Degenerate days: colonial sports tours and British manliness 1900–1910

ABSTRACT

The 1900s saw a crisis in English manliness that played out in the commentary on sport in the national press. At a time when the theory of social Darwinism was becoming more influential among intellectuals and politicians, the British Army put in a catastrophic performance against the Boers in the South African War. In the aftermath of the war some of the blame for the bad performance of the Army had been placed upon the poor physical and mental quality of recruits to the armed forces. This articles argues that the success of colonial teams caused a crisis of middle-class British masculinity that was played out in the national press as progressives and conservatives debated the future direction of cricket and rugby. A debate, it is argued, that was won by those who wished to demarcate their games from the masses, and who rejected class and ethnic inclusivity as a threat to their future leadership of the nation's sports.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. P.G. Wodehouse, Summer Lightning (London: Penguin, 2008), 217. The quote is a useful illustration of the Edwardians’ habitual use of British/Briton/Britain and English/England interchangeably.

2. Kate Jackson, ‘C. B. Fry: The Sportsman Editor’, Victorian Periodicals Review 34, no. 2 (2001): 167.

3. John Nauright, ‘Colonial Manhood and Imperial Race Virility: British Responses to post-Boer-War Colonial Rugby Tours’, in Making Men: Rugby and Masculine Identity, ed. John Nauright and Timothy Chandler (London: Cass, 1995), 121–39.

4. Ronald Hyam, ‘The British Empire in the Edwardian Era’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. IV: The Twentieth Century, ed. J.M. Brown and W.M. Roger Louis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 50, 47–63.

5. Cd 1789, Report of the Commission Appointed to Enquire into the Military Preparations and Other Matters Concerned with the War in South Africa (London, 1903), 79.

6. G.R. Searle, A New England? Peace and War 1886–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 305.

7. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 200–202.

8. J.A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal (London, 1986) and Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: The Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology (Abingdon, 2000), John Lambert, ‘“Munition Factories  …  Turning Out a Constant Supply of Living Material”: White South African Elite Boys’ Schools and the First World War’, South African Historical Journal 51 (2004): 223–48.

9. Neville Meaney, ‘Britishness and Australia: Some Reflections’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 31, no. 2 (2003): 121–35.

10. For a brief account of the growth of imperial sport see ‘Chapter 3: Empire and nation’ in Richard Holt, Sport and the British (Oxford, 1989), 203–79. For the development of football tours in the Empire, which given that they were amateur affairs were marginal events in the public consciousness compared to the overwhelming popularity of professional soccer, see the pioneering work by Chris Bolsmann, ‘The 1899 Orange Free State football team tour of Europe: “Race”, Imperial Loyalty and Sporting Contest’, International Journal of the History of Sport 28, no. 1 (2011): 81–97.

11. Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Islanders’ in The Times, 4th January 1904.

12. The Times, 6th January 1906.

13. Observer, 2nd February 1902.

14. Observer, 5th January 1902.

15. Dean Allen, ‘Beating them at their Own Game: Rugby, the Anglo-Boer War and Afrikaner Nationalism, 1899–1948’, International Journal of the History of Sport 20, no. 3 (2005): 37–57, C. Daley, ‘The Invention of 1905’, in Tackling Rugby Myths: Rugby and New Zealand Society 1854–2004, ed. Greg Ryan (Otago: University of Otago, 2005), 69–88 and Nauright, ‘Colonial Manhood’.

16. Daily Mail, 10th October 1905.

17. A New Zealand native team had toured in 1888 and had a great degree of success. For a full account of this tour see Greg Ryan, Forerunners of the All Blacks: the 1888–9 New Zealand Native Football Teams in Britain, Australia and New Zealand (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 1993). The 1905 team also visited France and North America on their tour, the results of which I have not included in the above summary.

18. See, for example, Keith Sinclair, A Destiny Apart: New Zealand's Search for National Identity (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986).

19. For revisionist accounts of the origins of the 1905 team see Daley, ‘The Invention of 1905’ and Greg Ryan, ‘Rural Myth and Urban Actuality: The Anatomy of All Black and New Zealand Rugby 1884–1938’, New Zealand Journal of History 35, no. 1 (2001): 45–69.

20. The Times, 18th September 1905. The wing forward was an extra man deployed at the back of a scrum whose purpose was to act as a spoiling man for the opposition scrum half, or as an extra scrum half for his own team. It should be emphasised that until the inter-war period there were no fixed rules about scrum positions and that before World War 1 experimentation with scrum formations was not unusual. That English critics should decry New Zealand innovation was seen by later commentators as evidence of a too conservative state of mind in English rugby in the Edwardian period. W.W. Wakefield and H.P. Marshall, Rugger (London, 1927), 112–14.

21. The National Review (1905), 1076.

22. Tony Collins, A Social History of Rugby Union: Sport and the Making of the Middle Classes (London: Routledge, 2009), 167.

23. Reported in New Zealand Evening Post, 18th October 1905.

24. W. David McIntyre, ‘Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands’, 667–92 in Brown and Roger Louis, Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. IV, 669.

25. David Hamer, The New Zealand Liberals: The Years of Power, 1891–1912 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1988), 61.

26. P.J. Gibbons, ‘Chapter 12: The Climate of Opinion’, in The Oxford History of New Zealand, ed. W.H. Oliver and B.R. Williams (Wellington, 1981), 308, 302–32.

27. R.G.T. Coventry, Daily Mail, 9th October 1905.

28. P.A. Vaile, Wake up, England (London: Skeffington, 1907). His self-confidence as an expert on both sport and England was treated satirically back home in New Zealand where he was spoofed in a cartoon as a swell-headed prig. Observer (Auckland), 12th January 1907.

29. Daily Mail, 10th October 1905.

30. Times, 10th October 1905.

31. Daley, ‘The Invention of 1905’, 74.

32. New Zealand Evening Post, 10th July 1905.

33. Judtih R. Walkowitz, ‘Chapter 1: Urban Spectatorship’, in City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London: Virago, 2000), 15–40.

34. New Zealand Evening Post, 10th July 1905.

35. Bryan Charette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature 1875–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 92; Nadia Valman, ‘Little Jew Boys Made Good: Immigration, the South African War, and Anglo-Jewish fiction’, in ‘The Jew’ in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa, ed. Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 46–48, 45–64.

36. David Feldman, ‘Jews and the British Empire c. 1900’, History Workshop Journal 63, no. 1 (2007): 78, 70–89.

37. Manchester Guardian, 28th September 1899.

38. Geoffey Levett, ‘Constructing Imperial Identity: The South African Cricket Tour of England in 1907’, in Empire and Cricket: The South African Experience 1884–1914, ed. Bruce Murray and Goolam Vahed (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2009), 241–59.

39. New Zealand Evening Post, 10th July 1905.

40. Kate Jackson, George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 1880–1910: Culture and Profit (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 206.

41. C.B. Fry, Life Worth Living (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1939); Iain Wilton, C. B. Fry: An English Hero (London: Richard Cohen, 1999).

42. B. and C.B. Fry, A Mother's Son (London: Methuen, 1907).

43. Wilton, C. B. Fry, 118–39.

44. Fry and Fry, A Mother's Son, 303.

45. Fry and Fry, A Mother's Son, 291.

46. C. B. Fry's Magazine, Vol. 4 (1905–6), 188. Fry had practical experience of educating working class children. During the 1900s he helped to run the R. S. Mercury, a training ship for ‘improved street arabs of fourteen of fifteen years of age who … vouched for themselves that they (were) willing to join the Royal Navy.’ Wilton, Fry, 110.

47. Trevor was rugby and cricket correspondent for the Daily Telegraph as well as a weekly columnist for The Sportsman. He was also a well-known club cricketer who managed an MCC tour to Australia in the winter of 1907–8. ‘Obituary of Trevor, Col. Philip Christian William’, in Wisden (London: John Wisden & Co., 1932) at http://www.espncricinfo.com/wisdenalmanack/content/story/228177.html (accessed January 3, 2014).

48. Philip Christian William Trevor, Problems of Cricket (London: Sampson Low & Co., 1907), 246–7.

49. Ibid., 248.

50. Times, 10th October 1905.

51. C. B. Fry's Magazine Vol. 5 (1906), 173–4.

52. C. B. Fry's Magazine, Vol. 4 (1905–6), 210.

53. National Review, Vol. 46:276 (1906), 1078.

54. Daily Mail, 3rd October 1905.

55. Times, 17th October1905.

56. The Globe, quoted in Wanganui Herald, 28th November 1905.

57. John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 53.

58. Ryan, ‘Rural Myth and Urban Actuality’. The All Blacks in this era were, to quote, ‘disproportionately urban, educated and occupationally professional.’ 33.

59. Wisden (London: John Wisden and Co., 1908).

60. Daily Mail, 9th July 1907.

61. Marylebone Times, 19th July 1907.

62. Observer, 7th July 1907.

63. Dilwyn Porter, ‘Cornwall and Rugby Union: Sport and Identity in a Place Apart’, in Sport, Representation and Evolving Identities in Europe, ed. P. Dine and S. Crosson (Oxford, 2011), 263–86.

64. Football Herald, 1st December 1906.

65. Football Herald, 14th April 1906.

66. Football Herald, 14th April 1906.

67. Collins, A Social History of Rugby Union, 45.

68. Tom Weir, ‘James Peters: The Man They Wouldn’t Play’ (Unpublished MA diss., De Montfort University, 2015), 3. I am grateful to Tom for sharing his MA research with me in a great spirit of academic generosity.

69. Tony Collins, ‘Peters, James (1879–1954)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/70984 (accessed January 2, 2017).

70. Yorkshire Post, 17th March 1906.

71. Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 5th February 1906. The latter remark is somewhat prescient of the Basil D’Oliviera affair. After initially not selecting the in-form D’Oliveira MCC considered naming him as a reserve to see if that would be an acceptable compromise for the South African Government. When the bowler Tom Cartwright withdrew from the squad MCC's hand was forced and D’Oliveira was named as his replacement. The next day John Vorster, the South African Prime Minister, vetoed the tour. Bruce Murray and Christopher Merrett, Caught Behind: Race and Politics in Springbok Cricket (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2004), 110–11.

72. Football Herald, 24th March 1906.

73. Ian Cooper, Immortal Harlequin: The Adrian Stoop Story (Stroud: Tempus, 2004).

74. Daily Mail, quoted in New Zealand Evening Post, 31st October 1906.

75. John MacKenzie, Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 2 and 235.

76. K.S. Ranjitsinhji, The Jubilee Book of Cricket (London, 1897); Keith A.P. Sandiford, ‘England’, in Brian Stoddart and A.P. Keith, The Imperial Game: Cricket, Culture and Society (Manchester: University Press, 1998), 27.

77. Trevor, Problems of Cricket, 2.

78. Huw Richards, ‘Review of the Literature’, in A Rugby Compendium, ed. Cynthia McKinley (London: British Library, 1998), 5.

79. Country life, 27th October 1906.

80. Sporting Life, 5th December 1905.

81. The Daily Mail put the figure at 75,000, the Sporting Life between 60,000 and 70,000. The FA Cup Final at the same venue during this era commonly saw crowds in excess of 100,000.

82. Illustrated Sport and Dramatic News, 9th December 1905.

83. Denis McClean, ‘Gallaher, David 1873–1917’, in Dictionary of New Zealand National Biography, updated 22 June 2007 URL: http://www.dnzb.govt.nz (accessed December 18, 2016).

84. C. B. Fry's Magazine, Vol. 6 (1906–7), 203.

85. E.H.D. Sewell, ‘New Zealand and British Football’, in The National Review (1906), 1083.

86. Daily Mail, 5th December 1905.

87. Sporting Life, 16th October 1905.

88. Sporting Life, 5th December 1905. George Tyler was one of the New Zealand forwards.

89. Philippa Mein Smith, Concise History of New Zealand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 117.

90. Michael King, ‘Between Two Worlds’, 279–301 in Oliver and Williams, The Oxford History of New Zealand, 298.

91. John McCrystal, The Originals: 1905 All Black Rugby Odyssey (Auckland: Random House, 2005), 132.

92. C. B. Fry's Magazine, Vol. 6 (1906–7), 203.

93. Charlotte MacDonald, ‘Chapter 12: Ways of Belonging: Sporting Spaces in New Zealand History’, in The New Oxford History of New Zealand, ed. Giselle Byrnes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 278.

94. Evening Post, 6th December 1906. Paul Roos was born in Stellenbosch in 1880, where he trained as a teacher and played rugby for Stellenbosch University. He saw brief service in the South African War before returning to his career on the cessation of hostilities. Piet van der Schyff, Paul Roos, se Springbokken 1906–2006 (Stellenbosch, 2007), 172–3. For an account of the tour's political significance see Dean Allen, ‘Tours of Reconciliation: Rugby, War and Reconstruction in South Africa, 1891–1907’, Sport in History 72, no. 2 (June 2007).

95. Punch, 21st November 1906. The Ferreira Raid was a pre-cursor to the Afrikaner Rebellion of 1914 in which there was a small incursion into the Cape Colony by former Boer soldiers who had been working for the German colonial government in South-West Africa. President Kruger refused to support them and the revolt was put down by the Cape Government. Tilman Dedering, ‘The Ferreira Raid of 1906: Boers, Britons and Germans in Southern Africa in the aftermath of the South African War’, Journal of Southern African Studies 26, no. 1 (2010).

96. Evening Post, 17th December 1906.

97. Sporting Life, 24th September 1906.

98. London Evening News, 26th September 1906.

99. C. B. Fry's Magazine, Vol. 6 (1906–7), 203.

100. Sandra Swart, ‘“A Boer and his Gun and his Wife are Three Things that are Always Together”: Republican Masculinity and the 1914 Rebellion’, Journal of Southern African Studies 24, no. 4 (1998): 738.

101. Ronald Hyam and Peter Henshaw, The Lion and the Springbok: Britain and South Africa since the Boer War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 15; Allen, ‘Beating them at their Own Game’, 51–2.

102. Lappe Laubscher and Gideon Nieme, eds., The Carolin Papers: A Diary of the 1907 Springbok Tour (Pretoria: Rugbyana Publishers, 1990), 189.

103. L’Auto, 1st January 1907. Using such language to describe the indigenous peoples of southern Africa is of course offensive to modern ears.

104. Anne Pallant, A Sporting Century, 1863–1963 (Kingsbridge: A. Pallant, 1997), 93 and 97.

105. van der Schyff, Paul Roos, 88. The original Afrikaans for ‘blot him out’ is ‘hok te slaan’. I am grateful to Anria Minaar for the Afrikaans translations in this article.

106. Football Herald, 20th October 1906.

107. South African Review, 2nd November 1906.

108. Allen, ‘Beating them at their own game’.

109. Football Herald, 14th April 1906.

110. Letter to The Sportsman from an unknown correspondent, quoted in Straits Times, 15th February 1907.

111. Straits Times, 20th May 1907.

112. Straits Times, 11th March 1907.

113. Minutes of the Rugby Football Union, 15th March 1907.

114. Sporting Life, 10th December 1906.

115. Wanganui Herald, 21st January 1907.

116. A complex game of dialectics between the universal and contextual dimensions of sporting cultures’. S. Darbon, Diffusion des Sports et Impérialisme Anglo-Saxon (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008), 323.

117. Minutes of the Rugby Football Union, 1st December 1906.

118. U.A. Titley and A.R. McWhirter, Centenary History of the Rugby Football Union (Twickenham: Rugby Football Union, 1970), 126; Ed Harris, Twickenham: The History of the Cathedral of Rugby (Cheltenham: SportsBooks, 2005), 40 and 54–5.