ABSTRACT
It was written of Eton in 1898:
There are fifty fives courts where before there was one; twenty games or thereabouts of cricket as against three; compulsory football for every house four or five times a week; to say nothing of beagles and athletic sports in the Easter Term, and rowing and bathing daily through the summer. There are house colours for football and school colours for football, cricket, rowing, racquets; there are challenge cups, senior and junior…
and the writer continued,What is true of Eton is, I believe, true, mutatis mutandis, of the other great public schools; the comprehensive net of athletics has closed around them all, sweeping in our boys by shoals, and few are the puny minnows that swim through its meshes. And yet the whole system is entirely modern, most of it a development of the last forty years. 1
