This Little Britain

by Harry Bingham

  Yet assumptions often lurk where we’re least expecting them. It’s easy for us to think of Victorian public health as part of the inevitable adaptation of an industrializing society to new conditions, as part and parcel of modernity itself. It was no such thing. All kinds of other responses could have been possible. Rich people could simply have procured clean water and stink-free neighbourhoods for themselves. The Houses of Parliament could simply have relocated to somewhere less pongy. Grand plans could have fallen apart in bickering over cost overruns (which were extensive) and delays (ditto). Central government need not have thrown money and resources at the national problem. Even if it had done, those municipalities could have wasted the money in corruption or bad practice.

  In the end, Victorian society solved a potentially lethal problem because of the strengths that it possessed to a high degree: engineering excellence, clean government, the willingness and ability to tax and spend on a large scale, and an ability to innovate not only in engineering terms but in contractual and economic ones too. Behind these obvious virtues lay a further one: British (and previously English) society had long been protective of its poor. This was a society unprepared to solve the problems of the wealthy and leave those of the poor unattended. It is a very striking fact that the rich of Chelsea got their sewers no earlier than the poor of Stoke Newington: the sewers were built at the same time, by the same men, from the same pot of money. No sooner had the capital accomplished something remarkable, but the same life-saving technologies were rolled out to all the rest of the country too. All this might not have been.

  Joseph Bazalgette is almost forgotten today. His only monument is a small bust hidden down by Charing Cross railway bridge, amidst the roar and blast of traffic along the Embankment. A Latin motto says, rather feebly, Flumini Vincula Posuit (‘He placed chains on the river’). If this paltry commemoration of Bazalgette’s achievement is all he’s to get, then perhaps at least the motto could be changed. The architect of St Paul’s, Christopher Wren, lies under a plain black marble slab and a nearby plaque says simply, ‘Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice’—‘Reader, if you seek a monument, then look around you’. Perhaps the words on Bazalgette’s own modest memorial should be rephrased: ‘si monumentum requiris, despice’—if you seek a monument, look under your feet.

  * Of which, by the way, there are many: you just can’t see most of them. The largest of London’s streams is the Fleet, which runs from Highgate Ponds on Hampstead Heath past King’s Cross station then under the Farringdon Road to discharge just west of St Paul’s. The stream is large enough that it used to be navigable as far as Holborn. Pirates once used it to attack King Edward II.

  † There’s been more work done on English life expectancy than on British life expectancy generally, hence the references throughout this piece to England, where you might expect Britain.

  * Also, by the way, the great-great-grandfather of Peter Bazalgette, the man responsible for the UK version of Big Brother. Feel free to invent your own joke about one man removing sewage, the other putting it on the telly.

  GREEKS

  And can any good thing come out of foreign parts? In matters of sport is the world not divided into two parties?—the one Greeks, the other barbarians; we being the Greeks and all other nations whatsoever the barbarians.

  REVEREND J.G. WOOD, The Boy’s Modern Playmate, 1868

  In the twelfth century, one William Fitzstephen observed that ‘After dinner all the youth of the city goes out into the fields for the very popular game of ball. The scholars of each school have their own ball, and almost all the workers of each trade have theirs also in their hands. The elders, fathers and men of wealth come on horseback to view the contests of their juniors, and in their fashion sport with the young men.’ The game that was being played would have had no formal rules. It might have been fifty or more a side. Propelling the ball with hands or sticks may have been permitted. Good-natured physical brawling was certainly a core part of the entertainment, with injuries commonplace.

  Such a game strikes us as so obvious, so elemental, that it must have been as universal in human history as war-making, say, or adultery. Not so. Although records exist of other foot-and ball-based games, such as the Chinese cuju or the Japanese kemari, the forerunner of football seems to have been largely concentrated in Celtic and Anglo-Saxon areas, and it seems more than likely that the Anglo-Saxons took the game from the Celts. By medieval times, the game was popular enough that it had to be banned. Often. Edward II, Henry V, Edward IV, Henry VII and Henry VIII all sought to ban or restrict the sport, with obvious lack of success. The sport continued—rough, fast, unlegislated—into the nineteenth century, played by the working classes of town and country, and by the public schoolboys who aped the same sports. There were no fixed rules to these games, beyond certain local customary forms. Some variants of the game involved plenty of handling, other variants less. There was no such thing as a foul and ‘hacking’, or chopping away at an opponent’s shins, was a core part of the sport’s delights. The delicate skills of a Cristiano Ronaldo, say, would have been no more suited to that version of the game than a sports kit consisting of ballet pumps and tutu.

  At the dawn of the nineteenth century, it wasn’t remotely clear that there was much of a future for the sport. Georgian aristocrats, on the hunt for recreations that could also serve as outlets for their gambing addictions, had started to formalize a variety of other sports. The Duke of Richmond had founded one of the earliest cricket clubs in 1727. The prizefighter and promoter Jack Broughton had devised rules for boxing in 1743 which brought both humanity and superior betting opportunities to the previously chaotic—and often life-endangering—fights. In 1752, the Jockey Club had taken the ancient pastime of racing horses and organized it into a formally rule-bound sport. Two years later, and following the example of an earlier Edinburgh-based club, the ‘Royal and Ancient’ St Andrews Club became home to the sport of golf. By the late eighteenth century most larger cities had well-organized, feverishly contested rowing regattas.

  All this activity, however, left football looking boorish and unmodern. Derbyshire Council frowned on such nonsense as the annual Ashbourne Shrovetide ‘football’ game, calling it, accurately enough, ‘the assembly of a lawless rabble, suspending business to the loss of the industrious, creating terror and alarm to the peaceable, committing violence on the person and damage to the properties of the defenceless poor’. (The game still goes on; windows in the town centre are still boarded up; but, hey, at least there’s a rule that says players aren’t allowed to kill each other.) When Joseph Strutt surveyed the sports of England in 1801, he said of football that ‘the game was formerly much in vogue among the common people, though of late years it seems to have fallen into disrepute and is but little practised’. Overlooked by aristocrats, disliked by urbanites, reduced by rural depopulation, campaigned against by Methodists, the game seemed destined to peter out.

  What saved it was the collision between the emerging Victorian ethic of Christian manliness and the unreconstructed thuggishness of those public school sports. Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby school from 1828 to 1842, launched the reform programme for public schools generally, though he himself had little interest in sport. Nevertheless, some of his key disciples became evangelical on the topic. Sports, properly organized and played, might turn those individualistic thugs into responsible team players; God would surely prefer honest, rule-bound, collective endeavour to all that physical scrapping; and, just possibly, if all those hormonal teenagers could be rendered tired enough, then they might keep their hands away from their own (or each other’s) private parts. While it’s safe to say that not every one of those hopes was fulfilled, public schools suddenly found a passion for sport which had never once been there before.*

  As the new generations of public schoolboys made their way on into the universities and armed forces, the philosophy spread, and as it did so one particular problem became prominent. It was all very well
for one particular school to fashion its own particular rules for its own particular game, but what if one school team wanted to play another? Worse still, what game would be played by a mixed bunch of Old Harrovians, Etonians, Wykehamists, Carthusians and so on once they got to Oxford or Cambridge? Compromise was both required and hard to find. For decades, the problem lingered on, unresolved, plagued by issues of tradition and prestige. Finally, in 1863, a group of former public schoolboys met in London to hammer out a common code. The two principal difficulties arose from the dispute between those who favoured a kicking/dribbling game and those preferring a catching/running one, and between those who favoured ‘hacking’ and those who wanted to ban such physical contact.† Finally, and after compromise with a near-simultaneous codification effort based up in Sheffield, the Association Football rules weren’t simply agreed on paper, but on the mud and turf of the nation’s pitches. In 1871, the aficionados of handling set up their own Rugby Football Union.

  The rest is history, but like so much history it took its own unpredictable course. For one thing, the sport was very quickly dominated by the urban working classes. The game that most signally marked the changing balance of power was the 1883 FA Cup Final, in which Blackburn Olympic beat Old Etonians by two goals to one, the winning goal coming in extra time, after the working-class Northerners had asked to complete the game then and there, as they couldn’t afford a rematch. For another thing, you might well have expected the empire to be the main agent of football’s propagation, yet in fact resentment of British imperialism rendered the game weakest in all the countries of empire, and strongest in the countries of Europe and Latin America where British influence was pervasive, but not usually accompanied by soldiers.

  The conventional story of British sport dwells at length on the story of football, makes further reference to other well-known British inventions (tennis, golf, rugby, cricket), then hangs up its boots in favour of a warm bath and changing-room banter. Yet dominant though football has now become in global terms, the most remarkable aspect of the whole tale is not that Britain produced the most globally significant sport, but that it produced virtually every other sport as well. What’s more, although the muscular Christianity of the Victorian era certainly saw an uprush of interest in sports of every kind, that interest had hardly been lacking before. Think back to those aristocratic Georgians, who first formalized the sports of boxing, rowing, horse-racing, golf and cricket. Those same Georgians had also developed billiards, baseball* and skating, and nurtured the much older traditions of lawn bowls and archery. In fact, if you want an even vaguely complete list of the sports first formalized by the British (including by British colonials overseas), you’d need to include at least the following:

  Football-based games

  Football, Rugby Union, Rugby League, Gaelic football, Australian Rules football.

  Other games of Celtic/Anglo-Saxon origin

  Cricket, hockey, ice hockey, golf, curling, baseball.

  European-derived games

  Tennis, squash, rackets, fives, hardball, fencing, billiards, snooker, croquet, lawn bowls, tenpin bowling, downhill skiing (yes, really), slalom skiing (ditto).

  Non-European derived games

  Lacrosse, polo, canoeing.

  Sports deriving from universal human activities

  Boxing, swimming, rowing, archery, horse-racing, yachting, skating, mountaineering.

  Invented sports

  Water polo, table tennis, cycling, badminton, motorcycling.

  If this list doesn’t smack your gob, then your gob is pretty much unsmackable. When we say ‘we invented sport’, the statement comes as close to literal truth as it’s possible to get. Time after time after time, and irrespective of a pastime’s geographical origin or climatic suitability, it was the British who turned diversions into sports. To be precise, recreations, which had previously existed only in the unlegislated, informal, chaotic manner of pre-FA football, were turned into organized, regulated, formal competition by the British.

  Take lacrosse, for example, which was most likely (and bizarrely) a Viking sport that became naturalized in North America just as it died out in Scandinavia. Though there had never been any tradition of the sport in Britain, it took British colonials in Canada to observe the native sport and codify it, setting up the first ever lacrosse club in the process. Subsequently, British Britons, snobbish about the codification prowess of any mere Canuck, rewrote the rules and thereby laid down the basis of the laws by which the modern game is now played. In sport after sport, the same thing occurred. Even where Britain was not involved directly, it was typically the major influence, either as something to emulate (notably in de Coubertin’s creation of the modern Olympics) or as something to resist (notably in the desire of American universities to hammer out their own code of football).

  In short, the scale of British leadership in the creation of sport seems so extreme—as great or greater even than our onetime leadership in the realms of industry, agriculture or the navy—that something extraordinary seems needed to account for it. So what does? Well, first of all, it does seem clear that we Brits have always enjoyed physical activity. The Celts seem to have originated much more than their fair share of sports, the Anglo-Saxons being highly enthusiastic adopters. So in part, we created sport because we may have been keener than most on its rough-and-tumble predecessors. We also seem to have had a knack of creating decent games, simple in conception but wonderfully complex in the playing.

  It’s also clear that from a certain point, around 1830 or 1840, the British began to idolize sport in a way that no other country came close to matching. The creation and codification of sports became a national obsession. Indeed, the plethora of games created by the Victorian Brits is hardly done justice by the list above. After all, it contains only those sports that survived into the present. The brutal process of natural selection had spelled extinction for dozens of others. Yet though the Victorian period certainly represented the pinnacle of British sport-making, it’s clear enough that that pre-eminence in sport-building arose long before public schools built a philosophy around thrashing foot, squash, tennis, rugby and every other kind of ball.

  Perhaps those universal activities—archery, horse-riding, sailing, rowing—provide the crucial clue. Most societies in the world used bows and arrows, yet Brits were the first to set up archery clubs and tournaments for fun. Though countless people have ridden horses, it took Brits to think that clubs and rules were essential. In sailing and rowing too, the same thing happened. All the oldest sports clubs in the world are British: the Southampton Town Bowling Club (1299), the Society of Kilwinning Archers (1483), the Guild of the Fraternity of St George (1537), the Kilsyth Curling Club (1716), the Royal Cork Yacht Club (1720), and the Edinburgh Skating Club and the Honourable Society of Edinburgh Golfers (both 1744). As soon as you have clubs, you need rules: what’s permitted?; what’s not permitted?; how should competitions be organized?; who can our club compete against? That habit of clubbishness is the clue, the reason why the pastimes of others became sports of ours.

  So why were we so very clubbable? The answer must surely lie in how very organized the country was. From Anglo-Saxon times on, the country was ordered, from national parliament down to local parish or manor. Members of Parliament were appointed or elected; laws were made, were locally applied, were enforced through the courts. Nowhere else was society as minutely ordered; nowhere else was that order so little disrupted by war, conquest or revolution. Nowhere else was physical roughhousing less likely to spill over into serious crime.

  And perhaps that’s the secret: British love of rough-and-tumble games plus British clubbishness equals the British creation of sport. If so, it would be tempting to do as most historians have done, and relegate the whole story of sport to little more than a colourful footnote to the main story of Britain. Tempting, but wrong. Clubbishness matters. It’s the insight of Robert Putnam, an American social scientist, whose book Bowling Alone traced the vast a
mount of social capital stored in a nation’s clubs and associations. That social capital manifests itself as economic success, better health, social cohesiveness—all the good things a society seeks. If Britain was vastly more associative as a nation than others, then it almost certainly had way more social capital too. That’s no mere footnote; that’s an observation that goes to the heart of what has made Britain distinctive, what has shaped British national success.

  The thought is a comforting one. If the most remarkable thing about Britons and sport is how many games we’ve invented, the second-most remarkable thing is how adept we’ve been at losing (the snobbish cult of Victorian amateurism being greatly to blame). Fortunately, though, social capital doesn’t come from being good at something, it comes from doing it together. We Britons may have bowled badly, but we’ve never bowled alone.

  * That’s why the Duke of Wellington almost certainly didn’t say that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. In his day, those fields had hardly mattered.

  † One sportsman said, disgustedly, that if hacking were banned, then ‘you will do away with the courage and pluck of the game, and I will be bound to bring over a lot of Frenchmen who would beat you with a week’s practice’. True enough, except that it took more than a week.

  * The first printed reference to baseball comes in a 1744 English publication entitled A Pretty Little Pocket Book, Intended for the Amusement of Little Mister Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly.

  VERY FINE LINEN

  No perfumes, he used to say, but very fine linen, plenty of it, and country washing.