ABSTRACT
The first match played by the famous Wanderers football team took place in September 1864. Their opponents were a team of army officers from Aldershot. The game lasted two and a half hours and the Wanderers won by a single goal to nil. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the officers’ team of the Royal Engineers at Chatham was one of the pioneers in the development of the passing game in Association Football. They paraded their skills during a Christmas visit to Nottingham and Sheffield in 1873 and won the FA (Football Association) Cup in 1875. Sport was one of the few ways in which soldiers and sailors might mix more or less freely with their civilian neighbours. Commanding Officers (COs) increasingly encouraged it. The COs of the Guards Depot at Caterham, Surrey organised an athletics meeting, not only for the benefit of the troops in the camp but also for the ‘edification’ of the residents in the neighbourhood. It was held on Easter Monday and by 1890 was attracting 5,000 spectators with some of the events open to civilians. In many respects it might be argued that a relationship between the two sporting worlds was an
obvious one. One of sports’ more endearing characteristics is its ability to bring people from different spheres together, in what is a social as well as a competitive environment. But it is important to remember that in the later nineteenth century and beyond, the British public tended to be ambivalent about their sailors and soldiers. Although enjoying the public displays provided by military bands on ceremonial occasions and excited by the imperial exploits of an age of small wars, they had a low opinion of the rank and file in both arms. Usually recruited from the pool of unskilled labour, the ordinary seamen and soldiers were often thought to be no better than they ought to be. Prone to drunkenness and frequenters of prostitutes, they were often believed to be responsible for hooliganism in public places and were frequently refused entry to pubs, music halls and other places of entertainment. Both the British Army and the Royal Navy had the reputation of being poor employers. No respectable working man would join either service save as a last resort. Sport became one of those areas of social life where these judgements might be challenged. This was, perhaps, the most important of a number of ways in which organised sport could
be seen to be of benefit to the armed services. It is not too difficult to compile a list of the others, such as improving the physical fitness of all ranks, and boosting unit morale and esprit de corps. It was also often argued that it helped to cement inter-rank relations without threatening the essential hierarchal structure and that sporting prowess when exhibited by an individual or a team brought not only publicity but also prestige and enhanced reputation. It might even aid
recruitment (see Mason and Riedi 2010). What follows is an exploration of the growing relationship between civilian and military sport during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with emphasis being placed not so much on what civilian sport did for the military but rather more on how far sport in the armed services contributed to the wider world of civilian sport. It is worth reminding ourselves that the growth of sport in Britain in the 50 years or so after
the Great Exhibition of 1851 was considered by many who saw it as one of the wonders of the age. Not only did the number of individual sports expand: the numbers of mainly men who played and watched increased dramatically especially after 1870. Moreover, the social composition of participants and sport’s geographical range both widened (see Tranter 1998). Sport became an important part of the curriculum not only in the public and grammar schools but also in the elementary schools to which most children went. It was increasingly organised on a national scale as clubs banded together in associations, and there was also an expansion in the employment of a small group of professionals at the elite level of several sports. The timing of sporting activity was radically altered by the spread of the five-and-a-half-day working week. Saturday afternoon became not only the main time to play sport: it also became the most popular time to watch it. The football codes of Association, Rugby League and Rugby Union were the biggest crowd pullers. By 1909 over a million people were watching football matches in the English and Scottish leagues. Athletics, boxing, horseracing and cricket also had many supporters. Moreover, many sports were developing an international dimension. British sportsmen frequently competed abroad and welcomed overseas rivals to these shores. It could be argued that the first Modern Olympic Games was the one staged in London in 1908, at which the rivalry between the British and Americans had a very modern ring to it. Nevertheless, sport and its associated idea of fair play had become very much a part of the social and ideological make-up of the British. It was increasingly one of the characteristics attributed by foreigners to the rulers of the largest Empire the world had ever seen. Moreover an awareness of all this was available to most parts of it, given the coverage of sport in books, specialist magazines, boys’ comics and both the daily and weekly press. In 1913 Lloyds’Weekly News, which sold a million copies every Sunday, published a series of articles, 57 all told, on famous sporting regiments, which underlined how far this remarkable expansion of sport had also infected the British Army (see Lloyd’s Weekly News, 30th March 1913-3rd May 1914). In fact, military sport was increasingly represented to the civilian world in a series of publications ranging from specialist papers, such as the Navy and Army Illustrated, to those largely aimed at male youth, like the Boys’ Own Paper and the Boys’ Realm, whose leading story for its Christmas edition of 1910 was about a young soldier who was ‘Every Inch a Footballer’ (The Boys’ Realm 443, Vol. X, 26 November 1910).
