This Sporting Life: Sport and Liberty in England, 1760-1960 by Robert Colls

This Sporting Life: Sport and Liberty in England, 1760-1960 Reviews

• 
  Stephen Goldenberg

  There are many fascinating nuggets of information in this social and cultural history of sport in England, but I found the whole book far too dense and academic for my taste. There are some cogent and interesting arguments running through it but they are hard to follow as I couldn’t discern a very clear organisation in its chapters.
  The key concept is present in the subtitle linking sport with liberty. Some of the most interesting sections look at the clashes between ancient customs clashing with modern concerns about animal cruelty related to hunting and events like the Stamford bull run. Likewise, there are strong sections on clashes between social classes e.g. the clashes between game shooting and poaching. In more recent times, there is a study of the move from the gentleman amateur to the professional sportsman and the struggle for women’s sport to be recognised.
• 
  Malcolm

  The claim to be a ‘sporting nation’ is widely made in many states, reflecting among other things sport’s social, cultural and ideological power as well as asserting a particular kind of masculinist gendering of the nation. Yet it is hard to pin down what it means (hence its ideological power) and the extent to which sociological and historical evidence bears out the assertion. Part of that difficulty lies in the very condition of pervasiveness, but much of it also lies in evidence and especially the evidence historians can use. In a cultural sense, part of the issue of demonstrating the sporting-ness of the nation is sport’s ubiquity and banality. In terms of evidence, that means we come up against the issue Rob Colls’ notes in this excellent if idiosyncratic exploration to England’s sporting-ness: that is, “Not everything we feel is written down, not everything we know is said” (p168).
  
  In what is more cultural than social history (but is very much both) Colls explores this anthropological concern with sport’s pervasiveness, with its weaving into the being of England. At the heart of the discussion is a tension between what it means to define and classify a practice as sport (and here he cites the well-known cases of Allen Guttmann’s and Sebastian Darbon’s models, widely if poorly deployed across the field) and the experiential problem that ‘actual sport’ (as he labels it on p6) does not comfortably fit either of those models: Colls’ counterpoint here is notions of play drawn from Huizinga, Geertz, Piaget and Wahrman. The anthropologist in me usually shudders when Geertz is invoked – because it is often little more than an aside – although not in this case, while the play studies person in me got very excited by this distinction.
  
  The challenge, for many of us trained in the writing of social history, is how to articulate the best way to express this pervasiveness, especially because the evidence is so allusive – it is those feelings not written down, those things known but unstated. Colls’ response is to step back from some sense of a completist, linear or even thematic narrative in favour of linked and inter-related essays. The effect is that while each chapter is both relatively autonomous and directly connected to at least one of its adjacent chapters, the book as a whole builds an overarching sense of sport as fundamental to the experience of being English. That is not to say this is an argument for sport as the exclusive condition of the English, but it is to say that Colls argues that sport has a distinctive relationship with being English.
  
  The thing about the essay format is that it allows Colls to engage deeply and meaningfully with the very evidential problem he notes – allusiveness and partiality. Each chapter/essay has a similar form, opening with a close reading of a specific event or set of circumstances before stepping back and spiralling out to discuss social and especially cultural contexts. In some cases, the essay form allows him to go further and unpack difference and distinctiveness. The opening chapter, exploring hunting as an exercise in power and status, as both tradition and modernising, is then juxtaposed in the second chapter by a discussion of poaching and hunting as the everyday survival acts of the poor, who may also be the very people who provide the labour the facilitates the hunt’s success. Whereas he explores courage as a national condition through a discussion begun as an examination of prize-fighting, he then extends that to see classed characteristics of courage (or ‘bottom’ as it was known in the 19th century) as an aspect of custom, which he explores by building on the struggles around the Stamford running of the bull as a popular blood sport.
  
  This sense of classed ‘courage’ returns in his exploration of school sport, so valorised in the emergence of British sports history as an aspect of empire, to explore the hierarchical violence of a masculinity asserting the status of the ‘bloods’ as tradition. This then is juxtaposed to the modernity of the football emerging in its institutionalised form from those schools, and the long run presence of women in football as an aspect of the very modernity of the game emerging from those bastions of tradition. This contradiction of tradition and modernity is seen as a consequence of the long 19th century struggles over those schools as sites of a new morality, struggles that resonated well beyond those schools.
  
  While Colls cannot escape the long run tendency toward modernity in English sport, his explicit and powerful rejection of any over-emphasis on the institutions of modern sport means that, for instance, football is not seen only as a regulated form of a popular street/folk game but as part of a continuum of sporting experiences that grounds sport in the freely chosen activities that are the liberties of the English. This notion of liberty both pervades the text and is more implicit than explicit, and is most clearly not the individualist notion of ‘freedom’ that pervades so much of contemporary discourse: Colls draws on JS Mill for whom liberty was an ‘associational condition’ (that is, was a collective characteristic) such that although actions and practices might be ‘free, voluntary and undeceived’ they are also contested. Sport’s links to liberty as an aspect of being English then lies in its contested collective condition, making clear that its banality relies on its cultural associativity that is the product of its pervasiveness, suggesting almost that the regulated form of sport is the aberration, while its play form is its link to liberty. But then that might just be my inner play scholar coming to the fore….. while Colls assets sports popularness (as in its ordinariness) as in his observation that “crowds were the standing conference of local historians, very serious and focussed most of the time, madly excited some of the time” (p 240).
  
  The effect of all this bottom-up-ness is a circumlatory presentational style. Colls is after all trying to get to the unwritten and unsaid while being limited to sources that are written or visual – and most definitely not ‘unsaid’. As a result, he grapples with what lies at the interstices of said/written/painted, coming and circling back, where chapters start with the specific to spiral out and around to explore the cultural trope or characteristic that he is drawing out from that specific. The result is a layered text, one the refers in passing to folk, fictitious and historical figures and events, often building clause upon clause to create a sense of cultural presence across time demonstrating the depth and breadth of sport’s associations with liberty in modern England. While circuitous the text is also therefore lyrical, and a long way from the conventions of ‘scientific’ writing as it has come to the fore social history where allusion and cultural depth is in tension with the demonstrability of the case.
  
  Amid all of this Colls has asserted the ordinariness of sport against its regulation while also resisting the romantic nostalgia that so often lies at the base of that challenge to the hegemony of sports institutional form, and in doing so has given us a rich, layered cultural history to be savoured, reviewed and revisited as much for its form and as its content. Seldom does a scholarly text bring me such pleasure-in-the-reading as well as the argument.
• 
  Jonathan

  An entertaining, engaging account of the role sport has played in English society in the modern period. I particularly enjoyed Colls’ insights on how sport expresses the underlying values of those that played and watched.