The development of sport throughout the nineteenth century. Pre-industrialisation sport in Britain came in the form of popular recreation. It was often a rural and parochial activity. Sport often had no rules and was poorly structured and organised. It commonly took place around public houses or during Wakes and Fairs and was therefore closely accompanied with heavy drinking and gambling. Sport typically took the form of mob games; there were too many people playing the games and there was a severe lack of order and rules. As a consequence there was a lot of violent behaviour; kicking, tripping and punching was recognised as part of the game, but this meant that injuries were common.
During this time popular recreation was generally based around cruelty; animal sports such as hunting, shooting, baiting, coursing and dog and cock fighting, were widespread. Public schools; such as Clarendon Boys’ school were an endowed place of education with great social standing. The Sons of Gentlemen, the talented and the elite attended them. They were exclusive schools although they were often frugal and the teachers severe; they therefore acquired the title “Barbarian schools” because of these harsh conditions.
These were privately owned schools and there were only 9 of them around the country. They were established in the 1864 Clarendon report.Most schoolmasters at this time strongly believed that sport was a waste of time and distracting. It was actively discouraged by most because it was alleged to encourage unhealthy indiscriminate and riotous behaviour; such as drinking, gambling and violence. There was hereafter a class divide, which decided that sport was not appropriate for future Gentlemen; “Football is only suitable for butcher’s boys” (said the Butler of Shrewsbury)
The preliminary period of public schools had a slight influence on the development of sport. It began to deal with the problem of order and organisation by introducing individual rules. The fact that schools had individual rules meant that there couldn’t any inter-schools competitions because the rules that each team played by varied from school to school. Following these teams began to step up the regularity of play thus improving all round performance, but due to the fact that they only used local rules games only went ahead internally.
It wasn’t until about the 1840’s that Public schools began to change and generate more influence and involvement in sport. One of the main leaders in the direction of athleticism was Rugby school, which was one of the Clarendon schools. The Head there Thomas Arnold can be remembered as one of a number of Headmasters who established an environment that eventually stimulated athleticism.
Arnold endeavoured to create social control and moral reform through sport. It was important to him to create Christian Gentlemen; form a “manly piety”. It was believed that he used sport as he thought it was morally good although it can be argued that it was due to his love for sport as Wymer (1953) suggested that Arnold did in fact have a love for several sports; such as cricket, mountain-walking, swimming, sailing, shooting, and riding.