ABSTRACT

In June 1814, the most illustrious prize-fighters in Britain assembled at the London house of Lord Lowther, the Tory politician and future Earl of Lonsdale, whose name still adorns the belts won by British boxing champions. Over the course of the evening, Tom Cribb, John Jackson, Tom Belcher, Bill Richmond and others gave possibly the most star-studded exhibition of sparring ever staged. Their audience included Tsar Alexander I, General Platov and Marshal Blucher, Frederick William III of Prussia and British royal princes, who were en route to the Congress of Vienna, at which they would divide Europe following the defeat of Napoleonic France. The exhibition had been arranged to celebrate the victory of the great powers. A week earlier, Cribb had been presented to the Prussian Field Marshal Blucher. On hearing that he was the champion of England, Blucher replied: ‘Then Cribb must be a brother Marshal!’2 For the first time, sport, nationalism and militarism had been publicly linked in the most overtly political fashion. Britain’s wars with revolutionary France and Napoleon consolidated and made

permanent the emerging relationship between sport and British nationalism, a link that was symbolically sealed by Lowther’s sparring exhibition. The placing of concepts of fairness at the heart of British ideas about games was not the only consequence that the French Revolution and its aftershocks would have on sport. Indeed, the revolution and its impact formed a fundamental turning point for the subsequent development of sport and its cultural meanings. From this point, sport and nationalism became inextricably linked.