From Hooligans to Heroes and from Ferocity to Fair Play:

Between 1850 and 1900 the private, boarding schools ¹ of the British middle and upper classes were increasingly obsessed with several major modern games. For reasons too lengthy and complicated to go into here, team games became the centre of school life. These games were instruments of reform. Prior to 1850 life in these schools, to adapt the classic Hobbesian expression, was nasty, brutish and certainly for some, not short enough. These schools were often godless, cold, harsh and brutal places. ² Eton, arguably the most famous of these schools was a microcosm of a macrocosm – the external upper-class world beyond the schools’ walls; a world of hard drinking, horse racing, gambling, blood sports, prize fighting and sexual indulgence. ³ Entertainments in the evenings were boy-made – sometimes esoteric, idiosyncratic and, both bloody and bloodthirsty.

In Long Chamber, Collegers, locked up for the night in their quarters, would engage periodically in a traditional domestic sport of their own. … When lights went out, in the darkness each night the rats came in troops. … On the night of a grande chasse traps were baited and set.

When a sufficient host was judged to have been lured on to the killing ground, the longed-for order to attack was given; the boys leapt out of bed, and silence and darkness were changed into the cries of hunters and the glare of torches. The rats stampeded. But all known holes and escape routes had been blocked. Fugitives took refuge under beds and bureaux and were pursued and bludgeoned to death in half an hour’s good run of the grande chasse … the rats were stripped of their skins, which were carefully stretched and dried, and the trophies nailed in rows over the broad fireplaces from the ceilings downwards. ⁴

While at Harrow, certainly one of the more famous of the schools,

The wildness, brutality and irresponsibility of the boys of the times is extensively recorded. Torre recalled that in the years before Vaughan many boys kept a dog and cats, the one to kill the others. He mentioned another popular activity – stone-throwing – and described fights between the Harrow boys and the navvies building the London and North-Western railway. ⁵