What about the South? A case study of soccer’s early development in Winchester

ABSTRACT

The historiography of soccer’s early years includes numerous references to the game’s development within the industrial heartlands of nineteenth-century Britain. But there are few studies of how soccer came to be established as a popular sport in rural and non-industrial parts of southern England. Using Winchester as a case study, this paper examines the factors which, during a twenty-year period from 1884, transformed soccer from an obscure diversion into a sport that vied with cricket as the area’s most popular recreation. The sources reveal that soccer initially gained acceptance at local schools during the 1880s before being taken up by middle-class cricketers eager to find a game to play during the winter. However, soccer failed to take hold of the public’s imagination until the late 1890s. Reasons for this failure are identified, as are some of the factors which led, from 1895, to a boom in the game’s popularity among the local working class.

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No potential conflict of interest is reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Curry, ‘Introduction: Towards a Deeper Understanding’, 3.

2. Cooke and James, ‘Myths, Truths, and Pioneers’, 19.

3. The three journals surveyed were The International Journal of the History of Sport, Soccer and Society, and Sport in History.

4. Several historians of British leisure have drawn attention to the sense of social and cultural dislocation experienced by workers who migrated from rural to the newly industrialized centres. They argue that sport allowed these newcomers to develop a sense of local belonging, and that the public’s engagement with sport helped to engender a sense of civic pride among migrants of all classes. For example, see Beaven, Leisure, Citizenship and Working-Class Men in Britain, 74 and Budd, Sport in Urban England, Middlesbrough, 83–84.

5. In 1871, 75% of the city’s resident population had been either been born in Winchester, or within a day’s walk from the city. See James, Winchester From Prehistory to Present, 142–4.

6. Winchester College’s status as an elite school is based on its inclusion in the investigation conducted under the auspices of the Clarendon Commission in the early 1860s. The Commission was charged with an examination of the finances and management of England’s nine principal public schools. The other schools investigated were Eton, Harrow, Charterhouse, Westminster, Rugby, Shrewsbury, Merchant Taylors’ and St Paul’s.

7. The South Hampshire and Dorset Football Association was formed at Wimborne, Dorset, in 1884. After its first year in operation, local interest in soccer had grown sufficiently for the Association to rebrand itself as the Hampshire and Dorset Football Association. By 1887 the demands of serving the soccer needs of such a wide area necessitated its split into two separate county associations, one for Hampshire, the other for Dorset.

8. Sabben-Clare, Winchester College, 105.

9. A Wykehamist is the name given to any current or past pupil of Winchester College, or to any master who taught there. The name derives from the College’s founder, William of Wykeham.

10. The Wykehamist, no. 63, 16 December 1873.

11. The first reference in The Wykehamist to a game of association football being played by a team representing Winchester College appeared in 1886 when the College faced the Old Wykehamists FC. The Wykehamist no. 206, March 1886.

12. The Wykehamist, no. 229, April 1888.

13. Winchester Modern School, v Portsmouth Grammar School, Hampshire Chronicle, 5 March 1881, 4.

14. In December 1877, the Odiham Grammar School, having arranged to host a football game against the Alton-based Ackender House School, were expecting to play a rugby match. However, ‘a day or two previous to the game it was notified to the home team that the Alton boys would not be allowed to play except under Association rules’, presumably owing to concerns over safety. Hampshire Chronicle 8 December 1877, 5.

15. Throughout the period 1879 to 1883, Hampshire’s local newspapers featured numerous reports of injuries and fatalities incurred during football games played throughout Britain. One local incident, in which a Southampton-based player died after breaking his neck, received extensive national coverage owing to that city’s mayor’s subsequent attempts to ban all football from local public playing fields. Many reports identified the relative safety of soccer compared to rugby; an editorial in the Portsmouth Evening News noted that ‘the rugby game is…a barbarously rough one’ and continued with the claim that ‘a revival of the old Association rules would be very welcome’. Portsmouth Evening News, 3 December 1881, 2.

16. The Training College’s first recorded rugby game was reported in Hampshire Chronicle, 13 November 1875, 5.

17. Warren, Warren’s Winchester Directory, 92.

18. For example, Adrian Harvey identifies several organized ‘football’ games being played between military teams during the 1850s, while James Walvin describes how, in the following decade, ‘army officers were particularly imbued with the public-school sporting tradition and responded eagerly to the creation of the FA’. It is also noteworthy that a military soccer team, the Chatham-based Royal Engineers, appeared in four of the first seven FA Cup finals. Harvey, Football: the First Hundred Years; Walvin, The People’s Game.

19. For example, the Rifle Brigade played two matches against an ‘XI of Winchester’ in early 1875. Hampshire Chronicle, 16 January 1875, 5; Hampshire Chronicle, 30 January 1875, 5.

20. Letter to the Editor from ‘Pastime’,Hampshire Chronicle, 5 March 1887, 6.

21. Harvey, Football: The First Hundred Years, 61, 69, 73.

22. Reports of football matches played between the Winchester Gymnasium and Hyde House School can be found in Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 2 December 1865, 7; Hampshire Chronicle, 16 December 1865, 5; Hampshire Chronicle, 24 November 1866, 4; and Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 15 December 1866, 8.

23. An example of a village football match being reported by Winchester’s local press appeared in 1874, in which a team from Hursley beat another from St Cross by three goals to two. (Hampshire Chronicle, 7 February 1874, 7). The same newspaper also reported the return match, played a fortnight later, in which St Cross gained revenge by winning fifteen to five (Hampshire Chronicle, 14 February 1874, 5).

24. Hampshire Chronicle, 14 November 1877, 4.

25. Juson and Bull, Full Time at the Dell, 18.

26. Soccer teams playing in Basingstoke at the end of the 1870s included Basingstoke FC, Mechanical Engineers, Queens School, and North Hants Foundry FC. Apart from matches against each other, the Basingstoke teams also regularly faced soccer clubs from Reading, Henley and Farnham.

27. An account of the Basingstoke Cup tournament, which was contested in 1879/80 and 1880/81, is provided by William Pickford in The Hampshire Football Association Golden Jubilee (1937), 17–20.

28. Lewis, ‘Innovation not Invention’, 483.

29. Bandy is a sport that is similar to ice hockey, but played on open ice as opposed to a defined ice rink. Tebbutt and his brothers were members of the famous Bury Fen Bandy Club and, in 1896, Arnold Tebbutt helped write the definitive rules of the game, published as Bandy, or Hockey on the Ice.

30. This quotation is taken from a report of a speech made by Tebbutt in 1929, at the annual dinner of the Winchester Rugby Club, Hampshire Chronicle, 21 December 1929, 10.

31. The one notable exception to the recruitment of players from middle-class backgrounds was the enlistment, in 1887, of William Winkworth, a Winchester-based carpenter and registered professional soccer player. Gibson and Pickford make direct reference to Winkworth: ‘the first player registered with the Football Association in all the broad countryside between London and Bristol was one William Winkworth, a half-back of the Winchester Town Club’. While Winkworth may have received payment for playing, it is notable that he continued to work as a carpenter throughout the 1880s and appears to have supplemented his wages through playing soccer, rather than being solely dependent on the game for income. Gibson and Pickford, Association Football and the Men who made it, 59.

32. Gibson and Pickford, Association Football and the Men who made it, 63.

33. Hampshire Chronicle, 21 November 1891, 5.

34. Ibid., 15 July 1893, 5.

35. Ibid., 29 October 1898, 2.

36. Although Gibson and Pickford make the claim that Hampshire was ‘the cradle of professionalism in the south’, the growth of professional game in the county was, compared to events further north, both slow and narrowly-focussed. In January 1888, the Hampshire FA first sanctioned a professional player to appear for one of its affiliated clubs, but it was only during the 1892/93 season that the Southampton FC became the first club in the county to take ‘tentative steps towards open professionalism’ before becoming fully professional after becoming a limited liability company in 1897. The Portsmouth Football Club was a professional venture from its inception in 1898. These two remained the only professional clubs in Hampshire until after the First World War. Gibson and Pickford, Association Football and the Men who made it, 59; Minute Book of the Hampshire Football Association Vol. I, entry for 19 January 1888; Bull and Juson, Full Time at the Dell, 32, 45; Cassar and Gannaway, Hampshire Football Association, 11.

37. See, for example, Money, Manly and Muscular Diversions, 121.

38. Extract from the Hampshire Football Association Annual Report 1892, copied from the Minute Book of the Hampshire Football Association, Vol II (June 1891 to November 1897) accessed at the offices of the Hampshire Football Association, Basingstoke.

39. For example, Eric Dunning and Kenneth Sheard claim that ‘the growth of working-class participation [in rugby] was not an autonomously working-class affair. Rather, the impetus seems to have come, in a structural sense, “from above”… [the working class] were, in most cases, taught to play by upper- and middle-class men’. Walvin cites the role of educational establishments in the diffusion of football play, stating that ‘Outside the public schools the move to football was initiated by pupils from the old grammar schools, who simply copied their educational superiors [i.e., those that had attended public schools]’. Dunning and Sheard, Barbarians,120; Walvin, The People’s Game, 61.

40. Hampshire Chronicle, 4 December 1886, 7.

41. Phrases such as ‘a very large number’ mean little to a modern-day readership. The phrase is relative, and should be considered in the context of contemporary expectations of a crowd’s size. In the local contemporary Hampshire press, a ‘large crowd’ seems to have been one which ranged from 400 to 1,000 people. Hampshire Chronicle, 29 December 1888, 7; Hampshire Advertiser, 29 December 1888, 7; Hampshire Chronicle, 2 February 1889, 7.

42. Sporting Life, 29 February 1888, 3.

43. Hampshire Telegraph, 14 August 1886, 2.

44. Ibid., 2 April 1887, 2.

45. Hampshire Chronicle, 24 September 1898, 6.

46. Ibid., 7 July 1906, 8.

47. Hampshire Observer, 9 November 1895, 3.

48. Ibid., 5 September 1896, 3.

49. Hampshire Chronicle, 27 August 1898, 7.

50. Ibid., 7 August 1897, 5; Ibid., 10 September 1898, 7.

51. Hampshire Chronicle, 19 November 1898, 7.

52. The Winchester Alfred Football Club were in existence between 1889 and 1903. The club’s choice of name was a tribute to King Alfred, a Saxon king with strong local associations with Winchester. The year of the club’s formation – 1899 – coincided with the 1000^th anniversary of Alfred’s death. Winchester Town Council promoted the ‘Alfred Millennial’ as a national celebration which, briefly, made the city the focus of nation-wide attention. The naming of the Winchester Alfred FC represents an unusual manifestation of civic pride. Hampshire Chronicle, 24 August 1901, 4.

53. Hampshire Chronicle, 17 October 1903, 7.

54. Ibid., 5 November 1904, 9.

55. Ibid., 7 November 1908, 4.

56. Southampton Football Club assumed a variety of names during its first twelve seasons. Originally formed as St Marys Young Men’s Association, by 1888 the club had come to be known simply as St Marys FC. Entry to the Southern League in 1894 coincided with the adoption of the name Southampton St Marys, with the club eventually becoming Southampton FC in 1897. Here, the name Southampton FC is used throughout, to avoid unnecessary confusion.

57. Hampshire Observer, 8 February 1896, 3.

58. Hampshire Chronicle, 27 January 1900, 7.