ABSTRACT
It was with great interest that I read the recent special issue of Sport in History (42.4) which reflected on the past, present and future of the British Society of Sports History (BSSH). I congratulate BSSH on its many successes in helping catalyse and galvanise significant developments in sports history whilst also embracing changing social values and attitudes in wider society. It is wonderful to read just how far the field of sports history has moved forward this past 40 years with many new initiatives, personalities and engagements with the wider public. However, some aspects of the society's history as portrayed in that special issue require clarification since, as all readers of the journal will appreciate, one of the most valuable lessons from history is that it is only through better understanding of our past that we better understand our present, and it is for this reason that I thought it worth writing to help provide some additional context. I intend to offer this clarification here by elaborating on several themes: the genesis, formation, aims and activities of the society; support of and engagement with its membership; BSSH activities to engage the wider public, and BSSH's changing profile.
The first myth to dispel is that contrary to what one might have heard elsewhere or read in the introductory essay, there is no real ambiguity about the formation of BSSH, or at least nothing inexplicable.Footnote1 BSSH originated with a group of like-minded individuals coming together to progress the profile and celebration of sports history in the UK, including the promotion of education, research and publication. In a recent declutter, I came across some notes relating to a meeting I held in Liverpool in November 1981, attended by, amongst others, Peter Treadwell of the then South Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education and Beryl Furlong, a colleague at the University of Liverpool, with a view to them joining what I had titled the British Society of Sports Historians. I had purposely not invited several members of the History of PE Study Group, of which I had been a member from the beginning, because, they were not prepared to broaden their outlook to embrace the wider field of sport (other than perhaps in public schools) or to embrace the application of social theory in relation to sport which at the time was starting to blossom with the work of such individuals as Eric Dunning in the UK and several sports historians in North America. I recall specifically a cool response to one member of the Study Group, Colin Crunden, who had struggled to win the support of his supervisor, David McNair, for a more theoretical approach to the history of physical education in his M.Ed. thesis.Footnote2 Tony Mangan had recently presented what I and a few others regarded as a very scholarly paper which was very challenging in comparison with other presentations that we had received to date but this too had not been warmly welcomed by the convenors.Footnote3 Their attitude was in part due to the Study Group being seen primarily as an outcrop of the History of Education Society and a prevailing conservatism regarding sport as a focus of historical inquiry. A society seeking to promote and celebrate sports history more widely could not develop and prosper under this umbrella organisation, much as I admired the work it did in other areas. I had offered my support for an idea promoted by Tom McNab in 1979 for a sports history group but this never got off the ground. Tom, shortly after, was busy advising the makers of Chariots of Fire and writing his novel Flanagan’s Run (1982).
The name assigned to the alternative group I had established was in line with the North American Society of Sports Historians (NASSH) of which I was already a member having joined when I was working at the University of California at Berkeley. It was this group that helped me put together the inaugural conference, entitled The Social History of Sport, held at the University of Liverpool in March 1982 which was followed by a general meeting the same weekend. As noted by Osborne and Porter,Footnote4 James Walvin, Peter McIntosh, John Lowerson, Dick Holt and Tony Mangan were invited to present papers and a letter of acceptance ‘to the inaugural conference’ was received from the latter. It was at the open general meeting that a name change was proposed by Tony Mangan and the British Society of Sports Historians became the British Society of Sports History. He also persuaded me, based on his greater experience – I was 28, he was 43 – that he should take the chair for the next three years, while I, as his vice-chair, would be groomed to take over the reins.
The template for the initial recruitment leaflet/membership form, produced in 1981 and now held in the archive, was easily modified to embrace the new name since the acronym remained the same (BSSH). Everything else, including the objectives of the society, remained the same. I guess the alleged ambiguity is whether you regard these developments as simply a name change or as the start of a new organisation.Footnote5
Support of and engagement with the BSSH membership
Engagement with and support of members was obviously vital for BSSH’s survival and after establishing what became an annual conference, a journal was the next priority. I had already approached some potential publishers (including Taylor & Francis) regarding an academic journal similar to the History of Education. The idea was that this would run alongside an in-house typescript periodical for newsy items and short articles and reports on the same lines as the History of Education Society Bulletin. This plan, however, was set aside on Tony Mangan’s involvement with the society. He had already established personal relations with Frank Cass, and they invited John Lowerson and this author to a meeting at the Leytonstone offices of Cass’s publishing company. Although receptive to the idea of a British sport history journal, Frank Cass was not comfortable about subscriptions being tied in with BSSH membership, I assume for mainly financial reasons. The three editors – John Lowerson, Tony Mangan and myself – were given the go-ahead to get on with it straightaway, each of us taking responsibility for one of the three issues of the British Journal of Sports History (BJSH), to be published annually.Footnote6 The in-house publication took the title of the Newsletter for the first two or three years before it became the BSSH Bulletin, then edited by the author of this article. In a separate development, BSSH set up Sports History Publishing in 1992 as an outlet for worthy but less commercially viable publications produced by society members. A few titles were published under this imprint, although Frank Cass had by then seen the merits of publishing the growing number of quality academic titles on sport.
Recruiting new members in the early years was less difficult than retaining them, especially as BSSH became more narrowly focused. Financial support for society awards and events was an appealing prospect and so, in 1991, I arranged a meeting with Lord Aberdare (1919–2005)Footnote7 in his chambers at the House of Lords at which he agreed to fund an annual book award. He was also instrumental in securing financial support from his friend and philanthropist Ritchie Graham for part of the documentation project described below. In 2002, Steve Ickringill, a BSSH board member and former colleague of Sir Derek Birley (1926–2002)Footnote8 at the University of Ulster, talked with Sir Derek’s widow and secured funding for an annual conference keynote address. Later, I approached the Sports Council regarding support for BSSH delegates to attend ASSH, NASSH, ISHPES and Olympic Scientific Congresses, attending twice-yearly meetings of the Council’s International Conference Committee between 1990 and 2007. Chris Harte, Dave Terry, Jack Williams, Benny Peiser, John Bromhead, Grant Jarvie and I were amongst the beneficiaries of funding from this source. Meanwhile, Dick Holt ensured that sporting personalities were included in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), and many BSSH members were invited to write entries for this and various encyclopedias on British sport, including the Encyclopedia of British Sport (2000) and the Encyclopedia of British Football (2002). Another initiative, originally conceived as a BSSH Millennium project, was to identify the 2,000 most significant dates in the history of British sport. This database still exists and now contains many more events.Footnote9 It can be interrogated via several fields, and combined searches throw up interesting questions yet to be fully explored. For example, why were similar rule changes introduced in different sports at around the same time and why were there identifiable clusters of certain records being broken?
Finally, on this theme, as the society chair in 1994, I contacted the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) authority who agreed that BSSH should nominate a member of the assessment panel for sports science. Previously, only scientific disciplines relating to sport had been represented. Subsequently, Grant Jarvie and Wray Vamplew took on this role.
Activities to engage and support the wider public: initiatives undertaken in relation to documentation
Creating the BSSH, as initially discussed and agreed, was part of a much bigger and wider endeavour to celebrate and promote the study of sport history in the UK.
One of the initiatives, driven primarily by this author, was to list and index the existing literature, including both secondary and primary material.Footnote10 I already knew that the extent of this material was vaster than hitherto appreciated because of the many and diverse outlets for publication, but visualised the project as providing a valuable starting point for researchers. It involved listing monographs, journal articles, conference papers, unpublished theses and many other items. These were listed in several select bibliographies such as the ‘Annual Bibliography of Publications on the History of Sport in Britain’, published in the BSSH Bulletin and the International Journal of the History of Sport then in stand-alone supplements,Footnote11 with substantial articles also abstracted in the BJSH.Footnote12 The cumulative database of secondary sources had grown to over 20,000 items by the turn of the century. This could be interrogated online at no cost up to 2010 when my post-retirement privileges as Visiting Scholar at the University of Manchester ended. Although not updated since 2008, the database still exists as an Endnote Bibliography (searchable via author, date, format, keyword etc.) and using Boolean operators. Many selective bibliographies have been generated from it, such as the three-volume Bibliography of British Sports History (2003) and this author’s International Sport: A Bibliography 1995–1999 (2002), as well as listings in publications such as Grant Jarvie and Graham Walker’s Scottish Sport in the Making of the Nation: Ninety Minute Patriots? (1994).Footnote13
Primary source material is obviously infinite and therefore impossible to comprehensively compile and list in any meaningful way. However, possible sources for different perspectives (economic, social, intellectual etc.), periods (medieval, modern etc.) and topics of research (coaching, sports medicine, physical education etc.) were collectively described in History of Sport: A Guide to the Literature and Sources of Information, published under the BSSH’s Sports History Publishing imprint in 1994. The starting point for this initiative had been a Sports Council funded study of sporting archives in the UK. This survey listed materials found in both public and private hands. It also made the Sports Council aware of the vulnerability of some private collections located in unsuitable environments, such as boathouses liable to flooding and damp lofts. It also reminded the National Register of Archives of the importance of collecting and indexing sporting records, hitherto often neglected. At the University of Liverpool, where I was working at the time, the Archives Department offered to be the custodians of some of this vulnerable material and offered itself as a repository for significant collections.Footnote14 The original listing of sporting archives was updated in Index to Sporting Manuscripts in the UK (1995), also published by Sports History Publishing, and annually in the BSSH Bulletin, The Sports Historian and Sport in History.Footnote15 Again, this provided a useful starting point for many research projects.
The documentation project also included a survey of sporting artefacts, memorabilia and even some ephemera collections held by organisations such as museums, governing bodies and players’ unions. There was also a listing of sports exhibitions that had taken place in the UK in the twentieth century. It came as a surprise to find that several organisations working in relative isolation had an interest and were active in sports history research and were collecting and documenting items. The History of Advertising Trust, for example, held significant sport-related material and the British Sporting Art Trust had also been documenting sport-themed paintings and prints, leading to several publications.Footnote16 Similarly, the Imperial War Museum, the British Library, the National Sound Archive, the British Film Institute Archive, the RAF Museum, the BBC Written Archives, the Mass Observation Archive and many other repositories all held significant material relating to sport in the UK.
The richness of this material and the interest shown in it provided the context for a Merseyside County Council sponsored feasibility study undertaken in 1983 with a view to opening a national museum and sports hall of fame in Liverpool. The original idea was that it would occupy the newly built but soon to be vacated Festival Hall on the International Garden Centre site. The Merseyside Development Corporation, set up by Secretary of State Michael Heseltine to regenerate the run-down urban area, owned the building and had invited suggestions for its future use. An outline proposal for a sports museum was welcomed by the commercial director, with the city’s rich sporting heritage especially in mind.Footnote17 Holders of collections responding to a questionnaire were asked to indicate whether they might be willing to release material for temporary or permanent display in such a museum. The response was sufficiently encouraging to persuade Richard Foster, Director of National Museums on Merseyside, to organise a one-year ‘test’ exhibition entitled Soccer City at the same time as the International Garden Festival in 1984.
BSSH activities to engage the wider public: exhibiting and celebrating Britain’s sporting heritage
Public interest in their memorabilia prompted some organisations to appreciate the educational and even commercial value of their holdings, encouraging some to start exploiting possibilities. I was engaged to advise Aintree racecourse about a projected Grand National Gallery. In 1983, Newmarket racecourse also contacted me regarding what later became the National Museum of Horseracing. A few years later, the Museum of the River was planned at Henley. Prior to these developments the only major sports collections on display were at Brooklands, Lords and the All England Lawn Tennis Club. A fact-finding trip to several sports museums and halls of fame in North America and Germany took place in 1982 and letters of support were sought from several prominent figures for a national sports museum in the UK. These developments stimulated some forward-looking local authorities to explore ideas and I was commissioned by Tameside Borough Council to undertake a feasibility study for a permanent display to celebrate the borough’s tradition of producing champion swimmers, water-polo players, cyclists and boxers. In 1994, as BSSH chair, I contacted Heritage Lottery making them aware of the society’s work and I was also invited to advise on the possible purchase of several items of sporting memorabilia including Bobby Moore’s England shirt.
Some of the records relating to these developments, including posters, letters, photographs and other materials, went to Manchester Metropolitan University (SPLEISH) with a view to it becoming a special collection as part of the Sport and Leisure History Resource Centre. A database of the listings, such as those relating to sporting exhibitions, is still in my custody.
Only on reading the special issue of Sport in History did I become aware of how some of this work has been taken on by Sporting Heritage, a body founded in 2012, after I had left the world of sports history. This is great news, but it is personally disappointing to find that BSSH had not continued to drive this and similar initiatives working with heritage organisations under a broader umbrella. Instead, as detailed below, it formed a tighter definition and identity limited to the academic study of the history of sport.
Another campaign, pursued by me personally, was to collect and create a library of sport history publications that one day would be made publicly accessible to members and the wider public. By 2010, this included all issues of the leading English language sports history journals along with biographical studies of Britain’s sportsmen, sportswomen and sporting animals. I had, by then, taken a part-time postgraduate qualification in library, archive and information studies that enabled me to devise a classification scheme and thesaurus for this collection and aid retrieval from the machine-readable catalogue. Although this library was part of the collection sold to Manchester Metropolitan University in 2016, changes at that institution meant that it was discarded in 2023, something that I became aware of at the eleventh hour and decided to rescue. The university generously agreed to let me have what was left of it back – staff had extracted the items they wanted including most of the rare items – and I am now in the process of trying to find it a more permanent home as a special collection. From my understanding of what I have been recently told, this is not only a sobering reminder of the demise of the printed book, but of the relative status of ‘sports history’ in traditional departments of history and modern departments of sports studies.
Some of the recent initiatives and ideas expressed in the commemorative issue of Sport in History relating to BSSH’s engagement with the wider public are, as we have already seen, but an extension of what was already happening several years before. A broad membership and public engagement were key objectives from the start. This was not so much to boost membership numbers, which it clearly did, at least for a while, but to embrace what everyone was doing in relative isolation, albeit with slightly different emphases. It was appreciated that to have a significant impact a sizeable, broad front was necessary and, in any case, we all had something to bring to the table to assist or complement each other.Footnote18 Connections were made with a wide variety of like-minded organisations and their work described in early editions of the BSSH Newsletter. These organisations included the British Sporting Art Trust, Robert Dover’s Games Society, associations of cricket, football and track and field statisticians, the Society for the Study of Play, the Ephemera Society, the Cricket Society, and a few that I have forgotten about. In those early years several other organisations were encouraged and supported to mount special exhibitions to celebrate and stimulate interest in sports history, notably the Alpine Club, Surrey Record Office (Sport in Surrey), the British Library (Sporting Prints), the Victoria & Albert Museum (Sporting Trophies), Bradford City Public Library (History of Rugby League), National Museums on Merseyside (Soccer City) and Manchester Museum (Manchester at Play). Audrey Inkman of Manchester Polytechnic was encouraged to include sporting photographs as part of the Manchester Studies Family Album project and to ensure that sport was well represented in the North West Film Archive. With the guidance of John Terry, BSSH had a presence on the World Wide Web from 1994, much earlier than any similar interest group.Footnote19 By the turn of the century, this presence amounted to over 2,000 pages, all of which are now archived and will hopefully become part of the BSSH archive at De Montfort University.
Profile
In later years BSSH clearly changed its emphasis to encourage and support ‘academic’ research. This mainly reflected the concerns of career academics seeking to reassure funding bodies that embracing sport as a topic of research was a worthwhile and scholarly thing to do. Traditionalists in some classics, education and history departments were worried that pursuing an interest in sport would be perceived as a watering- or dumbing down of their subject. I recall, even within a sports studies department, being required to justify the study of sports history. Similarly, Wray Vamplew and I had to draft a letter of justification to the Sports Council in order to secure its continued support for BSSH activities.Footnote20 Those based in higher education, however, were only a section of the membership, perhaps around a half, and so, as chair in the early1990s, I sought and won support for a policy of revamping the Bulletin to provide a continuing outlet for the perhaps less ‘scholarly’ but nevertheless useful and important work carried on by amateur enthusiasts like Dave Terry, Russell Potts, John Bromhead, Patrick Woods and others. Although not welcomed with open arms by some, there was an attempt to bring journalists into the fold at a successful conference organised by Jeff Hill at Nottingham Trent University in 1993, after which Bill Brewster, Geoffrey Moorhouse, Chris Harte, Huw Richards and When Saturday Comes joined the ranks of the BSSH. Chris Harte resigned from the BSSH shortly after to set up a rival society, the Association of Sports Historians (ASH), with its own journal, Sporting Heritage, but it did not survive very long. After retiring from the board on which I had served for 25 years in 2008, I noticed that the ever-present ‘W.G. Grace logo’, adopted in 1983 was eliminated and The Sports Historian revamped as Sport in History, reflections of a new era for BSSH. The dreaded RAE citation analysis of academic’s published work and official journal rankings have no doubt put additional pressure on sports historians in the early twenty-first century. Their work has to be published, but it also has to be highly rated.
Not all organisations, of course, wanted to be associated with BSSH and the academics. A group of amateur historians led by John Goulstone were critical of BSSH and set up a rival journal which published facts and figures and ran to about a dozen issues. I also recall some famous practitioners of sport, be it as players, coaches or fans, holding themselves up as guardians of its history and claiming that academics lacked an understanding of the cultures of the sports that they were writing about.Footnote21 They perceived themselves as having ownership of sport, its heritage and its history and considered that all this theorising as to why and how etc., to be unnecessary speculation. This attitude was reflected to some extent in some of the responses to the initial survey of manuscripts and artefacts undertaken in connection with the National Sports Museum project described above. As an academic and a Liverpool supporter, I sadly recall Liverpool FC writing back to me and pointing out that they had to work hard for their trophies and were not inclined to release them to outsiders who, they appeared to think, were trying to cash in on ‘their’ success. The club had no exhibition of any kind at the time. Similarly, no-one at the club was interested in a proposed oral history project entitled Echoes from the Kop, put to them by Beryl Furlong and this author, which would have given the fans an opportunity to speak about the club for themselves. Contrastingly, Everton FC listed a whole range of things they thought the public would be interested in if placed in a museum. As it happens, they had been more open to sports science interventions generally, working closely with Liverpool Polytechnic.Footnote22
I am intrigued as to whether, in these days of limited resources and greater public accountability, the trend indicated above has now come full circle and that, rather than thinking they could do better alone, that BSSH accepts that its survival depends on building a symbiotic or mutually dependent relationship with the broader sports history community beyond the academy.
I hope these reflections help to provide a fuller account of BSSH’s foundation and early development.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See Rafaelle Nicholson, ‘Introduction: Reflecting on the Past, Present and Future of the British Society of Sports History’, Sport in History 42, no. 4 (2022): 439.
2 Colin Crunden, ‘The Effect of Formal and Informal Influences on Physical Education in England between 1870 and 1920’ (M.Ed. thesis, University of Manchester, 1972).
3 A. J. Mangan, ‘Play Up, Play Up and Play the Game: Victorian and Edwardian Public School Vocabularies of Motive’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 20, no. 3 (1975): 324–35.
4 Carol A. Osborne and Dilwyn Porter, ‘The British Society of Sports History, c. 1982–2022: some reflections’, Sport in History, 42, no. 4 (2022): 450.
5 An email from Tony Mangan to Richard Cox, 12 September 2008, asks ‘when will I get an invitation to address the BSSH – after all I founded it with you!’
6 Tony Mangan, John Lowerson and Richard Cox, ’Statement from the Editors’, British Journal of Sports History, 1, no. 1 (1984): 3.
9 If anyone is interested in progressing this project, please contact the author. It was published by Cass before they were bought out by Taylor & Francis who remained interested but wanted to explore new ways of presenting it online.
10 See Richard William Cox, ‘A Model for Sports History Documentation: The Origins, Objectives, Methods, Findings and Recommendations of the British Sports History Bibliography Project’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 9, no. 2 (1992), 252–79; and ‘Sports history Bibliography – The Future: A Plea for Support’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 11, no. 2 (1994): 326–27.
11 Richard William Cox, ‘A Survey of the Literature on the History of Sport in Britain’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 1, no. 1 (1984): 41–59.
12 Richard William Cox, ‘Annual Bibliography of Publications on the History of Sport in Britain’, The Sports Historian, 16, no. 1 (1996): 160–214 and ‘International Bibliography of Publications on the History of Sport 2006 and Index to Sports History Conference Proceedings, Journals and Essay Collections’, Sport in History, 27, no. 4, (2007): 505–621.
13 See also, for example, Richard William Cox, ‘A Chronology of Tony Mason’s Scholarly Contribution to Sports History’, The Sports Historian, 16, no. 1 (1996): 139–142 and ‘Wray Vamplew: A Bibliography 1969–2008’, Sport in History, 29, no. 3 (2009): 540–52.
14 Richard William Cox, ‘Sports Archives, Libraries, and Museums in the UK – What should be the Policy?’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 13, no. 2 (1996): 156–59.
15 Richard William Cox, ‘Annual List of Accessions of Sporting Manuscripts in Repositories in the UK, 1991’, The Sports Historian, 13, no. 1, (1993): 87–90.
16 See, for example, Norah Titley’s A Bibliography of British Sporting Arts (1700–1984), with supplements (London, 1984–1994 and 1995–2001).
17 Liverpool’s sporting heritage is well documented in Ray Physick, ed. Played in Liverpool: Charting the Heritage of a City at Play (Liverpool, 2007).
18 See Osborne and Porter, ‘The British Society of Sports History’, 449.
19 Richard Cox, ‘The British Society of Sports History World Wide Web Bulletin Board and Information Gateway’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 14, no. 1 (1997): 206–09.
20 Richard Cox and Wray Vamplew, ‘The Historical Imperative’, BSSH archive, De Montfort University.
21 Tony Mason’s Association Football and English Society, 1863–1915 (1980) was dismissed as ‘superfluous’. See this author’s review of Peter J. Seddon, A Football Companion: A Comprehensive Guide to the History of Association Football (Wetherby, 1995), in International Journal of the History of Sport, 13, no. 2 (1996): 252–56. The Encyclopaedia of British Football (2002) was described in an issue of When Saturday Comes as typical of a group of boffins attempting to write about soccer.
22 Dil Porter recently informed me that Everton have continued to have a more generous outlook as far as making the club’s history available is concerned, having made a massive amount of archive material freely available online; see http://www.evertoncollection.org.uk.