowd 193 Stag at Sharkey’s 196 Tennis at Newport 202

246

Bell’s Life in Adelaide 27 Bell’s Life in London 27 Bell’s Life in Sydney 27 Bell’s Life in Victoria and Sporting Chronicle 27 Bennett, James Gordon, Jr. 39 Berenson, Senda 110, 160–1 Bergman-Österberg, Martina 72, 110 betting. See gambling Beveridge, Albert 52 Bicycle Race, The (Feininger, Lyonel) 213, 214f billiards 83 Bingham, George Caleb 189 Shooting for the Beef 189 Bizet, Georges Carmen 188 Black Sox scandal 36 Blackledge, Paul 175 bleeding 92 Blériot, Louis 214–15 blood sports 102, 125, 170 see also animal sports boating 204 see also rowing bocce 190 Boccioni, Umberto 208, 213 Dinamismo di un Ciclista 213 Dinamismo di un Footballer 208 body, the 20, 42, 93–4, 165 aesthetics 93–4 art 196, 197 colonialism 136 data 94 body culture 58 bodybuilding 168 Bourdieu, Pierre 40–1 Bourneville 85 Bowen, Andy 42 bowling 34 professional 46–7 Boxer Rebellion 52 Boxers/La Lutte (The Battle) (Archipenko, Alexander) 197 Boxiana 101 boxing 24, 37, 128, 178f see also prizefighting Aboriginal Australians 159 art 195–6 clubs 88–9 commercialization 86

INDEX

endurance 42 facilities 86 Fives Court 91, 92f gambling 36–7, 41 immigrant groups 48 Jackson, John 91, 93 Jews 157 literature 194–5 nationalism 48 rules 41, 101, 128 sculpture 197 social class 40–1 training 91 Warr, Bill 91 white supremacy 42–4 women 163 branding 96, 105–7, 168 Breton wrestling 132 Britain 13, 14, 55 see also under individual countries amateur sport 176 baseball 106 colonialism 136, 138, 139 cricket 36, 139 education 147 enclosure 115 exclusion 149–50 game laws 151 gymnastics in 70–2, 95, 96f imperialism 16–17, 49, 51–2, 69, 95 land ownership 115 leisure 78 media, the 27 model of sport 69–70 Parliament 4–5 public schools. See public schools race 157, 158 rivalry with America 50 social class 125–8 state schools 179 British Ladies Football Club 31 British Manly Exercises (Walker, Donald) 95 British West Indies 138 Budd, Arthur 175 bull-running 91, 102, 125 bullbaiting 12, 125, 144 Bulletin 181 Burke, Jack 42 Burke, Peter 22, 173–4

INDEX

Burns, Tommy 43 Burte, Hermann 189 Wiltfeber—der ewige Deutsche (Wiltfeber—the Eternal German) 189 business histories 28 Cadbury, George 85 caddies 180 calcio 62 calendars 122, 124 California Spirit of the Times 27 Camanachd Association 117 camogie 111 Camp, Walter 13, 154 Canada 12, 15, 17, 104 appropriation 138–9 colonialism 137, 138–9 exclusion 151 First Nation groups 113–14f, 115 fishing 151 hunting 115 lacrosse 113–14f, 122f, 138–9 nationhood 128 snowshoeing 138 Canadian Lacrosse Association 114 Cann, Abraham 78 capitalism 57, 119–20, 124, 135, 175 see also commercialization Carlisle and Cumberland Wrestling Association 101–2 Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Pennsylvania 153–4 Carmen (Bizet, Georges) 188 Carmen (Mérimée, Prosper) 188 carnival 3 Carriage Leaving the Races in the Country, A (Degas, Edgar) 193 Cashel Byron’s Profession (Shaw, George Bernard) 195 Cathay Club 157 Catholic Youth Organization 53, 146 Catlin, George Ball Play of the Choctaw 189 celebrity 28 Cetshwayo (king of the Zulu kingdom) 113 Cézanne, Paul 199 Chadwick, Henry 36 Chaloner, Tom 169 character building 16, 19, 48, 61, 69, 179

247

Charlton, John 169 cheating 87 Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum 10 Chicago Hebrew Institute 53 Chicago White Stockings 185 children 178–80f China 52, 136 Chinese-Americans 157 cigarette cards 28 Cincinnati Red Stockings 15 citius—altius—fortius 57 civic pride 185 Clarendon Commission 69 class. See social class classical Greece 28, 57, 74 climbing 34–5f, 45, 65–6f clothing. See sports clothing Clydesdale Harriers 100–1 cockfighting 12, 91, 102, 125, 144–5 Balinese 2 codification 102, 108, 113, 114, 115–18 Collins, Wilkie 198, 215 Man and Wife 198, 204 colonialism 16–17, 119, 122, 136–40 see also imperialism codification 113 hunting 115 lacrosse 113 national identity 181 Coming Game: Yale versus Vassar, The (Gibson, Charles Dana) 209 commercialization 15, 53–4, 79, 85–6 see also capitalism Archer, Fred 6–7, 8 baseball 40 exercise 95 football 18–19 invention and innovation 80–4 manufacturing and retailing 80–1 Muscular Christianity 136 profit 176 rowing 53 women 31 competition 14, 15, 31 see also Olympic Games American schools 148 golf 112 international 16, 48–9 masculinity 45 measuring achievement 57–8

248

politics 69 travel 78–9 conflict 120, 121–2, 123, 132, 134, 141 see also war colonialism 136–40 modernity 18 religion 170–1 see also segregation Congregationalist Guild 145–6 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A (Twain, Mark) 210, 213 conservation 115 consumer culture 15 conviviality 184–5 Copenhagen Ballgame Club (Den Kjøbenhavnske Boldspilklub) 103 Handbook of Cricket and Longball, The (Haandbog I Cricket og Langbold) 103 Corbett, James J, 42 corporeality 93–4 Coubertin, Pierre de 57, 74, 75 courage 177 Courbet, Gustave 197 Après la Chasse (After the Hunt) 192 Lutteurs, Les 197 Quarry, The (La Curée) 191f, 192 Course, La (Picasso, Pablo) 199 Cribb, Tom 48, 195 cricket 17, 35–6 Aboriginal Australians 158–9 amateur/professional 19, 20, 79, 127, 176 art 207 associativity 183 Australia 176 clubs 93 coaching 93 colonialism 136–7f, 138, 139–40 commercialization 85 courage 177 Denmark 103 employers’ teams 85 facilities 85 governing body 103 imperialism 36, 48, 114–15 Ireland 116, 134 literature 206–7 national identity 181 nationalism 48–9 north/south rivalry 181–2 race 122, 137f, 138, 158–9

INDEX

regional identity 182–3 rules 103 Samoa 114–15, 122, 139–40 skill 93 social class 39, 63, 176 stress 169 touring 79, 85 Cricket Field, The (Pycroft, James) 27 Cricket on the Goodwin Sands (Turner, Joseph Mallord William) 207 criminality 41 croquet 83, 88f, 107f, 200f art 200f–1 clubs 89 rules 106–7 Croquet (Tissot, Jacques-Joseph) 201 Croquet Players (Homer, Winslow) 200 Croquet Scene (Homer, Winslow) 200f–1 cross-country 101 crosse 189 Crossland, Joseph 93 Crowninshield, George 38 Cruelty to Animals Act 91 Cruikshank, George 195 cult of athleticism 61, 147, 171, 178–9 cultural history 22–5 cultural memory 8–10 culture 2, 121–2, 187 Geertz, Clifford 2 meaning/use of term 23 popular culture 77, 78 Cumbria 182 curling 102–3 Curry, David Park 200 Curtis, Henry Stoddard 148 Curtis, William B. 39 Cusack, Michael 116 cycling 25, 39 art 213–14f clubs 184 doping 42 golf 87–8 literature 213 popularity 82f race 157 technology 81, 82 women 30, 87, 126, 162, 163, 184 Cyclist (Goncharova, Natalia) 214 Cyclists’ Touring Club 82 Czechoslovakia 48, 133

INDEX

D’Angelo, Harry 91 danger 168–9 Danish Ballgame Union (DBU) 103 Danish Football Association (Dansk Boldspil Union) 103 Darwin, Charles On the Origin of Species 41 Davin, Maurice 116 Davison, Emily 45 Day, Dave and Oldfield, Samantha-Jayne 84 DBU (Danish Ballgame Union) 103 Dearman, James 93 Decatur, Stephen 44 deer hunting 115 Degas, Edgar 193 Carriage Leaving the Races in the Country, A 193 Delaunay, Robert 208 L’Équipe de Cardiff 208–9 Hommage à Blériot 214–15 Denis, Maurice 202 Jeu de Volant, Le 202 Denmark 41, 103 Denny, William 173 Derby, the 3–6, 45, 193 Derby at Epsom, The (Géricault, Théodore) 193 Derby Day at Epsom (Frith, William Powell) 193 Des Jardins, Julie 177 Dewey, Robert 122–3 Dick, Kerr Company 47 Dickens, Charles 193 Oliver Twist 63 Pickwick Papers, The 206–7 diet 92–3, 169, 170 Dinamismo di un Automobile (Russolo, Luigi) 214 Dinamismo di un Ciclista (Boccioni, Umberto) 213 Dinamismo di un Footballer (Boccioni, Umberto) 208 discourse 23–4, 26–9 discrimination 19, 29–31, 39, 152–3 see also exclusion anti-Semitism 157–8 ethnicity/race 152–9 gender 29–30, 159–60, 174 segregation 144, 147, 149–52

249

dishonesty 87 diversity 143 Dixon, George 42–3 Dod, Lottie 45 doping 42 double ball 153 Doubleday, Abner 25, 105 Dublin Hurling Club 116 Dublin University Hurley Club 116 Ducrow, Peter (the “Flemish Hercules”) 95 duels 44 dumbbells 95 Dunlop, John Boyd 81 Dunning, Eric 186 Eakins, Thomas 195–6, 204, 206, 211, 215 Baseball Players Practicing 211–12f John Biglin in a Single Scull 205f–6 Max Schmitt in a Single Scull 204 Sailboats Racing on the Delaware 205 Salutat 196 economics 176 education 48, 171 see also physical education and schools American athletics 53–4 Coubertin, Pierre de 75 inclusion 147–8 intercollegiate programs 150–1, 161–2 nationalism 60 Olympic Games 67, 75 spaces 60 sports creation 109–11 women 160–2 Egan, Pierce 101, 194, 195 Eichberg, Henning 57 “Genesis of an Industrial Mode of Behavior” 57 Ellis, William Webb 24 emigration 124–5, 181 see also migration emotion 165–70, 185–6 empiricism 120 employment 15, 171–4 children 180 identity 182 labor relations 34 law 77, 78 loyalty 84, 172, 173 social control 47–8 staff sports clubs/facilities 85 time 62, 77, 78, 124, 125

250

welfare benefits 172–3 workers’ sport movements/clubs 63–4 enclosure 115 endurance 42 England 12, 13, 15, 59 climbing 34 football 18, 20, 60–1 model of sport 68–9 north/south rivalry 181–2 professional sport 20 public schools 18, 24–5, 48 space 59 Swedish gymnastics 71–2 English Football League 53 Epsom “Derby”. See Derby, the equality 143 equestrian sports 33–4 see also horse racing and hunting art 193–4f courage 177 literature 192–3 polo 34, 113 social class 37 women 30, 160, 161f L’Équipe de Cardiff (Delaunay, Robert) 208–9 equipment 66, 80–1, 95 eroticism 166–8, 197 ethnicity 25, 34, 152–9 see also indigenous sport and race Americanization 47–8 anti-Semitism 157–8 Europe model of sport 68–9 nationhood 132–4 exceptionalism 52 exclusion 143–5, 149–52, 175 see also inclusion exercise 92, 95 Exercises for Ladies Calculated to Preserve and Improve Beauty (Walker, Donald) 95 FA (Football Association) 18, 20 facilities 84–6 Fair Toxophilites, The (Frith, William Powell) 201f, 202 falcon cubs 48 falconry 84 Falguière, Alexandre-Joseph 202

INDEX

family structure 126 Fancy, the 91 fandom 21–2, 26, 185–6 baseball 44 Feininger, Lyonel 213 Bicycle Race, The 213, 214f fell running 182 femininity 159 see also women fencing 91, 158, 198 Fennex, William 93 Ferri, Enrico 41 fiction 27 “field days” 161, 162 field sports 11, 84, 115 see also animal sports and hunting game laws 151 Fight, The 194 figure skating 158 film 28, 41–2 Finland 118 First Nation groups 113–14f, 115 fishing 84, 151, 183, 184, 192 fistfighting 128–9 fitness 94 Fives Court 91, 92f folk games 61, 62, 125, 189 football 60–1 see also rugby and soccer amateur 100 America 13, 26, 54, 129, 153–4, 177 Australia 19 clubs 183, 184 commercialization 54, 86 courage 177 Denmark 103 fans 185–6 folk roots 62 France 132 Gaelic 19, 116, 134, 151, 152f gridiron 209 intracity rivalry 182 Koch, Konrad 73 masculinity 45, 177 misconduct 185 national identity 181 newspapers 26 origins of 104 professional 20 rules 18, 19, 104, 108–9 schools 179 Scotland 152, 182, 184

INDEX

stadia 63 time and space 62–3 violence 177, 186 women’s 31, 126, 186 Football Association (FA) 18, 20, 123 Ford, Adam 105 Fordham, George 170 Fort Shaw Indian School 139, 154 fouling 61 France 12 cycling 25 folk games 61 football 132 gymnastics 41 identity 25 media, the 27 nationhood 132 rugby 132 skiing 25 French, Tom 169 Frith, David 169 Frith, William Powell 28, 193 Derby Day at Epsom 193 Fair Toxophilites, The 201f, 202 From Ritual to Record (Guttmann, Allen) 33 frontier, the 44, 115, 129, 177, 189 see also wilderness Futurism 58, 208, 213, 214–15 GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) 17, 48, 116, 134, 151–2, 181 Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) 17, 48, 116, 134, 151–2, 181 Gaelic football 19, 116, 151, 152f Gaelic games 151 Gamage’s 28, 80–1 game laws 151 Game of Tennis, A (Gore, Frederick Spencer) 202 games 60–1, 62, 72, 188–90 gambling 18, 91, 100, 170 Archer, Fred 7 baseball 36 boxing 36–7, 41 cricket 36 Derby, the 4 horse racing 4, 7, 10, 36, 87 local sport 11 women 88

251

Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri 197 Lutteurs 197 Geertz, Clifford 2 Gem, T. H. 108 gender 29–31, 43, 44–5, 159–63 see also masculinity and women clothing 28–9 croquet 108 family structure 126 lawn tennis 108 spaces 72 sport creation 109–11 “Genesis of an Industrial Mode of Behavior” (Eichberg, Henning) 57 “gentleman amateurs” 149–50 George, Walter 48 Géricault, Théodore Derby at Epsom, The 193 Germany 16, 41, 132 colonialism 139–40 cricket 139–40 football 73 gymnastics 48, 61, 69–71, 72 identity 25, 133–4 model of sport 68–9 nationhood 133–4 schools 69–71 Turnen 25, 60, 71, 132–3f Turnverein (Turnen gymnastics club) of Budweis/Bud jovi 132–4 unification 133–4 workers’ sport movements/clubs 63–4 Germinal (Zola, Émil) 189 Gérôme, Léon 196 Geschichte des Fußball im Altertum und in der Neuzeit, Die (Koch, Konrad) 73 Gibson, Charles Dana 209 Coming Game: Yale versus Vassar, The 209 Gillespie, Greg 27 Glasgow 182 Glasgow Ladies Cycling Club 184 golf 37, 86, 111–12, 130f art 203 caddies 180 clubs 183–4 governing body 103 handicaps 112 rules 112

252

Sabbath, the 171 women 87–8, 112, 149 Golf Links, North Berwick (Lavery, John) 203 Goncharova, Natalia Cyclist 214 good sport 11 Gore, Frederick Spencer 202 Game of Tennis, A 202 Tennis, Hertingfordbury 202 Gorn, Elliott 24 governing bodies 16, 19, 20 see also sports associations cricket 103 Denmark 103 Scotland 101 Grace, W. G. 20, 21f, 207 Graham, Sylvester 50 Graham crackers 50 Grand Caledonian Curling Club 102 Granite Curling Club 102–3 Great International Caledonian Games 49f gridiron football 209 Grouse Shooting (Alken, Thomas Henry) 190 Gulick, Luther Halsey 147 Gutsmuths, Johann Christoph Friedrich 67, 70 “Gymnastics for Youth” 67 Guttmann, Allen 99, 166 From Ritual to Record 33 gymnastics 25, 41, 60, 67, 95 Austro-Hungarian Empire 129 Britain 70–2, 95, 96f conflict 132 Germany 48, 61, 69–70, 72 Jews 158 parallel bars 72 Prussia 72–3 Sweden 70–2 women 129 “Gymnastics for Youth” (Gutsmuths, Johann Christoph Friedrich) 67 Hale, J. Hinde 107 Hall, Bill 92 Hamilton, Alexander 44 Hamley Bros. 83 Hancock, George 109

INDEX

Handbook of Cricket and Longball, The (Haandbog I Cricket og Langbold) (Copenhagen Ballgame Club) 103 hare coursing 125 harness racing 14 Harpers Weekly 129, 130f Hart, Lavinia 162 Hartwell, Edward M. 148 Harvard University 54 Harvey, Adrian 99 Hayes, Johnny 50 Hazlitt, William 194 health 30, 64, 72, 92, 169–70, 173 Heller, Michael 85 Henry Street Settlement, New York City 147 heritage 28–9 Hickman, Tom “Gas-man” 194 Hicks, Tom 42 Hidenoyama Raigorô 197 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth 50, 145 Highland Games 48, 62 Hill, Jeff 122 Hills, Arnold F. 62 hockey 31, 104, 116 Hogan, James 53–4 Hoggart, Richard 2 Holemnkollen (Wrenskiold, Erik) 213 holidays 59 Holt, Richard 61, 94, 175 Homer Iliad 57 Odyssey 57 Homer, Winslow 192, 200–2 Croquet Players 200 Croquet Scene 200f–1 Huntsman and Dogs 192 Waterfall in the Adirondacks 192 Hommage à Blériot (Delaunay, Robert) 214–15 homosexuality 44 Hoole, Henry 94 hoop and pole 153 horse racing 4, 10, 36, 64f African-Americans 155 Archer, Fred 2–10 art 193 children 180 clubs 90 commercialization 86

INDEX

courage 177 danger 169 Davison, Emily 45 Derby, the 3–6, 45, 193 exclusion 149 gambling 4, 7, 10, 36, 87 governing body 103 injury 169 Jews 158 jockey weights 169, 170, 180 literature 192–3 north/south rivalry 181–2 opposition to 4–5, 170 politics 4–5 race 155, 158 rules 100 social class 37–8, 149 support for 5–6 travel 79 Houseman, A. E. 198 “To an Athlete Dying Young” 198–9 Huggins, Mike 28, 175, 182, 185 Hughes, Thomas 50, 51f Tom Brown at Oxford 204 Tom Brown’s Schooldays 24, 204, 207, 208 Hull House, Chicago 147 Hunt, George 195 Hunt, Tom 134 Hunt, William Morris 211 Baseball Players, The 211 hunting 115, 125, 170 art 190–2 literature 190 sculpture 202 societies 184 women 160, 161f Huntsman and Dogs (Homer, Winslow) 192 hurley 116, 134 hurling 116–17, 151 ice hockey 15, 104–5 identity 17, 25, 33, 176–86 baseball 40 Iliad (Homer) 57 immigration 47–8, 53 see also migration inclusion 147, 173 imperialism 16–17, 33, 119, 136–40 see also colonialism America 49, 51–2, 136

253

Britain 16–17, 49, 51–2, 69, 95, 114–15, 136 cricket 36, 48, 114–15 hunting 115 lacrosse 113–14 Samoa 114–15 sport codification/rules 113 Inanimate Bird Shooting Association 84 inclusion 143–4, 145–8, 173 see also exclusion women 139 India 15, 113 Indian clubs 95 indigenous sport 113–14f, 115, 116, 136–7f appropriation 138–9 Canadian First Nation groups 113–14f, 115 India 95, 113 Native American Indians 42, 113, 153, 189 Samoa 114–15, 122, 139–40 indoor sports 109 Industrial Workers of the World 34 industrialization 12–13, 15, 57 injuries 168–9, 177 innovation 78, 80–4, 89, 95, 112, 114 International Association of Athletics Federation 20 International Olympic Committee (IOC) 20, 57, 73, 74–5 invention 81–4 investment 85–6 IOC (International Olympic Committee) 20, 57, 73, 74–5 see also Olympic Games Iowa 161 Iran 113 Ireland 15, 17, 48, 116, 133 cricket 116, 134, 184 football 134 Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) 17, 48, 116, 151 Gaelic football 19, 116, 151, 152f hurley 116 hurling 116–17, 151 national identity 181 rugby 19 segregation 151–2

254

soccer 24 sports clubs 184 Irish Hockey Union 116 Isthmian Club 90 Italy 61, 132 Jackson, Andrew 44 Jackson, John 91, 93, 195 Jackson, Peter 42 Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig 48, 70, 71f Japan 52, 105–6, 197 Jaques, John 83, 105 Jeffries, Jim 43 Jeu de Boules, Le (Matisse, Henri) 190 jeu de paume 188–9 Jeu de Volant, Le (Denis, Maurice) 202 Jewish Lads Brigade 158 Jews 53, 157–8 jockeys 169, 170, 180 see also horseracing John Biglin in a Single Scull (Eakins, Thomas) 205f–6 Johnson, Jack 43f–4 Joueurs de Football, Les (The Football Players) (Rousseau, Henry) 208, 209f Kaiser, Georg 213 Von Morgens bis Mitternachst (From Morning to Midnight) 213 Kay, Joyce 184 Kelly, Mike “King” 40 Kenealy, Arabella 160 Kent vs. Lancashire at Canterbury (Taylor, Albert Chevallier) 207 Kentfield, Edwin 83 Khnopff, Fernand 202 Memories 202 Kidd, Bruce 135 Kingsley, Charles 50, 135, 145 kirikiti/kilikiti 114–15, 122, 139–40 Klugman, Matthew 185–6 Knights of Columbus 52–3 Koch, Konrad 73 Geschichte des Fußball im Altertum und in der Neuzeit, Die 73 Kogai Yugibo (Tsuboi Gendo/Tanaka Seigyo) 105 La Chapelle, Exilda 163 labor relations 34

INDEX

lacrosse 110–11, 113–14f, 122f, 138–9 Ladies Golf Union (LGU) 112 Lallement, Pierre 81 Lambroso, Cesare 41 land ownership 115 Lardner, Ringold Wilmer “Ring” 210 You Know Me Al 210–11 Lassalle, Ferdinand 64 Lavery, John 202 Golf Links, North Berwick 203 Rally, The 202, 203f Tennis Party, The 202 Lawn mowers 83 lawn tennis. See tennis League of American Wheelmen 156–7 League of Jewish Gymnasts 158 leisure 13, 14, 33–7, 77–8 social class 80, 203 social control 47–8 sport-leisure split 126 time 15, 58, 59, 77, 78, 124 see also spare-time spectrum Veblen, Thorstein 203 Lever, William 173 Lever Brothers 173 Lewis, Robert W. 186 LGU (Ladies Golf Union) 112 Lhote, André Rugby 209 liberalism 58 Liebermann, Max 193, 199, 202 Tennisspieler am Meer (Seaside Tennis Players) 202 Lilly, Christopher 41 Lillywhite, John 80 Ling, Per Hendrick 70–1, 72 Ling Association 110 literature 27, 115, 187, 202, 215 athletics 198–9 baseball 210–11 boxing 195 cricket 206–7 cycling 213 equestrian sports 192–3 games 188–9 hunting 190 pugilism 194–5 rowing 204 rugby 208 swimming 199

INDEX

tennis 202 wrestling 197 yachting 204 “Little Tim’s Crib” 91 Loates, Tommy 170 London Athletic Club 39 London Prize Ring Rules 41 longball 103 loyalty 84, 172, 173, 179, 181, 182 see also associativity Ludwig, Friedrich 73 Luks, George Wrestlers, The 197 Lutteurs (Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri) 197 Lutteurs, Les (Courbet, Gustave) 197 Lye, Tommy 78–9 McAlery, John 24 McCoy, Thomas 41 McGee, W.J. 42 McGill University 15 Mackay, John Henry 199 Schwimmer, Der 199 McKenzie, Robert Tait 199 Athlete, The 199 Maclaren, Archibald 72, 94 Man and Wife (Collins, Wilkie) 198, 204 Manet, Edouard Races at Longchamp, The 193 Mangan, J. A. 179 Manitoba 102 Manship, Paul 197 manufacturing 80–1 Maoris 153 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 58, 208 Marquis of Queensbury Rules 41, 101 Marsden, Tom 93 Marsh, Jack 159 Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) 36, 103 masculinity 30, 44–5, 126, 127, 159, 177–8f America 44, 129 baseball 40 boxing 129 clothing 84 crisis in 31 cycling 81 football 45 Muscular Christianity 50 physical body 94–5

255

plowing 115 public schools 178–9 shopping 81 tennis 107 material culture 9–10 Matisse, Henri Jeu de Boules, Le 190 Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (Eakins, Thomas) 204–5 MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) 36, 103 meaning 120–1 media, the 26–8, 86, 185 see also representation African-American baseball teams 155–6 Archer, Fred 7–9 boxing 101 cycling 82 Derby, the 3–4, 5f exclusion 144 print 143, 144 race 154 rules 105 sporting intelligence 11 women 163 medicine 92, 174 Memories (Khnopff, Fernand) 202 memory 165 “mens sana in corpere sano” 171 menstruation 174 Mérimée, Prosper 188–9 Carmen 188 “Vénus d’Ille, La” 188–9 Metcalfe, Alan 24 Metzinger, Jean Au Vélodrôme 213–14 micro-studies 2 migration 47–8, 53, 121, 124–5, 128 inclusion 147 military, the 177 Millet, Jean-François 211 Angelus 211 Millikan, Matthew 135 mind, the 165 attitudes/beliefs 170–6 emotion 165–6 eroticism 166–8 identity 176–86 memory 165 pain 168–70 mining communities 24

256

minority groups 143–4, 182 see also race and segregation Mirbeau, Octave “628-E8, La” 58 Mitford, Mary Russell 206 Our Village 206 model towns 47 Model Yacht Club (MYC) 108 Model Yacht Sailing Association (MYSA) 108 model yachting 108 Model Yachting Association 108 modernity 119–20, 123–34, 139, 215 art 204–5, 213 conflict 18 Guttman, Allen industrial age 18 literature 213 Molineaux, Tom 48, 195 Monet, Claude 204 Montreal rules 104–5 morality 19, 20, 40, 60, 95 see also Muscular Christianity Coubertin, Pierre de 75 Graham, Sylvester 50 model towns 47 rational recreation movement 145–6 social class 125 women 126, 167 women 47 Morgan, William 111 Morris County Golf Club 149 Morrissey, John 37 Mosentheim, Rosa 163 motoring 214 mountaineering 34–5f, 45, 65–6f Murphy, Isaac 37 Murray, Andrew Graham 108 Muscular Christianity 19, 50, 78, 95, 134–6 Asia 52 rational recreation 145 YMCA 50, 61–2 Muybridge, Eadweard 41–2, 193 MYC (Model Yacht Club) 108 Myers, Lon 49 MYSA (Model Yacht Sailing Association) 108 mythology 24–5, 125

INDEX

Naismith, James 62, 109, 147 Nansen, Fridtjof 213 nation states 60, 67–9, 76, 128, 140 America 129, 131 education 70 Europe 132–4 race 129, 131 National Amateur Lacrosse Association 114 National Association of Baseball Players 20 National Association of Professional Baseball Players 40 National Baseball League 53 National Collegiate Athletic Association 162 National Heritage Centre for Horseracing and Sporting Art 9–10 national identity 17, 25, 60, 133, 181 National Lacrosse Association 114 National League 40 National Police Gazette 129, 163 National Skating Association 89 National Tennis Championships 149 nationalism 17, 25, 48–50, 60, 67 baseball 105–6 Ireland 151–2 lacrosse 122 rules 116–18 Native American Indians 42, 113, 153–4 stickball 189 nature 65 frontier, the 44, 115, 129, 177, 189 outdoor sports 65–6 wilderness 34, 115–16, 129, 177 Neate, Bill (“The Bristol Butcher”) 91, 194 netball 110f New York Athletic Club (NYAC) 39 New York Yacht Club 38 New Zealand 17 colonialism 138 race 153 rugby 17, 25, 138 women 162 Newcomb 111 Newport Casino Tennis Club 39 newspapers 26–7, 105 nomadism 121, 124, 127, 140 see also migration Northern Rugby Union 20, 123, 175 Norway 117–18 NYAC (New York Athletic Club) 39

INDEX

O’Callaghan, Eddie 81 Odyssey (Homer) 57 Oliver Twist (Dickens, Charles) 63 Olympic Games 57, 59, 60, 69, 73–5, 76 1896 45, 50, 74 1904 42, 139, 154 1912 75, 154 education 67 motto 57, 58 women 45 On the Origin of Species (Darwin, Charles) 41 opposition 4–5, 170–1, 174 organized sport 14, 52, 63, 89 Oriard, Michael 26 Ouimet, Francis 38 Our Village (Mitford, Mary Russell) 206 outdoor sports 65–6 PAA (Playground Association of America) 148 pain 168f–70 paintings 28 see also art Pakistan 15 Paradis, Marie 34 parallel bars 72 Parker Bros. 83 parks 34 Patagonia 115 pato 115–16 peasantry 125 Peck, Annie Smith 34, 35f pedestrianism 14, 86, 89, 125 Aboriginal Australians 159 dishonesty in 87 rules 100 women 163 Penn, Henry 46 Perera, J. B. 108 performance improving 42 perspiration 93 PGA (Professional Golfers’ Association) 112 Phiilipet, Léon 198 Schermlokaal (Fencing Hall) 198 Philippines 52 photography 28, 193 physical culture 95

257

physical education 67–73, 75–6, 95, 147–8 see also Muscular Christianity Coubertin, Pierre de 75 female 31 playgrounds 34 science 41 Picasso, Pablo 199 Course, La 199 Pickwick Papers, The (Dickens, Charles) 206–7 Pietri, Dorando 50 place 181–3 Played in Britain (English Heritage book series) 29 Playground Association of America (PAA) 148 playgrounds 34, 148 Plimpton, James L. 83 plowing 115 poetry 198–9 Poland 48 polo 34, 113, 193–4f Polo at Lakewood (Bellows, George) 193–4f Polo Crowd (Bellows, George) 193 popular culture 77, 78 population movement 121 Port Sunlight 85, 173 postcolonialism. See subaltern power 2, 3, 16–17, 23, 25, 29 see also exclusion accommodation/conflict 122–3, 134 America 129 body, the 30 exclusion 144 imperialism 136–40 Muscular Christianity 135 social class 61, 63 print media 143, 144 prisons 92 prizefighting 87, 125 see also boxing and wrestling art 93–4 bareknuckle boxing 24, 101, 125, 157, 168–9 clubs 88–9 Hall, Bill 92 injuries 168–9 medicine 92 pain 168–9

258

pugilism 36–7, 48, 86, 93, 177, 194–6 Warr, Bill 91 prizes 19 rugby 24 production, industrial 58 Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) 112 professional sport 19, 20, 46–7, 79, 127–8 African-American baseball teams 155–6 athletics 89–90 baseball 40 branding 96, 168 Budd, Arthur 175 golf 38 lacrosse 113–14 rowing 53 rugby 20 soccer 20, 30, 53 social class 46, 125–6, 176 women 31, 163 profit 176 protectionism 159 Proust, Marcel A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) 197 Prussia 72–3 public baths 33 public schools 18, 61, 147, 171 identity 178–9 imperialism 48, 69 nationalism 48 Rugby School 24–5, 61 social class 61 Public Schools Athletic League 158 publishing 105 pugilism 36–7, 48, 86, 93, 177, 194–6 see also bareknuckle boxing Pugilistic Club 88–9 Pullman, George 47 Punch 5 puritanism 134–6 Pycroft, James Cricket Field, The 27 Quarry, The (La Curée) (Courbet, Gustav) 191f, 192 Queen’s Club 90 Queen’s Park Football Club 100, 184, 185 race 25, 36, 27, 152–9 see also ethnicity America 129, 131f, 137

INDEX

anti-Semitism 157–8 baseball 129, 131f, 137 body, the 136 colonialism 136–8 cricket 122, 137f, 138 nationhood 129, 131, 132 pato 115–16 science 41, 42 segregation 144, 147 Social Darwinism 41, 42 stereotypes 136 white supremacy 42–4 Races at Longchamp, The (Manet, Edouard) 193 railways 78–9, 102, 124, 127 Rally, The (Lavery, John) 202, 203f Rangers Football Club 100, 184 Ranney, William Tylee 191 Retrieve, The 191–2 rational recreation movement 145–6, 172 rationality 120 rationalization 120 RCCC (Royal Caledonian Curling Club) 102 reason 120 recreation 145 Regatta at Molesey, The (Sisley, Alfred) 204 regional identity 182 Reid, Mayne 106 religion 1, 19, 50–3, 208 see also Muscular Christianity anti-Semitism 157–8 encouraging sport 171 inclusion 145–6 opposition to sport 170–1 rivalry 182 segregation 151–2 social class 144 Remington, Frederick Touchdown: Yale vs Princeton 209 Renoir, Pierre Auguste 204 representation 187–8 angling 192 aquatic sports 204–6 boxing 194–6f equestrian sports 192–4f fencing 198 games 188–90 hunting 190–2 lawn sports 200–3f

INDEX

running 198–9 swimming 199 team sports 206–12f technological sports 213–15 winter sports 212–13 wrestling 197 respectability 101–2, 126 retailing 80–1 Retrieve, The (Ranney, William Tylee) 191–2 rewards 19 Reynolds, Millie 163 RFU (Rugby Football Union) 18, 20 Richmond, Bill 48, 93 Ringerschule, Die (Slevogt, Max) 197 rivalry 181–2 roller skating 83, 89 Rose, Ralph 50 Roseland Eclipse baseball team 46 Roth, Mathias 72 Rothesay Academy, isle of Bute 111 Rothstein, Hugo 72 rounders 106 Rousseau, Henry Joueurs de Football, Les (The Football Players) 208, 209f rowing 39, 49 see also sculling amateur/professional 87, 125 art 204–6 boats 205 competitions 87 English 117–18 exclusion 149 fouling 87 literature 204 Norway 117–18 rules 117–18 social class 86 watermen 87 women 163 commercialization 53 Rowing Association of American Colleges 151 Royal Athletic Club 89 Royal Caledonian Curling Club (RCCC) 102 Royal Caledonian Hunt Society 184 Royal Cruising Club 184 Royal Thames Yacht Club 108 Royal Victoria Yacht Club 108 Royal Yacht Club 108

259

Rubenstein, Louis 158 rugby 16, 17, 175 art 208–9f courage 177 exclusion/inclusion 149–50 France 132 Ireland 19 literature 208 mythology 24–5 national identity 181 New Zealand 17, 25, 138 origins of 104 professional 20 rules 18, 104 social class 25, 62, 150 Rugby (Lhote, André) 209 Rugby Football Union (RFU) 18, 20, 123 Rugby School 24–5, 61 Rugby Union World Cup 24 rules 31, 41, 61, 99–103, 118 see also rationalization baseball 105–6 basketball 109–10 brand identity 105–7 camogie 111 croquet 106–7 football 18, 19, 104, 108–9 Gaelic football 116 golf 112 historicizing 104–5 hunting 115 hurling 116–17 ice hockey 104–5 lacrosse 110, 113, 114 lawn tennis 107–8 model yachting 108 netball 110 Newcombe 111 plowing 115 polo 113 shinty 117 social class 20 softball 109 standardization 13, 15, 16 stick-fighting 112 targette 111 volleyball 111 running 199 see also athletics rural sport 115

260

Russell, Fox 169 Russolo, Luigi Dinamismo di un Automobile 214 SAAA (Scottish Amateur Athletic Association) 100–1 Sabbath, the 14, 170–1 Sacks, Benjamin 122 Sailboats Racing on the Delaware (Eakins, Thomas) 205 sailing. See yachting Saint-Gaudens, Augustus 202 Salutat (Eakins, Thomas) 196 Samoa 114–15, 122, 139–40 Sandow, Eugen 96, 168 Sargent, Dudley 41 SCCA (Scottish Cross-Country Association) 101 Schaatswedstrijd voor vrouwen op de Stadsgracht in Leeuwarden (Women’s Skating Race on Leeuwarden’s City Canal) (Baur, Nicolaas) 212 Schermlokaal (Fencing Hall) (Phiilipet, Léon) 198 schools 48, 67, 178–80f see also education British public schools. See public schools British state schools 179 private schools 31 sports creation 109–11 Schwimmer, Der (Mackay, John Henry) 199 science 41–4, 92, 120 Scotland 13, 48, 100–1 associativity 183 football/soccer 152, 182, 184 identity 181, 182 land ownership 115 religion 152 segregation 152 shinty 117 sports clubs 184 Scott, Bill 170 Scottish Amateur Athletic Association (SAAA) 100–1 Scottish Cross-Country Association (SCCA) 101 Scottish Harriers’ Union (SHU) 101 Scottish Referee 184 sculling 125 see also rowing

INDEX

sculpture 197, 199, 202, 215 seasons 124 secularism 170–1 segregation 144, 147, 149–52 Seurat, Georges 199 Shaw, George Bernard 195 Cashel Byron’s Profession 195 Sheffield Cup Final 186 Sheffield Football Association 123 shinny 117, 153 shinty 117 Shinty Association 117 shooting 84, 189 Shooting for the Beef (Bingham, George Caleb) 189 SHU (Scottish Harriers’ Union) 101 Simms, Willie 37 Sironi, Mario 214 Sisley, Alfred 204 Regatta at Molesey, The 204 “628-E8, La” (Mirbeau, Octave) 58 skating 83, 89, 158, 212 Skelly, Jack 42 skiing 25, 212–13 skill 93 slavery 37, 155 Slavic identity 133 Slevogt, Max 197 Ringerschule, Die 197 Smith College 160 snowshoeing 138 soccer 16, 17, 207 see also football art 207–8 associativity 183 commercialization 18–19, 53 fans 20–1 Ireland 24 mythology 24 origins of 104 popularity 18–19 professional 20, 40, 53 rules 18, 104 Scotland 152, 182, 184 segregation 152 violence 20–1 women’s 47 Social Darwinism 41, 143 social class 25, 33–4, 37–41, 63–5 see also exclusion aesthetics 94

INDEX

amateur sport 15–16, 19, 79, 127, 174–6 blood sports 125 British 125–8 capitalism 135 commercialization 85–6 corporeality 94 cricket 35–6, 63, 176 croquet 107 cycling 82 Derby, the 3, 4, 5 family structure 126 Germany 63–4 golf 37 governing bodies 103 horse racing 36–7 investment 86 lacrosse 113–14 lawn tennis 107 leisure 78, 80, 203 local sporting events 11 middle class 175–6, 178 model yachting 108 modernity 125–8 movement between 86–7 Muscular Christianity 135 Olympic Games 74 peasantry 125 print media 144 professional sport 46, 79 religion 144 rugby 25, 62 rules 20 schools 61 shooting 84 sports associations/clubs 89–90, 149, 183–4 women 160 working class 124, 125, 144–5, 145 social control 47–8 social practices 23 socialism 63–4 softball 109 Sokol movement 127, 132–3 sokols 48 soule 62, 132 sources 26–9 spaces 57–60, 76 see also facilities and sportscapes employers providing 172–3

261

football 62–3 Germany 63–4 nature 65–6 Olympic Games 73–4, 75 outdoor sports 65–6 playgrounds 34, 148 rural 11 schools 61, 67 social class 63–5 spare-time spectrum 60–3 spectators’ 63 YMCA 62 Spalding, Albert Goodwill 54, 105 baseball tours 106, 210 Spalding’s Official Baseball Guide 105–6 Spalding Sporting Goods Company 55 Spalding’s Official Baseball Guide (Spalding, Albert) 105–6 spare-time spectrum 59, 60–3, 76 Sparkes, John 93 spectator sports 79–80 spectators 11, 13–14, 15, 127, 185–6 see also spectator sports art 193, 211 fanaticism 21–2, 185–6 space 63 speed 58 Spencer, Herbert 41 sphairistikè 108 Spirit of the Times: A Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature and the Stage 27 sport 11, 22–3 meaning/use of term 11, 13–14, 61 models of 68–9 Sport, Le 27 sport-leisure split 126 sportification 16 sporting characters 11 sporting estates 11 sporting games 62 see also games meaning of term 61 sporting heroes 2 Archer, Fred 2–10 sporting intelligence 11 sporting spaces. See spaces Sporting Star 27 Sports Argus 27

262

sports associations 88–90, 100–1, 108 accommodation/conflict 123 Jewish 158 segregation 156–7 sports clothing 28–9, 66, 83–4 uniforms 183 women 28–9, 126, 127, 167f sports clubs 14, 88–90, 100–1, 183–5 exclusion 149 sports creation 109–12 sports equipment 66, 80–1, 95 sportscapes 60, 72 see also spaces Spring, Tom 93 St Leonard’s School, St Andrews 110 St. Louis Brown Stockings 185 St. Paul’s School, Concord 104–5 staff sports clubs 85 Stag at Sharkey’s (Bellows, George) 196 Stagg, Amos Alonzo 53 standardization 13, 15, 16, 102–3 see also codification and rules Stanton, Elizabeth Cady 159 Starley, John Kemp 81 Starr, Ellen Gates 147 statistics 16, 36 Steer, George 93 Stevens, John Cox 38, 49 Stewart, Hattie 163 stick-fighting 112 stickball 189 Stone, Duncan 182–3 Stoney people 115 stress 169–70 Strong, Josiah 52 Strongman “Wolff ” 87 subaltern 122–3 see also colonialism suffragettes, the 45 Sullivan, James E. 42 Sullivan, John L. 42, 163 sumô wrestling 197 Surtees, Robert 190 sweating 93 Sweden 15, 41 gymnastics 70–2 “Swimmer, The” (Whitman, Walt) 199 swimming 83, 163, 199 table tennis 83 Tait, W. W. 101

INDEX

Taking the Count (Van Loan, Charles E.) 195 targette 111 Taylor, Albert Chevallier 207 Kent vs. Lancashire at Canterbury 207 team sports 15, 179, 206–12f technology 55, 78, 81–4 plowing 115 timing 89 tennis 39, 83–4, 86 art 202–3f Denmark 103 jeu de paume 188–9 literature 202 rules 107–8 women 149, 150f Tennis at Newport (Bellows, George) 202 Tennis, Hertingfordbury (Gore, Frederick Spencer) 202 Tennis Party, The (Lavery, John) 202 Tennisspieler am Meer (Seaside Tennis Players) (Liebermann, Max) 202 tewaarathon 113 theatrical spectacles 95–6 Thorpe, Jim 40, 154 Thurston, John 83 time 57–8, 59, 140 art 211 calendars 122, 124 cross-country 101 football 62–3 leisure 15, 58, 59, 77, 78, 124 see also spare-time spectrum Olympic Games 73–4 outdoor sports 65–6 schools 61, 67 social class 63–5 spare-time spectrum 59, 60–3, 76 work 62, 77, 78, 124, 125 timing 89, 101 Tissot, Jacques-Joseph 201 Croquet 201 “To an Athlete Dying Young” (Houseman, A. E.) 198–9 Toledo Blue Stockings 155–6 Tolstoy, Leo 204 Anna Karenina 190, 192–3, 202 Tom Brown at Oxford (Hughes, Thomas) 204

INDEX

Tom Brown’s Schooldays (Hughes, Thomas) 24, 204, 207, 208 Touchdown: Yale vs Princeton (Remington, Frederick) 209 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri 214 L’Automobiliste 214 tourism 33, 35, 59, 65, 66 cycling 82 trade 55 traditional sports 11 training 91–6 transport 15, 54–5, 78, 86 railways 78–9, 102, 124, 127 travel 78–9, 102–3, 127 Treatise on Gymnasticks, A (Beck, Charles) 94 Trinity College Dublin 116 Tsuboi Gendo/Tanaka Seigyo Kogai Yugibo 105 Turnen 25, 60, 71, 132–3f Turner, Joseph Mallord William Cricket on the Goodwin Sands 207 Turnverein (Turnen gymnastics club) of Budweis/Bud jovi 132–4 turnvereins 48, 132–3 Twain, Mark 210 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A 210, 213 universities 171 University of Chicago 53, 54 urbanization 12–13, 14–15, 33–4, 65 art 204–5 civic pride 185 identity 182, 185 spectators 79 US Amateur Athletic Union 102 USA. See America Utagawa Kunisada 197 Uzanne, Louis-Octave 58 Vale of Leven Football Club 184 Vamplew, Wray 13, 99 Van Loan, Charles E. 195 Taking the Count 195 Vassar College 160, 161 Veblen, Thorstein 203 “Vénus d’Ille, La” (Mérimée, Prosper) 188–9 Vertinsky, Patricia 174

263

Vikelas, Dimitrios 74 violence 18, 21–2 America 177 boxing 41 football 177, 186 labor relations 34 masculinity 44 spectator sport 186 visual representations 27–8 Voelker, Carl 95 Völker, Karl 71 volleyball 111 Von Morgens bis Mitternachst (From Morning to Midnight) (Kaiser, Georg) 213 Wagner, Honus 40 Wald, Lillian 147 Wales 13, 181 Walker, Donald 95 British Manly Exercises 95 Exercises for Ladies Calculated to Preserve and Improve Beauty 95 war see also conflict absence of 45 Warburton, James Edward “Choppy” 42 Warner, Glenn “Pop” 53 Warr, Bill 91 water sports. See aquatic sports Waterfall in the Adirondacks (Homer, Winslow) 192 wealth 37–8, 40, 58, 63, 175 Jews 158 spectators 79 weightlifting 45 Wells, John 169 West Ham Football Club 62 West of Scotland Harriers 100 Weston, Edward Payson 163 Wharton, Edith Age of Innocence, The 202 white supremacy 42–4 Whitehall Club 90 Whitman, Walt 199 “Swimmer, The” 199 Whitney, Caspar 45 Whymper, Edward 66f wilderness 34, 115–16, 129, 177 see also frontier Willard, Jess 44

264

Williams, Jack 171 Wiltfeber—der ewige Deutsche (Wiltfeber— the Eternal German) (Burte, Hermann) 189 Wingfield, Walter Clopton 108 Winkfield, Jimmy 37 winning 176 women 29–30, 45, 87, 159–63 art 200f–2 basketball 109–10, 139, 161 camogie 111 clothing 28–9, 126, 127, 167f croquet 107 cycling 30, 87, 126, 162, 163, 184 discrimination 29–30, 159–60, 174 eroticism 166–7 family structure 126 football 31, 126 as football fans 186 gambling 88 golf 87–8, 112, 149 gymnastics 128 inclusion 149 independence 45–6f, 47 indigenous sport 153 lacrosse 110–11 lawn tennis 107, 149, 150f menstruation 174 mountaineering 34–5f, 45 netball 110f Olympic Games 45 opposition to 174 public sport 126–7 respectability 126 sports clubs 90 weightlifting 45 World War I 47 Workman, Annie Bullock 34

INDEX

Wrenskiold, Erik Holemnkollen 213 Wrestlers, The (Luks, George) 197 wrestling 44, 86 art 197 Breton 132 Cumbrian 182 literature 197 rules 101–2 women 163 Wylie, Alexander 173 Yacht Racing Association 108 yachting 38, 49, 184 see also model yachting art 206 literature 204 rules 108 Yale University 54 YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) 49, 50, 52, 61–2, 146f–7 basketball 109 Chinese-Americans 157 colonialism 136 Yoke Choy (Disseminate Knowledge) Club 157 You Know Me Al (Lardner, Ringold Wilmer “Ring”) 210–11 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). See YMCA Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) 157 YWCA (Young Women’s Christian Association) 157 Zola, Émil 189 Germinal 189 Zulu kingdom 113

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