Sports development in the nineteenth-century British public schools

Sports development is a key component of contemporary British sport. The sports development system, based around central government policy and local authorities’ application of it, influences every aspect of sport, from the hosting of the Olympic Games through to the provision of exercise classes for the elderly. The system is a channel through which governments target social, economic, and cultural problems. Sport has many features that make it attractive to the state for such ends. For example, it can help to promote social cohesion, particularly in multicultural communities. It can provide a place for the dispersal of excess energy, particularly amongst young males, that might otherwise be directed into anti-social or criminal activity. It can promote good health and thus help to reduce the costs that sickness causes to the economy. Sport can also help to generate economic activity, through hosting events, building infrastructure, and sports tourism. These and other classic functionalist readings of sport give it an appeal to governments, and sports development is central to governments’ attempts to reach these objectives. (See Jarvie 2006: 17-41 for an overview of key social theories.) Anyone with a professional or academic interest in contemporary British sport needs to look at sports development critically, and to appreciate its political and ideological nature (Hylton et al. 2001; Houlihan and White 2002; Green and Houlihan 2005). The chapters in this book explore contemporary sports development in great detail and from

a variety of positions. To help set the scene for these present-centred discussions, this chapter’s purpose is to promote debate about the historical roots of sports development. Contemporary sports development has its most obvious origins in the 1960s, when, as part of the work of a maturing welfare state, Conservative and Labour governments began to take an active interest in how sport was run. Since then, governments have managed sport to promote wider social policy objectives relating to health, education, social inclusion, multiculturalism, crime, and many other areas. We can trace the evolution of sports development through the history of the Sports Council and it successor bodies, and through the emergence of a funding and policy network involving central government, local government, quangos, sports’ governing bodies, and clubs (Coghlan with Webb 1990; Polley 1998: 12-34). An understanding of this recent history is essential if we wish to have a perspective on why contemporary sports development is like it is, what the main agencies are, and how they inter-relate. Exploring this contemporary

history can take us into causation and context, into the ways in which political, social, and economic needs inspire policy, and into the ways in which people have used sport to respond to the problems of their times. Such historical enquiry can also help us to understand how different ideologies can influence sports development, as it can show up the links between political parties’ intellectual and philosophical bases and how they have acted towards sport. However, historians of sports development are not simply interested in narratives of how the

present system came about. Essential as this is, it is also instructive for us to cast our gaze beyond recent political history, and to go further back than the influential Wolfenden Report of 1960 (Wolfenden Committee on Sport 1960). By looking for longer-term precedents and influences, we can root contemporary sports development deeper in history. Moreover, by looking in a comparative way at earlier systems that appear to share some common features with contemporary sports development, we can ask historical questions to illuminate both past and present: questions about the links between ideology and action; about the inter-relationships between providers and participants; and about the ways in which sport has been promoted through both financial support and cultural approval. With this remit, the sporting culture of British public schools in the nineteenth century emerges as an obvious contender for consideration. There was something both systematic and developmental about what happened in the

schools during this period. What Honey said of the schools as a whole can also be applied to their sports: ‘the public schools … emerged or adapted themselves during the [nineteenth] century in such a way as to constitute a system, an articulated and coherent set of schools serving a common set of social functions’ (Honey 1977: xi, emphasis in original). It was a time in which schoolboy games changed rapidly from being relatively unstructured pastimes into being central to elite educational life. Sports attracted funding and facilities, the kind of features we associate with modern sports development. Moreover, these public school sports were closely tied to political objectives. Sports became associated with schoolmasters’ desire to control pupils’ spare time and to channel their excess physicality into acceptable activities, and with boys’ sense of political allegiance with their schools as communities. Sport also became underpinned by an ideology, with orthodox values relating to class, gender, religion, national and racial identity, and imperial duty all tied up with how boys played football, rugby, and cricket. These sports were later exported around the world by former public school boys working for British military, imperial, religious, and trading interests, helping to create a global culture of team games based in part on the value systems of the British public schools. It was in the public schools that games first became linked to the notion that sport could act as a panacea for any and every problem facing the individual and the community, a notion that remains embedded in contemporary sports development, despite its fallacy. With these challenging points of comparison, it is fitting to explore the sports culture of these schools as one of the ancestors of modern sports development. There is a rich and diverse literature on this subject. Indeed, one of the pioneering works of

academic sports history, Mangan’s Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School of 1981, was devoted to the subject, which has helped it to become a central theme in the historiography of British sport. Mangan combined archival work in selected schools with a contextual analysis of the meanings that sports took on (Mangan 1981). Mangan also wrote the key text on the links between these school sports and the development of sport throughout the British Empire (Mangan 1985). Dunning and Sheard concentrated on football codes in the schools, especially Rugby’s version, in their historical sociology, Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players (Dunning and Sheard 1979). Other sports historians have taken up these books’ themes and have explored various aspects of the public school sports, including Dewey on Eton (Dewey

1995a, 1995b) and Collins on Rugby (Collins 2009), while some criticism of the apparent primacy of the public schools in developing team games has come from Harvey (Harvey 2005). Fletcher shifted attention to girls’ experiences in Women First (Fletcher 1984). The intense debates that ensued between Harvey and Dunning around the importance of the schools (Harvey 2001; Dunning 2001), and the fact that Mangan’s and Dunning and Sheard’s key texts have gone into second editions (Mangan 2000; Dunning and Sheard 2005), illustrate the continued centrality of this subject to sports historiography. The role of sport has also been explored by historians of the public school system as a whole, such as Mack (1939, 1971), Honey (1977), and Chandos (1984). These works place the development of games in the wider context of the changes that schools as a whole went through in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to this academic work, which typically combines detailed analysis of the primary evidence with a critical awareness of contexts, a number of schools have their own accounts that narrate their sporting history. These tend to lack contextual awareness, particularly on such crucial issues as class and gender politics, but they provide us with details, chronicles, statistics, and anecdotes (see Polley 2007 for guidance on different types of sports history writing). Money’s Manly and Muscular Diversions is a synthesis of this literature (Money 1997). Both academic and institutional histories draw on varied primary sources, including school records, logbooks, prospectuses, government enquiries, and curricula, as well as the literature that the pupils created in their magazines and poems. Taken together, this literature shows that there was a shift in school sports in the nineteenth century during which games became organised, codified, and regulated, and imbued with certain ideological values. The picture that emerges from this literature suggests that there was a system in place by the

start of the twentieth century. What is particularly interesting for our current concerns is that this system delivered – apparently without too much conflict – the two objectives that Houlihan and White (2002) have seen as a tension in modern sports development. There was both ‘development of sport’, through the creation of rules, the establishment of competitions, and the expansion of facilities; and ‘development through sport’, with games promoted as a way to improve the physical, mental, social, and moral well-being of the boys. It is around these themes of ‘development of sport’ and ‘development through sport’ that we will now consider the place of the nineteenth-century public schools in the history of sports development.