Playing the Market Game: Cash Prizes, Symbolic Awards and the Professional Ideal in British Amateur Sport

Abstract

The rise of modern sport in Britain was a concomitant of the century-long process of commercialisation that gave birth to a modern market society. This background throws up several questions: Why was money, which greases the market economy, regarded as a problem at a certain point in the development of British sport? Why was it the Victorians in particular who first recognized this problem? Why did they take it so seriously that they ‘invented’ the amateur principle and on this basis developed a decidedly non-commercial idea of sportsmanship?

In order to answer these questions the article compares two periods of British sport history and analyses them sub specie pecuniae: on the one hand the period when modern sport was created, a period stretching from the end of the Middle Ages until the early nineteenth century which was marked by the fact that victorious athletes in competitions were awarded cash prizes; and on the other hand the period of readjustment between roughly 1860 and 1914 when the amateur principle was ‘invented’ and new governing bodies dispensed with cash prizes in favour of symbolic awards.

In a preliminary analysis the article investigates the capacity of the two award models to create reciprocity and strong social relations in a social context organised around competition. It then goes on to explore the high level of attraction award-giving societies in sport exerted on their specific social basis, the Victorian professions. Identifying the professions as the ‘inventors’ of amateurism might seem paradoxical, however this paradox provides a major explanation as to why the symbolic award model left a lasting mark on Victorian sports and why it was so difficult for the British to communicate their idea of sportsmanship to other sporting nations.

Notes

1. This article is based on the Sir Derek Birley Memorial Lecture, delivered to the British Society of Sports History, London, 11 September 2010. At this point I should like to express my gratitude for the criticism and ideas thrown up by the members of the audience.

2. Up to now there is no comparative study on the rise of market society in Britain and continental Europe; however, my statement on scheduling should be non-controversial. See also the considerations in Christiane Eisenberg, Englands Weg in die Marktgesellschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009), 107–132.

3. George J. Stigler, ‘Perfect Competition, Historically Contemplated’, The Journal of Political Economy 65 (1957): 1–3.

4. Georg Simmel, ‘Soziologie der Konkurrenz’, Neue Deutsche Rundschau 14 (1903): 1009–23. This essay was a preliminary study for Simmel's book Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1983 [orig. pub.1908]).

5. Simmel, Soziologie, 214.

6. Simmel, ‘Soziologie der Konkurrenz’, 1010, 1012 (and idem, Soziologie, 200; my emphasis).

7. Simmel, Soziologie, 200.

8. Against the background of the excavations in Olympia his ideas were clearly influenced by ancient Greek sport, a feature typical of the educated classes of the period. Thus Greek sport was generally acknowledged to be a nobleundertaking, determined by purely idealistic motives and thus far removed from market ideas. Georg Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989 [orig. pub. 1900/1907]), 471.

9. Simmel has pointed to this fact in Philosophie des Geldes, 129. See also the argument by Geoffrey Ingham, The Nature of Money (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 25.

10. Pamela Nightingale, ‘The Ora, the Mark, and the Mancus: Weight-standards and the Coinage in Eleventh-Century England (Part 1)’, Numismatic Chronicle 143 (1983): 248–57.

11. Juliet R.V. Barker, The Tournament in England 1100–1400 (Woodbridge/Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1986), 12, 69, 189; Thomas S. Henrick, ‘Sport and Social Hierarchy in Medieval England’, Journal of Sport History 9, no. 2 (1982): 21f. Land could be freely sold although the law regarded it as remaining in the supreme possession of the king.

12. Barker, The Tournament in England, 14, 69, 161; Henrick, ‘Sport’, 24 (on the impact of ‘scutage’).

13. Henrick, ‘Sport’, 20–37; Dennis Brailsford, A Taste for Diversions. Sport in Georgian England (Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 1999), 95–116; James Williams, ‘Sport and the Elite in Early Modern England’, Sport in History 28, no. 3 (2008): 389–413. However, Williams uses a very broad definition of the word sport, for he also deals with pastimes such as hunting where money and valuables were presented as a gift in the hope of a reciprocal gift; see in particular 401–3.

14. Ray B. Westerfield, Middlemen in English Business Particularly Between 1660–1760 (Repr. New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1968 [New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1915]).

15. This was a parallel development to the generalization of ‘merchants’ in the law merchant (lex mercatoriae) which did not bestow a privilege on a particular status group (as on the European continent) but on usual trading operations; Albrecht Cordes, ‘The Search for a Medieval lex mercatoria’, in From lex mercatoria to Commercial Law, ed. Vito Piergiovanni (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2005), 61.

16. This was suspected in the case of Bill Richmond (1763–1829) and Tom Molineaux (c.1784–1818), two boxing stars in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century; see Ruti Ungar, ‘The Boxing Discourse in Late Georgian England, 1780–1820: A Study in Civic Humanism, Gender, Class and Race’ (PhD thesis, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2010), 155–65. See also Dennis Brailsford, ‘Nationality, Race, and Prejudice in Early Pugilism’, in Proceedings of the 11th HISPA International Congress, ed. J.A. Mangan (Glasgow: University of Strathclyde, 1985), 17–23; idem, Bareknuckles: A Social History of Prize Fighting (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 1988).

17. The information on boxing was kindly supplied by Ruti Ungar, Frankfurt. I have been unable to find any written evidence relating to other types of sport.

18. Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes, 471.

19. There exist scarcely any modern studies of the concrete form of prizes. However, see Karl Lennartz (with the collaboration of Ian Buchanan and V. Lker Kluge), Olympische Spiele 1908 in London (Kassel: Agon Sportverlag, 1999), 200–7.

20. All these conventions can be found in the Minutes of the First Meeting of the Amateur Athletic Association in Oxford, 24 April, 1880, printed in Fifty Years of Progress 1880–1930. The Jubilee Souvenir of the Amateur Athletic Association (London: Amateur Athletic Association, 1930), 20f. (in Birmingham University Library: National Centre for Athletic Literature [hereafter NACL] XVIII G.7).

21. For a detailed overview see the newspaper cuttings of a series of articles in, and letters to The Sporting Life, October 16, 1908, in: NCAL XXV. H.27. The Constitution Rules of the AAA for 1889, 10 (in NCAL VI A6) seem to have served as a blueprint; see also Lennartz, Olympische Spiele 1908, 200–7.

22. Wray Vamplew, ‘Reduced Horse Power: The Jockey Club and the Regulation of British Horseracing’, Entertainment Law 2, no. 3 (2003): 97; Brailsford, A Taste for Diversions, 161–80. For a general account see Richard Holt, ‘Amateurism and its Interpretation: The Social Origins of British Sport’, Innovation 5, no. 4 (1992): 20f.

23. See the ‘Chronology of Amateurism’, in Lincoln Allison, Amateurism in Sport. An Analysis and a Defence (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 165 ff.

24. In the long term, even equestrian sports, which had been about cash prizes from time immemorial, were included in the new framework. In show jumping, for example, the prize was awarded to the rider; the horse and its owner were only mentioned to complete the details.

25. For an overview see John Lowerson, Sport and the Middle Classes 1870–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 1–28; Christiane Eisenberg, ‘English Sports’ und deutsche Bürger. Eine Gesellschaftsgeschichte 1800–1939 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999), 69–78; Dilwyn Porter, ‘Revenge of the Crouch End Vampires: The AFA, the FA and English Football's ‘Great Split’, 1907–1914’, in Amateurism in British Sport: It Matters Not Who Won or Lost?, eds Dilwyn Porter and Stephen Wagg (London: Routledge, 2008), 68.

26. Wray Vamplew, ‘Playing with the Rules. Influences on the Development of Regulation Sport’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 24, no. 7 (2007): 850–3.

27. ‘[D]er Geldpreis bezieht sich auf die Leistung, der Ehrenpreis auf den Leistenden’: Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes, 471.

28. William J. Goode, The Celebration of Heroes. Prestige as a Control System (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 152; see also 178f.

29. For some famous names see John Arlott ‘Sport’, in Edwardian England 1901–1914, ed. Simon Nowell-Smith (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 486.

30. The dissemination of British sports is dealt with by numerous articles in The International Journal of the History of Sport. For the dissemination within Britain, see, among others, J.A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School. The Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology (London: Frank Cass, 2000 [1981]); Tony Mason and Eliza Reidi Sport and the Military. The British Armed Forces 1880–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Roger Munting, ‘The Games Ethic and Industrial Capitalism before 1914: The Provision of Company Sports’, Sport in History 23 (2003): 45–63.

31. The discovery of the professions as actors behind the symbolic award model and amateurism in sport is not exactly new; see among others, Lowerson, Sport and the Middle Classes, 9–11; Norman Baker, ‘Whose Hegemony? The Origins of theAmateur Ethos in Nineteenth Century English Society’, Sport in History 24, no. 1 (2004): 1–16 (here other writings are mentioned). However, these authors looked at the problem too much from the perspective of sport and failed to deal sufficiently with the professions. My own preoccupation with the role of the professions in British sport was stimulated by Dick Holt's criticism of an old essay of mine (Holt, ‘Amateurism and its Interpretation’, 28f.; Christiane Eisenberg, ‘The Middle Class and Competition: Some Considerations of the Beginnings of Modern Sport in England and Germany’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 7 (1990): 265–82). Holt complained that I had not paid sufficient attention to the fluid transitions between the aristocracy and the middle-classes – which is a true objection. However, it pales into insignificance if we focus on the special interests of the professions instead of speaking generally about the middle classes.

32. There were around 160 professional societies in Great Britain at the end of the nineteenth century; see Michael Burrage, ‘Unternehmer, Beamte und freie Berufe. Schlüsselgruppen der bürgerlichen Mittelschichten in England, Frankreich und den Vereinigten Staaten’, in Bürgerliche Berufe. Zur Sozialgeschichte der freien und akademischen Berufe im internationalen Vergleich, ed. Hannes Siegrist (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), 55. For an overview on professional societies in Britain, see the seminal study by A.M. Carr-Saunders and P.A. Wilson, The Professions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 289–304.

33. Hannes Siegrist, ‘Bürgerliche Berufe. Die Professionen und das Bürgertum’, in Bürgerliche Berufe. Zur Sozialgeschichte der freien und akademischen Berufe im internationalen Vergleich, ed. Hannes Siegrist (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), 26.

34. Thomas H. Marshall, ‘The Recent History of Professionalism in Relation to Social Structure and Social Policy’, The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 5 (1939): 327; Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society. England since 1880 (London: Routledge, 1989), 116–23; Burrage, ‘Unternehmer’, 52; George Robb, White-Collar Crime in Modern England. Financial Fraud and Business Morality, 1845–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 169–80.

35. Siegrist, ‘Bürgerliche Berufe’, 14.

36. Marshall, ‘Recent History’, 327.

37. Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society, 117.

38. Burrage, ‘Unternehmer’, 55.

39. The example and the phrasing are from Penelope J. Corfield, Power and the Professions in Britain 1700–1850 (London: Routledge, 1995), 203.

40. In this respect even historians were sometimes irritated. Thus, for example, Michael Burrage, one of the foremost experts on British professions and their history, in a survey of professional societies feels it necessary to mention that the ‘somewhat bizarre, but imaginative genres of corporative self-administration’ like the Jockey Club are not considered in his study; see Burrage, ‘Unternehmer’, 55.

41. Paul Johnson, Making the Market. Victorian Origins of Corporate Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 201, 222–5; G.R. Searle, Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 255f.

42. Donald C. Coleman, ‘Gentlemen and Players’, Economic History Review 26 (1973): 92–116.

43. The Sportfolio. Portraits and Biographies of Heroes and Heroines of Sport and Pastime (London: George Newness Ltd., 1896); see also British Sports and Sportsmen, compiled and edited by The Sportsman (‘Sporting Life’), 13 vols (London: Sports & Sportsmen, Ltd., 1908 [–1932]); Burke's Who's Who in Sport and Sporting Record 1922 (London, 1922).

44. With regard to this chop-logic Harold Abrahams makes some mocking comments on amateurism (in NCAL XXV.H.27). Sport became a major area of ambitious journalists towards the end of the century; see Tony Mason, ‘Sporting News, 1860–1914’, in The Press in English Society from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Michael Harris and Alan Lee (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1986), 168–86; Mark Hampton, ‘Journalists and the “Professional Ideal” in Britain: The Institute of Journalists, 1884–1907’, Historical Research 72 (1999): 183–201. For teachers, see Mangan, Athleticism, and his subsequent research, esp. J.A. Mangan and Colm Hickey, Soccer's Missing Men. Schoolteachers and the Spread of Association Football (London: Routledge, 2009).

45. Mason, ‘Sporting News’, 174, 179–81, 185.

46. Adrian Harvey, The Beginnings of a Commercial Sporting Culture in Britain, 1793–1850 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); J.H. Plumb, ‘The Commercialization of Leisure’, in The Birth of a Consumer Society. The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 265–85, 273, 281; Dennis Brailsford, ‘1787: An Eighteenth Century Sporting Year’, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 55, no. 3 (1984): 217–230. Some results also included the times but these were unreliable because of the imprecise methods used to measure them. Precise stopwatches only became generally available at the start of the nineteenth century; see idem, Sport, Time, and Society. The British at Play (London: Routledge, 1991), 28.

47. According to Andrew Huxtable, A Statistical History of UK Track & Field Athletics (London: National Union of Track Statisticians, 1990), 4. See also H. Ellington, ‘Athletes of the Present and the Past’, The Nineteenth Century 21 (1887): 517f.; no one was yet interested in track and field records in the 1850s and 1860s. Systematic lists of records only began in the 1880s.

48. For a contemporary complaint about this see Hely Hutchinson Almond, ‘Football as a Moral Agent’, Nineteenth Century 34 (1883): 907.

49. Matthew Taylor, The Leaguers. The Making of Professional Football in England, 1900–1939 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), 3–5; Jack Williams, Cricket and England. A Cultural and Social History of the Inter-War Years (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 164, 167; Keith Booth, The Father of Modern Sport. The Life and Times of Charles W. Alcock (Manchester: The Parrs Wood Press, 2002), 165, 257.

50. For a similar argument see Vamplew, ‘Playing with the Rules’, 857. For the development of bookmakers and off-course betting in these years, see David C. Itzkowitz, ‘Victorian Bookmakers and Their Customers’, Victorian Studies 32 (1988): 7–30. See also Izkowitz's recent article on the blurring of boundaries between financial speculation and betting in Victorian discourse: ‘FairEnterprise or Extravagant Speculation. Investment, Speculation, and Gambling in Victorian England’, in Victorian Investments. New Perspectives on Finance and Culture, eds Nancy Henry and Cannon Schmitt (Bloomington, IN and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009), 109–13.

51. Taylor, The Leaguers, 4.

52. Anonymous, ‘Professionalism in English Sports’, The Saturday Review, April 14, 1888, 437–8, esp. 437.

53. Richard Holt, ‘Champions, Heroes and Celebrities: Sporting Greatness and the British Public’, in The Book of British Sporting Heroes, ed. James Huntington-Whiteley (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 1999), 10–26; idem, ‘The Batsman as Gentleman: Inter-War Cricket and the English Hero’, in Heroic Reputation and Exemplary Lives, ed. Geoffrey Cubitt and Allen Warren (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 225–40; Harvey Taylor, ‘Sporting Heroes’, in Geordies: Roots of Regionalism, eds Robert Colls and Bill Lancaster (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 113–30; Mike Huggins and Keith Gregson, ‘Northern Songs, Sporting Heroes and Regional Consciousness, c.1800–c.1880: “Wor Stars that Shine”,’ Northern History 44, no. 2 (2007): 141–58.

54. S.W. Pope, ‘Amateurism and American Sports Culture: The Invention of an Athletic Tradition in the United States, 1870–1900’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 13, no. 3 (1996): 290–309, esp. 298–302; Richard Holt, Sport and Society in Modern France (Oxford: Macmillan, 1981), 68, 79–80; Eisenberg, ‘English Sports’ und deutsche Bürger, 188, 239ff., 335–41.

55. Burrage, ‘Unternehmer’, 79f.; Mark Neal and John Morgan, ‘The Professionalization of Everyone? A Comparative Study of the Development of the Professions in the United Kingdom and Germany’, European Sociological Review 16, no. 1 (2000): 17f., 21. For a general account of the internal stratification of the middle classes see Jürgen Kocka, ‘Bürgertum und bürgerliche Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert. Europäische Entwicklungen und deutsche Eigenarten’, in Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert. Deutschland im internationalen Vergleich, vol. 1, ed. Jürgen Kocka (Munich: dtv, 1988) 13–16.

56. Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes, 471.

57. Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes 472.

58. Amateurs and Professionals in Post-War British Sport, ed. Adrian Smith and Dilwyn Porter (London: Frank Cass, 2000).

59. In the case of the IOC one of the decisive reasons was the urgent necessity to stage the Olympic Games in London in 1908 because the late withdrawal of Italy as the host nation would otherwise have meant having to abandon the 1908 games completely. The founders of FIFA regarded it as indispensable for their work to gain the support of the English FA, the mother of all football associations.

60. A large number of examples can be found in Klaus Nathaus, Organisierte Geselligkeit. Deutsche und britische Vereine im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009).

61. The percentage is from Maarten van Bottenburg, Global Games (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 67f., 207–14. The source does not provide any data for the UK as a whole.