when he comes to deal with the Victorian era, will hail it as not only the golden age of football, but the age also during which the citizen soldier, trained to manliness in the playing-fields, first voluntarily abandoned the shop for the sword, to show how fields were won in the grim game of war.1
In an age when, for football at least, professionalism was in the ascendancy, this paean to amateur sporting ideals serves as a fascinating indication of just how deeply embedded the Victorian public school games ethic was in the public consciousness.
Certainly, Britain, over the course of the second-half of the nineteenth century, became a nation obsessed by sport. From the 1860s onwards the codification of games resulted in the development of a truly national sporting life and gave rise to an all-pervading cult of athleticism.2 For the emerging middle classes especially sport was, in J. A. Mangan’s phrase, elevated ‘to the status of a moral discipline’.3 Educated in a burgeoning public school system where athletic endeavour was regarded as more important than intellectual achievement, Victorian polite society valued character above all else.4 And sport was regarded as the major medium for developing character. Courage, discipline, teamwork and, that ill-defined yet catch-all term used by Stuart, ‘manliness’ were all thought to be cultivated through regular and intensive participation in games.5 This view was given an official stamp of approval in 1864 when the Clarendon Commission reported, ‘[T]he cricket and football fields … are not merely places of exercise and amusement: they help form some of the most valuable social qualities and manly virtues.’6 Although propagated in the public schools, the belief that sport cultivated moral as well as physical strength quickly filtered out into wider society. As both Michael Paris and Geoffrey Best have noted, the public schools enjoyed something of a cultural hegemony in the Victorian period. Citing as evidence the popularity of public school fiction in state elementary and secondary schools, Best and Paris have argued that there was a widespread acceptance in the non-public school world of the elite’s cultural ideals and that these ideals, in the words of Best, ‘filtered downwards and outwards until they permeated the whole of society’.7
Sport also lay at the heart of late Victorian society’s attachment to Empire. Notwithstanding the economic imperatives that underpinned neo-imperialism, Britain’s imperial drive was presented to the public as a moral crusade, a force for good in which salvation for indigenous populations lay in their assimilation of British values. Central to this cultural transmission was sport. The Daily Telegraph was commenting on more than just a national predilection for bat and ball when, in an editorial of September 1888, it proudly declared:
Wherever we go, whatever land we conquer, we found the great national instinct of playing games. Plant a dozen Englishmen anywhere – on an island, in a backwoods clearing or in the Indian hills – and in a wonderfully short time … the level sward is turned into a cricket field in summer and a football arena in winter.8
For the readers of the Telegraph, and indeed for the wider public, cricket and rugby were distinctively British and encapsulated many of the qualities that made up their imagined national identity. Thus, the colonialist’s commitment to the propagation of these games could serve as shorthand for the civilising mission at the heart of British imperial expansion.9 Versed in the poetry of Henry Newbolt, it was taken for granted by the British middle classes in the late nineteenth century that the nation’s imperial warriors and sportsmen would, without hesitation, transfer the lessons they had learned facing ‘a bumping pitch and a blinding light’ to the perils of rallying ‘the wreck of a square that broke’.10
The veneration of sport, however, was not restricted to the civilian and imperial worlds. As J. D. Campbell revealed in his pioneering study on sport and the army, the military also indulged in games to an almost fanatical degree. With the establishment of the Army Gymnastics Staff in 1860, organised sport quickly assumed a central position in the professional and social lives of officers and men.11 From the 1870s, according to Edward Spiers, sporting opportunities no longer depended on the actions of a few enthusiastic officers but instead became institutionalised.12 Athletic endeavour, the authorities felt, not only improved physical fitness but also helped to build regimental esprit de corps by offering a rare chance for officers and men to mix, at least temporarily, on an even footing. Indeed, the games field was considered to be so central to the creation of regimental identity and cross-rank harmony that the editor of the Manchester Guardian was moved to suggest that the introduction of sporting opportunities for the armies of the East India Company might have even warded off the horrors of the Mutiny. ‘In the English army’, he lectured the paper’s readers a month after news of the massacre at Cawnpore had broken,
pleasure brings the regimental officer continually in contact with his men…. [H]e joins in their sports. On the cricket field Colonel Parade is bowled out by Private Pipeclay, and my Lord Viscount Sabretache gains undying honour for the manner in which he stopped the slashing hits of Corporal Trim. At sport in which they do not actually take part, such as boating, foot racing, jumping and wrestling, they are present, providing stakes for competition, backing the chances of their favourites, and feeling that the credit of the regiment depends upon the wind and sinews of Jones and Smith, who would be bad fellows indeed if they did not take some interest in their officers in return…. The good feeling begotten this way in times of peace finds expression under the fire of the enemy, in the deadly trade, in the weary march, in the hospital…. But as for mutinying and murdering [their officers] in cold blood, the thing is moral impossible.13
However, as David French has pointed out, sharing games fields did not necessarily lead to sharing cultural values. For other ranks, the public school spirit of sportsmanship generally took a poor second place to the more primal spur of winning.14 Whatever the differences in individual motivation though, it was still the case that by the end of Victoria’s reign, the army’s adherence to, and passion for, organised sport had become all-consuming. Campbell noted that by the late nineteenth century the average officer spent more time on sport than any other single pursuit, including military duties; even students attending Staff College had their time filled up with a never-ending diet of physical activity and team games.15
This explosion in military sport was, in no small part, driven by fears of national degeneration. There was widespread concern from the 1850s onwards that rapid industrialisation and urbanisation were undermining the health and martial vitality of the nation.16 Shocking reports during the Crimean War about the poor physical condition of the troops and their susceptibility to disease led to demands for government action. Sport and exercise appeared to be the best way forward.17 The military authorities took as a model of good practice the military training programmes of the French and Prussian armies, where physical drill and gymnastics had been part of compulsory fitness regimes for a number of years.18 Yet, as Jeffrey Richards has astutely observed, the appeal of establishing military sport in Britain in the late 1850s and 1860s went beyond the purely physical. With the Crimean War, Indian Mutiny and Jamaican Revolt all throwing into high relief the vulnerability of Britain’s overseas possessions, military preparedness and the defence of Empire quickly assumed a moral purpose.19 Team games, with their roots in the amateur sporting creed of the public schools, seemed, therefore, a perfect fit for this new-found belief in the morality of what J. A. Mangan has termed ‘militaristic imperialism’.20 Henry Brackenbury, a future director of Military Intelligence, was of the opinion that Britain already had at its disposal a vast reserve of amateur sporting warriors who could secure the Empire; the real challenge was how this resource was to be exploited. In a review of a report by the Royal Commission into Army Recruitment in 1866, he tacitly acknowledged the degenerative effect of urbanisation by insisting th...
