Sport, War and the British: 1850 to the Present

Abstract

The intersection of Britain's military and civilian worlds during wartimes has received no shortage of attention. Yet these explorations largely overlook or underplay the role of sport. What distinguishes Peter Donaldson's text is his analysis of how sporting language and imagery were used to both shape and reveal popular understandings of military service and war. His emphasis on sporting metaphors as cognitive tools that entangled war with cultural values, thereby evoking emotional responses to conflict by blurring literal and figurative boundaries, is particularly revealing. “Packaging conflict in the language and imagery of sport,” Donaldson observes, “helped to promote self-sacrifice on the frontline, sustain bellicosity on the home front and mitigate grief for the bereaved” (3). This exploration of conceptual metaphors in the narration of Britain's wars—how they were packaged, configured, and presented to the public, most of whom experienced war vicariously—gives insights into the cultural values of the time from which that narration is produced.Sport, War and the British comprises five chapters, spanning more than 150 years of military endeavors. Each chapter deals with a period of military engagement, from Victorian imperial conquests to the South African War, through the First and Second World Wars to wars in the nuclear age. This longitudinal study allows Donaldson to show continuities and shifts in how war was understood by the wider public against the backdrop of changing material conditions within society. He identifies popular understandings of the sport-war intersection as representative of ideologies and values which were characteristic of a particular sociocultural present.Donaldson begins his text with an exploration of the Victorian notion that the sports pitch and battlefield paralleled one another. While his key analysis is the conceptual metaphors used by civilians and combatants to make sense of Britain's wars, he also explores the pervasive mythology that sport served as a prelude to war. The cult of athleticism, as spread through the public schooling system, engrained physical endeavor upon generations of young men as a central pillar of British national identity and imperial power, making sporting ability widely held as perhaps the key marker of an effective combatant. The “sporting warrior” was believed to possess the physical fitness and aptitude for war originating from a sense of fair play, moral purpose, teamwork, and self-sacrifice derived from the sports field and which were easily transposed onto the battlefield. The effect, Donaldson shows, is that the sporting imagery employed to represent imperial conquests in Africa and India to the British public served to legitimize, but also obscure, the brutal realities of colonial warfare.From here on, the “sporting warrior” became an increasingly tenuous concept. The appropriateness of the cult of anti-intellectual athleticism, which underscored British public schooling and, accordingly, much of its military corps, was called into question during the South African War when soldiers struggled to suppress Boer guerrillas. Yet the perceived martial benefits of physical activity kept the army devoted to an all-embracing sporting culture. The mechanized warfare of the two world wars exposed the notion that sport could be an ideal training ground for military service. Although recourse to sporting imagery and language remained tools to impose meaning and nobility upon combat, these wars severely challenged the morality of viewing conflict as extensions of the sports field. While representation of war through sporting metaphors endures, amongst the armed forces, sport has come to be held as something in which soldiers partook recreationally, rather than as a substitute for the professional study of war.Donaldson shows that throughout Britain's wars, and despite numerous challenges, sport remained firmly embedded in the popular consciousness of civilians and combatants and served as an enduring frame of reference to make sense of conflict. For soldiers, sport made the foreignness of war more familiar while also demonstrating that they had not abandoned their civilities amid the brutalities. For civilians, sporting language was a shorthand to make sense of wartime complexities and legitimate conflict.Sport, War and the British is effectively a cultural history of a dominant ideology embedded in middle- and upper-class value systems. Donaldson draws extensively on those who, in their day, comprised the ruling classes and opinion leaders within society—headmasters, novelists, journalists, war correspondents, newspaper and magazine editors, politicians, high-ranking military officials, and artists. The transmission of this ideology is evident in the way, for instance, children's books socialized young boys into the “sporting warrior” image and how adults were reminded of the virtues of amateur sport through war novels, memoirs, and biographies, which linked military success to athletic prowess. Donaldson's use of Mass Observation surveys, while enabling wider conclusions about popular beliefs, demonstrates how entrenched the ideology around sport was. This text captures many of the continuities of a British sporting ethic molded in the value system of the late-Victorian genteel, for whom amateur sport helped to counter the perceived decadent forces within the British Empire.