Rule Britannia: Nationalism, Identity and the Modern Olympic Games

Matthew Llewellyn

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415663908
• eBook ISBN: 9781317979753
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

On 6 July 2005, the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2012 summer Olympic Games to the city of London, opening a new chapter in Great Britain's rich Olympic history. Despite the prospect of hosting the summer Games for the third time since Pierre de Coubertin's 1894 revival of the Olympic movement, the historical roots of British Olympism have received limited scholarly attention. With the conclusion of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the passing of the baton to London, Rule Britannia remedies that oversight.

This book uncovers Britain's early Olympic involvement, revealing how the British public, media, and leading governmental officials were strongly opposed to international Olympic competition. It explores how the British Olympic Association focused on three main factors in the midst of widespread national opposition: it embraced early Olympian spectacles as a platform for maintaining a sporting union with Ireland, it fostered a greater sense of imperial identity with Britain's white dominions, and it undertook an ambitious policy of athletic specialization designed to reverse the nation's waning fortunes in international sport.

This book was previously published as a special issue of International Journal of the History of Sport.

Prologue: An Indifferent Beginning

On 6 July 2005, during the 117th annual session of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) held in Singapore, delegates voted to award the 2012 Summer Olympic Games to the city of London. In defeating a highly favoured Paris bid, the British capital realised the unrivalled prospect of hosting the Summer Games for the third time since Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s 1894 revival of the Olympic movement.¹ For a nation that served as the cradle of modern sport, the IOC’s decision provided a crowning glory for British sporting and Olympic history.² Born on the playgrounds of the nation’s most prestigious public schools during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modern competitive sport flourished throughout the British Isles.³ The British embraced sport as a vehicle for the promotion of masculine virtue and muscular Christianity, and also as an instrument for empire building. They believed that sports such as cricket and rugby union solidified colonial and dominion relations with the motherland and furthered Britain’s territorial claims overseas.⁴ Even outside of the framework of empire, the British exported, both directly and indirectly, their games to the farthest reaches of the globe. In the Pax Britannica, an age of unrivalled British commercial and naval power that followed Waterloo, sailors, merchants and engineers introduced British sporting pastimes to foreign lands, established the organisational framework that ensured their diffusion and inspired the development of local traditions and patterns of play.⁵

The British not only spread sport around the globe, they organised and controlled the process as well. Through their dominance and control of bureaucratic organisations such as the Football Association (1863), the Jockey Club (1752), the Marylebone Cricket Club (1788) and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club (1754), the British provided the formal codification and national administration that propelled sport from its traditional roots towards its place in modernity.⁶ They revelled in their role as the leader of international sport, espousing their own chivalrous ideology of amateurism and fair play, a sporting ethos that was translated into guidelines for social intercourse. By the second half of the nineteenth century a sports mania had gripped the British Isles. Fuelled by the twin forces of industrialisation and urbanisation, football, rugby union and cricket became not only pastimes but passions for the British, transcending and reconfiguring class, racial and eventually gender boundaries, and pervading social and literary discourses. Renowned West Indian scholar and liberationist C.L.R. James confirmed the importance of sport in the fabric of national life when he described games such as football and cricket ‘as the greatest cultural influences in nineteenth century Britain’.⁷ Sports, more so than the prose of Shakespeare or the scientific discoveries of Newton, provided an image that the British presented to the world and which foreigners came to associate with Britain.⁸

Olympic Heritage

Embedded within the patchwork of Britain’s rich and vast sporting history lay the roots of the modern Olympic movement. While the ancient Olympic Games of classical Greek antiquity (776 BC–394 AD) obviously provided an important foundation for a modern Olympic revival, the British provided the ideological and institutional framework that inspired Baron Pierre de Coubertin to bring it to fruition. Born in Paris on 1 January 1863, Coubertin grew up in the aftermath of Napoleon’s stunning 1815 defeat at Waterloo that led the French Empire into a decline that reached its nadir with their capitulation in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. A crippling sense of degeneracy, together with an impassioned search for the root cause of the malignancy, pervaded French life in the post-war Third Republic. Reeling from the humiliation of defeat, Coubertin became absorbed with finding a remedy to the debility and turmoil that gripped the nation. France had fallen behind her imperial rivals in the quest for overseas expansion, her foreign trade plummeted and the nation’s birth-rate declined at an alarming rate. Coubertin identified a lack of physical training in French schools as a major cause behind his nation’s rapid decline. Rejecting the military, political and legal careers expected of a member of France’s old aristocracy, he devoted his life towards overseeing the physical and athletic development of the nation’s youth.⁹

As an aspiring educational reformer, Coubertin embraced Britain’s sporting traditions as the cornerstone of his pedagogical ideology, eschewing the German model of regimented, paramilitary gymnastics – Turnen – that had long proved popular on the European continent, even in France. During the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, a ‘cult of athleticism’ dominated the English public school system as educational reformers elevated sport to a position of unrivalled prominence. Built upon the chivalrous Greco-Renaissance concept of manhood, along with the aggressive spirituality of muscular Christianity, a coterie of influential public school headmasters endeavoured to redefine elite concepts of masculinity and behaviour. Through organised team sports such as football, rugby union and cricket, proponents maintained that students acquired important character traits such as equanimity, bravery and honesty – qualities deemed central to the development of patriotic, imperialistic and religiously devout English gentlemen.¹⁰ Coubertin’s fascination with British competitive sport derived from reading Thomas Hughes’ totemic fictional novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Reading Tom Brown as a work of detailed and contextualised history, Coubertin mistook Hughes’ fictional version of Thomas Arnold, the legendary headmaster of Rugby School and a champion of muscular Christianity, as the person responsible for the significance accorded to competitive sport in English schools.¹¹

In reality, the historical Arnold had been far more interested in promoting the moral and religious education of his students than in overseeing their physical development. Blissfully unaware of this fact, the passionate Anglophile Coubertin sailed across the Channel in 1883 to the homeland of his own personal athletic philosophy, calling at public schools in Rugby, Eton and Harrow, and the two leading bastions of elite English university education, Oxford and Cambridge. The baron returned from his pilgrimage convinced that Britain’s sporting traditions were the keystone of her empire, a vast collection of transoceanic realms that covered over one-quarter of the world’s land mass ‘upon which the sun never set’.¹² He hypothesized that if France adopted a British sporting culture, it would revitalise French society, consolidating the ruling classes and restoring the nation to its former status as arbiter of Western civilisation. Inspired by his educational sojourn in Britain, followed by at least three subsequent visits before the end of the decade, Coubertin returned to France to begin a 21-year campaign to transplant an English and ‘Arnoldian’ physical educational system to his homeland.¹³

Unsurprisingly, Coubertin’s educational mission put him at odds with many of his Anglophobic countrymen who held a strong distaste for the British and their wild sporting pastimes. Paschal Grousset’s overtly nationalistic Ligue Nationale de l’Education Physique captured the virulent tone of opposition against reforming French education through British sport. The baron proved resilient in the face of Gallic prejudices, producing a constant stream of publications in support of a British educational system and even founding a number of sports organisations on the British amateur model, the most notable of which was the Union des Sociétés Franҫaises de Sports Athlétiques.¹⁴ While chauvinism continued to stymie the baron’s ambitions for overhauling the French educational system, a new objective had captured his attention: the revival of the Olympic Games.¹⁵ The baron’s attempts to reignite the Olympic flame after nearly 1,500 years – the Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius dissolved the ancient Olympic Games in 394 AD on the grounds that they were a pagan festival¹⁶ – has been the subject of a body of consummate research.¹⁷ Evidence has clearly shown that in spite of his own historical account and a strong tendency for personal aggrandisement, Coubertin was not the first to conceive of the Olympic revival idea.¹⁸ On the contrary, Panagiotis Soutsos, a Greek poet writing in the aftermath of his nation’s vict...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Excerpts
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editors' Foreword
• Historical Perspectives series pages
• Sport in the Global Society series pages
• 1. Prologue: An Indifferent Beginning
• 2. Lighting the Olympic Flame
• 3. A British Olympics
• 4. The Battle of Shepherd's Bush
• 5. 'A Tale of National Disaster'
• 6. The Empire Savers
• 7. 'Olympic Games are an International Farce'
• 8. 'Olympic Games Doomed'
• 9. The Curse of the Shamateur
• 10. Epilogue: Britannia Overruled
• Index