ABSTRACT
Though it is something of a journalistic cliché to recall an age of innocence when amateur values predominated and the influence of money was absent, sport and business have an intimate and long-standing connection. Much that is recognizably ‘modern’ in their relationship dates from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Yet, as Neil Tranter has noted of Britain, the commercialization of sport had a significant pre-history. Cricket, horse-racing, pedestrianism, prize-fighting and rowing all had ‘a long history of mass spectating, profit-seeking promoters, paid performers, stake-money contests and gambling’.1
Derek Birley notes a newspaper advertisement from 1700 notifying ‘Gentlemen and others who delight in cricket-playing’ of a match to be held on Clapham Common for £10 per head. There was, he observes, ‘a distinct commercial message behind the polite language’. Later, in 1787, when Thomas Lord leased some land in London, built a high fence around it, and prepared a ground for cricket that could be hired by aristocratic patrons it was with the intention of making money. Lord’s original enclosure staged pedestrian events, pigeon-shooting matches and even hopping contests as well as cricket.2
Its entrepreneurial proprietor clearly regarded sport as a business opportunity. Lord would probably have admired the enterprise of O.E. McGregor, owner of the
Molineux Arms and Gardens in Wolverhampton, who cashed in on the enthusiasm for velocipedes that exploded in the late 1860s and early 1870s to create a venue – now more closely connected with soccer (football) than cycling – that became ‘England’s bicycle racing Mecca’. The races he promoted were ‘most definitely a profit-making activity, in line with other leisure-time entertainments and amusements such as the music-hall or the theatre’.3 By this time the connections between sport and industrialization were becoming apparent. English bicycle racing in the 1870s, driven forward by commercially minded promoters such as McGregor, ‘gave a powerful economic and manufacturing stimulus to the young bicycle industry’, not least in terms of design. With the emergence of urban mass markets business success or failure in the production of sports goods was related to a company’s ability to exploit large-scale, machine-based production methods. Hence Dunlop and the North British Rubastic Company prospered as manufacturers of golf balls in the last years of the 19th century at the expense of the undercapitalized Anglo-French Golf Ball Manufacturing Company.4
