A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain

by Michael Paterson

  Football had, curiously, taken root at both ends of the social scale. It continued to be played with enthusiasm by the top-drawer public schoolboys who had organized it, yet it was taken up with equal enthusiasm by mill hands, railwaymen and miners in the north and Midlands. In 1879 Darwin, a team of mill workers, competed for the FA Cup, and in 1883 a side of Old Etonians were beaten at the Oval by Blackburn.

  The first football club to have a constitution and a set of rules was established at Sheffield in 1860. Six years later another club that has represented the city ever since – Sheffield Wednesday – was started. The oldest ‘League club’ (for it was to join the Football League when that was founded) in England or indeed the world was Notts County, which was raised in 1866. It was in the same period of roughly a decade and a half that many of the major teams – the household names of today – came into being: Glasgow Rangers (1872), Aston Villa (1874), Hibernian (1875), Everton (1878), Sunderland (1879), Tottenham Hotspur (1882), Manchester United (1885), Arsenal (1886), Glasgow Celtic (1887), Liverpool (1892) and Newcastle United – an amalgamation of two earlier clubs – in 1893. Many had origins that were humble but intriguing: Manchester United was formed by employees of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway and was originally called Newton Heath. Sunderland was originally ‘the Sunderland and District Teachers’ Association Football Club’ – something of a mouthful for those cheering its efforts. Everton began life as the team of the St Domingo’s Sunday School, while Aston Villa was associated with a local Wesleyan chapel. Stoke City, a club dating from as early as 1863, was founded by old boys of Charterhouse.

  Though these sides usually began as a group of enthusiastic amateurs, they quickly developed a more serious outlook, for in the eighties and nineties an increasing number of clubs became fully professional: Everton was entirely so by 1885, Arsenal by 1891 and Tottenham by 1895. It was a notion unheard of before that time, but one with which we are familiar today. The Football League, which allowed for organized competition between teams that could be either amateur or professional or a combination of the two, was formed for the 1888–9 season.

  Rugby, like soccer, had for some time attracted devotees among the wider public. Players were amateurs, but this situation began to alter in the nineties, when a number of working-class players – and clubs – in the north-west of England wished to turn professional. They were not allowed to do so within the terms of the game’s governing body, the Rugby Union. As a result they set up in 1895 their own equivalent, the Northern Union (later the Rugby League), in which players were initially allowed to receive expenses for participating in matches, and then – three years later – to be paid for their services (in fact it had been common for some time to pay then surreptitiously), provided they had some other paid occupation. Not until the following century would the full-time professional player become part of the sporting world, but the basis of this system was established in the Victorian era. The Rugby League meanwhile drifted farther from its parent sport by developing a number of different rules – most notably the playing of matches between teams of thirteen, rather than fifteen, players. The two forms of the game have remained separate, and separately popular, ever since. Though it cannot be established when professional sportsmen began to appear – for wrestlers and boxers had been paid since time immemorial – this aspect of modern games began with the Victorians, the creators of spectator sport as we understand it.

  Oars

  The fact that a few schools (Eton and Westminster, most obviously) were situated by rivers meant that rowing gradually became a major sport at public schools, and because the universities too were on rivers it was natural that enthusiasm should spread there. The Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race was first staged in 1829, and inter-collegiate competition also became highly organized. The Regatta held annually from 1839 at Henley became – and long remained – a patrician affair, for there was no aquatic equivalent of Rugby League (it was not until well into the twentieth century that the Thames Tradesmen were permitted to compete) and in any case rowing did not gain any noticeable following outside the confines of muscular Christianity. Henley Regatta was not an entirely British affair, however. Rowing had spread to the older American colleges, which consciously modelled much of their gentlemanly ethos on the English universities. Both Harvard and Yale sent crews to take part in the Regatta. In the Victorian world the great sporting clashes between ancient seats of learning attracted much more widespread interest than they do today, and among the many millions who had no connection with these places there would often be a surprising degree of partisan feeling. The newspapers gave extensive coverage to the Eton–Harrow cricket match, first recorded in 1805, so that by the middle of the reign it seemed like a long-established tradition. It was a two-day contest, and was a recognized part of the Season. It could be assumed that much of the Government and aristocracy, as well as the leadership of the Church, the armed forces and industry, would be at Lord’s to see it. The Boat Race was less socially exclusive but attracted greater interest. On the day it took place, the light- and dark-blue ribbons of the rival crews could be seen all over London, even on the hats and coats of workmen and flower-sellers. ‘Boat Race night’ remained a major event at least until the Second World War, with supporters of both sides creating good-natured mayhem in the streets.

  Others

  Some games owed nothing to the influence of schools. Golf became popular because it was gentle and unstrenuous but very skilful. This meant that it could be played well by people who lacked the size or the fitness level necessary for other sporting activities. It also required very little equipment, for a set of clubs could often be rented, and it was sociable – even a hard-fought match could have much of the feeling of an agreeable outdoor stroll with one’s friends (indeed critics of golf liked to describe it as ‘a good walk spoiled’). Despite its relative simplicity, it did not appeal to the British working class, developing instead an image as the epitome of suburban respectability. When women began to take part in games, golf was an obvious choice, for long skirts did not hamper an activity that relied on upper-body strength and hand-and-eye coordination. Women’s golf clubs had begun to appear by the end of the reign; the St Rule’s Ladies’ Golf Club was founded at St Andrews in 1898.

  The game was largely confined to Scotland until about the eighties, though the first English club, the Royal North Devon, had been established in 1864. St Andrews, on the east coast of Scotland, had a history of golf dating back to the Middle Ages, and was thus considered the Mecca of the game. It was here in 1857 that the first great modern golf tournament took place. This had, in less than two decades, evolved into the Open Championship (so-called because any player, amateur or professional, could take part) that has been held at different clubs throughout Britain ever since. The first entirely amateur championship was held at Hoylake in Cheshire in 1885. The fact that ‘professionals’ existed at all in this game says something about the speed with which it had gained popularity. The skills of those who could play well and teach others were considered worthy of respect and remuneration. Of these, the most legendary golfer of all time was the St Andrean Tom Morris (1821–1908), four times winner of the Open Championship.

  Golf was not the only gentler game to become characteristic of Victorian Britain. Archery enjoyed a vogue in the early and middle part of the reign. Once again, this was an activity that demanded skill and practice but which involved only the upper body, and was thus suitable exercise for ladies. A more sociable pastime was croquet, a game derived from the old French pell mell that had been played in England since at least the time of Charles II. Like golf, this was a sociable, peripatetic activity, but required far less space and, significantly, could be played by men and women together (as a result of which it could become highly flirtatious). ‘Lawn croquet’ was – as was usual with Victorian sporting passions – thoroughly organized and endowed with a set of rules; the Croquet Association, its governing body, was established in 1896. It also, like so
many other games, found a spiritual home, in this case at Hurlingham in London.

  Another game had, by the later decades of the century, attained an immense popularity and importance. Tennis was, until the 1870s, still the traditional ‘real’ game that had been played since the Plantagenets. It had complex and arcane rules, and was played in an indoor space such as can still be seen at Hampton Court. In 1873 an army officer, Major Walter Wingfield, invented a game that he called sphairistike which rapidly developed into the more familiar lawn tennis. The game was fast and skilful, required minimal equipment and was suited to a (relatively) confined space. It was equally suited to men, women or a combination of both, with matches between two players or four. The game spread like wildfire throughout Britain, for, the ‘weekend’ having come into fashion, it was an ideal means of killing time socially at country houses in summer. Crossing oceans, it became equally popular in Europe, in America and throughout the British Empire. Within four years of Major Wingfield’s invention, the All England Croquet Club, based at Wimbledon, had added to its title the words ‘Lawn Tennis’, and held the first world tennis championship, an event it has been hosting ever since. Such was the game’s popularity that croquet was swiftly pushed aside.

  Billiards was not a British invention, though ‘snooker’ was a game, and a word, bequeathed to the world by Britons. The term in fact meant a first-year cadet at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. Used in the context of an officers’ mess to mean an amateur or beginner (one officer is said to have remarked that ‘We are all snookers at this game’) it enjoyed considerable vogue in the Indian Army. The same was true of polo, a game played in ancient India and Persia but organized with the usual thoroughness by Anglo-Saxons. It perfectly suited the high spirits of young officers stationed in Indian garrisons where there was very little else to do. As readers of Winston Churchill’s memoirs will know, several hours every day were devoted to practising and playing, and it was effectively compulsory to have a passion for it. It was taken up by civilians too, and made its way through the English mercantile community to Argentina, where it is still avidly played – yet another British sporting legacy to have put down roots far from home.

  A rare example of traffic flowing in the other direction – an unexpected sporting manifestation that was largely confined to the north of England – was baseball. This game, similar to the old English game of rounders, had been organized in the United States in 1839. Sixty years later it was so popular in parts of England that there was a league of professional teams, as well as a number of amateur clubs – indeed the football stadium in which Derby County plays is to this day called the Baseball Ground. It has not been established when or why this sport took root in industrial Britain, nor is it known how or why it declined. A silver trophy in the museum at Stockton-on-Tees bears witness to the prestige it once enjoyed in that area.

  Whatever the origins in England of this transatlantic import, native English games continued to proliferate. The public schools had produced the game of fives – a type of contest that involved ricocheting a ball, propelled either by the hand or by various forms of bat, around a court that was either completely enclosed or open at one end. As with other games, each school had its own version that was dictated by local conditions. The most famous of these was, and is, the Eton game, which was played between two of the buttresses of College Chapel. The shape of the ‘court’ was dictated not only by these but by the jutting, at the left-hand side, into the playing-space of the stone banister from a flight of steps. The game was successful, popular and much imitated. The school itself built rows of fives courts, and the design has been copied internationally. In each instance, the same jutting banister has been included.

  From fives developed two games that have outdistanced it in popularity: racquets and squash. Both were developed at Harrow. Racquets was a fast game played with a hard ball in an enclosed court, and required a certain amount of courage. It achieved a slightly wider popularity, during the sports craze of the mid-century, through the efforts of public-school old boys, who had courts built in a few locations in London, but it remained – as it has ever since – confined to these schools and to those who attended them. Squash, on the other hand, is played all over the world. A game for two or four players, it uses a rubber ball and racquets similar to, but smaller than, those used for tennis. It was played – again by the middle of the century – by boys unable to get into the racquets court, who amused themselves by hitting a rubber ball off an outside wall (the ball ‘squashed’ when impacting on this).

  As well as inventing, adapting and playing games, the British copiously wrote about them. Wisden, the annual bible of cricket, was begun in 1864 by a cigar merchant of that name, and the Football Annual, a similar volume dealing with the other most popular game, began at roughly the same time. The Badminton Library, a series of exhaustive reference books on all major and minor sports, was published throughout the later Victorian decades and rapidly gained the reputation of being the ‘last word’ on questions relating to the subjects. Sets of these were an essential component in the libraries of gentlemen’s clubs and country houses. Though subsequent works of reference have been as authoritative, none has been as thorough.

  Given British dominance of the world of sport, it might seem surprising that it was a Frenchman – Charles, Baron de Coubertin – who founded the modern Olympic Games. Coubertin, however, a somewhat eccentric character who was a passionate anglophile, was a great admirer of the English public schools and their ethos. He made, in fact, a pilgrimage to Rugby School chapel in 1883 to see the tomb of Thomas Arnold, and fell on his knees beside it in a kind of trance, lost in a sense of deep reverence. His own country had been defeated in war and he believed its future salvation lay in training French youth by the same methods the Doctor had used. Though he failed to make headway with this notion, thirteen years later he presided over the first modern Olympic Games at Athens, and his inspiration was once again the playing fields of Rugby.

  Once the machine age had produced greater, and more widespread, leisure it was the British who more or less single-handedly organized the ways in which it could be profitably used. It has proved a more lasting legacy than the nation’s military and economic ascendancy.

  10

  THE PRESS AND LITERATURE

  The Papers

  During the second half of the nineteenth century two important elements came together to create a revolution in communications. The first was a massive increase in the amount of material published. The second was a massive increase in the number of people able to read. Rapid advances in printing techniques made possible for the first time publishing for a mass market, while the Education Act of 1870 provided, almost overnight, a colossal reading public. In addition to this, following the reforms of 1867 and 1884, this wider public had political power that could be influenced and exploited. The implications of this changed for ever the style and content of journalism and the role of the written word in British life.

  From the 1840s onwards, greatly improved machinery enabled newspapers, and other printed materials, to be produced more quickly, more cheaply, in greater quantities and with greater sophistication than ever before. Illustrations could be reproduced with much greater clarity, and by the end of the century it was possible to reproduce photographs and coloured pictures, a fact that was to give rise to a plethora of illustrated weekly papers. The writing and presentation of news also underwent great changes. From the earliest printed periodicals in the seventeenth century until the latter decades of the nineteenth, the format of newspapers had remained essentially the same: though there might be a decorative ‘masthead’, with bold lettering, a royal coat of arms or even an engraving, the outside of the paper was considered to be of little importance. The front and back pages were used for columns of advertisements because they were regarded as mere wrapping, while the news itself was on the inside pages. Even here, news items were not announced through headlines or bold type, but simply placed in c
olumns according to whether they were domestic or foreign news. The stories were difficult to find amid the bland and uniform layout, and the type was so small that it must have strained the eyes.

  A random sample – the Morning Star (no relation of its present-day Communist namesake) for 6 July 1857 – may serve as an example. It is four pages long and its name, set between two decorative stars, is in Gothic script. The front page is entirely given over to advertisements for performances at London’s theatres, cheap excursions on the Great Western Railway and life insurance. Half a column is given over to advertising coal from different collieries. There is also an intriguing miscellany of other goods and services: ‘Water your garden with flexible tube, from 2d per foot’; ‘Try Rogers’s improved method for Fixing Artificial Teeth’; ‘Swimming learnt in an hour’; ‘Crimean Tents – A large quantity, available for gardens, lawns &c, to be SOLD’; ‘Where shall we dine? – at the SALUTATION TAVERN, 17, Newgate Street’; ‘Washing in Earnest’. Lively though these sometimes are, they are not eye-catching in the way we would expect. Inside, the news is a good deal less interestingly presented: ‘Parliamentary Business for the Week’; ‘Foreign News’ (‘The Insurrection in Italy’, ‘The Ballot in the United States’). Admittedly there is almost a whole page on ‘The Glasgow Poisoning’ and the trial of Mary Smith, one of the century’s most important criminal cases, but it is presented without any attempt to draw the reader’s attention or hold his interest. The back page is divided, more or less equally, between theatre reviews and financial news.