ABSTRACT

Ward’s advice that sport need not be isolated, or in his words, ‘privileged’, from the wider body of work on leisure history certainly makes sense. This is especially the case for sport in the late-nineteenth century, the nascent era of codification, standardisation and professionalisation in modern British sport, a time when sport’s major institutions were largely in their infancy. Undoubtedly, commercially successful sports (at the time of writing) like football and cricket inevitably have more than their share of books and written about them, distorting their true place in the leisure lives of people from the past. ‘Sport’, as a category, came to be defined as ‘athletic’ around the early 1860s: the Oxford English Dictionary did not define it as such until 1863, and previous to then, ‘field’ sports were the only such application of the term.10 ‘Sports’ explicitly linked to agriculture, like ploughing for instance – wellcovered by non-metropolitan newspapers in the mid-nineteenth century – await a thorough scholarly examination. (As Little hints at in his article on the sporting boycott of a post-independence Rhodesia, even ploughing had political implications beyond mere prowess in farming.11) It would, however, be helpful if Ward could acknowledge that scholars have been working towards this end. Two of British sports history’s recent classic monographs have placed sport firmly within the wider leisure context: Tony Collins and Wray Vamplew’s Mud, Sweat and Beers: A Cultural History of Sport and Alcohol, and Patrick Chaplin’s Darts in England 19001939: A Social History. Darts in England was positively reviewed by Philip Waller in a well-respected general history journal, the English Historical Review, while one review of Mud, Sweat and Beers found an even more ‘mainstream’ audience: that of the Saturday Guardian.12 These books, therefore, managed to safely navigate their way out of the scholarly ghetto which Ward believes encases British sports history. They are not the only works, however, to examine sport in the wider context of leisure, commercialised or otherwise.13 Sport must be situated contextually within wider popular cultural trends, and Ward is well within his rights to warn historians against exaggerating sport’s purposed importance as a cultural device.