ABSTRACT

A notable, if not widely noticed, encounter between historians and sport took place when the editor of this book, William Lamont, attended the 1980 Wembley Association Football Cup Final with one of the greatest Tudor historians of this century, the late S.T.Bindoff. West Ham beat Arsenal (the editor’s favourite) 1:0. Bindoff had last attended a Cup Final in 1923 when West Ham was also playing, but against Bolton that time-they lost 2:0. That match has passed into footballing legend because of the one policeman on a white horse who controlled the large crowds coming to what was Wembley’s first Cup Final. Neither of these two historians exercized his clinical judgement on anything but the quality of play; they were there for recreation, spectators rather than observers. Few of Bindoff’s generation of historians would have regarded football as worth a scholarly thought-it was a game, a pastime, an escape from the archives and the footnotes which were the sign of the true academic. Sport might appear in the sort of books designed for popular consumption, pastimes of the people and so on, but it was history without seriousness; even G.M.Trevelyan’s deliberately popular Social history of England (supposedly “history with the politics left out”) made little reference to it. Such treatment might now seem surprising in view of the development of sports history as part of the secondary or tertiary spin-off from historiography since the 1960s, yet it still lurks in the suspicions of those who drift slowly along what is left of the old historical mainstream, while many of the rest of us dance about the more fascinating eddies. The nature of historians’ engagement in the study of sport has its own narrative history, but it also mirrors many tensions within the scholarly profession and wider controversies about the uses to which history is put, as well as over interpretations of general trends and particular events. In this brief discussion I can only outline some of the main issues-roots, political usage and divergence. British sports history emerged as a consciously defensible sub-skill of the historian’s craft in the early 1980s, the time it had taken for the key strands of initial research to be worked through in the wake of the turmoil the 1960s produced by shifting the focus and loosening the boundaries of many intellectual disciplines. It would be reasonable to argue that almost all major British work in the field since then counts as an offspring of one key text,

E.P.Thompson’s The Making of the English working class (1963). A substantial number of scholars have now locked themselves into working through the ramifications of both his uneasy populism and his commitment to modernism, either placing cricketers, footballers and even lawn tennis players or golfers alongside Thompson’s stockingers and impoverished handloom weavers as deserving rescue from the “enormous condescension of posterity”, or questioning the whole assumption that “popular culture” is the preserve of the working classes in sporting terms. The two milestone texts in this process were Tony Mason’s Association football (1980) and Tony Mangan’s Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian public school (1981), apparently concerned with opposite ends of a social spectrum. The division was never quite so sharp as that suggests, but they did focus on the tensions produced before 1914 by the emergence of the professional player as against the manly amateur. Since then we have seen a number of papers with the loose generic title of “The state of sports history”, usually offering a descriptive review of the literature together with a suggested agenda for further research designed to clarify the author’s hegemony in the field. That is something which I am trying to avoid here, since there are wider questions to be asked about the cultural milieu of sports history which make it a lively and occasionally perilous arena into which to venture. Any professional activity which defines itself as only existing within the confines of its recent outpourings runs into serious difficulties by concealing some key agendas which go beyond the convenient modernist/postmodernist dichotomies which offer an easy route into late twentieth-century controversies.