ABSTRACT
This chapter adds additional colour to an already variegated historical canvas. It sketches in fresh details of a fundamentally English moral crusade in the guise of the promotion of educational principle and practice, which directly and indirectly had an extraordinary global influence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and a later extensive, if sometimes serendipitous, impact on all the inhabited continents during the age of modern global sport. The dissemination of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ sport can be considered retrospectively, of course, from a number of perspectives, but many period proselytizers saw themselves as moral crusaders. It scarcely needs to be repeated that the participants of the games-playing educational revolution that occurred initially in British public schools (private schools for the privileged) were directly and indirectly responsible, far from exclusively of course, but to a remarkable degree, for a twentieth-century ‘global sports culture’ of 275exceptional enthusiasm, commitment and importance involving countless millions across the world. This is both the measure and significance of the cultural diorama in which during this chapter yet another small part of the canvas is painted in for the first time — this being athleticism and the imperial teacher training college.
