ABSTRACT
In any assessment of the importance of sport and the games ethic in Scottish culture, it is necessary to take a wide geographical, cultural and political view embracing the Victorian and Edwardian ideologies, largely middle-class, regarding Britain and the Empire. Here I consider the assimilation of the games ethic into various Scottish private and state schools, largely through inspirational headmasters and the motives that inspired them. Both pragmatism and idealism were the sources of an eventual revolution in manners and morals in Scottish middle-class education, which resulted in the loss of an exclusive Scottish identity but which ensured a compensatory British identity at the height of empire and brought social acceptance and occupational opportunities.
