Norridge - Can we have our balls back, please?: how the British invented sport (and then almost forgot how to play it)

How the British invented sport

ALLEN LANE
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PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published 2008
1

Copyright Julian Norridge, 2008

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

978-0-14-190337-8

For my father, Bobby Norridge, who gave me my love of sports.
And to the women in my life Susan, Helen, Zo, Pippa and
Jessica who have had to put up with it ever since.

C ONTENTS

A multitude of people have contributed to the writing of this book, many of them unknowingly. I am grateful to all the authors whose books I have shamelessly rifled. Id like to single out the late Sir Derek Birley, not so much for information as inspiration. I have received valuable assistance from the librarians of the Rugby Football Union, the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club and the Amateur Rowing Association. The staff of the London Library have been endlessly patient and helpful. At Penguin, Georgina Laycock and Alice Dawson have done everything to make the writing of the book as painless as possible and Georgina came up with endless useful and creative suggestions. I am grateful to Tim Waller for correcting so many of my mistakes those that remain are, of course, entirely my responsibility. Many thanks too to my ever enthusiastic agent, Laura Morris. I have received valuable advice and suggestions from Anwer Bati, Donald Carroll, Michael Williamson, Gavin Weightman and my brother Simon Norridge. Above all I must thank my wife Susan not only for putting up with nine months of obsession, but positively encouraging it.

I N THE BEGINNING , there were games. There always have been. As soon as our ancestors found they could spare a bit of time from hunting and gathering, they started playing around with whatever came to hand sticks, stones, spears, each other and competing. As Jonathan Swift said: Most sorts of diversion in men, children and other animals are in imitation of fighting.

Over the centuries, games proliferated and spread. But they were mainly localized affairs, played between local people or local teams. If there were any rules and often there werent they tended to be different from town to town and village to village. Quite often they were agreed between the contestants on the day. What the British did between the middle of the eighteenth century and the end of the nineteenth was to enable this localized game-playing to become globalized sport. They made it possible for a soccer team from Brazil to play one from France on equal terms; for a Russian tennis player to compete against a South African. The British didnt invent every modern sport, but they did invent most of them. Above all, they established the idea of sport that could be played around the world.

So how and why did this happen? The how is relatively easy. The British codified sets of rules according to which the different types of contests should be conducted. With the rulebooks came referees and umpires to see that the rules were observed, and regulatory bodies, both national and international, to ensure the orderly administration of each sport (and to keep an eye on the referees and umpires).

The why is a little more complex. You could just say that during those 150 years, the British were inventing the whole of the modern world. They were energetic, imaginative and creative. So is it any wonder that during that period they also invented modern sport? Well, yes. But theres more to it than that.

You can roughly divide the development of sport in Britain into two phases. One took place from the middle to late eighteenth century, the other from the middle to late nineteenth century. The two are very different because Britain, in particular England, went through a huge change in the intervening years. The social historian Harold Perkin put it like this: Between 1780 and 1850 the English ceased to be one of the most aggressive, brutal, rowdy, outspoken, riotous, cruel and bloodthirsty nations in the world and became one of the most inhibited, polite, orderly, tender-minded, prudish and hypocritical.

It has been called, rightly or wrongly, a civilizing process. Its causes were complex. They included industrialization, mass migration from the countryside to the new cities, the growth of Empire and the development of international trade. It reflected the emergence of a new, respectable, socially aspiring and socially exclusive middle class which made the feel of the sports that developed in the nineteenth century very different from those that emerged in the eighteenth.

I think Perkin may have been a little harsh on the seventeenth century. Yes, it was rowdy, outspoken, riotous and probably cruel, but it was also fun-loving and open in an almost innocent way. The class system was markedly less rigid in England at that time than in the rest of Europe. The landed gentry, who felt secure both financially and socially, were willing to fraternize with the lower orders. A duke was happy to play cricket in a team captained by his gardener. The Prince of Wales entertained a pugilist to dinner at his house. The owner of a racehorse could develop a close working relationship with his groom or jockey. This had an effect on how early sport developed.

So what began the process of regulation? In any investigation its always wise to bear in mind the sage advice of Deep Throat in Watergate: Follow the money! In the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries, most of the money belonged to the aristocracy and the landed gentry. And what many of them liked doing with their money more than anything else was gambling. Joseph Strutt, in his Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, says that by 1801 (when the book was published) gambling had attained to a gigantic stature. But the activities on which the rich and the poor when they had the chance wagered at this time were not always what we would now expect.

Consider this. Two teams of highly paid professionals, effectively owned by very rich men, are playing a game for a purse of 1000 guineas the equivalent of nearly 100,000 in todays money. They are being watched by a large and raucous crowd, many of whom are drunk and nearly all of whom have money on the outcome. This is cricket in 1777.