Niels Bukh's Gymnastics School in Denmark, 1912–1933: Gymnastics,Erotics, and Male Bonding

Around 1916–1917 the Danish gymnastics pedagogue Niels Bukh (1880–1950) created, in an international sense, a revolutionary men's gymnastics, and in 1920 he established Denmark's and the world's first folk high school of physical education and sport. During the 1930s, Niels Bukh and his team of gymnasts first became a symbol for the dynamic Danish farming community, and then for the face of Denmark both at home and abroad. Bukh changed the stereotypical male expression of bodily dynamics, which in Danish rural gymnastics had been almost military. He made it legitimate for the young lads to get in close physical contact and to work in pairs in order to create beautiful masculine gymnastic choreographies. Within the aesthetic history of masculinity, it has often been male homosexual aestheticians, designers, musicians, dancers, and so on who have opened new avenues for the expression of male emotion, which was a trademark of Bukh's achievements, too.     

Football,Migration and Industrial Patronage in the West of Scotland,c.1870–1900

This article examines the history of football, migration and industrial patronage in the counties of Ayrshire and Lanarkshire, Scotland, during the formative years of the Scottish Football Association (1870–1900). It begins with an overview on the formation of clubs and associations in the two counties up to 1900. The article focuses on two specific case studies: one investigates football's relationship to Irish migration in Larkhall, Lanarkshire; the other examines the patronage of football clubs by paternalist coalmasters Bairds of Gartsherrie. Throughout this article, local football is observed in the context of class and religious identity within the two counties, as well as analyses of both the significance and limits of elite patronage in early Scottish football.     

Football Club Formation and the Lancashire Leisure Class, 1857–1870

This paper outlines the transition from football games played for occasional amusement to a system of organized football clubs playing regular matches in Lancashire in the mid-nineteenth century. This was led by young men of an emerging Lancashire leisured class being, in the main, the public school educated sons of the northern county’s commercial and industrial elite. These families had accumulated sufficient wealth, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century, to exempt a considerable part of their population from work both at weekends and during the normal working week with football becoming an act of conspicuous consumption. Three case studies of individual clubs and leading individuals within those clubs are presented with detailed archival research carefully avoiding the teleology implicit in much historical writing of the past. It also swells the paucity of good historical material about the organization of sport at levels below national bodies. In so doing, it aims to illuminate some of the shadows in the big picture of the evolution of sport and leisure in Lancashire and Britain itself while informing the ongoing orthodox/revisionist debate into the origins of football in the nineteenth century.     

Sport in the service of the state: Images of physical culture and Soviet women, 1917–1941

Using images drawn from a number of media, this article explores how and why the Soviet government encouraged women to take up sport prior to World War II. It is suggested that the regime had three goals in mind: to strengthen the military preparedness of the country, to improve the productivity of its workers, and to further the acceptance of new, more ideologically correct, forms of leisure. These goals offer a striking contrast with movements in Western Europe and North America, where women's participation in sport was heavily connected with their roles as wives and mothers.     

Swedish Gymnastics for Export: A Study of the Professional Careers and Lives of Swedish Female Gymnastic Directors, 1893–1933

The aim of the study is to analyze the careers of women gymnastics directors about the turn of the century in 1900. This is done by means of a collective biographical study of the women’s course at the Royal Central Institute of Gymnastics in Stockholm from 1891 to 1893. The study is based above all on unique correspondence between the members of the course, namely a correspondence book circulated among them between 1893 and 1943. This book contained a total of almost 500 letters comprising thousands of handwritten pages with detailed accounts of their professional career and family, as well as life’s positive and negative sides. The study shows that their opportunities of making a career – in Sweden and abroad – in the occupation they had received training in were good. There are several reasons for this success. Swedish gymnastics’ treatment methods were the height of fashion round about the turn of the century in 1900 and there was great demand for their services. They remained faithful to their choice of occupation, even if their career took a back seat for half of them when they married: family life and a professional career could not be combined for them.     

No place for women among them? Reflections on the axé of fieldwork

Capoeira, the Brazilian dance and martial art, is now taught in many countries outside Brazil. Reflections on a year's fieldwork on capoeira teaching in the UK are used to make educational ethnography anthropologically strange. Issues of locality, noise, uncertainty and bodily contact are explored in a reflexive way.     

The Diffusion and Transmission of Cricket among European,Indigenous and Migrant Communities in the British Straits Settlements and Malay States during the Late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century, 1786–1899

The British colonised Penang in 1786, Malacca in 1895 and Singapore in 1819. In 1874, the British, through its Residents, came to control the Governments of Perak, Selangor and Sungei Ujong, and wherever they went, they indulged in their leisure pursuits such as horse riding and cricket. This research attempts to show how the immigrant Malay Eurasian, Chinese and Tamil communities come into contact with the different British and European communities and were introduced to cricket. The process of diffusion and acceptance becomes evident when the local populations in turn set up their own sports clubs and cricket clubs. The study tries to identify the various means of the cultural transmission of sports by the different ethnic groups during British colonial rule from 1876 to 1899.     

Social Class,Etiquette and Behavioural Restraint in British Lawn Tennis, 1870–1939

From the 1870s, lawn tennis developed a code of behavioural etiquette demanding on-court self-restraint, which notably influenced the development of particular playing strokes and styles. This paper explores the sport's historical development in Britain from 1870 to 1939, with its main aims: to document the changes in behavioural etiquette and playing style; to consider these interdependent developments in the context of shifting class relations in wider British society; and to examine the social and practical functions etiquette served for players. Evidence suggests that prohibitions against certain playing strokes up until the First World War were indicative of class anxiety among the socially aspirational upper middle classes who controlled lawn tennis, as certain playing styles conveyed seemingly an abhorrent ‘working-class’ competitiveness. Greater inclusion for lower-middle-class players during the inter-war years signalled a trend towards adopting a more ‘professional’ mentality, helping to relax behavioural controls in playing style around the world.     

Ideology and sociability: a review of new French research into the history of sport under the early third republic (1870–1914)

P. Arnaud (ed.), Les Athlètes de la République: gymnastique, sport et idéologic republicaine 1870–1914 (Toulouse: Editions Privat, 1987). Pp.423. FF175. ISBN 2–7089–532330.

P. Arnaud and J. Camy (eds.), La naissance du mouvement sportif associatif en France: sociabilitiés et formes de pratiques sportives (Lyons: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1986). Pp.422. FF 128. ISBN 2–7297–02938.     

Rhodesia and the Olympic Games: representations of masculinity,war and Empire, 1965–1980

White-settler-ruled Rhodesia faced isolation from international sporting competition after its unilateral declaration of independence in 1965, including from the Olympic Games. Sport reflected the qualities of white Rhodesian society, including its gendered and racialized norms. Rhodesia inherited its sporting ethic from Great Britain, and the British influence on Rhodesian sport remained indelible even as anti-British sentiment flared in the white community as Britain worked to exclude Rhodesia from international sport. This work highlights the irony that Rhodesia adhered to Imperial British social norms on the playing field while trying to assert an independent and anti-British national identity.