Christ and the imperial playing fields: Thomas Hughes's ideological heirs in empire

Abstract

Theodore Leighton Pennell, A.G. Fraser and Cecil Earle Tyndale-Biscoe, together with many others, were in part the heirs of Thomas Hughes in empire: in much of what they did, they were chivalrous in action, classless in disposition, compassionate in intention and Christian by persuasion. They were not without personal weaknesses: without them they would not have been human. And they were not without cultural convictions born of their time and now viewed more critically: confident ethnocentricity, certain superiority, moral myopia. Nevertheless, to adopt a modern idiom, they were ‘caring' in their purposeful Muscular Christianity. For them, the strong body was an instrument of edificatory purpose; while their games, both learnt and taught, were a means of spiritual induction ensuring the growth of physical ‘sinews of the spirit'. In this conviction, they were unquestionable sincere. In this conviction, however, they were the heirs of the advocates of the mid-nineteenth-century ‘games ethic' of the English public schools of the privileged such as G.E.L. Cotton of the re-born Marlborough College as much as the heirs of Thomas Hughes of the pre-rebirth Rugby School. They viewed the playing field as a metaphorical gudgeon holding together their Christianity and their Muscularity.