Derek Birley, Sport and the Making of Britain (Manchester University Press 1993) pp.388, ISBN 0-7190-3759-X; Land of Sport and Glory: Sport and British Society 1887-1910 (Manchester University Press 1995) Pp.287, ISBN 0-7190-4495-2; Playing the Game: Sport and British Society, 1910-45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1995), Pp.342, ISBN 0-7190-4497-9.
Sir Derek Birley is the author of one of the few genuinely distinguished and important books on the history of cricket. In The Willow Wand he offered us Grace `warts and all' as well as attacking Cardus and the `aesthetic fallacy'. Birley's stance was that of a cultivated northern iconoclast, dismissing the pseudo-pastoral fantasy constructed around the game without losing his own enthusiasm for it. He especially disliked the way the `honest pro', who loved the game, was made to feel second rate by social distinctions imposed from above. He has now pursued this grand social theme _ amongst others _ on a vast canvas stretching from the Romans to the end of the Second World War. However, he makes no pretence of even coverage. Pre-Victorian sport is dispatched in under two hundred pages as a prologue to the proper business. The remaining eight hundred pages are devoted to the long century of amateur dominance that began in the middle years of the nineteenth century.
This is by far the most detailed account of modern British sport to date and impressive in many respects; it is also notably idiosyncratic, both easy to read and difficult to understand. It is stronger on detail than on argument. It is full of splendid stories of hard riding squires and hard fought matches, which at one level can simply be enjoyed for their own sake. It is no small achievement to have produced a compendium of entertaining anecdote and terse observation sustained over hundreds of thousands of words. Reading chapter upon chapter one is sometimes reminded of a remark attributed to Lord Kinnaird to the effect he wouldn't pass the ball because he was `playing purely for his own pleasure'. Birley carries on regardless, ploughing his own furrow, telling us sometimes rather more than we want to know about yachting or hunting _ the upper classes are over-represented here _ but compensating with illuminating sections on under-researched sports like hockey, cycling or badminton. On football codes he is more knowledgeable and sympathetic to Rugby (Union and League) than to the association game despite giving it ample space. On cricket he is predictably and uniformly excellent.
He has created a kaleidoscope of sport decade by decade. His method is simple. Begin each chapter with a survey of the major political events with a nod in the direction of economic and social change. Then proceed to catalogue the main events interspersed with historical reflection here and there. This reads rather like the volumes of the old Oxford History of England, with which Birley is clearly familiar. Whilst this approach can bring great sporting moments vividly to life, it is not well suited to examining the changes in population growth, urbanisation and work which lay beneath the glittering surface of sport.
Apart from this, there are inevitably quite a few small mistakes in a text of this length. Usually this is simple matter of misprints. Some, however, are more important than others. To say the population of pre-famine Ireland, for example, was 18 million is around 10 million too many. Such big errors are easily spotted but smaller ones may be harder to see but potentially more important. Take the following example. In alluding to the important research on nineteenth century sports participation by Tranter for the Stirling area, Birley writes as follows: `In Stirling, for example, in the first decade of the new football era, 1861-71, there were already 66 soccer clubs to 22 for rugger, and in the next there were 506 to 16.' (vol. 1, p.271). The non-specialist might let this pass. But to the more expert eye these dates and numbers do not make sense. His source is Tranter's article on the `Chronology of Organised Sport in nineteenth century Scotland: a regional study' (IJHS, 7, 2, Sept. 1990 p. 189). On checking we find (a) the area examined by Tranter is not Stirling but `Central Scotland' (i.e. `lying within a rough 15-20 mile radius of Stirling'); (b) the `66 soccer clubs' were not formed in the 1860s but in the 1870s and the 506 new clubs came in the following decade, 1881-1890; (c) Tranter is elsewhere at pains to stress that many of these clubs may have been formed for a season alone and few survived for any significant period of time. Hence the picture is much more complex than Birley suggests and fits the general pattern of the spread of football rather better. It is perhaps churlish in such a large work to look so closely at a single detail _ this just happened to be a source with which I was familiar - but it does leave the nagging doubt that there may be more such instances that have gone unnoticed in what was perhaps a hasty final revision and copy-editing process.
As a whole, we need to know more about the emergence of football as the dominant popular spectator sport. But this is not really what interests him. I looked in vain for much use of the new history of leisure associated with the work of Harrison, Bailey, Walton, Russell and others. Here Birley's work stands in stark contrast to the latest survey of British sport by Neil Tranter, Sport, Economy and Society in Britain 1750-1914 (Cambridge 1998), which tries to fix sport in the wider framework of historical debate. Taken together, however, they work surprisingly well. Tranter's hundred pages offer a key to open Birley's thousand, which lacks a proper conclusion. His coverage of the period 1910-1945 contains some splendid material on neglected aspects of inter-war sport but then quite abruptly the book stops, leaving the reader waiting for the ends to be tied together. As if exhausted by his labours, Birley can do no more. The chance to sum up the amateur century is not taken. Rather it is developed intermittently throughout the text and the reader has to do the work to find it.
How many readers he will have? Probably fewer than he deserves. For the enthusiast who wants nothing more than a rich tapestry of physical endeavour, these volumes work well. However, those who build up sporting libraries - and they seem to be quite numerous - presumably prefer the kind of nostalgic, sumptuously illustrated evocation of a Golden Age which Birley rightly criticises. On the other hand, the real academic specialist for whom these volumes are essential reading, may be put off by the overtly anecdotal approach. This would be a shame. The `decade by decade' method may be repetitious and confusing at times but it does have the advantage of `freezing the action' at a given historical moment. Again and again, Birley does what few of us have been able to do. He shows how many men _ and some women, too, though the female coverage is a bit thin reflecting the relative paucity of secondary material - played a wide range of sports. He is good on the social and sporting clusters which developed, especially amongst the landed elite. The interplay of ancient and modern and the overlapping of different sports in different places and phases of development is very striking. For sheer mastery of how many things were going on at once, these books are hard to beat, spanning the sporting proclivities of medieval kings to the intricacies of croquet or Rugby League.
These are not books for students with limited knowledge, who have to write an essay. Such undergraduate readers could easily become bogged down in the detail and would be well advised to get the `big picture' clear in their mind first before dipping in here and there to flesh out their argument (for which these volumes with their splendid quotes and lively sketches are perfect). They also have to learn to pass over the eccentricities of the opening volume. By this I refer to the sporting tour of the English Middle Ages organised around the interests of successive kings. I have to say that I found this rather diverting and congenial. Memories of studying medieval English history thirty years ago crowded in on me. For example, the sons of William the Conqueror dismissed as `a strange lotthe eldest weak and lazy, the seconda blasphemer with little interest in anything except hunting, military exercises and nameless depravity'. This is good stuff in its way but not relevant for most readers Hunting and the tournament figure prominently but he runs into the same problem that has beset other histories of pre-industrial sport: the lack of primary material or proper original research on popular sports. Laborious work in the manorial and legal records, which become more plentiful in the thirteenth century, might permit some kind of reconstruction of village games but as yet very little research of this sort exists. The same is broadly true of the early modern period though with less scholarly justification. Hence Birley does not really add much to what we already know but there are some nice stories and a handy discussion of James I's `Book of Sports'.
The work really gets underway with Jack Broughton, Hambledon, the Derby and all the rest of the elite sporting culture that developed so rapidly in Georgian England and came to be associated with the `Fancy' of the Regency. Those familiar with Brailsford will know much of this but it bears re-telling and makes an important contribution to the wider debate on the emergence of modern sport. Birley is firmly against a `leisure vacuum' hypothesis. He frequently points out the continuities between the old and the new. When the undergraduates of Exeter College, Oxford decided to run instead of race on horseback across country, they gave `steeplechasing' a modern athletic meaning, linking new forms of human exertion with older animal forms of sport. He shows, too, how the various football codes evolved organically within the public schools. He stresses how much Victorian public school sport was a product of the boys themselves and how little it really had to do with all but a handful of athletically inclined headmasters. He does a predictably good job of debunking the Webb-Ellis myth of the origin of Rugby.
He is good, too, on the background against which amateurism developed. By making it so clear that pre-modern sport was often corrupt, the amateur reaction and their strong anti-gambling ethic becomes more understandable. So, paradoxically, does the tolerance of generous expenses and sinecures which irritated the professionals. What mattered to the amateur authorities was not just about payment per se but promoting honest and even competition. The new purpose of sport was to harness the physical force of man to improve health and competitiveness in an enjoyable way which benefited the individual and the nation. Full professionalism not only meant the danger of match fixing but would inevitably tend towards the creation of a small number of elite teams who would dominate all others. This in turn would promote a culture of spectating rather than participation. He admires the new ideology whilst denouncing the snobbery that clung to it. Amateur values were worthy but its social reality was flawed. Too many amateurs were saying the right things for the wrong reasons, using idealism as a cloak for exclusivity. He is especially good on the complex social structure of different amateur sports, ranging from the explicit segregation of rowing to the informal coteries of athletics. Needless to say the peculiar class structure of cricket comes in for extensive examination, including a memorable portrait of the independent and irascible S.F. Barnes, who could never stand the `gentlemen' for long. A particular virtue of Birley (as a Yorkshireman himself) is his awareness of regional differences amongst both professionals and amateurs. For once the north gets equal, even preferential, treatment over the south.
Whilst the later nineteenth century is relatively well covered in the existing literature, the inter-war years have been nothing like so fully studied. Here Birley really comes into his own. For me the third is the best of the three volumes. His coverage of female sport improves. He has nice sections on hockey, for example, and there is good coverage of golf and tennis where women were especially important. Individuals come over strongly. Three of the best known sportsmen of the 1930s, Fred Perry, Henry Cotton and Wally Hammond, were all socially ambiguous, questioning in different ways the conventions that had been built up in the `Golden Age'. Here he draws effectively on his earlier work, citing Fred Root and `Cis' Parkin amongst others to underline continuing social discrimination. However, his decision to stop at 1945 is unfortunate. The natural cut off point is the ending of the Gentlemen and Players distinction in the early 1960s with an account of the appointment of Hutton as the first professional captain along the way. Norman Baker's recent work has shown how little the Second World War effected the social assumptions of the amateur elite and how firmly they sought to re-impose the status quo as soon as the war was over. A more thematic approach would have allowed this to be linked to the ending of the maximum wage in football and the opening of Wimbledon to professionals, setting in train the steady retreat from amateurism and the wider acceptance of commercial and media manipulation.
Whilst the lack of a proper discussion of the growth of the sporting press is a weakness, the coverage of sport in the First and the Second World Wars is a strength. His chronological approach means that he does not skip over the wars just because official fixtures were suspended. He explains the differing response to the organisation of sport between the two wars and admires the sense of duty that sent men back into action after injury or disillusionment. His own heroes are Edgar Mobbs, a rugby international who led his troops into battle in April 1916 by kicking a rugby ball as he went `over the top' _ a northern gent; and Hedley Verity, the professional Yorkshire bowler, who was commissioned and killed in the Italian campaign in 1943. In an age when it has become embarrassing to confront such idealism and sacrifice, he is not afraid to speak up for patriotism. Both men could probably have found a `safer billet' _ as many sportsmen did _ but they chose not to do so. He is stronger on the acceptable face of sporting nationalism than on the imperial dimension with its undertones of miltarism and racism. This is very much `our island story' with all but the Australians getting rather short shrift.
Birley starts with kings and finishes with them. He is always alive to the input of the monarchy into sport. The symbolic role of the crown as a source of national integration is not forgotten. In fact, George V gets a longer entry in the index to volume three than anyone else as sport became more important in royal public relations. It is typical of the strengths and weaknesses of this work that it should deal so well with an aspect of the subject that most have missed. For this is a case of a book which is so old fashioned it is sometimes right up-to-date. Being more interested in shared values than most, he has produced what is more of a cultural than a social history. He is interested in what people believed about their sports rather than reconstructing the social conditions under which they played. He is concerned about what they wore and how they appeared to others. His interest in the technique of play, the kind of strokes and movements involved, is almost postmodern. He is good at telling us what a particular way of playing styles meant and supplies off-the_cuff `deconstruction' of all sorts of sporting activity. Finally, his relative neglect of Wales and Scotland at least has the virtue of making him particularly aware of contested definitions of Englishness _ a subject much in vogue.
As a historian, Birley gives the impression of a well-read literary and sporting gent. Quotes from the classics abound with Kipling a particular favourite. Sasson and Priestley are well represented. This gives a kind of `Folio Society effect'. Indeed I would hardly be surprised to see a nicely bound and illustrated Birley on special offer to new subscribers. More seriously, he makes good use of sporting biography and is not over-reliant on the established works of synthesis. He seems to have picked up a lot along the way in a lifetime of eclectic reading dictated primarily by his sporting interests. Like a good amateur he doesn't believe in appearing to take it all too seriously whilst steadily piling up the runs. Arguably, he would have been better served by a tough minded editor, who would have insisted on cutting half of the first volume and compressing the second and third to create one big book. Be that as it may, as it stands this trilogy offers an infectious mixture of learning, enthusiasm and awareness of the peculiarities of the British class system as expressed through sport. If you can't always see the wood for the trees, the trees themselves are always worth seeing.
Richard Holt
International Centre for Sports History and Culture
De Montfort University, Leicester
Douglas Booth, The Race Game. Sport and Politics in South Africa (London: Frank Cass, 1998), Pp xxi + 250. £17.50. ISBN 0-7146-4354-8.
John Nauright, Sport, Cultures and Identities in South Africa (London: Leicester University Press, 1997), pp x + 214. ISBN 0-7185-0072-5.
South Africa was placed at arms reach by the majority of the sporting world from the mid-1970s, until the end of the minority rule of apartheid in the early 1990s. Despite all the attention that South Africa received during that period, academic work on the nature and function of South African sport, was, with the exception of campaigning `scholarly journalism', ignored. The boycott, it seemed, stretched even to those academic minds that were interested in South African sport. Ever since F.W. de Klerk announced the end of apartheid and the ensuing democratic elections returned Nelson Mandela and the ANC to power, academics have been willing to tackle the thorny subject of South African sport. These two books are but part of the upswing in interest in the whole topic. South Africa is fascinating, not only for its recent history of liberation, but also as it is a bastion of modern codified sport. Since the late nineteenth century the country has organised sport amongst and between its three central populations: black, white and Boer. In the twentieth century the Springbok teams on the cricket and rugby field became feared across the world. While most understood the need for sanctions in the 1970s, most sports followers were undoubtedly sad to see the challenge of playing on the veld disappear. It is a product of this sporting past, which was at once glorious and while at the same time inglorious, that the world was pleased to see a democratic, and seemingly unified South Africa, returned the bosom of global sport when it hosted and won the 1995 Rugby Union World Cup Finals. The process of return was completed in 1998 with the predominantly black South African soccer team travelling to France to compete in the Soccer World Cup Finals. With a nation that is so keen on sport back in the fold, it is understandable that many commentators are now discussing the possibility of a South African Olympics in the not too distant future.
Booth and Nauright, in their different ways, challenge many of the myths that surround the chain of events and the ethos that is so simplistically, but so recognisably explained above. Booth, who has written widely on the issues surrounding recent and contemporary South African sport has based his book on his doctoral research which was undertaken both in the Republic and from afar. Nauright, whose background lies in non-sporting South African history, has built on his wide-ranging knowledge of sports history and sociology, as the basis of his text. It was here that the clearest differences in approach are to be witnessed. Booth is supplying an in-depth and wide ranging critique of the politics surrounding South African sport since the 1960s. His work is built on an intricate knowledge of the specific sporting history of his topic, of the key figures and organisations. Nauright's work attempts something quite different, although it is obviously the same subject matter at the heart of the work. Nauright's remit is clearly to offer a more wide ranging, and thus by necessity a more synthesis style approach, to the whole topic. His whole chronological period is more stretched than Booth's and his horizons in many ways wider. Both books however, fulfil the remits of the author in question.
Booth argues throughout his book that the history of South African sport has essentially been a battle concerned with the questions of South African identity and the nature of its political order. He clearly demonstrates how the National Party and the broader white population used sport to distinguish itself from the majority black population and to prove the superiority of its race policies through an international sporting platform. Booth goes on to detail how sport became the battleground of apartheid. Internally the white population saw sport as a way of preserving the racial distinctions that apartheid had introduced and externally allowed them to link with their white cousins around the world. In exploring these constructions of identity and power relations, Booth throws much light on the importance of South African relations with key nations such as New Zealand, relations which, it is apparent, were held together by little more than a shared passion for Rugby. The black population, and those activists across the globe who battled against apartheid understood well how important sport, especially Rugby Union and cricket, was to the apartheid regime and to the white population in underpinning a sense of their righteousness and their solidarity. Booth examines in great deal the move toward sporting sanctions, and the apparent success of the boycott. The overriding importance of sport to the white population is reinforced in Booth's coverage of the post apartheid era, and the ANC's embrace of sport, tendentially a white dominated sport, as a way of allaying the fears of the white population. In all his coverage Booth shows a solid understanding of the politics of South Africa, both black and white, and offers a sensible critique and assessment of the policy of sports boycott. Where I would suggest that Booth is weaker, is in placing the South African fixation with sport generally, and the use of sport as a political tool specifically, in a wider context.
It is here that I found Nauright most convincing. He seemed far more able to place the South African experience in a wider context and offered some pertinent points that illustrated well the political, and increasingly global nature of sport as a weapon of diplomacy or disagreement. Nauright did not demonstrate however, the intricate knowledge, or the even handedness of Booth. In dealing with South African sport I felt that Nauright was far more ready to approach the white identity within South Africa (and especially its use of Rugby) as bad, and to promote the black identity as good. This feeling was reinforced by an over concentration on and an overt criticism in the book of white Rugby, and a comparative lack of focus on cricket or soccer. The work also had the understandable tendency to cast its net wide and ask questions of where gender exists in South African sport (a highly valid question), and then fail to offer any sustained consideration of the enquiry.
I would suggest that both books have admirably fulfilled their stated aims, and both make an important contribution to what will not doubt become a growing field as more work emerges that examines sport in South Africa. It should also make useful comparative reading as sport historians spread their net wider and tackle other emerging nations such as those that have found freedom since the collapse of the former Soviet Union. Having read both books together, and found so much in them that was valuable and engaging, but not finding that either was repetitive of the other, I would suggest that anyone interested in South African sport tackles the pair together.
Mike Cronin
De Montfort University Leicester
Stephen Fisher, editor, The Erratics: The Glory Decade to 1994, (Exeter: University of Exeter Staff Cricket Club, 1997), Pp. xi + 163, ISBN 0-9512356-1-3.
This is the second volume in a history of the Erratics, a cricket club for the staff of Exeter University. The first volume _ The Erratics - Fifty Not Out _ was published in 1987 and covered the years 1937 to 1987. This volume looks at the next ten years but concentrates on the tours to Ireland in 1990 and the Isles of Scilly in 1991 and the matches played in 1994. Several members of the team have contributed match reports. All succeed in writing with a light touch. The match report by Richard Fox in the style of Samuel Pepys is a tremendous tour de force. The editor, the economic historian Stephen Fisher, who played in 356 matches for the club between 1958 and 1994, writes that the book may be a source book for English social life leisure in the late twentieth century. He points out that `No full-frontal approach has been offered for such was not really wanted; rather it is a revelatory, atmospheric type of approach that has been essayed.' The Erratics will certainly be a valuable source for the study of recreational cricket in the late twentieth century England. My experience of playing a similar sort of cricket in the 1980s and 1990s, though not against teams with such evocative names as Clyst St George or Stoke-in-Teignhead, persuade me that this book has captured perfectly the banter, bonhomie and not too intense competitiveness of friendly match cricket. Changing rooms which can accommodate comfortably only midgets, players arriving late for matches and the occasions when players turn up for a match to find that there is no opposition team are all familiar. Many who have played this form of cricket would probably agree, or at least feel that they ought to agree with Fisher's contention, that `All cricketers, Erratics notably included, still recognise this character-shaping nature of the game, and benefit from its ordered framework, from which so much individual and collective expression can flow. We now chiefly see cricket and other sports as entertainments. But it and they provide some reason to believe in human progress, of sunnier uplands - well, don't you think do, at least in cricket's case, especially on a glorious summer's day?' This book helps to explain and illustrate why cricket is so often described in such terms.
Like the vast number of cricket club anniversary histories published each year, The Erratics has a section of playing statistics and photographs of its teams and leading players, but unlike such club histories it can be enjoyed by those who know nothing of the club or its players. Its wit and gentle humour give it great charm.
Jack Williams
Liverpool John Moores University
Rob Hess & Bob Stewart, More Than A Game: An Unauthorised History of Australian Rules Football, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1998. Pp. 304, $29.95. ISBN 0-522-84772-2.
Australian Rules Football is Australia's greatest sporting invention. For almost a century and a half it has been a uniquely Australian leisure activity: the size of its playing area an historical legacy of the nation's vast open space; the point for narrowly missing a goal a recognition of Australia's `fair-go' principle; and the absence of an `offside' rule rendering it a decidedly different form of football but the subjective nature of `holding the ball' or `holding the man' decisions allowing full scope for Australians' traditional dispute with authority. Yet it has not remained unchanged: on the field, as the authors show, tactics, team formations and style of play have all altered, and, off-field, corporate capitalism has come to dominate with, as Dave Nadel explains in his chapter on the game going national, Melbourne-based Fitzroy being compulsory merged with a Brisbane team `not by supporters or members, but by an administrator from a firm of accountants' (249).
That one of Australia's established university presses saw fit to publish a work emanating from one of Australia's newest universities is testimony to the quality of this multi-authored book. It stems from a series of seminars hosted at the Victoria University of Technology and indeed, apart from knowledgeable amateur historian, Robin Grow, and sports journalist, Russell Holmesby, all the contributors are associated with that institution, either as staff (Dave Nadel and editors Rob Hess and Bob Stewart) or as postgraduate (Dale Blair).
The book is not a comprehensive account of the development of Australian Rules Football. It has little to say on country football, devoting most of its space to metropolitan events; it rarely mentions the game at school level or the participation of children; lower leagues receive attention generally only in acknowledgement of the footballing star who has emerged from them to shine more brightly elsewhere. That said it is an excellent chronological history of the game at the elite level, though even here it is not complete as it concentrates on events in Victoria where the game was first played to the relative exclusion of the senior leagues in other states.
Each chapter deals with a different time period. Chronological approaches, especially when narrative, have their academic critics but establishing a series of benchmarks is surely a reasonable way to plot the historical development of a sport. It can also enable events to be put into historical context as with the different responses taken within and outside the game to the two World Wars. Yet it should be emphasised that themes such as violence, media relationships and gender aspects of football, can be identified across the chapters. The writers dispel the nostalgia surrounding the manliness of the game and show that it has exhibited a culture of violence for many years which has only recently been changed as the sport's authorities have sought to `civilise' it in the interests of market forces. What has stood the test of time and the emergence of new forms of communication has been the symbiotic relationship between Australian Rules and the Australian media, though it is noteworthy that at its formation in 1897 the breakaway Victorian Football League had to pay for its own publicity in the Melbourne press. A pioneering effort is made to understand the role in - and attitude towards - the game by women. In particular Rob Hess introduces a gender variant of the `rough' and `respectable' football spectator.
One lesson for the nostalgic sports historian is that, except perhaps in its very early days, Australian Rules Football has had a commercial element both overtly in the charging of gate money and covertly via illegal payments to players. Nevertheless this bears little comparison to the more recent corporatisation in which sports clubs have become subject to market forces in a non-sporting world.
When the Australian stock market collapsed in 1987 Powerplay shares fell from $1.80 to twenty cents. When its subsidiary Sportsplay failed to secure the contract to telecast sport by satellite into pubs and clubs it lost $17 million. Normal risks of big business you might say. However, these companies were the owners of the Sydney Swans football team, which, in contrast to the off-field business activities of its backers, was performing successfully on the field of play. But not for long. The financial problems of its owners led to a fire sale of its chief assets, its better players, and a downward spiral of football failure. For the British reader concerned with corporate ownership of domestic football clubs, this book shows too clearly that businessmen do not always make sound business decisions, let alone footballing ones.
Wray Vamplew
De Montfort University
John Jenkins, A Rugby Compendium: An Authoritative Guide to the Literature of Rugby Union (Boston Spa: The British Library, 1998), Pp XXII, 322. ISBN 0 7123 1096 7
This compendium provides in many respects an excellent model of scholarly bibliography. John Jenkins, already well known to many readers of The Sports Historian as the authority on rugby literature, set out with the ambitious aim of listing every book on rugby union published in the English language world wide, and every book on rugby published in Britain and the Republic of Ireland up to the end of the December 1997.
In all the lists approximately 3,000 titles divided into ten main sections in the following order: History and Development, Club Histories, Personalities, Competitions, The Tours, Theory and Practise, Rugby and Society, Rugby and Literature, Reference Books, Wit and Humour.
The literature divides itself very nicely into these very helpful divisions and considerable thought has gone into developing each of these sections into appropriate categories. The divisions within Chapter F Theory and Practice and G Rugby and Society must have been difficult but illustrates the compiler's professional training as a librarian and insight into the game itself. What surprises me as a bibliographer is the order. Convention normally lists reference works first, for obvious reasons, but in this compendium these are included next to the end. Within club histories, convention would also normally dictate that representations of vaster geographical areas come before more parochial ones, but here the reverse applies - a history of Truro RFC rugby club appears ahead of the history of the county club.
Apart from the odd exception (eg F318 and 362), there is excellent cross-referencing between sections and different editions of the same publication. However, where the scope of a work crosses boundaries of the chapter headings, the entry is listed in more than one section (eg B421 is repeated four times). Although this practise defies convention it is one I accept bearing in mind the way the compendium is likely to be used by the typical user.
The compendium includes some non-mainstream works containing significant information on rugby but these are listed under the heading `Additional References' at the foot of each section. For reasons justified elsewhere (see R. W. Cox's review of A Football Compendium in IJSH 13, 2 (August 1996), pp. 252-6), this is a feature to be applauded.
All bibliographers, at some time in their research and presentation of the final manuscript are torn between depth and width of coverage. By and large, the professional bibliographer, by nature of their personalities, are inclined to go for comprehensive and complete coverage. On the other hand, where a commercial publisher is involved and profit and/or publicity lies at the top of their agenda, there is a tendency to press for widest appeal at minimum cost. Consequently, whilst the bibliographer limited by time and/or resource starts to impose demographical; historical; level of scholarship; date, country, language of publication constraints on his work the publisher pushes for reduction in bibliographical detail included in the final product. John Jenkins and the British Library appear to have reached a curious compromise. Juvenile as well as adult literature is included, non-specialist as well as specialist rugby literature (as described above). Although stated to the contrary (see p. XIX), some unpublished research works such as university theses are included. The major exception is periodical articles. The reasons given by the British Library for their exclusion suggests that such items are mainly only reports of work in progress, that `the information dates quickly and is readily and best accessed through secondary sources' such as Sports Discus and Sport Quest. Such comments are so naïve as to be unbelievable and ones I totally reject. By adopting this policy (as they did with Seddon's Football Compendium), a valuable literature has been lost. Whilst it would have been unfeasible to include all journal material (especially pieces from the popular press such as Rugby World) there were influential articles published in contemporary review journals at the turn of the century that were important, perhaps even pivotal to certain changes. Similarly, there are substantial secondary works addressing significant issues but never published in monograph format. Using this compendium, you would not be alerted to the vast debate about rugby v the grid iron game in the United States in the early part of this century. As highlighted in Roberta Park's article "From Football to Rugby and Back, 1906-1919' in the Journal of Sport History 11, 3 (Winter, 1984), 5-40, rugby became the major inter-collegiate sport at the Universities of California and Stanford between 1906 and 1919. It offered an acceptable alternative to the increasingly dangerous (there had been a number of fatalities) and discredited (several corrupt practices had been revealed) the Grid-Iron game (see W. T. Reid's American Football versus Rugby California Occident (Feb 1908) 3-16). Although the Grid-Iron game re-established itself (for interesting cultural reason) the game has continued to be played by some American colleges and in local communities as a result ever since (see Tindall's MA thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1969). Another example of excluded coverage, due to the policy of not including journal articles, is the growing literature pertaining to legislation and legal battles on and off the field of play, as a result of injuries, professionalization of the game and media coverage. The argument that periodical articles can be accessed via Sports Discus and other such databases also holds little water. I do not know of a single indexing or abstracting service that examines the content of the popular rugby magazines. Similarly, there is no single source to pick up rugby articles appearing in the diverse range of academic journals including items on rugby. One would need to check out Historical Abstracts, Sociological Abstracts, etc in addition to Sports Discus. I had always been under the impression that it was the bibliographer's role to help establish short cuts to the literature, not the researchers.
Whilst I appreciate I have laboured this point I have done so because I am conscious that the message has not got home to the publisher. This is the second in a series of bibliographies on sport to be published by the British Library and they still appear inflexible in their policy.1
Although individual periodical articles are not included, Rugby periodicals, fanzines, newsletters, handbooks and certain annuals from around the world are listed in the Reference Section. A number of conference papers are also included.
Getting back to the subject content of the bibliography itself the breadth of scope is highly commendable. Without John Jenkins' research it is highly unlikely that many of the obscure works such as novels, poems, short stories, essays, plays, religious tracts, books on fashion, etc would have come to the attention of researchers and writers on rugby who have access to this compendium. Songs and ditties, that vital ingredient of rugby culture, are included - not under humour and wit but literature. Whilst cartoon, quiz and joke books are included under humour, women's rugby is not! It has a section of its own in Rugby and Society immediately beneath the heading `The Game for People with Different Abilities'. I assume it was not meant to be a sub-division of this! Clearly the compiler has not been brainwashed into treating these topics, as some rugby players would have us do.
When we come down to discussing the specific detail of individual entries, John Jenkins has included as much information as he could muster in the time frame available to him. Thus, title, author, place of publication, publisher, date of publication, pagination, indication of whether it was illustrated, published as a paperback edition, separately written, preface, etc, ISBN, British Library catalogue information and a synopsis are all included for a good proportion of the entries. Many of these descriptions are essential for gaining an insight into the content, especially where the titles are vague or the same as many others (eg Playing Rugby). A minor criticism here is that in the case of university theses, I would have liked it to have been indicated for which degree the thesis was submitted. This would have been helpful in getting a feel for the standard (eg M.Ed. dissertation v M.Phil. thesis) and whether a copy was likely to be held by the degree awarding institution or not.
Whilst inclusion of BL catalogue information I would suggest is primarily to promote the collection itself, it will have benefits to those who have ready access to the British Library. Unfortunately, lack of time did not permit me to check the accuracy of these catalogue reference details. One hopes that the notorious inaccuracies in the computerised catalogue of a few years ago, due to the short comings of the OCR software used in scanning the detail from the printed copies, has been rectified.
Name, club, title and subject indexes provide excellent access to the compendium. My only criticism of this is that these are computer-generated. Whilst computerisation of records in machine readable databases makes production of such indexes possible, both quickly and cheaply, they can end up listing a great deal of unhelpful material. There are, for example, several hundred entries under rugby, 26 of these with no additional information. The opportunity for some `manual' editing of these electronically generated indexes would have improved them considerably. Whilst I found the use of a letter prefix helpful in locating individual items within the main body of the text, emboldening these would have been most useful. On more than one occasion I ended up misreading 1 for I.
In terms of its physical presentation, the layout is acceptable to me although the use of italicised fonts for headings, listing contents, etc is not one I would have chosen. I feel that italicised or emboldened titles, on the other hand, would have helped the user distinguish this information from the rest of the bibliographical detail.
The use of illustrations in the form of line drawings and book title pages will provide light relief for some users but otherwise provides no useful purpose that I can see.
So far, I have failed to mention the fact that this Compendium is more than a listing of literature. Michael Green, well known author of the Art of Course Rugby provides a six page Introduction. This is followed by an 18 page bibliographical review of the literature by Huw Richards. Writing a bibliographical essay, as many readers will know, even if only for an undergraduate dissertation, is a difficult task. In the course of discussing this vast array of literature, Richards shown an awareness and understanding of the academic as well as popular literature and he is able to juxtaposition these works as they reflect on wider issues in culture, reflect changing times, popular themes, motivations and backgrounds of the writers/publishers, in terms of their literacy and artistic merits. He also identifies significant themes and avenues for future research including studies of those who watch as well as play the game. Richards also combines his academic training and professional skills as a journalist to produce some thought-provoking and often witty comments penned with some memorable prose. `Chronic cultural malnutrition' is one phrase I will not forget in a hurry! His suggestion that rugby is "too rapid for the contemplative, too co-operative for those who seek symbolism and too vigorous for aesthetic delight" when attempting to account for the dearth of literature compared to cricket is an interesting one.
Personally, I would have liked to have seen more analysis of some of the earlier literature in influencing public opinion and practice of the game. Which, if any works on coaching and tactics, for example, were influential in changing the style of play, methods of training and preparation etc. Biographies are often revealing of hidden motives, personality traits and other variables of the individual psyche. I would have enjoyed a discussion of these.
Finally, I am curious as to why he excluded tackling the issue of gender (male, female, gay) in rugby and the contemporary economics of the game, in particular the move towards professionalization with all its ramifications. As rugby correspondent of The Financial Times and the literature in the bibliography alluding to this phenomenon, I am a little surprised. I can only assume he was limited by time and space or felt that whatever he wrote would soon be out dated given the rapidly changing scene.
Unfortunately, unlike most bibliographical compilations, there are no essay or notes by the compiler on the strategy used to compile the Compendium. Through personal communication I happen to know that he has used many collections - public and private, home and abroad, to compile this work. He has also consulted with many authorities. To have had this explained in detail (beyond the brief acknowledgements) with comments on the merits and otherwise of individual collections, would have been helpful and interesting to the serious scholar.
For those of you who have managed to stay with me through this very lengthy review, I wish to reiterate my very first sentence. Within the confines imposed on the compiler this is an excellent bibliography. As someone with a thorough grasp of the literature, I have not managed to identify any item not included within the given terms of reference. Although I am not qualified to pass comment on accuracy of detail, there are no flaws I can detect. The Compendium is very helpful and accessible, providing an invaluable reference source for anyone interested in the book literature of rugby, be they a high flying academic, book collector, or amateur enthusiast. It reflects a thorough knowledge of the subject matter and is the outcome of much more than three year's effort during which period the compiler was contracted to the British Library. No one knows the literature of rugby better than John Jenkins, including non-book formats.
At £30 this Compendium reflects excellent value for money and should be on every library shelf supporting aspects popular culture.
Dr Richard William Cox
UMIST
1 This point is one I believe worthy of some analysis in its own right. Whilst I welcome the British Library's excursion into the field of sport, I remain wary of their involvement. Elsewhere, I have discussed the wealth of information on sport contained in such collections as the British Library and the difficulty of locating it early amid the vast array of literature on just about every topic under the sun; using up until recently the unwieldy catalogues and unreliable OPAC (see R. W. Cox `Sport Archives, Libraries and Museums in the UK The Sports Historian 16 (May 1996) 156-9. Although the British Library OPAC has improved considerably in recent times and is now accessible over the Internet, it will never be as helpful as the separate Compendium on specific sports such as this one and others planned in the series.
Commissioning an expert in the subject to structure the work and supplement the catalogue listing with other works is a commendable one but the continued exclusion of journal articles, the reluctance to include theses, etc begs the question are the British Library like so many other entrepreneurs and institutions throughout history using the popularity and high profile of sport primarily for ulterior motives - in this case promoting their collection, profile, and revenue? It is only a decade ago that I was involved in a campaign along with others fighting to persuade the British Library not to cut subscriptions to sporting and recreational literature, as had been proposed as part of a cost-cutting exercise.
In future, my preference would be to see either simple sports specific listings contained in the British Library collection or fully fledged bibliographies of individual sports containing all formats of publication. This is what is ultimately required by the researcher and enthusiast as opposed to the book collector/dealer.
Bruce Kidd, The Struggle for Canadian Sport Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Pp. 323. Index, illus.
The Struggle for Canadian Sport is an important book not only in the Canadian context of sports studies, but internationally. The book, deservedly, won the 1997 book prize of the North American Society for Sports History. The author, Bruce Kidd, is well known as a scholar of sport in Canada and also for his contributions to knowledge about sport in South Africa and of the Olympic movement. More than that, however, Kidd has been a passionate activist for better sporting environments and for reforming sport to capture the joys of movement and physical activity in bodily performances of athletes at all levels. It is from this philosophical and political positioning that Kidd's analysis emanates, though from a sound historical analysis and theoretical framework.
The book does not become a polemic for some idealised past, rather, it chronicles the path taken by sport in Canada in the first half of the twentieth century as a struggle took place over the forms and content of Canadian sport. Kidd charts the long and detailed debates about amateurism and professionalism which has greatly shaped the resultant Canadian sports system, the role of nationalism and importantly the emergence of capitalist and continentalist driven elite sport, particularly as it manifested itself in Canada's national winter sport of ice hockey and the progressive overwhelming dominance of the National Hockey League. Read alongside Alan Metcalfe's, Canada Learns to Play; Colin Howell's Northern Sandlots: A Social History of Maritime Baseball and Richard Gruneau and David Whitson's Hockey Night in Canada: The Struggle for Canadian Sport fills a significant gap temporally, but also furthers connections between the work of historians and sociologists through excellent links between Gramscian-influenced theories of hegemony and the historical evidence of Canadian sporting organisations, officials, players, the public and politicians. Far too little of such analyses are pursued elsewhere by historians of sport, though some recent studies on Australia, Britain, South Africa and the USA as well as in Canada have furthered the use of theory in historical analyses. Specific chapters focus on emerging links between sport and masculinity, women's sport, workers' sport, ice hockey and the National Hockey League and the state leading to the conclusion entitled `The Triumph of Capitalist Sport' Kidd concludes somewhat optimistically that the quote triumph; is not universal or irreversible: As they vie for scarce resources and political support, the new progressive initiatives must confront the consumer loyalties, conventional wisdom, economic power, and political clout forged by the sports corporations in the 1930s, and which they have strengthened and extended exponentially in the years since. Other continentalist cartels such as Major League Baseball and the National Basketball League have expanded to Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver with the help of provincial and municipal financial support, while global pressures threaten the entire material and ideological basis of cultural expression in Canada. In this context, the effort to create alternatives to the commercial sport culture will continue to be an uphill fight. But such alternatives do exist. They have a long, rich, and proud history (p. 270). Thanks to Kidd' s work, we know much more about this long, rich history.
The main criticism I have of this work, like so much of Anglo-Canadian sports studies, is that `Canada' is far too often English-speaking Canada. Kidd does a better job than most in his analysis but we are still left with far to scant a picture of the role of Quebec in the development of twentieth century Canadian sport, though the role of eastern European migrants in the workers' sport movement is well documented. It is clear that Quebec sporting culture and practice is different from Anglo-Canada and we need to know more of how this difference emerged in the past several decades. We learn far more, for example, about the role of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Hockey Night in Canada on CBC Radio hosted by Foster Hewitt is forging a pan-Canadian (read Anglo-Canadian) identification with the Leafs and the NHL than we do for the Montreal Canadiens as an emerging symbol for Quebec's nationalism related vividly in Rick Salutin's play, Les Canadiens. For Kidd recounts the Leafs story is some detail showing how `Far beyond southern Ontario, Canadians listened to the Maple Leaf network in growing numbers. Many adopted the Leafs as their team. . .'. The Leafs enjoyed their monopoly in English-speaking Canada for more than four decades. This fact explains why, even where there are now other NHL franchises, they remain a popular team (p. 223). The Canadiens had a similar monopoly in French-speaking Canada and it would be useful to compare the two. Additionally, we learn much in this book about central and western Canada, but perhaps too little about the Maritimes. (For an excellent study of baseball, class and region in the maritimes, Colin Howell's Northern Sandlots is a must read). Indeed many English- speakers in the east and eastern Ontario and in Quebec have supported the Canadiens rather than the Leafs.
More on the social history of Canadian football prior to the formation of the Canadian Football League in 1958 would also have been useful to compliment the detailed narrative account provided by Frank Cosentino. I would like to have seen more particularly on the role of the Saskatchewan Roughriders, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, Edmonton Eskimos and Calgary Stampeders (none of which appear in the index) in the development of local and regional identities in western Canada. Indeed, the CFL is only briefly discussed on pages 267 and 268 as a league that `fostered athletic rivalries that affirmed the geography and political economy of Canada rather than the continentalist lure of the United States. It fashioned an exciting, distinct, Canadian style of play and kept franchises viable and jobs for Canadian athletes through creative revenue-sharing [a source of resentment for western teams] and player quotas'. For many fans, the CFL's annual Grey Cup championship was the highlight of the sporting calendar.
Yet, nothing of how this came to be so, and little beyond a brief mention on p. 91 on how reliant Canadian teams have been on American players and nothing about reliance on American administrators and coaches from at least the 1930s onwards. As professional football became established as a career for post-university players in the USA, those who wanted to continue playing but could not make American professional teams often turned to Canadian teams to extend their playing careers and earn a living from their playing skills. Additionally, we learn nothing of Canadian football's inability to make a significant impact on the consciousness of French-speaking Montreal. Finally, most western Canadian CFL teams have been community owned making them the only community owned North American professional sporting franchises other than the Green Bay Packers. This tradition is an important one to contemporary debates about the future of the CFL and deserves much more than the scant mention of Winnipeg on p. 90.
These silences will hopefully be taken up in future, but Kidd has nevertheless provided us with a significant study of Canadian sport that deserves a wide reading. In the international context, this book also should be read by students of modern sport as it is an exemplary study of the struggles that shaped the face of contemporary sport not only in Canada, but in other advancing capitalist societies. The Struggle for Canadian Sport sits well alongside the 1980s work of the late Stephen Jones on interwar sport, leisure and class in Britain and is a must read for historians and sociologists of modern sport.
John Nauright
Department of Human Movement Studies
The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
Peter Lush and Dave Farrar, editors: Tries in the Valleys: A History of Rugby league in Wales (London: London League Publications, 1998), Pp. 272, ISBN 0-9526064-3-7, Paperback.
Tries in the Valleys is very much a book for the fans of rugby league. It will appeal to those who wish to be reminded of great matches and famous players they have seen and also to those fascinated by sport facts and figures. The book is divided into six sections. The first four are arranged chronologically covering the period up to 1914, the inter-war years, post-1945 and the 1980s and 1990s. Section five includes an essay in which Robert Gale selects his thirteen best Welsh rugby league players and interviews with former players and with those who have tried to promote rugby league in Wales. Part six - statistics and records - gives the dates, scorers, venues and spectator numbers for every rugby league international played by Wales, a list of those who have played most times and scored most points in internationals for Wales and the match scores for every game in the Rugby League played by a Welsh club. Much of the first four sections concentrate on accounts of international matches. Whilst the book is concerned primarily with rugby league in Wales, it does contain much material about the contribution of Welsh players to the game in the North of England. The seven contributors all write in a clear and highly readable style.
The question which those interested in the social and cultural history of sport ask most often about rugby league in Wales is why has the game failed to attract a mass following. Tries in the Valleys does not provide a definitive answer to this question but does include much detail which cast light on this issue. It examines the various attempts to establish rugby league in Wales and shows each attempt petered out. Tony Collins and John Coyle explain that in the years immediately after the split from the Rugby Union, the Northern Union clubs made little effort to recruit the leading Welsh rugby union clubs. They conclude that `In reality, the NU had no expansion policy...clubs were given senior status with few questions asked, yet were expected to stand on their own feet and provide proper competition for their rivals.' (page 34). The chapters examining the fate of clubs from Wales which played in the Rugby League have statistics to show that spectator numbers, after the first few matches, were not sufficient to sustain teams able to hold their own against even the weaker teams from northern England. Further details are provided of the opposi tion from the Welsh rugby union establishment to rugby league have been unearthed, but there are also interesting examples of how some town councils were prepared to allow municipally-owned stadia to be used for rugby league. The ambivalent attitude to rugby league in Wales among northern England clubs is brought out in several chapters. For the northern clubs, recruiting the best Welsh rugby players for themselves always too took priority over the establishment of top rate clubs in South Wales, with the result that Welsh clubs rarely had the big name players needed to attract spectators or to build successful teams. As this book was not intended primarily for an academic readership, there are no footnotes but it would be helpful to know the issue of the newspaper from which of the quotations were taken.
Jack Williams
Liverpool John Moores University
Tony Money, Manly and Muscular Diversions: Public Schools and the Nineteenth-Century Sporting Revival, London: Duckworth, 1997 Pp.xii + 191, £ 18.95. ISBN 0 7156 2793 7
Tony Money is the archivist at Radley College where he has taught for thirty-three years. During those years he has devoted long and dedicated hours to the sporting education of his charges. Likewise, in the writing of this book, he has spent much time and energy collecting information from a wide selection of sources both within the public schools and beyond.
In this well-produced book, Money is largely concerned with the part played by the upper and upper-middle classes in the revival and promotion of sport in nineteenth-century England. Money's thesis, which remains implicit and is never fully developed, is that without the development of cricket, football and rowing in the public schools from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, England's sporting heritage would have looked very different as would that of the British Empire. In effect, there would have been no significant sporting revival of the tradition of athletic exercise of the medieval upper class. Money's aim is to elaborate on the history of the sports and games found in the major (boys) English public schools of the nineteenth century and recount the part played by these schools in the broader development of these activities.
In fulfilling this aim, Money focuses much of his attention on the `sacred seven' or `great' schools, namely: Winchester, Eton, Westminster, Harrow, Charterhouse, Shrewsbury and Rugby. He assigns a central role to the boys in each of these schools in this revival and earmarks them as instigators and developers of competitive matches, not only within their own schools, but also in `foreign' matches and then at Oxbridge. While he concentrates on the major activities of football, cricket and rowing, he also has interesting sections on (real) tennis, rackets, golf and some of the more esoteric activities which were unique to a particular school. Thus the Royal Shrewsbury School Hunt which was a variation of the old school game of `Hare and Hounds' was unique in that it had an elaborate constitution and assigned each boy a role as either huntsman, whip, gentleman, hound or fox (never hare) for a whole season. The honour of being assigned the title of `killing hound' or `killing gentleman' was decided by the number of `kills' or first place finishes during the season.
While Money does succumb to personal interest by reviewing Radley's rowing history and the school's impact on both public school and Ox bridge rowing in some detail, (who could avoid a discussion of a school that had nurtured the legendary W.B. `Guts' Woodgate!) he generally offers pride of place to Winchester and Eton. He argues that, as the two oldest and best endowed institutions with the longest history of taking boarders and generally the largest number of boarders, Winchester and Eton played central roles in the development of nineteenth-century public school sport. He suggests that it was the need for activity for all of these boarders once the classroom had been abandoned for the day that really sparked the sporting revival. Money notes that with the growth of numbers in all seven of the great schools towards the end of the eighteenth century, organized competitive team games really begun in earnest. Thus we see Eton playing Westminster at cricket from as early as 1786, and playing Harrow from 1805 onwards.
The broader context for Money's `revival' is presented through a discussion of the history of court games and notably `fives' and tennis. He suggests that these were probably the first games played with any regularity at Winchester and Eton and by providing such background, limited though it is, offers a broader context for the now well-trodden ground of the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Money certainly doesn't suggest that there was anything inevitable about the advance of games in this revival. As he points out, numbers declined in nearly all of the schools in the early years of the nineteenth century, particularly amongst boarders. However, he does note that the stage had been set and that from the 1840's onwards, increased numbers meant that organized games were a readily available option for out of school hours for boys and staff alike; cricket or rowing in the summer, football in the winter.
The history of football in the public schools is a matter dear to Tony Money's heart. Accordingly, over a number of years he has reviewed the game in a large number of schools in an effort to trace elements of schools' games in both the Association and Rugby codes. He has also tried to assess the degree of interaction between schools on the basis of their rules and rule-changes. Here he provides comments and/or commentary on football as played in twenty-four different schools, offering some interesting insights into the relationship between the context in which a game was played and the rules adopted in the various codes such as the Cambridge and Sheffield codes. The chapters on cricket and rowing (boating) also offer some interesting new insights about the Lord's public school matches. Initially played between Eton and Harrow (the longest standing fixture at Lord's) and Winchester, Lord's week later included a variety of strong cricketing schools selected by MCC to enjoy the privilege of playing at cricket's headquarters _ Rugby and Marlborough, Haileybury and Cheltenham, Clifton and Tonbridge. This privilege was removed in the late 1960's when touring teams complained about the state of wickets at Lord's.
This book provides a close-grained description of games in the most influential public schools and offers a number of interesting new insights to scholars of sport. It should be noted that little attention has been given to much of the recent scholarship in this area; and while this is not, in and of itself, cause for criticism, it does mean that the reader needs to be aware of the fact that Money is `reading' what he sees as a revival largely through the eyes of commentators from the 1920s and 1930s rather than those of the 1980s and 1990s. As such the discussion is not framed by questions which are perhaps more pertinent today, - questions regarding the role of public school sport: in the formation of identity and masculinity; in building bridges between the leaders and the led; in promoting social stability and social control; in propagating class consciousness and class conflict; and in pursuing health or prestige. What this book does do splendidly is bring together in one place, ninety-two wonderful illustrations and photographs which illuminate the text, adding greatly to the impact of the book. So while the paucity of notes may be a disappointment, the quality and range of illustrations is a visual delight.
Money is an unabashed proponent of the ethos of `fair play' and the principles of amateurism and sportsmanship which underpinned public school and Oxbridge sport during this period of revival. He obviously regrets the fact that those educated in such an ethos have lost influence over the manner in which sport is now played. He is undoubtedly saddened by what he sees in modern sport, namely television companies deciding the future of many sports and the television viewer as the ultimate arbiter of our sporting future. While I'm not sure that reviving the spirit of the nineteenth century public schools is necessarily an answer to such a situation, I am left wondering, like Money, if I want the future of sport in the hands of spectators rather than participants.
Timothy J. L. Chandler
Kent State University
Brian Stoddart and Keith A.P. Sandiford, The Imperial Game: Cricket Culture and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), Pp. 178. ISBN 0 7190 4978 4
Books about cricket history are legion; proper histories of the game like Birley's The Willow Wand are much rarer. There is, of course, plenty of good writing on cricket _ it has almost become a literary sub-genre in its own right _ but most of this biographical scholarship and team history does not engage critically with the wider meanings attached to the game. Enthusiasts are happy to celebrate and embellish the historic centrality of cricket within English and imperial culture without going any further. Analysis might spoil the enjoyment of a shared mythology.
Hence this volume, which appears in a major series on imperial history under the distinguished general editorship of John MacKenzie, is especially welcome. It is most important that sports history keeps a foot in the historical mainstream. The format chosen here works well. Instead of assembling disparate authors and pet topics as in so many other edited collections, a small number of contributors have been assigned general essays on specific parts of the former British Empire. The result is an important survey, which despite some omissions - North America surely needed more than a couple pages in the introduction - brings together a wide range of new material in an easily accessible fashion.
The central theme is the nature of national sporting identity as expressed in cricket. Given that this was partly defined through and against the `mother country', it obviously appropriate to start with a clear account of the cultural significance of cricket in England. Predictably, Keith Sandiford, as the author of an important work on Cricket and the Victorians does a good job on the nineteenth century. This is a richly textured piece with some nice passages of collective biography _ he follows the careers of the Cambridge cricket blues of 1890, for example _ but the story stops at the turn of the century. This leaves the interwar and post war years unexamined from the English and British perspective. As it stands we have to work out English reactions from the other articles which give a broader chronological coverage of Australia, New Zealand, the Indian sub-continent, the West Indies and South Africa. A second essay on England or a more synoptic view was needed here and its absence is the main weakness of the volume.
The other area surveys are well done, though some are more authoritative than others. For example, Richard Cashman's essay on Australia carries more conviction than his piece on the Indian sub-continent, despite Cashman's good work on Indian cricket. It is not that there is anything to fault in what he says about the remarkable importance of the sport in both India and Pakistan. On the contrary, he says the obvious things about the role of the Princes, the Raj and the separation of India and Pakistan clearly and well. However, Cashman is stronger on the culture of cricket in his native Australia, where he produces a richly textured piece, deftly summing up the mutual respect and resentment that underlay the most important sporting event in England and Australia for most of this century : the Ashes.
Equally impressive is Greg Ryan's essay on New Zealand which never loses sight of the game itself in the wider analysis of its significance. He is very good on the exceptional degree of Brititsh cultural influence, leaving New Zealand apparently untouched by the kind of spiky national consciousness found in Australia. Ryan describes how even the most critical minds were in the thrall of imperial sporting culture. For example, `Ian Milner, son of the rector of Waitiki Boys School and an active socialist later implicated as a KGB agent' was steeped in English cricket lore, faithfully following the career of Jack Hobbs through `the cream and green coloured mag, which had traveled twelve thousand miles into my hands', poring over county scores months after they were made.
Both Cashman and Ryan allude to discrimination against native and subordonated peoples. Predictably, this is the main theme of Christopher Merrett and John Nauright's analysis of South Africa. They have produced a tightly written account of how black cricket developed before the Boer War and was marginalised and undermined thereafter. The seeming naturalness of not wanting to play with non-whites, including some great black batsmen like J.A. `Dol' Freeman (also brilliant at rugby and similarly excluded) and the wicket keeper Salie Abed, is expertly explained - and still has the power to shock. There is also the unwitting absurdity of Sir Abe Mitchell and Lord Nuffield, two of the leading philanthropists of cricket, denouncing `race' feeling in cricket (meaning between the two white races). That the Britisher and Boer should be brought together in a racial alliance seemed as natural to such men as that black and white races should be kept apart. Yet Boers were not properly integrated into the game and perhaps did not wish to be so. This crucial aspect needed more space. When the South African Prime Minister, John Vorster, was told `die Engelse' had lost three wickets for 42 in a test match in South Africa, he replied `Hulle Engelse of ons Engelse?' (`Their English or our English?').
The remaining essays in the book are by all Brian Stoddart. One on the West Indies, which is well done and endorses much of what is already well known about the complex stratification by skin colour to be found in Beyond a Boundary. Stoddart has a truly global grasp and in `Other Cultures' (mostly about Samoa) and in a lengthy postscript (including Malaysia), he examines the many forms of cultural adaptation to be found within the game. He is good on cricket grounds and the carnivalesque and intersperses conceptual and personal reflections. Keener on theory than the other contributors, he is anxious to point out how the game fits into the wider literature colonial and neo-colonial culture. Cricket can `mean' almost anything its participants and observers want it to mean according to the particular context in which it is played. But these meanings have to be grounded in proper historical ethnography. He has little time for Ashis Nandy's The Tao of Cricket on the West Indian case ( Cashman is rather more indulgent to Nandy on India) which links `aggressive fast bowling with a deep seated desire to beat the former colonial masters' and a `flashy' batting style with the `instant gratification circumstances of slavery.' It is the job of book like this to provide a foundation of good knowledge from which to judge such crude and arbitrary assignations of meaning. It succeeds in this by giving the basis of a proper historical account, which will prove an important introductory text.
Richard Holt
International Centre for Sports History and Culture
De Monfort University