A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain

by Michael Paterson

  For those with a bent towards gambling and the necessary social standing, the casino at nearby Monte Carlo was in operation by 1857 and grew into the principal gaming centre of Europe. In less than a quarter of a century it had made such huge profits that the local ruler was able to absolve his subjects from paying any taxes. It at once gained a reputation for high stakes, raffish behaviour (the Prince of Wales was an habitué) and suicides among the unsuccessful. As one English observer wrote just after the end of the century: ‘When a gambler has become bankrupt at the tables of Monte Carlo, the company that owns these tables will furnish him with a railway ticket that will take him home, or to any distance he likes, the further the better, that he may hang or shoot himself anywhere save in the gardens of the casino.’3 The resort was widely condemned by the press in Britain, but it nevertheless became an important part of Victorian expatriate life.

  For the middle classes, opportunities to travel abroad remained very limited until the spread of the railway. This altered almost overnight the habits and expectations of millions, for within a single generation – from the thirties to the fifties – Continental Europe was brought within reach. It was in the middle of this period that an enterprising Englishman changed the nature of travel for ever.

  Thomas Cook was a Baptist and a temperance campaigner. One day in 1841 he organized a train to transport a number of his colleagues from Leicester, where he lived, to a temperance meeting at the nearby town of Loughborough. The excursion was a success, and Cook realized that there was potential in the notion of arranging journeys for others. Not only did passengers have greater pleasure in travelling when someone else had dealt with all the arrangements, the railways were willing to offer more favourable rates when block bookings were made in advance, and they could also schedule trains to suit the passengers.

  Within four years, Cook was organizing regular trips with the Midland Railway, providing outings to coastal resorts. A decade later he ran an excursion from Leicester to Paris. His ambitions kept pace with his accomplishments, and the next year – 1856 – he began his ‘Grand Circular Tour of the Continent’. He meticulously planned these journeys, reconnoitring in person the routes and the places to be visited, and then accompanying the tourists. Italy, a country that had long fascinated the British, was an extremely popular destination. Cook, as a teetotaller, was often dismayed by his passengers’ fondness for local wines, which he assumed – often with justification – would have unfortunate effects on their digestion. In one of the more bizarre quotations to emerge from the Victorian era, he pleaded with them: ‘Gentlemen! Do you wish to invest your money in diarrhoea?’

  Europe and Beyond

  The railway and the steamer opened central Europe to the British in the middle decades of the century. The Rhine was filled with Anglo-Saxon tourists, the castles, cathedrals and hotels on its banks echoing to the sound of their language. Armed with guidebooks from the German firm Baedeker, which have been a ubiquitous symbol of tourism ever since, they were known for their noisy confidence and their perpetual complaints – about the food, the beds, the weather, the cost of things, the rudeness of locals and the lack of cleanliness. They colonized Switzerland in the sixties, and they poured into Italy, familiar to their countrymen since the Grand Tour a century earlier, and now treated as an extension of the Home Counties.

  Travellers of this sort were not confined to Europe. By the end of the sixties, the empire of Thomas Cook had reached the Middle East. In 1869 he was a guest at the opening ceremonies for the Suez Canal. He was not alone. A multitude of British tourists were also there, brought by his company. In the same year he hired two paddle-steamers and began running excursions to the pyramids. Egypt became almost his personal fiefdom, for he gained from the Ottoman ruler the exclusive right to run excursion boats on the Nile. With this monopoly went a palpable sense of power. He was nicknamed ‘Field Marshal Cook’ for the armies of native workers he employed as porters, messengers and guides. He was also referred to as ‘the real ruler of Egypt’. He was certainly able to influence events there, for he loaned a number of his vessels to the British Army, which used them to transport troops and supplies upriver in the attempt to relieve Gordon at Khartoum. In 1899 he launched the first of a fleet of luxurious paddle-steamers that opened a new chapter in river-cruising, and the Nile had by this time acquired the nickname ‘Cook’s Canal’.

  The British descended on Egypt, in their thousands, for several reasons. The country’s history and culture were of course a source of fascination, and appealed to the Victorian desire to combine leisure with improvement. The warm, dry climate was beneficial for those suffering from consumption at home, and numerous Anglo-Saxons developed the habit of spending winters there. A further inducement was the fact that being abroad gave Victorians a certain licence. Young people of both sexes were able to behave with greater freedom than could be found within the tight strictures that governed them at home. At a hotel in Cairo or Alexandria – as in Interlaken or Biarritz – it was much easier to meet strangers who, at home, might well consider one unsuitable. No matter what the differences in station or in income, one had after all something in common: the experiences of travel. Victorian novels are full of instances of embarrassment caused by holiday friendships that cannot be pursued at home. They are also replete with stories of ‘adventures’ – flirtations, often passing but sometimes serious – that women enjoyed with strangers. For men, a tour in Egypt gave frequent opportunities to help young ladies on and off camels or donkeys, or to assist them up the sides of pyramids. For both men and women, this was not the least among their reasons for wishing to travel.

  Britain’s dominance in Egypt, begun when Disraeli purchased control of the Suez Canal and continuing when the country became a protectorate, was a further encouragement to tourists, who could enjoy the protection of British arms amid exotic surroundings. Because the country remained volatile, however, military adventure was sometimes an inducement. The prospect of a naval bombardment and the landing of troops prompted this advertisement in The Times on 7 March 1885:

  Advertiser proposes to hire a steam yacht and join her at Alexandria, and proceed thence to Suakin at once, in order to WATCH the OPERATIONS AGAINST OSMAN DIGMA. Would be glad to hear of three others willing to JOIN and share expenses. Time required about six or seven weeks, and total expenses probably £300.4

  Cook and his employees took much of the uncertainty – and therefore the stress – out of foreign travel. Smartly uniformed company staff escorted tourists to, or met them at, their destinations. They arranged hotels, restaurants, guided tours and – where necessary – medical treatment. This made it possible to spend weeks abroad without needing to speak to a single foreigner, and created the prototype of the modern ‘package tour’.

  Cook’s empire continued to expand. He devoted much of the year 1872 to a trip around the world, scouting new routes and destinations. The company opened offices in Calcutta and Bombay, and with them arrived the whole paraphernalia of agents, native staff and chartered vehicles. Cook’s tours then spread to East Asia, and it was soon possible to circumnavigate the world with them.

  By the mid-eighties tourists could visit any continent. Each of the huge mail-carrying steamers that plied, with clockwork regularity, between Britain and America, Asia and Australasia could carry hundreds of passengers, and onward travel once they arrived was becoming easier. From 1885 it was possible to make a week-long journey across Canada on the Canadian Pacific Railway, and the Australian outback also became a destination for trippers. The western American frontier was not considered ‘closed’ (i.e. settled and civilized) until 1890 – in other words, places that were still ‘wild’, and possibly haunted by bandits and armed natives, were already on popular tourist routes. Just as today, there were complaints that mass travel had made the world smaller, taken much of the adventure out of going overseas and filled the hotels and monuments of the globe with undesirable fellow countrymen.

  Playing Fields
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  At the start of the reign the traditional English ‘sports’ – hunting, shooting and fishing – went on as they always had. In addition there were ‘games’, cricket and football, the former well organized. Its rules had been codified in 1788, and it was played by eleven-man sides. Football, on the other hand, was a generic term for numerous forms of scrimmage that might involve scores of players – the male populations of rival villages or entire forms of schoolboys. Such rules as existed usually referred to local circumstances. Few moves were unacceptable; injury was taken for granted and was almost universal. In each of the great schools at which football was played – Winchester, Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Charterhouse, Shrewsbury – a different version had developed, based on local geography and conditions and with its own rules, terminology, scoring and even size or shape of ball. The Rugby game, famously ‘invented’ in 1823 by William Webb Ellis, a boy who (as a memorial plaque at the school announces) ‘first took the ball in his arms and ran with it’, was taken up over subsequent decades by so many other schools and clubs that it gained a permanent hold throughout the country and beyond. Even those schools that proudly kept their own version of football came grudgingly to accept the Rugby game and to let it share their playing fields.

  England had initially had no monopoly of games. Tennis had come from France, and was played in England, at schools and universities, from the fifteenth century. Cricket may also have originated across the Channel as a game played by peasants using a curved bat and a wicket made from sticks. The Celtic countries had their own bat-and-ball games, shinty and hurley. One of them, golf, had been played in England – as a very minor activity – for centuries (it is thought to have been introduced from Scotland by James I), though it did not become popular in the south until the later nineteenth century.

  At schools, whether ‘public’ or otherwise, pupils amused themselves with the usual playground games and with the rolling of hoops. This was often done competitively – one hoop, or several simultaneously, requiring considerable skill to manoeuvre. As cricket developed in the later eighteenth century, schools that were within reach of each other began to compete in the game. Eton played Westminster in 1786 – the first such inter-school fixture – and began playing Winchester a decade later. These contests were not officially approved, and the teams, supporters, venue and subsequent result had to be hidden by both winners and losers from the authorities. When discovered, those involved were usually thrashed or otherwise punished, a situation that continued until, in the 1820s and 30s, some headmasters gradually accepted the advantages of organized exercise. Despite official disapproval, however, games had steadily increased in popularity, and the school athlete had already become the hero that he has remained.

  Character Building

  Victorian schools are credited with the invention of team games, partly as a means of channelling aggression and using up surplus energy, and it is true that in the decades before Victoria there were a number of noisy rebellions against authority in public schools, resulting in damage and expulsions. Bored young men tended to create trouble with neighbouring farmers by trespassing, poaching and vandalism, and there were often fights with local roughs. Organized games not only lessened these problems but trained participants in fitness, courage, teamwork, fairness and sacrifice. After the cult of games had become established, one of the most trite misquotations of the era was trotted out to justify it: the Duke of Wellington was reputed to have said that the Battle of Waterloo had been ‘won on the playing-fields of Eton’, though this was a twisting of his words. Games did indeed help to develop many positive qualities, but they entered the world of the school and university (for old boys took the games to Oxford and Cambridge) gradually and in spite, rather than because, of official endorsement.

  Thomas Arnold, the legendary Rugby headmaster whose tenure (1828–42) only just lasted into the Victorian era, has been credited with creating the entire public-school ethos. The school he organized became a model for others, his influence spread by several pupils who themselves became headmasters elsewhere. Games were part of this legacy, though in fact Arnold took almost no interest in them (at least he allowed them to be played openly against other schools, which represented progress!). In fact, the fixation with games had outgrown any opposition by the middle decades of the century.

  The consolidation of games had derived, like so much else in Britain during the first half of the century, from improvements in transport. The creation of better roads and the building of railways meant that young men could travel to distant schools more easily. The result was an increase in the number of boarders at the great schools. It also meant that teams could much more easily visit each other’s schools – or some other, mutually convenient venue – to play fixtures. The growing wealth of the middle class was meanwhile bringing about the opening of new schools: Marlborough, Radley, Clifton, Wellington, Lancing and Cheltenham, as well as a host of smaller establishments, belong to the middle decades of the century. These quickly developed rivalries both with each other and with their more ancient counterparts. There was suddenly a whole network of opponents, and this helped drive the cult of games that had become a frenzy by the end of the century. The availability of competition also meant an increasing standardization of rules.

  Willow

  Cricket progressed from a school and village game to a county and national sport, with standards of play becoming increasingly high. Bats lost their curved shape and became straight and flat. Wickets were standardized as three – rather than two – upright sticks with bails on top. Boundaries were introduced, and pitches gradually became smoother, which enabled play to become more sophisticated. One development came not from the deliberations of some committee but from the playing of young people in a garden. The older sister of a boy was bowling at him, but owing to the shape of her wide crinoline skirt she was unable to throw the ball underarm, as was universal practice. She therefore bowled it overarm, with her arm straight. This doubtless seemed absurd at first glance, but it proved a much more effective means of delivering the ball. It gave the bowler much greater speed and enabled the ball to be placed with surprising accuracy. It also meant that a fast-moving ball would bounce on the crease, making it far more difficult, and more challenging, to hit. This method was introduced into matches in 1864, and has been used ever since.

  County cricket began with irregular, occasional fixtures, but by the end of the reign there were permanent sides with their own – often hallowed – grounds. National teams toured the country and international competition was also well established by the middle years of the reign, for an English side had first gone to Australia in 1861, and thereafter there were regular exchanges. During one of their return visits, in 1877, the Australian team defeated their opponents so decisively that the British press commented that English cricket was dead and that the Australians had taken its ashes home with them. This jibe gave its name to one of the world’s most eccentric sporting trophies – a tiny urn containing the remains of a burnt wooden bail – for which the two countries compete every year. It continues to be one of the great sporting fixtures. The international element in this and other games gave an added glamour and an impetus to public enthusiasm. Crowds at matches became bigger as improved public transport and special trains made it possible for greater numbers to attend, and the facilities – grandstands and permanent clubhouses or pavilions – improved.

  As games became more sophisticated, those who played them well became increasingly revered. Though there had been ‘sports personalities’ in the past (one thinks of Regency prizefighters such as Daniel Mendoza), the new mass media were able to make household names out of the best of them. The most outstanding – and perhaps the greatest British sportsman of all time, for that matter – was W. G. Grace (1848–1915). A Gloucestershire country doctor, his sturdy build – he was as barrel-chested as a blacksmith – and thick beard became his trademarks. He came from a cricketing family (he and two brothers played in the England side ag
ainst Australia in 1880). At the age of seventeen, playing for England against Surrey in 1866, he scored 224 runs. Thirty years later he made 257 against Kent. In the course of a lengthy career he scored 54,896 runs as well as taking 2,878 wickets. That he was a kindly and convivial man greatly endeared him to the public, who poured into the grounds to see him play. He was perhaps the first of what has been a numerous breed since his time – the national sporting celebrity.

  Leather

  The first inter-school football match was played between Charterhouse and Westminster in 1863, but in the same year took place a much more important event – indeed, one of the most significant moments in British sporting history. The Football Association was formed by a gathering at the Freemasons Tavern in London, on 26 October, of old boys from different public schools, who sought to settle differences in rules and procedures so that they could play matches against each other. (The word ‘soccer’ derived from ‘Association’.) This not only cleared the way for such fixtures but enabled national sides to play against other countries. The Football Association (FA) Cup was first competed for in 1871, and the first international match took place the following year. Two years after that, Oxford and Cambridge played the first University Match.