![]()
Count me in: reflections on a career as a sports historian
Wray Vamplew
ABSTRACT
This article outlines my work as a sports historian and the people and events that have influenced my research and career. On route, I outline some of my thoughts, opinions and prejudices about academic life.
Early years
Figures have always fascinated me. Sad child that I was, I voluntarily took arithmetic books home from primary school. At Hemsworth Grammar School, an institution that provided educational opportunity for working-class kids from coalmining villages, I discovered economic history, a topic pioneered in the curriculum by Don Hudson, a man who demonstrated that enthusiasm for your subject was a vital cog in teaching â something that I tried to bear in mind in my later lecturing and tutoring. A new world opened as I found that statistics was applicable to the humanities. My A levels (do they still exist?) were in Mathematics, Further Mathematics and History. Heeding my headmasterâs advice, I opted to go to university at the other end of the country to study a new degree, a BSc in Social Sciences at Southampton. There, courses in accountancy (which I had intended as a profession- sad again), sociology, economics, econometrics and history, all stood me in good stead as I ventured into an academic career. I represented the University at athletics, rugby union and soccer (at the time when I was suspended by the local RFU for playing rugby league alongside professionals) but the only history I did was that of the Chartist movement. Eric Clapton, the guitarist, took his trousers off in my room but thatâs another story!
In my training, as an economist, I was taught positive rather than normative economics, the branch of the subject in which value judgements are not supposed to impinge on analysis. Hence, my aversion to those sports academics, generally of left wing persuasion (as I am myself) who are guilty of what I term âreverse researchâ in which they know what they want to conclude so they search solely for evidence that will support this. Or those who draw the conclusion even if it is not fully backed up by the empirical data collection.
I was also schooled in the use of theory which I believe is central to understanding the social science of sport. As an economist, I have always used theory both implicitly and explicitly. In his seminal work, Booth takes sports historians to task for a failure to engage more extensively with theory and criticizes those who simply gather facts to tell a story (Booth 2005). Yet Booth can be too harshly judgemental and appears unwilling to accept that approaches other than his own can still be useful. Although (very) few sports historians openly discuss theoretical issues, many implicitly use theory, or more precisely, theoretical concepts, to help them frame questions. Booth later acknowledged that theoretical structures such as modernization, hegemony, feminism, discourse and textualism have been embraced in this way (Booth 2010, 12â13). Yet I worry that these concepts are being applied uncritically. The concept of the âbodyâ pervades a corpus of writing by sports historians but how many of them are clearly aware of the subtleties and complexities of Foucaultâs work on the knowledge-body-power trilogy? Moreover, Booth plays down the possibility that the theory being applied could be erroneous. However, no theory is immutable. If the facts do not fit the theory then the historian should check the facts again and, if still convinced they are correct, then the theory should be modified. Historians must not only be prepared to use theory, they also must be prepared to adapt it. Until substantiated by evidence, theories are just competing hypotheses. They might aid our understanding but they do not explain a situation completely. Empirical support is a necessary concomitant for accepting any hypothesis. I see no place in sports history for those who accept a theory in its entirety and then slavishly and uncritically apply it with a âone theory fits all situationsâ mentality.
Edinburgh
On finishing my degree, I was offered a tutorship in economics and economic history at the Australian National University under Professor GSL Tucker, but turned it down in favour of a place at Nottingham University to qualify as a teacher of history. So much for plans to be an accountant. Then, out of the blue, the Dean of Social Sciences at Southampton asked if I would be interested in doing a Ph.D. in the Department of Economic History at Edinburgh University. âThey need an opening batâ he said. The unbeaten fifty that I had scored in a staff vs. student cricket match had been remembered. A scholarship followed and away I went across the border to work on a history of the relationship between railway development and the Scottish economy. This was a study in counterfactual history. The basic notion of which is that if it is alleged that fact A led to result B, one way to show this is to argue that if A had not happened then B also would not have occurred. In my case, I attempted to remove the railways from Scotland and assess what would have happened to its industries if there had been no railway demand for coal, iron and engineering products, and transportation would have been dependent on a version of what already existed in the form of canals, roads and shipping. The thesis involved many thousands of computations all done on a hand-wound, mechanical calculator: thank goodness for the development of the computer and statistical packages. Much depends on the logic of the assumptions made as to what developments might have occurred: Napoleon might have won at Waterloo had he had nuclear weapons is not an acceptable counterfactual. In my thesis, I ruled out an earlier invention of the automobile but accepted that the canal network might have expanded as might coastal shipping facilities, thus avoiding, I hope, the criticism of counter-factual history by Eric Hobsbawm (1974, 376) and others as being âif my grandmother had had wheels she might have been a greyhound busâ history!
Later I took an element of counterfactual history â âwhat if historyâ â when I explored what might have happened to British sport in the absence of greater leisure time, increased disposable income and the growth of towns and cities, factors which promoted the development of mass spectator sport, widespread commercialism and professionalism within sport and the ensuing problems of corruption and sharp practice consequent upon the influx of money into the sector. I argued on the basis of empirical evidence that neither of the realistic alternatives â pre-commercialized sport and contemporary amateur sport would have been problem-free (Vamplew 1988, 6â8).
After two years, as a Ph.D. student and one concurrently as a part-time zero-hours contract teaching assistant, I was offered a lectureship in the Department. Although I continued my doctorate and began to publish on railway history, I commenced my research in sports history. It is probably new to the Leicester School with whom I have had several academic skirmishes, that I also did some voluntary sports sociology teaching. The sociologists at Edinburgh encouraged my new interest and asked me to participate in a sampler short course collection for students finishing their first year. Frank Bechhofer was particularly supportive, even when I so bored one of his dinner guests that, looking at what was then my small frame, she asked if I was a jockey!
The results of my research were published as The Turf: A Social and Economic History of Horse Racing in 1976 to mixed reviews (Vamplew 1976). I explained the development of horseracing in economic terms along the lines that it originated from a combination of wealth, lack of spending opportunities and competitive instinct. It was a prime example of conspicuous consumption in which match races between two owners demonstrated an ability and willingness to risk money. Racing has been a dynamic product and clearly, even by 1900, was a different sport from that of 1700. The pre-modern version was predominantly rural, highly localized and was free to watch but two centuries later it had national rules and many courses were enclosed and charging gate money. What happened was a combination of commercial widening (more fixtures), commercial deepening (new revenue sources), product improvement (modifying the original sporting competition) and product development (changing the nature of racing).
The most critical review came from Roger Longrigg in the Times Literary Supplement who felt that mine was âa classic example of history rewritten by preconceptionâ (hoisted by my own petard?), though he acknowledged that my efforts to find evidence to support my ideas were âingeniousâ. The broadsheets were more easily satisfied: the Sunday Timesâ reviewer said it was ânever dull or unduly sociologicalâ and that of the Irish Times thought it âthoroughly researched and well-arguedâ. The Economist praised the âhigh quality analysisâ (Times Literary Supplement, 23 July 1976; Sunday Times 30 May 1976; Irish Times, 5 June 1976; Economist, 5 June 1976). As might be expected, most academic reviewers found something to criticize. Although James Walvin stated it to be âa notable contributionâ, both âperceptiveâ and âoriginalâ, Tony Mason felt that I had been cavalier with my source material and John Walton, though accepting that it was âthe first serious history of an important business enterpriseâ, did not appreciate the âfrothy frivolityâ of my writing style and felt that I failed to bring together the threads of my twentieth-century analysis. Jack Dowie saw it as âa good book, well-researched and written, simultaneously entertaining and informative, always asking sensible questionsâ but followed Waltonâs line via a racing metaphor in which he compared the work to âwatching the Cesarewitch on a misty October day at Newmarket ⌠[where] ⌠it is a long time before it is clear what exactly is (and has been) going onâ, especially when I âfinished the race a few furlongs from the spectatorsâ(New Society 27 May 1976 [Walvin]; Victorian Studies, 20 (1977/1978), 105â106 [Mason]; Business History,19 (1977), 103 [Walton]; Economic History Review, 30 (1977), 356â357 [Dowie]. Nevertheless, even with its shortcomings, it became a standard citation in horseracing and sport history literature.
By the time the book came out, I had left Scotland. Edinburgh University operated a ratio of senior to junior staff which worked against the Faculty of Social Sciences, a new grouping in a university dominated by long-established faculties of Medicine, Law and Divinity. Hence, with promotion unlikely, in 1975, I immigrated to Australia to take up a lectureship in economic history at the Flinders University of South Australia. This came about via a chance meeting with Eric Richards, a professor of history at the Flinders. There was no interview, just the submission of a CV. This time I decided to go. Michael Flinn, one of the professors in the Edinburgh department, had an old colonial view of the empire and felt I should only move to a chair, something I never achieved in my 18 years in Australia. In passing I should note that at the time I had less respect for Flinn than the other professors in the department, Berwick Saul and Christopher Smout. They, I felt, were real researchers whereas Flinn had moved into synthesis, something which as a Young Turk, I felt, was not what chairs should be doing. Some years on I realized that synthesis can be true scholarship: Michael, a belated apology.
Another reason for leaving was disillusionment with a country in which the lights were off half the time and there was a running political sore in the shape of Northern Ireland. In 1974, I did a stint teaching at Queenâs University in Belfast which gave me an abhorrence of organized religion and its consequence for civil society. I had never lectured before where the Catholics and Protestants sat at opposite sides of the theatre and a tutorial argument had sectarian undertones and this was to be the next generation of influence! One of my economic history colleagues was later murdered by Loyalist paramilitaries. I spent most of my free time working through old copies of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society to produce a reappraisal of the operation of the Corn Laws (Vamplew 1980).
Australia
Flinders was an institution in its first decade of operations and open to ideas. There, alongside my conventional economic history teaching, I was allowed to develop a multidisciplinary course in Sport and Recreation with sports philosopher Bob Paddick. I also developed an honours course on sports history from which emerged Daryl Adair with whom I later co-authored a debated history of sport in Australia (Adair and Vamplew 1997).1
In 1977, Richard Cashman and Michael McKernan organized the first Sporting Traditions Conference at the University of New South Wales.2 From this emerged the Australian Society for Sports History which, despite some initial friction between those trained in physical education and those with a history background, became a progressive force for the development of sports history. I was the foundation editor of its associated journal, Sporting Traditions. In those pre-personal computer days everything had to be typewritten and duplicated on a Xerox machine. I became President of the Society in 1989 and was honoured with its first life membership when I left Australia.
Whilst in Australia, my penchant for quantitative work led to an invitation to write a major statistical history of South Australia to commemorate the stateâs 150th anniversary (Vamplew 1986). This gained me a place on the stateâs heritage committee where I was instrumental in saving the scoreboard at the Adelaide Oval. It also produced an approach to edit Australians: Historian Statistics, one of the collections in a multi-volume set of reference works commemorating the Australian Bicentennial (Vamplew 1987). Within that volume, I put together data on sport and recreation with a concentration on crowd attendances. Years later, when visiting my son in Ballarat, we took a Sunday afternoon trip to a bookshop in a nearby rural community. There in the window was a mint, second hand copy of the volume. When told that I was the editor the proprietor insisted that I autograph the book, destroying its pristine nature but, in his opinion, increasing its value. I suspect it will still be there on my next visit! A useful spin off from this project were several statistical monographs and the Australian Historical Statistics Bulletin, both of which enabled useful quantified sporting material to gain an audience.
I continued work on British sports history and in 1988 produced my seminal work, Pay Up and Play the Game: Professional Sport in Britain, 1870â1914. This was to be published by Leicester University Press but when they insisted on cutting its length, I sent the manuscript to Cambridge University Press who accepted it in its entirety. Leicester was miffed but academics should not allow publishers to dictate everything in what is often a one-sided relationship. One thing that was missing from The Turf was any real theoretical underpinning. I first attempted to rectify this in Pay Up and Play the Game in which I applied the concepts of profit and utility maximization, cartelization and economic rent to several sports including racing. The objective of the work âwas to produce a quantified economic and slightly social history of commercialized sport by the application of comprehensible economic theory to hard, empirical dataâ (Vamplew 1988, xiv). This was fortunate enough to win the inaugural North American Society for Sport History (NASSH) Book Award.3 I was appreciative of the fact that an American society had given its prestigious award to a book on British sport by a Yorkshireman living in Australia, especially when there was an outstanding book on American college football also on the shortlist.
Given the distance of Australia from my basic source materials, the book could not have been written without the aid of grants from the Australian Research Grants Committee, the Carnegie Trust and Flinders University. I have been fortunate in my career to obtain grants to aid my research, over $300,000 in Australia and over ÂŁ150,000 in Britain, so hopefully what I say now will not be construed as sour grapes. Scholars today are forced by their employers to apply for grants, not to pursue scholarship but to be measured as part of a research quality exercise. Yet grants reflect only the quality of the proposal not the quality of the research which still has to be done. Grants are an input not an output. ...
