The high moral tone of Rugby Union, the romantic nostalgia of cricket and even the prosaic populism of association football were all notably absent from Edwardian boxing, Britain’s oldest nationwide spectator sport. In 1910 its popularity was boosted by a less than elevated enterprise – the search for a ‘great white hope’ to defeat Jack Johnson, the black, and therefore disputed, heavyweight champion of the world. Johnson had been denied a fight with his predecessor, Tommy Burns, partly because Burns’s backers had thought the title would change hands and partly because they feared that a riot would follow a black victory. Hugh McIntosh, realising the attraction such a fight would have, promoted the long-awaited bout in Australia. Johnson won easily. Finding a white man to beat him was the path to a fortune.
In 1910 McIntosh heard of a soldier who had become the heavyweight champion of India during the previous year. The winner of what amounted to the British Army championships was William Wells, a twenty-two-year-old bombardier in the 6th Mountain Battery of the Royal Artillery. McIntosh bought him out of the Army and matched him, in an £8 bout, with an opponent of no great distinction. The soldier proved popular with the crowd. Bombardier Billy Wells had become, with remarkably little effort, a contender for the heavyweight championship of the world.
McIntosh paid Wells £100 for three fights – an immense amount by the standards of the time. For the third match, with Gunner Moir, the posters advertised ‘The Search for a White Champion’. The fight was held in January 1911 and, according to the Referee magazine, ‘Every seat was occupied. I heard that all sorts of prices were offered for admission by latecomers, but there was no room … Boxing at Olympia was going to be a great success.’16 It was not such a success for Wells. At the end of the first round, betting (always an essential feature of boxing) was 20 to 1 on the bombardier. Halfway through round three, Moir knocked him out. The bombardier had what was called a ‘glass jaw’. But Wells, handsome and patriotic, drew crowds. McIntosh announced that the bombardier was still the chief contender and the match against Johnson was set to take place at the Empress Hall, Earls Court on 11 October 1911. Johnson was to receive £6,000, Wells £2,000.
Johnson, theoretically in London to train, became the star of a vaudeville show at the Walthamstow Palace. The District Times reported that again ‘every seat is occupied at every performance’ and ‘large numbers have been quite content, if they have standing room … The huge black’s exhibition bouts … have been rapturously applauded and his genial way of making a speech or singing a song … considerably enhances the popularity of the smiling giant.’17
However, everyone knew that once Johnson was in the ring the smile disappeared. The Free Churches objected to the fight on principle. Lord Lonsdale – whose father had given his name to the famous belt which champions were awarded – denounced the bout as a mismatch because Wells had no chance. The London County Council threatened to revoke the Empress Hall’s entertainment licence and the Metropolitan Railway, the Earls Court freeholder, applied for a court injunction to prevent the misuse of its property. The fight was cancelled.
Wells boxed on. He lost twice to Georges Carpentier of France and made history when he was knocked out by Joe Beckett in the Holborn Stadium. Until then the British Boxing Board of Control, a lineal descendant of the National Sporting Club, had decreed that all title fights must take place on its premises. Bombardier Billy Wells, flat out on the ring floor but still the British heavyweight champion – because the venue of the bout did not allow the title to change hands – put an end to that restrictive practice. But his personal popularity endured. He became the man who struck the gong before the credits of Rank Films appeared on the screen. Prize-fighting had evolved into a matter of personality and appearance as well as straight lefts and right jabs.
In racing the personalities were the horses. Minora won the 1909 Derby for the King and was then sold to Russia. Witch of the Air, another of Edward’s horses, won at Kempton Park on the day of the sovereign’s death. That victory was said to be the subject of the last message passed to Edward VII before he was left to spend his final moments alone with Mrs Keppel. The King had enjoyed extraordinary success as an owner when he was Prince of Wales. Persimmon, his Derby winner of 1896, sired Sceptre. The mare won thirteen races in 1902, including the St Leger, the Oaks, the Two Thousand Guineas and the One Thousand Guineas. The Sport of Kings had become more regal than ever before. The seal was set on his success in 1900 when both the Derby and the Grand National were won by the Prince of Wales’s horses.
Accession changed Edward’s luck. During his first six years on the throne, his horses performed so badly that Colonel Hall Walker, an Irish gentleman steeplechaser who claimed that he had persuaded the Aga Khan to race in Europe, leased his yearling colts to the King. The owner had more success than the horses he gave away. The King’s results remained mediocre. But Hall Walker, after giving his bloodstock as the foundation of the National Stud, became Lord Wavertree. The one winner which Hall Walker provided for the King was Minora, a horse which, it was universally agreed, would not have won the Derby if the favourite, Bayardo, had been fit.
Three great families – the ancient Derbys and Primroses and the recently arrived, if not nouveau riche, Astors – extended their influence over both racing and breeding, while the Duke of Westminster sold his stable in 1900. None of the dominant owners was, by nature, an innovator. They bought and bred horses and won as many races as they could, confident in the knowledge that they could employ the best trainers and hire the best jockeys. Steve Donohue had not yet made his name and Fred Archer was dead, killed by his own hand. The most important jockey of the period, and perhaps the most talented, was an American called Tod Sloan.
Sloan had visited England in 1897 and won twenty races out of fifty-three rides using what was called ‘the forward seat’. It had been employed ten years earlier, without success, by another visiting American who was more notorious because of his colour than for the revolutionary posture he adopted in the saddle. Black jockeys were not welcome on English race courses. Sloan took up an even more exaggerated posture – weight taken by the stirrups, posterior well clear of the saddle and body hunched over the horse’s neck. He ‘won races on bad horses which no English jockey would have won’.18 The following year he rode for the Pierre Lorilland and Lord William Beresford partnership. Some of the more aristocratic owners were scandalised: ‘Monkeyship has replaced jockeyship’ wrote one racing journalist.19 But as American jockeys came to Britain and won more and more races in the American style, the more upright posture was gradually abandoned. By 1914, elegance had totally given way to efficiency.
It was not the only American import to affect racing. George Lamport, part of the wave of imports who followed Sloan, openly admitted that he ‘doped’ his horses before a race with cocaine. Why not? In Victorian England, administering stimulants had been a perfectly legal activity. It was forbidden by the Jockey Club in 1906.
That was also a year of legal regulation. Fearful that gambling was undermining the character, as well as the finances, of the working class, the government reacted in a fashion which typified the spirit of Edwardian Britain. The Street Betting Act did not reduce either the number of bets made or the amount of money laid; it simply hid gambling from public view. Lord Durham complained that the government was ‘turning what is only a human instinct into a crime’ by ‘interfering with the amusements of the working class’. In fact, all it did was inconvenience small gamblers. The Edwardians knew that racing depended on gambling and, in consequence, would never have taken any action which cut its lifeline. The Edwardian Jockey Club wanted to encourage and extend the sport, to improve the health of horses and enhance their performance. The United States’ example proved especially beneficial. They kept their horses cool, without blankets, in stables in which the doors and windows were open in all but the coldest weather. Their training methods were radically different from those employed in England. They favoured sharper work over shorter distan
ces and they had perfected a lighter shoe (‘plate’ in racing parlance) which, because of the way they trimmed hooves, fitted the hoof more closely. All those innovations were incorporated into English stables,20 and the changes were accompanied by a near invasion of American horses. Over a hundred mares and yearlings bred in the United States were sold at Newmarket in 1908. The Jockey Club was not altogether sure that all the American imports were genuine thoroughbreds. So Lord Jersey was asked to provide a new definition. He ruled that a horse could only be called a thoroughbred ‘if it could be traced without flaw on both sire’s and dam’s side of its pedigree’. The invasion of horses was halted. But the intrusion of the new ideas was irresistible. Some of them were more important than the posture of a jockey and the size of a horseshoe – for in Edwardian Britain women were beginning to argue that they had a part to play in national sport. It was a symptom of the fast-burgeoning feeling that women should be free to take their place in every part of society.
Golf and tennis led the way. In 1900 women’s competitions in both sports were included in the Olympic Games, and Charlotte Cooper of Great Britain became the first woman Olympic gold medallist when she won the tennis singles championship. Six years later, women golfers from Britain and America met in international competition; Britain won by six matches to one. In 1908, Mrs Gordon Robertson replaced a man as a professional at Prince’s Ladies’ Golf Club. But there were strong voices which argued that even a limited achievement in sport was likely to have damaging consequences. ‘Doctors and schoolmasters observe that the excessive devotion to athletics and gymnastics tends to produce what might be called the newer type of girl.’21
The ‘newer type of girl’ was not regarded by the old type of male as the sort of woman he would want his son to marry. And it was not only prejudice which held women athletes back. Tennis and golf, the two most ‘ladylike’ sports, were expensive pastimes, the necessary clothes as costly as the essential equipment. Most female sport remained an essentially middle-class activity. However, the dam had been breached. Women were seen in energetic physical activity, engaged in serious competition and showing the emotions of gracious winners and bad losers. Their appearance on the golf course and tennis courts meant that they had taken at least one step down from the pedestal which was also their prison.
Male sport became more and more the preserve of the working classes and was welcomed by politicians as a convenient way of keeping the proletariat out of trouble. F. E. Smith – perhaps prejudiced against games by losing the academic competition at Wadham to C. B. Fry – became an unlikely football supporter.
What would the devotees of athletics do if their present amusements were abolished? The policeman, the police magistrate, the social worker and the minister of religion, the public schoolmaster … would each, in the sphere of his own duties, contemplate such a prospect with dismay … The poorer classes in this country have not got the tastes which superior people or a Royal Commission would choose for them. Were cricket and football abolished, it would bring upon them nothing but misery, depression, sloth, indiscipline and disorder.22
Those sentiments demonstrate how deeply Edwardian Britain was divided by class. The social distinctions, although rigorous and rigid, were also complicated and confused. Hunting, then as now, was said to unite the gentry in their top hats and the tenant farmers in their brown bowlers. In Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Siegfried Sassoon described the top-hatted gentry riding out with bowler-hatted tenants and tradesmen. The novel, which is in truth a memoir, is full of nostalgic charm and describes village cricket with the same boyish enthusiasm as it sets out the joys and terrors of hunting. It also contains lines which illustrate how the myth of the long Edwardian afternoon came about. ‘Aunt Evelyn always enjoyed a game of croquet with him at a garden party.’
The ‘him’ in question was Squire Maundle, a man who, as befitted his status, took dogs seriously. ‘House dogs bury in the shrubbery, shooting dogs bury in the park …’ Sassoon left stories of shooting to the rather better sequel, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. But the normal habit of Edwardian country gentlemen was to begin shooting a month before cubbing began in September. Victor Cavendish shot at Chatsworth and at Bolton Abbey in North Yorkshire, the traditional home of the Devonshire heir apparent or presumptive. On Saturday 24 August 1901 he ‘got to Bolton about 3.30’. His diary for his week’s visit confirms that the passion of the Edwardian upper class for shooting turned the sport into an industry. They could not possibly have eaten all those birds themselves.
Saturday August 24
Very hot … So far they had got just under 4000 birds. They say there are a lot left.
Tuesday August 27
Fine but very windy … Good day. About 200 brace. Did not shoot very well.
Wednesday August 28
Got 128 brace.
Thursday August 29
Shot fairly well.
Saturday August 31
Mild morning … I shot badly at what might have been a very good drive for me. We got just under 200 brace. Total bag is 9000 birds (about 180 more than the claim). If the weather had been as fine all this week as today, we should have killed 1500 brace.
The Bolton Abbey ‘bags’ were not exceptional. Indeed, by comparison with the most assiduous shots, they were modest. Lord Ripon, who was the champion shot of his day, killed 556,813 head of game between 1873 and 1923.
A couple of months later Victor Cavendish was out with the Quorn, though his diaries give the impression that he hunted more out of duty than enthusiasm. Siegfried Sassoon, on the other hand, experienced the joy of a chase even when it did not end in a kill. He writes of Edwardians hunting in the manner of a recent convert.
On one of my expeditions, after a stormy night at the end of March, the hounds drew all day without finding a fox. This was my first experience of a ‘blank day’. But I was not as upset about it as I ought to have been, for the sun was shining and the primrose bunches were brightening in the woods. Not many people spoke to me. So I was able to enjoy hacking from one covert to another and acquiring an appetite for tea at the Blue Anchor. And after that it was pleasant to be riding home in the latering twilight, to hear the ‘chink-chink’ of the blackbirds against the looming leafless woods and the afterglow of sunset and to know that winter was at an end.23
Sassoon hunted, in unfashionable company, during the sport’s last patrician period. In other parts of the country, proceedings were less relaxed. When the Earl of Lonsdale, Master of the Quorn, suspected – wrongly as it turned out – that some riders had committed a never-to-be-forgiven breach of etiquette by overtaking the hounds, he called off hunting for the day. He was gratified to receive a telegram which read, ‘Entirely approve of your action. Wilhelm I.’24 Gradually the nouveaux riches moved in. By the time of Edward’s accession, Gilbert Greenall, a rich brewer, had taken over from the Duke of Rutland as Master of the Belvoir. As a result of the infiltration of the middle classes, manners deteriorated in general. In 1908, Lord Rothschild found it necessary to write to followers of the family staghounds in the Vale of Aylesbury. ‘We beg them that they will in every way conform to the wishes of the Field Master and, further, we should take it as a compliment if the etiquette of hunting dress were more correctly observed.’25
The vulgarity of the middle class was said to have encouraged the breeding of hounds which ‘ignored their hunting qualities. What was gained in looks was lost in stamina and drive.’26 In an article written for the Field by Charles McNeill, the Master of the Grafton, Greenall was accused of such unforgivable mismanagement as failing to ensure that bitches sent to the Belvoir were properly serviced. The assault was so personal and bitter that the Duke of Rutland thought it necessary to resign. But by 1906 Balys magazine announced that in racing ‘the feudal system is as dead as the dodo’. Farmers increasingly agreed. In 1912 Buckinghamshire farmers banded together to demand a pound from every horseman (who neither owned nor rented property in the county) who crossed their land.
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br /> Part of the problem was that hunting costs rose as agricultural incomes fell. But the real change was in the composition of society. In the north, coal owners had taken over the Tynedale and the Braes of Derwent. Merthy Guest, the son of an ironmaster, had been Master of the Blackmoor Vale. He could afford to keep eighty grey horses for himself and his hunt servants. The new middle classes introduced practices which the old aristocracy would not have tolerated. Foxes were imported from Germany and vixens with litters were killed and their cubs reared in captivity.27 No doubt the old-style Masters and their huntsmen believed – rather as the Bourbons of the MCC believed – that their sport was being corrupted by the irresistible rise of trade and commerce.
It was no coincidence that foxhunters led the campaign to defend the House of Lords against the Liberal reforms of 1911. Willoughby de Broke told his noble friends, ‘I have been brought up in the midst of stock breeding of all kinds all my life and I am prepared to defend the hereditary principle whether it is applied to Peers or whether it is applied to foxhounds’. His leadership of ‘the diehards’ attracted the accusation that he lacked loyalty to Lord Lansdowne, the Unionist leader in the Upper House who had agreed to ‘hedge’. His defence was, ‘As a Master of the Hounds, I don’t like killing a fox without my huntsmen, but it is better than losing my hounds.’
The Edwardians Page 39