Sport In Britain Research Articles

Money for nothing and kicks for free? – Aspects of the long-term relationship between sport and gambling in Britain

Summary The intention here is to trace the development of the sport-gambling nexus in Britain from the early-nineteenth to the late-twentieth century. An overview of this kind facilitates an understanding of a relationship that has often been characterized as symbiotic. Over the long run, as Britain has transitioned from a pre-industrial to an industrial and then to a post-industrial society, the relationship between sport and gambling has remained intact. In particular, it survived a long period between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries when the ideological hegemony of amateurism in British sport predisposed governing bodies to view gambling with suspicion and even, at times, hostility. The article draws extensively on recent published research into the history of sport in Britain and outlines key developments in the relationship between particular sports and gambling, notably cricket, football, horseracing, greyhound racing and pedestrianism. Recent changes related to the advent of online gambling are identified and briefly discussed, with particular reference to cricket.

The legacy of a cultural elite: the British Olympic Association

At the 1996 Olympics Britain finished thirty-sixth, but changes in the State’s attitudes towards intervention resulted in an upwards trajectory that culminated in a second position in the medal table in 2016. The Government’s willingness to invest through the National Lottery after 1996 had signalled a major shift in its approach towards elite sport and marked a turning point for many long-held traditions. This paper examines a significant influence on these traditions, the British Olympic Association (BOA), and its relationship with amateurism, a sporting philosophy espoused by the cultural elites who formed the BOA in 1905. Confident in their social and political status, this sporting aristocracy used their cultural power throughout the twentieth century to impose their own hegemonic version of how sport should be managed and the values that participants should espouse. This paper draws on a range of archives to illustrate the impact of this upper-class cultural elite on the development of Olympic sports in Britain. It discusses the formation and development of the BOA by this social elite and highlights the ways in which their legacy of class interests still resonates.

‘An incredibly vile sport’: Campaigns against Otter Hunting in Britain, 1900–39

AbstractOtter hunting was a minor field sport in Britain but in the early years of the twentieth century a lively campaign to ban it was orchestrated by several individuals and anti-hunting societies. The sport became increasingly popular in the late nineteenth century and the Edwardian period. This paper examines the arguments and methods used in different anti-otter hunting campaigns 1900–1939 by organisations such as the Humanitarian League, the League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports and the National Association for the Abolition of Cruel Sports.

Clothes make the rider? Equestrian competition dress and sporting identity

Tailored jackets, long boots and white gloves are clothes not normally associated with sport, yet they make up required competition dress within equestrianism. The modern equestrian sports of dressage and showjumping have their origins in the military and on the hunting field, and this highly formal, masculine style persists in contemporary equestrian circles. Perceived by many non-participants as archaic, comical and distinctly unsporty, equestrian competition dress requirements have remained relatively unchanged for a century and are one factor (amongst many others) that visibly marks equestrianism as different to most other sporting practices. This paper draws on an ethnographic study of equestrian sport in Britain in order to consider how participants today relate to and experience formal competition dress in the course of regular sporting activities. Formal competition dress is an important aspect of individual sporting identity for contemporary riders and is understood by participants to represent the unusual ethos of equestrian sport.

Sport, industry and industrial sport in Britain before 1914: review and revision

This article focuses on three aspects of the historical relationship between sport and industry. First, it will assess the view that modern sport was a lagged by-product of the Industrial Revolution which then was exported round the world from the first modernized economy. Second, it will consider sport as an industry in its own right examining the early commercialization associated with sport, the nature of the sports product and the often neglected issue of entrepreneurship. Finally, it will turn to workplace sport which demands attention not only due to the sheer scale of its extent but also for the apparent approach to some form of gender equality in the provision of sports facilities.

‘It is pleasing to know that football can be devoted to charitable purposes’: British football and charity 1870–1918

Football charity matches and tournaments played a significant role in the development of the sport in Britain, overlapping the era of friendly games and the coming of competitive leagues. The football community prided itself on its contributions to charity, raising more money than any other sport before 1918, and stakeholders within the game – associations, clubs, players and patrons – gained kudos for this perceived altruism. However, the amounts donated, though welcomed by the recipients, were relatively minor sources of revenue for both institutions and individuals. Moreover, the charity match became less important to clubs in an era of growing professionalism and commercialization.

Successful workers or exploited labour? Golf professionals and professional golfers in Britain 1888–1914

Golf was one of the fastest growing recreational sports in Britain before 1914. It created a market for professional golfers as shopkeepers, teachers, greenkeepers and craftsmen. A database of 3000 players was used to examine their social and economic experience at club and competitive level, and this experience was then compared to that of professionals in horse racing, cricket and football. Golfers were the first sportsmen to permanently organize themselves with the establishment of the Professional Golfers’ Association in 1901, which provided welfare services and promoted tournaments, thus actively and uniquely assisting the development of the industry within which its members worked.

Village greens, commons land and the emergence of sports law in the UK

This article traces the legal development of recreational rights surrounding village greens and, later, urban public spaces in the UK. The article highlights that at a critical juncture in the development of modern sport in Britain—in the mid-nineteenth century—the law helped embed not only just a space for sport in the emerging industrialised and increasingly urbanised environment, but also the place of sport in the Victorian era’s evolving socio-economic landscape and, further, the relevant case law was the precursor for what is known today as sports law.

Historians and the History of Sport

This chapter offers a new and extensive analysis of the role of the historical profession in the writing of sports history in Britain, France and the United States with additional reference to Germany, Italy and Australia. The aim is to show in depth how the form and content of the various approaches taken by historians from the 1960s to the present compares to those trained in the social sciences and in physical education. The chapter has three parts: it looks first at the differing national traditions of historical writing on sport by historians; then it examines their relationship to that of sociologists, anthropologists and physical educators; finally, these differing disciplinary perspectives are critically examined in detail through concrete examples drawn from both traditional and modern sports in Britain, Europe and beyond.

Open space planning standards in Australia: in search of origins

While national standards for open space planning have long been subject to criticism, their use is still advocated in a number of Australian state planning guidelines, even if only as a ‘starting point’. This suggests that the British and American origins of open space standards commonly used in Australia are believed by some to have at least a modicum of credibility. This paper seeks to establish documented evidence of the link between Australian standards and their British and American origins and to examine the scientific basis for the latter. It was found to be impossible to establish clear, explicit and documented statements of such links. Furthermore, it was found that, in the case of American standards, the responsible organisation was itself unable to explain their basis and abandoned their use in 1996. In the case of British standards, it is found that they were based on estimated demand for sport in Britain in 1925, have remained substantially unchanged since the 1930s and do not include standards for informal open space. No evidence was found of any efforts to establish Australian standards based on contemporary Australian recreation demand patterns.

‘One of the Worst Statistics in British Sport, and Wholly Unacceptable’: The Contribution of Privately Educated Members of Team GB to the Summer Olympic Games, 2000–2012

Much has been published on sport in Britain's private schools of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, but no research of modern policy, practice and outcomes has been conducted since the 1970s. Assessment of the contribution of these schools to Team GB at recent summer Olympic Games – and to international sport in general – by politicians, sports leaders and physical education lobbyists has thus largely been informed by speculation. Future government policy on physical education and sport in schools may therefore be influenced by flawed evidence. This article examines the schooling of all members of Team GB for the summer Olympic Games of 2000–2012, and compares the contribution of its privately educated and state-educated members in terms of performance in competition and medals won. Online research using the websites of schools, sports associations, governing bodies of sport, Olympic associations and the media, together with biographies of sportsmen and sportswomen, provided information about each team member's schooling, sporting background and Olympic record. The speculation was inaccurate – exaggerating the proportion of privately educated members of Team GB but underestimating their contribution.

Playing the Market Game: Cash Prizes, Symbolic Awards and the Professional Ideal in British Amateur Sport

The rise of modern sport in Britain was a concomitant of the century-long process of commercialisation that gave birth to a modern market society. This background throws up several questions: Why was money, which greases the market economy, regarded as a problem at a certain point in the development of British sport? Why was it the Victorians in particular who first recognized this problem? Why did they take it so seriously that they ‘invented’ the amateur principle and on this basis developed a decidedly non-commercial idea of sportsmanship? In order to answer these questions the article compares two periods of British sport history and analyses them sub specie pecuniae: on the one hand the period when modern sport was created, a period stretching from the end of the Middle Ages until the early nineteenth century which was marked by the fact that victorious athletes in competitions were awarded cash prizes; and on the other hand the period of readjustment between roughly 1860 and 1914 when the amateur principle was ‘invented’ and new governing bodies dispensed with cash prizes in favour of symbolic awards. In a preliminary analysis the article investigates the capacity of the two award models to create reciprocity and strong social relations in a social context organised around competition. It then goes on to explore the high level of attraction award-giving societies in sport exerted on their specific social basis, the Victorian professions. Identifying the professions as the ‘inventors’ of amateurism might seem paradoxical, however this paradox provides a major explanation as to why the symbolic award model left a lasting mark on Victorian sports and why it was so difficult for the British to communicate their idea of sportsmanship to other sporting nations.

Imaging Sport at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art (1929–37)

The mass popularity of sport in Britain during the inter-war years was a source of fascination and inspiration for a group of artists working at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London. Although largely neglected by their contemporaries, sport was embraced by Grosvenor School artists as a means to engage with both modernity and tradition within contemporary British culture. This essay examines one work, Cyril Power's 1930 linocut print, ‘The Eight’, as a case study to investigate the interrelationship between two cultural activities frequently regarded as at opposing ends of the cultural spectrum: art and sport. By simultaneously drawing upon a rich heritage of visual culture conventions and deploying new media and methods to represent the excitement, dynamism and sheer energy of sport, Power's work offers an insight into how visual culture can engage with, and enhance, our understanding of contemporary debates and practices in both fields of activity.

"White shoes to a football match!": Female experiences of football's golden age in England

Although many British historians claim that English football in the post-World War II period was substantially the passion of working-class men, oral history accounts also reveal a largely hidden history of active female sports fans, women who keenly followed football. These female fans often faced opposition from fellow supporters and from other women. In many ways, academic research on sports fandom has worked to omit serious discussion of the role of women. Taken from a wider project aimed at making more visible the historical experiences of female spectators in sport in Britain, this paper draws on interviews with 16 older female fans of the Leicester City football club based in the East Midlands in England. It explores their experiences in the so-called golden age of the game with regard to the football stadium, styles of female support, and relationships with and perceptions of football players. Via oral history research, the paper offers a wider context for understanding the sporting experiences of female fans. But it also analyzes and explicates the meaning of sport in the lives of female fans during a period when football players were paradoxically glamorous and unobtainable local figures, but also, in some contexts, still accessible, ordinary members of local communities.

Beyond altruism: British football and charity, 1877–1914

Football charity matches and tournaments played a significant part in the development of the sport in Britain, overlapping the era of friendly games and the advent of competitive leagues. The football community prided itself on its contributions to charity, raising more money than any other sport before 1914, and stakeholders within the game – associations, clubs, players and patrons – gained considerable kudos for this perceived altruism. However, this essay will demonstrate that amounts donated, though welcome, were relatively minor sources of revenue for both institutions and individuals, and that the charity match became less important to clubs in a professional, and increasingly commercial, era.

Sport, gender and society in a transatlantic Victorian perspective*

Following the America Civil War (1861–1865) organized sport became a major vehicle for defining and acting out gender roles. This was especially so with regard to the middle class – a considerably broader category than was the case in Great Britain, the nation from which Americans derived many of their sporting practices. Much of what Americans read also was either of English origin or patterned after that country's journals and books. Tom Brown's Schooldays sold more copies than any book except Little Dorrit in 1858, and as late as 1893 David Copperfield, Jane Eyre and Charles Kingsley's Hypatia were among the 25 novels most frequently circulated by major American libraries. Many British authors who had visited the United States were of the opinion that the reason that American men paid their women ‘exaggerated chivalry’ was to compensate for the fact that ‘the female was not granted equality’ in a nation that boasted of being egalitarian. This lack of equality deeply troubled leaders of the American ‘woman's rights movement’, no one more than the resolute Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who in 1850 declared ‘the girl should have all the freedom of the boy, in romping, swimming, climbing and playing ball’. Following an 1859 cricket match with a visiting English team Harper's Weekly asserted that ‘the importance of athletic exercises is only beginning to be understood’. By the 1890s, however, male athletes were well on their way to making America the world's leading sporting nation. Their penchant for professional coaches evoked criticisms from English sportsmen as well as American college presidents. American females also benefited from the growing interest in athletic sports, although with few exceptions their participation was meagre compared to that available to males. Tennis, golf, and bicycling, sports that were deemed most appropriate for ‘the ladies’, were imported from England, as was field hockey, a vigorous game that was played mostly at private women's colleges and in settings that drew upon these contexts. Netball (derived from basketball) was one of the few contributions that the United States made to women's sports in Britain. Whereas athletic sports for males became a very public affair, with the exception of tennis, golf, and in certain instances swimming and ice skating, athletic sports for middle-class American females remained substantially, but not exclusively, a cloistered affair until the 1970s.

Successful workers or exploited labour? Golf professionals and professional golfers in Britain 1888–19141

Golf was one of the fastest growing recreational sports in Britain before 1914. It created a market for professional golfers as shopkeepers, teachers, green‐keepers, and craftsmen. A database of 3,000 players was used to examine their social and economic experience at club and competitive level, and this experience was then compared to that of professionals in horseracing, cricket, and football. Golfers were the first sportsmen to permanently organize themselves with the establishment of the PGA in 1901, which provided welfare services and promoted tournaments, thus actively and uniquely assisting the development of the industry within which its members worked.

Introduction

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Jeremy Crump, ‘Athletics’, in Tony Mason, ed., Sport in Britain: A social history (Cambridge, 1989), p. 51. 2. Mike Amos, ‘Storms in a tea cup’, in Brian Hunt and Mike Amos, eds., Northern goalfields revisited: The millennium history of the Northern Football League (Shildon, 2000), pp. 484–90. 3. Contemporary British History, 14 (2) (2000); the collection was republished as Adrian Smith and Dilwyn Porter, eds., Amateurs and professionals in post-war British sport (London, 2000). 4. Eric Dunning and Kenneth Sheard, Barbarians, gentlemen and players (Oxford, 1979). 5. Lincoln Allison, Amateurism in sport (London, 2001). 6. D.J. Taylor, On the Corinthian spirit: The decline of amateurism in sport (London, 2006). 7. William Deedes, Dear Bill: a memoir (London, 2006), p. 108. 8. For a recent treatment of the idea of amateur hegemony see Norman Baker, ‘Whose hegemony? The origins of the amateur ethos in nineteenth-century English society’, Sport in History, 24 (1) (2004), pp. 1–16. 9. Pinner quoted in John Moynihan, The soccer syndrome: From the primeval forties (London, 1966; republished 1987), p. 138. 10. Amos, ‘Storms in a tea cup’, p. 488. 11. Alan Tomlinson, ‘Bannister's feat in austere times: The construction and reconstruction of a sporting trope’, Sport in History, 26 (2) (2006), p. 230. 12. ‘Amateurism as defined by the International Federation of Rowing Associations’ (trans. Sydney Fleming), in G. Van Rossem, ed., The ninth Olympiad: Being the official report of the Olympic Games of 1928 celebrated in Amsterdam (Amsterdam, 1928), p. 709. 13. Baker, ‘Whose hegemony?’, p. 11. Additional informationNotes on contributorsDilwyn PorterDilwyn Porter, De Montfort University, LeicesterStephen WaggStephen Wagg, Leeds Metropolitan University

Projecting the visual: British newsreels, soccer and popular culture 1918–39

Between the wars soccer was the leading national sport in Britain. But far more watched the brief depictions of ‘celluloid’ soccer on the newsreels in the cinema than ever watched football on the pitch. Newsreels were a central cultural feature, yet their broader social, historical and ideological significance has been overlooked by both sports and media historians. This study draws on an extensive body of surviving newsreel material. It begins by exploring the complex nature of the inter-war cinema audiences, their responses to sporting newsreels and the cultural competencies they brought to their watching. Examination of newsreel content reveals the changing nature and highly varied coverage of professional and amateur soccer over the period, including significant attention devoted to women's soccer even after its banning from English Football Association grounds in 1921. The day to day practices of newsreel soccer coverage provide fascinating insights into the British sporting values and identities, contained, encouraged or prevented by its representations, codes and conventions. Soccer newsreels produced by the leading companies, while largely conservative in tone, were also highly ideologically charged. Through the ways in which they addressed notions of class, gender, politics, region and identity they had a major cultural impact on broader British society.

Theorising Gun Control: The Development of Regulation and Shooting Sports in Britain

Utilising an account of the development of gun control legislation in Britain and the work of Norbert Elias, this paper argues that there are a number of processes that influence the development of such legislation, both in Britain and elsewhere. It argues that while processes such as the state's predisposition to consolidate its monopoly on the use of violence and advances in people's threshold of repugnance at violence influence the development of legislation, they can also lead to a blurring of the distinction between legally held sporting guns and illegal firearms in the hands of criminals. The paper concludes by considering other factors such as the efficacy of the prohibitionist lobby on the one hand and the gun lobby on the other, together with historical factors that may, in part, account for international variation in regimes of gun control.