Tony Collins and Wray Vamplew

De Montfort University, Leicester

From earliest times, the public house has always been closely identified with sport. Whether as an alehouse, a tavern, an inn or a modern pub, sport has been at the heart of its life. And the publican has been central to the development of sport both ancient and modern. The importance of the pub to the development of the modern football codes has been extensively documented by historians and, along with the church and the workplace, its position in the triumvirate of agencies crucial to the formation of many early clubs is well established.2 In facilitating the growth of association and rugby football clubs, the role of the pub has been assumed to be a continuation of the role it played in the development of traditional sports. However, the reality is not quite so straightforward as it might seem. The drinks trade, comprising the breweries, pubs and associated businesses, underwent a profound change in the latter third of the nineteenth century, coinciding with the rise of modern football, which reshaped many of its traditional activities and also its relationship with sport. This essay seeks to situate football in the context of the changing world of the pub, and to highlight the ways in which the links between the two represented a break from tradition and pointed the way towards a modern, commercially-based relationship.

The drinks trade in transition

It is difficult to underestimate the importance of the drinking house to pre-industrial societies. In general, it served as the fulcrum for village life. It was a meeting place for socialising, doing business, finding work, receiving wages and organising political activity. It was a centre for travel,
The Sports Historian, No. 20, 1 (May, 2000), pp. 1-17

PUBLISHED BY THE BRITISH SOCIETY OF SPORTS HISTORY
serving as a stopping station for coaches, a stop at which to change horses and a hotel for travellers. It was the focus for leisure activities for the whole community, encompassing everything from organising annual fairs and feasts to arranging informal singing and dancing. Most importantly, it was a place in which to drink alcohol, an activity which was a form of leisure in itself.3

Certainly by the sixteenth century, and probably much earlier, the ale house was closely associated in the public mind with sport, as landlords found that the space adjoining their property could be utilised to promote sports events which would attract crowds. The yards, greens and grounds of the drinking place provided the spaces in which sports as diverse as skittles, quoits, bowls, boxing, wrestling, tennis, foot-racing, cricket and any number of games featuring animals could be staged. In order to stage the events which would bring in crowds, the publican became the promoter of sports, arranging matches and providing prize money, as well as being the bookmaker. If there was money to be made from the ale and food consumed by the sporting crowd, the same was true of the opportunities for gambling.

Animals were perhaps the most popular sources for gambling entertainment. Cock-fighting was hugely popular for centuries, as can be seen in the frequency with which the sport is alluded to in pub names. Bull-, bear- and occasionally ape-baiting were a feature of pubs large enough to house bull or bear pits. Dog-fighting and rat-killing contests were commonplace.

Other than those involving animals, no sport had closer links with the pub than boxing. Partially because of its illegality, prizefighting was heavily dependent on the support of the publican for its promotion, its staging and its administration. Landlords gave prize money, held stakes and took bets; they provided the ring for the boxers, refreshments for the audience and publicity for the fight and its aftermath. When their careers in the ring ended, many prizefighters took up the tenancy of a pub, often having the licence bought for them through collections from admirers. By the 1840s, dozens of London pubs were known as boxing pubs, many hosted by ex-pugilists and the unofficial headquarters of the sport moved from pub to pub as the standing of their landlords waxed and waned in the prizefighting universe.4

Cricket, too, was very much the child of the drinking house. The first known publication of the laws of the game was the 1755 New Articles of the Game of Cricket, subtitled Particularly That of the Star & Garter in Pall Mall, which were drawn up by the gentlemen involved in London's leading cricket clubs. John Nyren, the chronicler of the sport's infancy, was the landlord at Hambledon's Bat and Ball Inn. William Clarke, the force behind the All England XI, earned his place in cricket history partially due to his marrying the landlady of the Trent Bridge Inn in Nottingham and opening a cricket ground there.5

But the emergence of urban industrial society heralded the beginnings of a change in the role of the pub. The exigencies of industrial work and time discipline saw the erosion of many traditional practices based on the pub. Drunkenness not only became a widespread social evil but it also came to be perceived as such: the passing of the Beer Act of 1830, whereby any ratepayer could obtain a two guinea licence to sell beer, was introduced to undermine the popularity of the gin palaces, and had the effect of diluting the power of the landlord. The influence of the church and growing moral revulsion towards cruelty to animals, at least as practised in working-class pubs, saw cock-fighting outlawed by Parliament in 1849.

The rise of the temperance movement in the first half of the nineteenth century forced the drinks industry on to the back foot, more so as the moral crusade of reformers also encompassed opposition to sports they saw as crude or lewd. By banning gambling in pubs, the Betting Houses Act of 1853 removed another major attraction of the pub, although it remained a centre for illegal betting until the 1960s. The opening of public parks and other civic amenities from the 1830s also provided new outlets for recreation - indeed, the drinks trade opposed many moves to provide such facilities on the rates, rightly seeing them as a threat to their dominance of the leisure market. And, as Brian Harrison has noted, the railway dealt the greatest blow to the drink seller: by 1850 stage-coaching was all but dead, taking with it not only drinking places along the coaching routes but also much of the raison dêtre of the big city pubs.6

Paradoxically, the commercial success of the entrepreneurial landlord was also helping to undermine the centrality of the pub in the world of leisure. From the 1830s the popularity of music in pubs had seen the gradual development of singing or music saloons. Often the only form of organised entertainment available in working class communities, by the 1840s the saloons had become major businesses in themselves and had begun their transformation into music halls.7 Similarly, the promotion by landlords of sports involving human physical activity, such as pedestrianism, bowls and cricket, also laid the basis for alternative routes for the pursuit of leisure outside of the pub. From being the conduit through which almost all popular sport was organised, the pub by the 1870s was becoming one of a number of recreational options available to the population at large, a population which was also beginning to experience a rise in its standards of living and levels of disposable income.

The pub's decline as a social and commercial centre was exacerbated by the economic difficulties faced by the drinks trade in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. After reaching a peak in 1874, the demand for beer fell steeply - by 1886 it had plummeted by 20%. Between 1880 and 1890 the trade found itself in a trough as demand failed to pick up. The flotation mania of the 1880s and the consequent extension of the tied house system were an attempt to solve the problem of falling demand and over-capacity. The increased interest in commercial sport from the trade was part of this response. Nor was it the only response; music, the other pillar of pub entertainment, received new attention from the trade in the 1880s - the Leicester Town Crier noted in 1882 that pub music had re-emerged as "one of the methods which is being largely adopted to bolster up the fall off in the liquor trade".8

The consolidation of the brewing industry, and especially the tying of the vast majority of pubs in England and Wales to brewers which took place from 1886, greatly intensified competition between pubs. Following the flotation of Guinness in 1886, the next fourteen years saw a rush to market which saw 260 breweries float on the stock market. The immense sums of capital raised in this way were used to finance the purchase of pubs to turn them into tied houses, whereby they sold only beers and beverages made by, or at least approved by, their owning brewery, thus securing distribution channels against their competitors. Although this was not a new phenomenon, particularly in London, the rate at which it was carried out was: by 1890, around 70% of all pubs were tied. By 1900 approximately 90% of all pubs in England and Wales were tied.

The tie meant that the nature of the pub was changing too, as it was increasingly transformed into a retail unit of the parent brewery, quantitatively accelerating a process which had emerged in London as far back as the 1830s. This was most obviously seen in the calamitous decline in the number of publicans who brewed their own beer: the proportion of beer sold nationally by publican brewers fell from 45% in 1830 to just 5% in 1900, and their numbers dropped from 29,381 in 1870 to 4,361 in 1900, falling to 2,284 by 1914. The economic pressures on the trade in the 1900s led to a rise in pub bankruptcies, many of them as a consequence of over-optimistic predictions of the levels of return of the investments in them in the previous decade. The trade also suffered the depredations of the 1904 Licensing Act, which gave local magistrates the right to close pubs where they felt there were too many in an area. The distribution of pubs per head of the population plummeted from one for every 285 adults in 1896 to one for every 416 in 1915. Pubs faced competing pressures from within the industry too. Bottled beer, pioneered by Bass and William Younger, began to be seen as an alternative to going to the pub for an alcoholic drink and helped stimulate a move towards drinking beer at home.

Most worrying for many publicans was the rapid growth of private clubs, which provided much the same attractions, including alcohol and especially the new bottled brands, without the legal restrictions. Exploiting a legal loophole that meant that private clubs were not subject to the licensing laws, which had originally been intended to benefit gentlemen's drinking clubs, the working men's, Irish and political club movement underwent a huge expansion in the 1890s, growing by 85% in the decade to 1896 and then doubling in membership again in the next two decades, exactly the time at which the penetration of public houses per head of the population had dropped so precipitously.

Taken together, these changes were revolutionising the drinks industry - the seemingly timeless nature of the industry had been fatally undermined. The old world of the pub and the brewery had been left behind.

The rise of football

Thus the growth of football took place in the context of a drinks industry which was undergoing tremendous social and economic changes. These changes represented the acceleration of its transformation into a modern retail industry, in which the importance of marketing, product brands and retail outlets were paramount. Its relationship with football could not therefore be anything but different to its relationship with sports of an older era.

Both the association and rugby codes of football sprang from the public schools and worked their way downwards, finding a deep resonance among the working class. Unlike almost every other sport, these new forms of football had no prior connection with the pub or the drinks trade in general. The relationship to football differed fundamentally from that which pubs enjoyed with the traditional sports of the first half of the century and, in many parts of the country, continued to enjoy with sports such as coursing, bowls or quoits. Whereas these sports were commercially organised by pubs and survived in large measure due to the patronage of the landlord, football was not beholden in the same way.

As clubs were set up and large crowds assembled to watch matches, publicans responded in their traditional role as entrepreneurs, most obviously by the renting out of grounds and changing rooms. How much of an impetus publicans themselves actually provided to the initial formation of growth of clubs is, however, open to doubt, as Mason points out:9 there would be few other places in towns or villages which would be able to let out rooms in which a football team could change or hold meetings and, other than public parks, few institutions which had grounds on which the game could be played.

Many landlords found that it was to their advantage to have a football club attached to their pub and were prepared to make a considerable commitment to its success: after falling out with Woodhouse rugby club in Leeds in 1893, the publican, Mark Higgins sued the team for the return of money and goods he had loaned them over the previous two years to help with incentives paid to players, at the time illegal under rugby union rules, which included food and two gallons of free beer at every match. Many clubs developed long and mutually beneficial relationships with the pubs that provided them with facilities. Numerous junior football sides took their names from their local pub and others took their nicknames from the pubs in which they changed; for this reason Swinton rugby club were named the Lions and their near neighbours Broughton Rangers were less obviously known as Mrs Boardman's Boys, taking the name of the landlady of their pub headquarters. Pontypridd RFC were similarly known as The Butcher's Arms Boys in their formative years. When the landlord of the pub which Kilmarnock used for changing rooms decided to move in 1883, the club went with him.10

Nevertheless, the fact that football was not exclusively reliant on the pub could be seen in the frequency with which clubs moved grounds in order to secure better facilities and more advantageous terms. Sunderland, for example, played their first matches on the field next to the Blue House Inn but found the £10 annual rent too much so moved to a site at Ashbrooke. Everton, despite being deeply indebted to the brewer John Houlding and playing on the field adjoining his Sandon Hotel, quarrelled with him over rental charges, which led to him abandoning the club and founding Liverpool FC. Wolves and Arsenal both clashed with their publican landlords and moved grounds. Hunslet rugby club were forced to move when the landlord of the Cemetery Tavern, emboldened by the rapid success of the side, raised the rent for the use of his pitch to £365 per year. Conversely, Spurs' decision to move to play on a field attached to the White Hart Inn was made on strictly economic grounds.

Indeed, rather than football being an adjunct of the pub, the pub almost became an adjunct of football. Regular updates of games in progress and results of matches were sent by telegraph to pubs on Saturday afternoons, pubs put the trophies won by local teams on display and savings clubs were set up in pubs so that their patrons could save for important away matches. In 1895 the Scarbrough Hotel in the centre of Leeds advertised that it could provide match updates every ten minutes during big games. Pubs became a key outlet for the sale of Saturday night football specials, which themselves were often filled with advertisements from pubs. Such was the importance of these newspapers that in 1908 Birmingham brewery Mitchells and Butlers held two boardroom discussions on which paper to supply to their tied houses.11 In general, breweries viewed proximity to a football ground as an important asset for a pub. The directors of Mitchells and Butlers commissioned a study in 1910 which revealed that their pubs near the Hawthorns, West Bromwich Albion's ground, showed increased takings on the Saturdays of home matches. Brickwood's, the Portsmouth brewers, agreed to local magistrates' demands that they close four beer houses before they were given permission to open a new pub, The Pompey, next to Portsmouth FC's ground. Similarly, Whitbread had to surrender the licence of another pub before they were allowed to open the refurbished White Hart Inn.12

Even so, a site next to a football ground was not necessarily an automatic passport to commercial success. Despite a huge investment of £35,000 in the White Hart Inn at Tottenham, Whitbread struggled for many years to make it a success. The Cardigan Arms in Leeds almost closed in 1890 despite being directly opposite Cardigan Fields, home to St John's, the leading rugby club in Leeds, and host to international and county matches.13 And at the beginning of the football boom in the 1880s the sport had been viewed suspiciously by many in the trade: as early as 1883 a Blackburn publican had complained that by emptying the bars on a Saturday afternoon, football had been bad for business in most cases; Routledge's Handbook of Football noted that the popularity of football meant that "the public houses were emptied of their thoughtless occupants, and all the vicious amusements were abandoned". Emphasising the way in which football had superseded the pub as a provider of sporting entertainment, James Miller, who first led and then opposed the move to introduce broken-time payments into rugby, disparagingly commented that northern rugby spectators were "the same crowd which formerly followed rabbit-coursing, dog-fighting and matters of that description".14 Even the presence of a famous football personality as mine host was no guarantee of profitability as former England rugby captain Dicky Lockwood discovered. Despite probably being one of the most famous sportsmen in the north of England, he could not make his Heckmondwike pub, The Queen, a success and was forced to leave the pub as a bankrupt, returning to manual labour in 1897.

Lockwood was one of the more famous of the many footballers of both codes who became pub landlords due to their footballing prowess. Although the presence of footballers serving in or running a pub seemed to hark back to the earlier days of the drinks trade when it was commonplace for boxers to run pubs, in fact it was more indicative of the shift which had taken place in the relationship between sport and the pub. Footballers were given jobs in pubs by breweries in order to attract custom. The economic difficulties of the trade had seen competition between breweries increase dramatically, which was fuelled to an even greater extent by the flotation mania of the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century. Pubs began to use new attractions to bring in customers; temperance campaigners were especially disturbed at "devious devices such as high kickers and female pianists [who] were employed to attract custom."15

Footballers were one more such devious device. As competition between clubs increased from the late 1870s onwards and the securing of talented players became more important, the provision of a pub tenancy became an especially attractive inducement to a player to change clubs. This was particularly true for those clubs playing in a nominally amateur competition, such as Scottish soccer before 1893 or northern rugby prior to the 1895 split, where it could easily be used to disguise payments for play. Scots players were often enticed to English clubs by the opportunity to run or work in a pub, and the number of rugby players in Lancashire and Yorkshire who happened to be pub landlords became something of a standing joke - of the 35 players who played for the Yorkshire rugby union side in the 1892-93 season, ten were publicans. Celtic were also well known for the number of footballing publicans in their side in the 1890s. Mason has identified six Blackburn Rovers players of the early 1880s as being publicans while they were playing for the club and notes that in the 1890s it was rumoured that up to half the Sunderland side were publicans.16 For those without the inclination or the skills to run a pub, jobs as pub waiters were available, again as a means of circumventing payment restrictions and of providing a job that did not interfere with football. Indeed, this became such a common way of avoiding payment regulations that the occupation was specifically outlawed when the Northern Union rugby authorities drew up that sport's professional regulations in 1898.

Temperance reformers were quick to denounce the practice of putting footballers into pubs. Their oft-expressed suspicions that pubs employing such sales tactics tended to be more prone to financial difficulties seems to have had some basis in fact, as the case of Dicky Lockwood demonstrates. Bankruptcy, alcoholism or a combination of both often conspired against the footballing publican. Unfortunately for the historian, there are few sources which would allow us to test the success rate of the footballing landlord - brewery archives reveal almost nothing about those they chose to run their pubs, their careers or indeed the methods by which they were selected. It seems safe to assume, however, that, as was the case for boxers and cricketers in earlier times, success in the job could never be taken for granted by sporting publicans, nor, for that matter, for publicans in general, and it is probable that the rate of failure among sportsmen was little different to that of the population as a whole.

As with the appointment of pub landlords, much of the relationship between clubs and breweries was carried on in an informal fashion. So, for example, despite Charles Tetley of the Leeds brewing family being president of both Leeds Northern Union club and Headingley rugby union club in the late 1890s, there is no trace of this link in the Tetley archives or his own private letter books. We can, however, gain a picture of the involvement of the drinks trade in professional football of both codes by looking at shareholders and their shareholdings in those clubs which incorporated before 1915. This demonstrates that, although publicans played an important role in the financing and administration of both association and rugby clubs in this period, they were not the controlling force they had once been in sport. 14.9% of shareholders in association clubs were proprietors and employers associated with the drink trade - using the occupational categories of the 1911 Census - who held 6.9% of the total shares available. The figures were similar for the professional rugby clubs of the Northern Union: 13.1% of the shareholders in rugby clubs were from the same occupational category and they owned 15.2% of the shares issued. In Scottish soccer, the involvement of the drinks trade was higher but still not decisive; 11.3% of shareholders were proprietors or employees in the trade who owned 31.2% of all shares issued. A look at the number of club directors who were involved in the trade in 1914 demonstrates the same pattern: 14.7% of directors of English first division clubs were from the trade, as were 10.1% of second division clubs. Northern Union rugby clubs mirrored this percentage, with the drinks trade making up 14.5% of all directors. Again, in Scotland the figures were somewhat higher, with 21.8% of first division and 15.8% of second division directors being from the trade.17 Other than in the percentage of shares held in Scottish soccer clubs, representatives of the drinks trade were not first in any category. It is also the case that many of these investors were not the principal actors in the affairs of their clubs: for example, Middlesbrough's promotion to division one of the Football League in 1902 led them to seek new capital to invest in the Ayresome Park ground and an appeal was issued to members of the licensed trade to invest in the club.

Breweries themselves often provided clubs with loans to help them purchase or improve grounds; some even bought grounds and leased them back to clubs. This was a major change from pre-1870 times, when sporting entrepreneurship was the sole preserve of the pub landlord. Watford were rescued from collapse by Benskins, their local brewers, and Oldham Athletic were reliant on J.W. Lees & Co for the lease of Boundary Park. Of course, some clubs were entirely dependent on brewers for their existence, such as Manchester United who were controlled by Manchester Breweries' chairman J.H. Davies, and Liverpool under John Houlding. But the widespread involvement of the breweries came largely in the 1890s and 1900s after football had established its nation-wide popularity following the formation of the Football League and the huge crowds which gathered for F.A. Cup ties. The success of football meant that breweries saw it as an important arena in which to communicate with their primary market of working-class males. Indeed, this imperative could see clubs clash with their new backers. For example, when Manchester City started looking for a larger ground to replace their Hyde Road ground in 1903, the brewery representatives on the board of directors protested that it would undermine their sales if the club were to move out of the area, despite the fact that it was widely recognised that Hyde Road was too small for the crowds City were now attracting.18

One of the most obvious ways in which the new relationship between football and drink was manifested was in the importance of temperance reformers in the growth of soccer. Traditionally, the temperance movement had shown interest in sport only in so far as it could be used to demonstrate the degrading nature of the drink system. Cruel animal sports, violent folk football and gambling were viewed as part of the same continuum occupied by drunkenness and vice. The close association of sports with drinking, the idea that the rotund stomach of the copious beer-drinker was a sign of health and strength, and the lax morals associated with sporting events such as fairs and race meetings gave the reformer more than enough reason to oppose involvement in sport.

But by the 1870s cricket and the new codes of football, the latter shorn of the taint of the mob as a result of their codification by the public schools, had themselves taken on a moral element. The idea of a healthy body in a healthy mind echoed many of the tenets of temperance propaganda and the Arnoldian belief that sport built character meant that these games appeared to share many of the imperatives of the temperance movement. Whereas the rational recreation movements of the mid-nineteenth century had failed to convince many working people that uplifting leisure pursuits were attractive in themselves, the explosion in the popularity of football from the late 1870s appeared to offer the possibility of linking a moral message to a recreation with mass appeal.

Football and cricket were therefore enthusiastically embraced by the Church of England and, to a lesser extent, non-conformists in the north of England. In particular, it was men from a Methodist, teetotal background, with its emphasis on self-improvement and moral purpose, who provided much of the drive which established soccer in its Lancashire and Midlands heartlands. Although it is important not to over-emphasise the importance of temperance campaigners to soccer - publicans and brewery employees also played leading roles in the game and drinking and non-drinking administrators alike seemed to mix without rancour, as least as far as the temperance issue was concerned - it is clear that teetotallers were central to the foundation of the Football League in 1888. As Matt Taylor points out, "[t]he overwhelming tone of non-conformity on the [Football League] Committee seems to have been reflected in attitudes to drink and gambling".19 Birmingham's William MacGregor, the dominating influence in the early years of the Football League, was a committed teetotaller; Charles Sutcliffe, the Football League's founding secretary, was a Sunday school preacher and ardent teetotaller; Charles Clegg of Sheffield and Walter Hart of Small Heath in Birmingham were both leading figures in the League and active temperance reformers; and John Lewis, the League's leading referee, was known as "a fearless advocate of teetotalism" inclined to impromptu lectures on the liquid demon.20 North of the Border, the Scottish Football Association was actually founded at Dewar's Temperance Hotel in Glasgow in 1873. Local church and Sunday school leagues were formed as alternatives to those clubs and leagues which had their headquarters in pubs, and in some places actually outnumbered those teams.21

Rugby's leaders, although generally coming from more orthodox Anglican backgrounds, also felt that their sport had a responsibility to give a moral lead: Fletcher Robinson argued that

perhaps the best feature of this enthusiasm for Rugby football which has grown up among working men is the delight in hard exercise and consequent self-denial that it has taught him. A man cannot spend his nights and his wages in the public house if twice a week he has to face a hard struggle of forty minutes each way.

In 1887 the Yorkshire Church Temperance Challenge Shield competition was started in order "to promote an interest in football among the younger churchman of Yorkshire and, secondly, to keep them out of the public houses".22 Although the trophy was eventually abandoned as it became increasingly difficult to restrict it to teetotallers - on their triumphant return home after winning it in 1888, Hull Britannia incongruously put it on display in their local pub - there was a general feeling that rugby had helped to provide an alternative to drunkenness.

In this, it would appear that football of both codes had some success. Complaints from publicans about low takings on Saturday afternoons were not uncommon. Giving evidence to the 1898 Royal Commission on the Liquor Licensing Laws, the Chief Constable of Liverpool felt that the success of the two soccer clubs had led to a decline in drunkenness in the city as men no longer went straight to the pub after leaving work early on Saturdays. The Report of the Commission went so far as to argue that "the passion for games and athletics - such as football and bicycling - which has been so remarkably stimulated during the past quarter of a century, has served as a powerful rival to boozing, which at one time was the only excitement open to working men".23 This belief that the fall in the rates of arrest for drunkenness which had been seen in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century could be attributed to the tremendous popularity of outdoor sport was widespread: Austen Chamberlain, in his budget speech of 1905, expressed the widespread opinion that

the mass of our people are beginning to find other ways of expending some portion of time and money which used previously to be spent in the public house. No change has been more remarkable in the habits of the people than the growing attendance in the last fifteen years at outdoor games and sports.24

In Scotland, similar opinions were expressed in the 1880s, the Scottish Athletic Journal noting that "The football field is one of the strongest temperance agents existing, and during a popular match, the bars are almost entirely deserted. The working population must be amused - is it to be the football field or the dram shop?"25 However, the case had become less clear by the 1890s, as arrests for drunkenness in Scotland, although declining in the decades before the First World War, continued to be higher than in England and Wales. Football was increasingly held to be to blame for drawing young men into drinking. Drinking to excess after matches became a recognised problem, and one of the major causes of the 1909 Cup Final riot at Hampden Park was thought to be the widespread imbibing of spirits before and during the match - indeed, as the Scotsman reported, whisky was used by the rioters to ignite fires around the ground.26 It is of course impossible to say whether football was a contributory factor to increasing levels of drunkenness, but it may be safe to assume that the influence of football was but a minor factor compared to the prevailing social conditions in the industrial centres of Scotland at the time.

Conclusion

Historians of leisure and sport have tended to investigate their particular fields as unconnected, discrete spheres; for example, the standard work on the history of the British brewing industry during this period, Gourvish and Wilson's The British Brewing Industry, makes hardly mention of football or sport at all. Yet, the rise of football was one of a series of changes in the second half the nineteenth century which had a profound impact on the recreational role of the pub.

The independence of football from the traditional cradle of sport saw publicans use both traditional and new methods to capitalise on its popularity. From hiring out meeting rooms as changing facilities to utilising the latest telegraphic technology to provide running match reports, the publican sought to use football without ever being able to control it. Those that did seek to exert total control often found that the club simply moved elsewhere.

Involving themselves directly in sport for the first time, the breweries too sought to exploit football in new ways. The growth of the tied pub now meant that they could build relationships with professional football clubs by offering jobs and pub tenancies to star players, helping the club to attract and retain high quality players and enabling the brewery to do likewise with customers.

The involvement of breweries in football clubs represented a tremendous shift in the way sport was utilised by the drinks trade, foreshadowing the explicit sponsorship and marketing arrangements of the latter third of the twentieth century. The use of players as landlords in order to increase custom, widespread advertising at grounds and financial support to teams in order to boost awareness and sales of beer were all early manifestations of what would later become known as corporate marketing.

In stark contrast to sport in earlier times, the growth of football did not appear to result in a rise in drinking; not only did its emergence coincide with a rapid decline in alcohol consumption, but it was generally acknowledged, especially in England, that it presented an alternative to drinking in the pub. Indeed, the traditional roles had been reversed - the drinks trade needed football in order to market its products, but football did not necessarily need the drinks trade to survive. This new relationship marked the beginning of a new stage in the commercialisation of sport, a stage which has only began to reach maturity in recent years.

References

Peter Bailey (ed.), Music Hall, The Business of Pleasure (Milton Keynes: OUP, 1986)

J. Baxter, The Organisation of the Brewing Industry (University of London: unpublished PhD, 1945)

Dennis Brailsford, Bareknuckles: A Social History of Prizefighting (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 1988)

John Chartres and Katrina Honeyman (eds.) Leeds City Business (Leeds: Leeds University Press, 1993)

Tony Collins, Rugby's Great Split (London: Frank Cass, 1998).

P. Eley and R.C. Riley, The Demise of the Demon Drink? Portsmouth Pubs 1900-1950 (Portsmouth: self-published, 1983)

TR Gourvish and RG Wilson, The British Brewing Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)

Ian Hamilton (ed.), The Faber Book of Soccer (London: Faber, 1992)

Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, 2nd Ed, (Keele: Keele University Press, 1994)

Kevin Hawkins, The Conduct and Development of the Brewing Industry in England and Wales 1880-1938 (University of Bradford: unpublished PhD, 1981)

Jeff Hill and Jack Williams (eds.), Sport and Identity in the North of England (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996)

Simon Inglis, League Football and the Men Who Made It (London: Willow Collins, 1988).

Diana Raitt Kerr, Hambledon Cricket and The Bat and Ball Inn (Chichester: 1951)

Morris Marples, A History of Football, (London: 1954)

Tony Mason, Association Football and English Society 1863-1915 (Brighton: Harvester, 1981)

Henry Mitchell & Co Ltd Managing Directors Board meeting minutes, Bass Museum Archives, Burton-on-Trent.

Sidney Neville, Seventy Rolling Years (London: Faber, 1958)

Barrie Pepper, Old Inns and Pubs of Leeds (Leeds: self-published, 1997)

B. Fletcher Robinson, Rugby Football (London: Dent, 1896)

Royal Commission on the Liquor Licensing Laws, Final Report, 1899

Scottish Athletic Journal

C. E. Sutcliffe and F. Hargreaves. History of the Lancashire Football Association (Blackburn: 1928 - Yore Publications reprint, 1992)

Matthew Taylor Proud Preston: A History of the Football League (De Montfort University: unpublished PhD thesis, 1997)

Stephen Tischler, Footballers and Businessmen (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981)

Wray Vamplew, Pay Up and Play The Game (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988)

John Weir, Drink, Religion and Scottish Football 1873-1900 (Renfrew: self-published, 1992)

George B. Wilson, Alcohol and the Nation (London: Faber, 1940).

Yorkshire Owl

Yorkshire Post

Notes

1 This is an expanded version of the paper More than Beer And Skittles, presented to the 1999 British Society of Sports History conference at the University of Brighton in March 1999.

2 See, for example, Mason, Tischler, Weir, and Collins.

3 Key works on the history of the brewing industry and the drinks trade during this period are Harrison, Gourvish and Wilson, Hawkins, Baxter and Wilson.

4 Brailsford, p. 18.

5 Harrison, p. 49.

6 Harrison, p. 322.

7 Bailey, p. x .

8 Leicester Town Crier, 6 January 1882, quoted in Bailey, p. 61.

9 Mason, p. 27.

10 Weir, p. 22.

11 The Yorkshire Owl, 3 April 1895. Henry Mitchell & Co Ltd Managing Directors Board meeting minutes, 23 and 30 April 1906.

12 Henry Mitchell & Co Ltd Managing Directors Board meeting minutes, 17 January 1910. Eley and Riley, p11. Neville, p. 177.

13 Yorkshire Post, 7 January 1897. Neville (1958), p. 177. Pepper (1997), p. 56.

14 Mason, p. 175. Routledge's Handbook of Football, p10, quoted in Marples, p122. James Miller quoted in Yorkshire Post, 18 January 1897.

15 John Chartres Joshua Tetley & Son, 1890s to 1990s in Chartres and Honeyman, p. 121.

16 Mason, pp. 118-119.

17 Figures taken from Vamplew, pp. 156-171, and Collins, pp. 243-245. Similar findings can be found in Mason and Tischler.

18 We are grateful to Neil Carter for drawing our attention to the Middlesborough case. See also Tischler, pp. 75-76 and p. 78.

19 Taylor (1997), p. 45. For detailed biographies, see also Inglis.

20 Sutcliffe and Hargreaves, p. 18

21 For example, Jack Williams has discovered that in eight major towns in the north of England church teams outnumbered both teams based on pubs and workplaces between 1900 and 1939. Jack Williams, Churches, Sport and Identities in the North, 1900-1939 in Hill and Williams, p. 120.

22 Robinson, p. 17. Yorkshire Post, 5 December 1887.

23 Royal Commission on the Liquor Licensing Laws PP. 1898 36, 26311. Royal Commission on the Liquor Licensing Laws, Final Report, 1899, p. 2. For a discussion on the link between football and the decline in drunkenness, see Mason, pp. 178-179 and Tischler, p. 134.

24 Quoted in Wilson, p. 241.

25 Scottish Athletic Journal, 21 December 1883.

26 The Scotsman, quoted in Hamilton, p. 15-21.