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.     

‘The Best Football Team,The Best Platoon’: The Role of Football in the Proletarianization of the British Expeditionary Force, 1914–1918

This article examines the role of football, alongside other working-class pastimes, in engendering the proletarianization of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) during the Great War. The article details how the nature and longevity of the Great War, allied to the associated need to raise a predominantly working-class ‘civilian army’, stimulated new approaches to sustaining morale which embraced working-class-derived values and customs. The raison d’être of the BEF's combat motivation (why a soldier should fight) increasingly depended upon workplace-centred notions of solidarity and mutuality. In military terms, these proletarian set of motivational influences became known as ‘loyalty to the primary group’, and the proletarian sport of football became one of the major vehicles for their diffusion. Concurrently, troop entertainments and recreations became dominated by some of the temporary escapes of proletarian culture – most notably organized football tournaments, but also music hall, cinema, fairs and trips to the seaside. By 1918 the BEF was decidedly proletarian, not just in its composition but also in its values and customs.     

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.     

Professional Bodybuilding and the Business of ‘Extreme’ Bodies: The Mr Olympia Competition in the Context of Las Vegas's Leisure Industries

Since 1999, the pinnacle of bodybuilding as professional sport, the Mr Olympia competition, has been held in Las Vegas. The present paper explores how the event has been produced materially and symbolically in this context. More specifically, an attempt is made to trace connections with other well-developed leisure industries that thrive there: in packaging the Mr Olympia as a lifestyle weekend in ‘Sin City’, bodybuilding entrepreneurs capitalize on Las Vegas's reputation and the various networks and infrastructures of its show, event, tourism and night-life entertainment industries. Through this discussion, a comparative picture will emerge between, on the one hand, the Mr Olympia and the bodybuilding industry and, on the other hand, those other industries prominent in Las Vegas. I argue that, although the former may be viewed as a niche enterprise that addresses a relatively closed audience of ‘insiders’, it shares fully the logic and practices of corporate entertainment that define the latter. This is both a reflection of and a force in the late-modern transformation of bodybuilding as organized sport towards ‘extreme’ spectacle and relentless competition that can, in turn, be situated in a wider system of cultural forms and activities operating on a similar model. In treading upon this largely unexplored territory, the discussion and arguments are based on a combination of methods and original research, including archival, online media and ethnographic research involving in-depth interviews with key figures in the for-profit promotion of bodybuilding.     

‘Between Work and Laziness’: Leisure in the Polish Countryside (1945–1989)

Abstract

The paper draws attention to free time activities in the Polish countryside after 1945. In pre-war rural worldview, every action in which the element of household usefulness was absent, was valued negatively, and considered to be laziness. Growing spatial mobility of village dwellers and changing attitudes towards work on farms resulted in depreciation of land as superior value. This shift together with industrialization and positive valuation of urban culture brought new patterns of spending time in the countryside. Traditionally, ‘Neighbourhood sit-ins’ – a kind of zone of pleasure and fun, situated on the border between the spheres of work and active rest – have been transformed into something totally different. The emergence of radios, TV sets, and pop culture meant that group meetings were focused on content entirely separate from work. In my article, I would like to examine the intersection of two domains of leisure in post-war countryside, time of community, associated with relaxing meeting, spontaneous fun on the one hand and organized time of the youth on the other. Another major issue I would like to discuss in my paper is emergence of private spare time and its perception by village dwellers.     

‘Dashing about with the greatest gallantry’: polo in India and the British metropole, 1862–1914

ABSTRACT

The period from 1870 to the Great War was defined by a new and more intensive phase of imperialism. Following previous debates initiated by scholars such as MacKenzie, Burton, or Bayly this article analyses the impact of Empire on the metropole. In suggesting that the imperial space was not a one-way street, the paper is going beyond Said's orientalist approach. This argument uses the example of the Indian game of polo. Unlike most imperial sports, polo was adapted by the British from their colonial subjects, creating the opportunity of a common cultural space. How did polo influence socio-cultural and political power constellations in India and the metropole? The paper will provide nuance on regional contexts and the effects of sport on specific groups. Unpacking the resulting interdependencies, ambivalences, and the mutability of polo in the British imperial self-image, the paper does not neglect Indian agency. Polo showcases an interrelation of ideas and beliefs which are used to understand the respective environment as well as the internationalisation of sport. Researching sport in an imperial context and its interactions on a local and transnational level can thus display rising asymmetries of political, cultural, and social agencies in a global process.     

The ‘British World’, other worlds,and the five rings: possibilities for trans-imperial histories and historical ‘what ifs’

In the early 1890s an ardent British imperialist proposed a ‘Pan-Britannic Olympics’ that included not only the British Empire but the USA in a plan to use sport to unite the English-speaking peoples of the globe into a world-ruling coalition. While that proposal was eventually bested by the Baron Pierre de Coubertin's movement that created an even more inclusive modern Olympics, the sentiments of the ‘Pan-Britannic’ scheme became in embroiled in debates over the national and imperial uses of international sport. Pondering the role of Coubertin's Olympics in forging a variety of imperial and national identities within the British Empire while also employing speculative alternative histories reveals the complex transnational and trans-imperial dimensions of the Olympics in modern global history.     

The Origins of Football Debate: The ‘Grander Design and the Involvement of the Lower Classes’, 1818–1840

This article presents extensive new material in ‘the origins of football debate’ by using the British Library's digitisation project of nineteenth-century newspapers. In so doing, it responds to claims from Graham Curry and Eric Dunning that previous works of the ‘revisionist historians’ John Goulstone, Adrian Harvey and Peter Swain are misleading and have led to hasty conclusions. It evidences a football culture beyond the domain of the public schools and highlights the shift in the locus of games from urban areas to paddocks and fields complying with the Highways and Police Acts. This compliance reduced the number of prosecutions covered in newspaper reports of the day but other games, in which misdemeanours took place, are recorded, suggesting that a broad football culture did still exist in this period. The article rejects Curry and Dunning's thesis surrounding a mid-century ‘civilising spurt’ in sport in favour of explanations surrounding the structural changes taking place in the nineteenth century, including increasing industrialisation, urbanisation, population growth, and migrationary movements. It also emphasises the emergence of a horizontally stratified class-based society and an attack on football games from an emerging social and industrial elite who were looking after their property and commercial interests.     

Carnival supporters,hooligans, and the ‘Against Modern Football’ movement: life within the ultras subculture in the Croatian context

Abstract

This paper is based on sociological research on Torcida, football supporters of Hajduk Football Club from Split (Croatia). We used ethnographic methodology throughout 37 months of fieldwork (from July 2012 to August 2015) and conducted 23 in-depth interviews with hardcore members of Torcida. Although our research included the distinction between carnival supporters and hooligans, these elements are much more interconnected within the hard core of Torcida than they are separate. Because of various social efforts (sometimes coordinated with other Ultras groups) against the local and global football establishment – especially against the Croatian Football Federation and UEFA – we consider Torcida part of a wide, heterogeneous social movement against modern football. This corresponds to the self-reflection and self-perception of the core group of Torcida. Ultras subculture in the Croatian context represents a key (although not the only) social actor in bearing the AMF movement.     

‘That Little Sugarloaf Island’: Ailsa Craig,Romance, Reality and the Branding of Scottish Sport and Leisure, 1707–2013

This article examines the post-1707 history of Ailsa Craig, a small island off of the Ayrshire coast in the west of Scotland. The island was a site of tourism for Scots, and for English and other foreign travellers, who offered romantic depictions of what they saw as a uniquely Scottish natural landscape, inclusive of rare species of nesting seabirds. Of more relevance to the world of sport was that granite from Ailsa Craig comprised the majority of the world's curling stones. In terms of its imagery, the island was also used as both a selling point and narrative device by journalists covering British Open golf tournaments at nearby Turnberry. These uses both represented globally-transmitted ideas of what was represented as an ‘authentic’ Scottish sporting material culture. This article goes beyond these depictions, however, to examine the island as a food store and as a playground for its aristocratic owners, and to examine the quarrying ‘industry’ – both as a small-scale family affair, and later as a larger, even riskier venture. The place of Ailsa Craig in discourses on ‘Scottishness’ will be balanced against the difficulty of life on the islands, and concerns over the environmental damage done by man's presence there.     

‘One of the Worst Statistics in British Sport,and Wholly Unacceptable’: The Contribution of Privately Educated Members of Team GB to the Summer Olympic Games, 2000–2012

Much has been published on sport in Britain's private schools of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, but no research of modern policy, practice and outcomes has been conducted since the 1970s. Assessment of the contribution of these schools to Team GB at recent summer Olympic Games – and to international sport in general – by politicians, sports leaders and physical education lobbyists has thus largely been informed by speculation. Future government policy on physical education and sport in schools may therefore be influenced by flawed evidence. This article examines the schooling of all members of Team GB for the summer Olympic Games of 2000–2012, and compares the contribution of its privately educated and state-educated members in terms of performance in competition and medals won. Online research using the websites of schools, sports associations, governing bodies of sport, Olympic associations and the media, together with biographies of sportsmen and sportswomen, provided information about each team member's schooling, sporting background and Olympic record. The speculation was inaccurate – exaggerating the proportion of privately educated members of Team GB but underestimating their contribution.     

For a ‘United’ Kingdom and a ‘Greater’ Britain: the British Olympic Association and the limitations and contestations of ‘Britishness’

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Home-Nations of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales joined forces in competing in the Olympic Games under the banner of ‘Great Britain’ (or deviations thereof). The Olympics served as an important symbolic site for fostering and promoting a broader ‘British’ national identity. In practice, however, the prevalence and persistence of competing national identities and allegiances roiled early attempts to create a unified British Olympic team. These counter-prevailing forces of nationalism further served to undermine the British Olympic Association's ambitious attempt to unite the British Empire in a ‘Greater Britain’ team for the 1916 Berlin Olympic Games. As this work will reveal, ‘Britishness’ was a layered, contested and racially homogenous term that was interpreted and applied differently across various parts of the British Isles and its Empire.     

All-in Wrestling in Inter-War Britain: Science and Spectacle in Mass Observation's ‘Worktown’

All-in wrestling was established as a spectator sport in the 1930s and appealed primarily to a working-class audience. All-in was controversial because of its excessive violence and its blend of the spectacular and dramatic with sport, which led to accusations that it was not really a sport. Nevertheless, it retained many characteristics of sport, and audiences consumed it as such. All-in wrestling was an outcome of the evolution of a traditional ancient sport into a commercial entertainment and represented an extreme conflation of sport and drama. Using records of All-in wrestling in the Mass Observation Archive, this paper explores the ways in which audiences negotiated the tensions between sport and spectacle.     

The decline of the ‘Soccer-Nation’: journalism,soccer and national identity in the 2002 World Cup

This essay analyses the media narrative in the coverage of the Brazilian team during the 2002 World Cup. The corpus of our work is concentrated on the sports supplements of Jornal do Brasil during the 2002 World Cup from two days before the event until two days after its end, reaching the total of 32 supplements. We focus on the hypothesis that the qualification ‘Brazil: the soccer country’, usually even more intense and singular during this worldwide event, has been decreasing and the journalistic narratives about the Brazilian soccer team do not approach soccer homogeneously as a metonym for the nation. The reflection about the role of the sports press as cultural builder is fundamental to observe how newspapers confirm and construct mythologies and identitary discourses, in spite of the journalistic objectivity, one of the pillars of the profession.