Gender and Imperial Sport

Abstract

In the winter of 1906, the national rugby team of South Africa, the Springboks, traveled to Britain for a series of matches. Twenty-five games later, they had lost just two and drew one, all the while outscoring their opponents 553 to 79. The trouncing, though decisive and embarrassing, may not have been as newsworthy as it proved to be had the same thing not happened the year before, when the New Zealand All Blacks took 31 of their 32 matches in the British Isles by an aggregate score of 830 to 39. Within a year, then, two teams from the Empire came to Britain, the home of organized sport and the birthplace of athleticism, and earned victories that resonated not just with fans of rugby but also with the culture at large. In contrast to earlier colonial victories, most notably the Australian success at cricket against England, had been explained away by stressing the “Englishness” of the Australians, the rugby defeats struck a warning chime among English commentators and were seen to be a portent of doom for the future of the British Empire, especially in the wake of the perceived poor showing of the British army in the recently concluded Anglo-Boer War.1 Organized games and the doctrines of Muscular Christianity, which held that athletics in general and team games in particular were uniquely able to foster the manliness which an Empire needed in order to prosper, had been exported over the second half of the nineteenth century.2