‘Just a Bit of Fun’: Recreation, Ritual, and Masculinity in Irish Boys’ Boarding Schools, 1800–1880

Abstract

Organized sport has been a well-documented feature of the elite boarding school since the Arnoldian reforms of the 1830s. This chapter seeks to widen the scholarly definition of physical education to include other, often unsanctioned, forms of recreation like student protest, bullying, and fighting. By exploring the internal politics and disciplinary procedures of the boarding school, we can see how these institutions differentiated between healthy forms of competition and physical aggression and discouraged other forms of student violence and revolt. Doing so provides us with an institutional construction of masculine success and failure and suggests how adult projections of boyhood shaped children’s experience of a boarding school education. The micro politics of religion, gender, and class within the Irish boarding school suggest a distinctive political environment for Irish boys, shaped by complex ideas about political rights and the perceived state of the British/Irish relationship during the period. Far from being ‘just a bit of fun’, the physicality of a boarding school education allowed boys to imagine and act out ideas about their position in society and defend the rights and independence they envisioned as their natural inheritance.BoysBoarding schoolIrelandMiddle-classRecreation