The Gentleman Game (football)
THE GENTLEMAN'S GAME
If cricket on an Eton Field trained up our youth for Waterloo, Sure Rugby’s noble game has sealed the fate of many a battle too. “Sunk in ease” cry croaking ravens, England’s nodding to her fall, Know ’tis false, ye tim’rous cravens, For her sons still love football. —The Goal, 18731
There was, however, one section of British society where football had
become hugely popular during the first half of the nineteenth century: its elite private schools. By the time of the Great Reform Act of 1832, which gave the vote to the middle classes, football was on its way to becoming an essential part of the education of young men educated at Britain’s public schools, as the elite private schools were known. Eton, Charterhouse, Harrow, Rugby, Westminster and Winchester each developed their own distinctive versions of the game. The undermining of football’s plebeian traditions by the industrial revolution allowed the public schools and the middle classes to embrace football as a symbol of the new ideology of Muscular Christianity. Freed from the physical and social dangers of playing football against those they saw as their social inferiors, these upper-middle class schoolboys took up the game with gusto. This should not be surprising. Public schools were often located in places where folk football had a long history. In the town of Rugby in the English midlands, for example, football had been played every New Year’s Day since the early 1700s and as late as 1845 ‘six tailors of Rugby’ challenged teams in the area to a match for a prize of £5.2 For school authorities, football was welcomed as an outlet for the
excess physical energies of adolescent youths. For the boys, the violence with which they played was a source of pride: ‘the savage “rouge” or the wild broken bully, would cause a vast sensation amongst our agricultural friends’, an Old Etonian remembered in the 1860s.3 By the middle of the nineteenth century, the public schools had imbued football, and also cricket, with a moral purpose and educational role that would have been unthinkable in the gambling-obsessed Georgian era. The ethos that underpinned Britain’s elite schools was Muscular Christianity, which placed vigorous and masculine physical activity at the centre of its character-building outlook. At root it was an expression of British nationalism, rendering the teachings of the Church of England into a credo that both justified and maintained the principles of the British Empire. Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby School from 1828 to 1841, had popularised a Muscular Christian educational philosophy that sought to create ‘healthy minds in healthy bodies’ which, although he personally had no interest in sport, valued games as importantly as academic studies. Healthy minds were those seen as free of sin and moral weakness, and vigorous football was promoted as a reliable antidote to the great triangular fear of the Victorian public schools: masturbation, effeminacy and homosexuality. ‘Every school ought to regard it as part of its duty to and mission to rid itself almost entirely of delicate complexions, narrow chests and feeble limbs’, declared Loretto headmaster and prominent Scottish rugby official H.H. Almond.4 Football therefore came to be seen as a vital part of the training of the boys and young men who would grow up to lead the government, industry and empire. Other than two teams, two goals and a ball, every school’s football rules were unique. Even the ball was not uniform: Eton’s ball was round but much smaller than a modern soccer ball, Harrow’s resembled a large cushion and Rugby’s was an irregular ovoid. Offside differed, in that Harrow and Rugby deemed any attacking player in front of the ball to be offside, whereas the Eton game deemed a player to be onside if there were at least three defenders between him and the goal. Almost all schools allowed a ball in the air to be caught with the hands but Eton only allowed the hands to be used to knock the ball down. When the ball went over the touchline, play at Eton and Winchester was restarted with a form of scrum, known as a ‘bully’ and a ‘hot’, respectively, at Harrow and Winchester by kick-in and at Rugby by a right-angled throw-in. A ball that went behind the goal line resulted in a
bully in front of goal at Eton, a kick for goal at Rugby or a kick-out by the defending side at Harrow and Charterhouse. To complicate matters, the ‘Wall Game’ version of Eton football consisted of little more than endless scrummaging as the ball was slowly propelled back and forth against a wall
towards rarely reached goals. All schools decided matches solely by goals, except for the Eton field game, which also counted ‘rouges’, the equivalent of a try in the Rugby game.5 The rules of the Rugby School version of football were printed for the first time in 1845, and those for the Eton field game appeared in print in 1847. But these circulated only among boys of the two schools and had little influence on the spread of public school football into the wider population. The book that played a major role in expanding the popularity of football was not a rulebook but a novel, Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Written by Thomas Hughes, an old boy of Rugby School, it was published in 1857. Based on his own experiences of life at Rugby, Hughes’ book depicted the values of Muscular Christianity as a boy’s adventure yarn, replete with trials of courage and tests of character, a portrait of a saintly Thomas Arnold, and stern warnings against bullying, effeminacy and ‘funk’, as cowardice was known. Hughes’ book portrayed football as a school for moral education and character building through the simple technique of writing the most thrilling descriptions of a football match yet committed to print. It was a runaway best-seller. A guide for boys about to be packed off to boarding school, a yardstick by which parents could judge a school and a handbook for aspirational private schools, Tom Brown made football not only morally respectable but also fashionable. It brought Rugby School and its version of football to a new, national audience. This prestige was enhanced several-fold in 1864 when the Clarendon Commission published the report of its inquiry into the state of England’s leading public schools. It lauded Rugby above all other schools, declaring it as ‘a national institution, as being a place of education and a source of influence for the whole Kingdom’.6 Thanks to a best-selling novel and a Royal Commission seal of approval, the Rugby version of football was now identified in the public mind with morality, education and excitement. This was the reason why Rugby School’s football survived and flourished as an adult sport. None of the other public school codes of football survived outside of their native environments, despite the social prestige of the institutions that produced them. Although elements of Eton and Harrow’s rules were incorporated into the rules of the FA, the FA’s game was very different to that seen on any public school playing field. Rugby’s sense of separateness from other schools’ football was heightened by the crusading moral certitude that the school imbued in its pupils, causing ‘Old Rugbeians’, as its former pupils were known, to disdain those who did not share its traditions. This was a not unimportant factor when it came to understanding the opposition to its style of football. Antipathy to Rugby School football rules often reflected public hostility to the widely perceived arrogance of its alumni.
The enthusiasm for football among public schoolboys often did not diminish as they began their adult lives. The game that had meant so much to them at school now became the focus of their adult recreation. The mid-1800s were a period of widespread concern about the health hazards of living in the rapidly growing but dirty and polluted industrial cities. The sedentary lifestyles of the new legions of office-bound lawyers, accountants, clerks and other administrators of the burgeoning capitalist economy spurred the formation of gymnasia, athletic clubs and football teams. And, as with the other male clubs, these new football clubs constituted an entirely masculine kingdom. They provided a respite from the new world of Victorian middle-class domesticity, offering young men a haven from women, children and family duty, while giving them the opportunity to display an overtly masculine physicality in defiance of contemporary fears of softness and effeminacy. Football was not only fashionable, it had also become, perhaps more importantly, respectable. Between the publication of Tom Brown’s Schooldays in 1857 and the formation of the FA at the end of 1863, numerous football clubs would be formed by privately educated young men, including Edinburgh Academicals (1857), Sheffield (1857), Liverpool (1857), Blackheath (1858), Richmond (1861), Wanderers (1859), Manchester (1860), Crystal Palace (1861), Lincoln (1862), Bradford (1863), Royal Engineers (1863) and the Civil Service (1863). Although football supporters have long debated which was the ‘first’ adult club to be formed, the reality was that the sudden creation of clubs to play football in the 1850s and 1860s was part of a burgeoning new associational world of social and business networks of the Victorian middle classes. Between 1830 and 1870, fifteen of what would become seen as the most prestigious elite gentleman’s clubs were formed in London, such as the Garrick Club (1831), East India Club (1849) and the Hurlingham Club (1869). In the provinces, the same social clustering took place, and as can be seen from the previously mentioned roll-call of football clubs formed in industrial cities, the game was one of its most conspicuous beneficiaries. Perhaps the earliest example of these new middle-class football clubs was that formed in Edinburgh by John Hope in 1824. He had played football at Edinburgh’s High School and, on moving to what is now Edinburgh University and discovering that the game wasn’t played there, formed his own ‘football’ club. Composed largely of young Edinburgh solicitors, Hope’s club lasted for seventeen years playing internal matches against each other.7 This would be the initial pattern for all clubs of the mid-Victorian era. Liverpool members would divide into Rugby and Cheltenham old boys versus the rest, Bradford played captain’s side versus secretary’s side, and many clubs played fair versus dark, married against single, and when all else
failed, A-M versus N-Z or some other alphabetical adversarial arrangement. Clubs made no effort to attract spectators and paid little attention to those who did watch. None of the twenty-one provincial football clubs listed in the 1868 Football Annual charged an entrance fee to watch a match. Indeed, admission to some of Sheffield FC’s early matches was by invitation only. The first football clubs were precisely that: associations of young men organised solely for the enjoyment of their members. The football played by these clubs was neither soccer nor rugby as we know them today. The obvious modern differentiation between the two football codes – that football is a kicking game and rugby is largely a handling game – cannot be extended back to the 1850s or 1860s.8 Clear differentiation between the association and rugby codes did not emerge until the 1870s. So, for example, handling the ball and passing it by hand were a minor part of the Rugby School version of football. Even when the Rugby Football Union was formed in 1871, the use of hands was subordinate to dribbling and kicking the ball. Play revolved around scrummaging and kicking to set up scrummages. Forwards, who would usually comprise fifteen of what were twenty-a-side adult teams until 1877, aimed to break through their opponents by dribbling the ball with their feet through the scrum. Until 1886 a rugby match could only by won by the side scoring the most goals. Conversely, scrum-type struggles for the ball were common in Eton and Winchester schools’ football games, and references to ‘scrimmages’ are not uncommon in reports of matches played under Sheffield Association rules.9 Far from being a ‘handling code’ at this time, Rugby School’s football rules severely limited handling the ball. If the ball was caught on the full from a kick – a ‘fair catch’ – the catcher was allowed to kick the ball unhindered by the opposing side, as was the case in the early rules of both the FA and the Sheffield FA. But if the ball was on the ground, it could not be picked up unless it was bouncing. A rolling or stationary ball could not be touched with the hand. Using the feet to propel the ball was a major feature of the football games that emerged from Rugby School, and, conversely, catching and handling the ball was also common among those games that would later become associated with soccer. In fact, all forms of football that were played in the 1850s and 1860s had far more in common than that which set them apart. Kicking and handling the ball differed only by degree. Rather than being two distinct codes, there was one football with a spectrum of views about how it could be played. Outside of a few public school partisans, rules were a matter of pragmatism and subordinate to the desire to play the game. The view of one of the founders of the Hull club (today’s Hull FC rugby league side), William Hutchinson, that ‘we played any mortal code possible with other clubs away
from home so long as we could get a game of some sort’, would have been widely endorsed. Hull’s first away match was under FA rules at Lincoln in 1866 and, despite being known as a rugby club, they regularly played against FA sides, so much that when the Nottinghamshire Guardian called for the formation of a Midlands football association, it included Hull alongside Nottingham, Lincoln and Newark as one of the leading clubs of the region.10 Stoke Ramblers, the forerunner of Stoke City, played Sheffield rules against clubs in Derbyshire and South Yorkshire, and rugby matches against the Congleton and Leek clubs in their first season. Sale FC committed themselves in 1870 to play association and rugby on alternate Saturdays.11 Even rugby-playing Bradford still set aside two Saturdays a season on their fixture list for ‘association practice’ as late as 1873. Like Blackheath, London’s Civil Service FC was a founder member of both the FA and the RFU. Manchester FC, arguably Lancashire’s most socially prestigious rugby club, entered the FA Cup in 1877. Clapham Rovers were so successful at both rugby and association that they were not only a founding member of the RFU in 1871 but also won the FA Cup in 1880. The fluid nature of the rules of the game at this time and the lack of what might be termed ‘code-patriotism’ is exemplified by Bramham College, a small private school in West Yorkshire. It played its own code of rules (which had soccer-style goals, rugby’s offside and ‘fair catch’ rules, and allowed the ball to be propelled forward by the runner bouncing the ball in front of him, as in Australian Rules) and was an early member of the FA, but its old boys were founders of Bradford, Huddersfield and Hull rugby clubs.12 Ultimately, the vast majority of footballers just wanted to play a game – and codes of rules were merely a means to this end.
very helpful!
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