Origins of Amateurism Paper

THE INVENTION OF AMATEURISM, 1820-1886! Tony Collins! De Montfort University! ! The cultural dominance of the amateur paradigm in sport has led to a general assumption that amateurism was the original state of sport, a prelapsarian era in which sport was pure and free from its subsequent corruption by money, commercialism and professionalism.! ! In fact, this idea is completely wrong. ! ! A glance at the Oxford English Dictionary demonstrates that, even in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the word ‘amateur’ had a different meaning. It did not mean someone who was not paid to play sport. It was used to describe an aristocratic patron of sport rather than an unpaid participant. Pierce Egan’s Pancratia and his later Boxiana both emphasise the fact that London society ‘amateurs’ were the arbiters of most issues in boxing. Indeed, the word was almost interchangeable with the ‘Fancy’, the informal social networks of aristocrats and their hangers-on that controlled most sporting activities.1 Aristocrats who played sport, such as cricketers or the occasional pedestrian such as the famous pedestrain Captain Barclay, were not called amateurs but ‘gentlemen’, a term which denoted social status rather than whether they were paid for their endeavours. The idea that an amateur was a sportsman who did not receive money for playing was 1" For the original meaning of amateur, see, for example, Egan, Boxiana, pp.12,14, 15, 56, 111 and 204. unknown until the mid-1800s. This paper seeks to explore and how amateurism was redefined and invented in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.! ! Modern sport began to emerge in England in the eighteenth century, in considerable part due to aristocratic patronage.. Boxing, cricket and horse-racing began to be codified, regulated and commercialised. Central to this development of sport was the importance of gambling and other monetary interests. Indeed, a crucial reason for the codifying of sport was in order to facilitate transparent, open wagering - for example, the MCC’s ‘Laws of the Game of Cricket’ had sections on gambling until the early 1800s. ! ! But by the 1820s and 1830s this model of sport was in decline. The conspicuously extravagant wagers of the cricketing nobility dried up and the boxing halls were emptied of their titled spectators. This aristocratic disengagement with sport (with the exception of horse-racing) was due to the breakdown of eighteenth century hierarchies of deference and control. Peter Burke’s belief that the ‘the clergy, the nobility, the merchants, the professional men’ had abandoned popular culture by 1800 was both premature and too sweeping to apply to Britain.2 The British aristocracy continued to engage in popular sports until the end of the Napoleonic wars. But within a decade of the Battle of Waterloo, the titled no longer commanded unquestioned authority in society, whether it was in politics, culture or games, and started to withdraw from sport. ! ! 2" Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, London, 1978, p. 270 This eclipse could be clearly seen on the cricket field Of the twenty-two annual Gentlemen versus Players matches played between 1819 and 1840, the Gentleman came out on top on just six occasions, whereas the professional Players won fourteen times. The dominance of the professional undermined the authority of the MCC and eventually led to the creation in the 1840s of the All England XI, the first of many professional cricket teams that toured the country playing local sides, organised and led by William Clarke, an archetypal pub landlord sportsman-entrepreneur.3 ! ! These changes were directly connected to the shifting relationships between the classes in British society. Rapid industrialisation and urbanisation led to an increase in the size and influence of the middle- and working-classes.The industrial bourgeoisie and the growing army of lawyers, accountants and civil servants that the administration of industrial capitalism required had begun to chaff under the archaic structure of a corrupt parliamentary system. Moreover, the ideologues of the middle classes, for example Rugby School headmaster Dr Thomas Arnold, saw themselves as the new moral core of the British nation, opposing what they saw as a dissolute aristocracy and an uncivilised working class. Pressure for reform resulted in the 1832 Reform Act which brought the vote to the middle classes. As Eric Hobsbawm has argued, ‘no period of British history has been as tense, as politically and socially disturbed, as the 1830s and early 1840s, when both the working class and the middle class, separately or in conjunction, demanded what they regarded as fundamental changes’.4 ! 3" Robert Light, ‘Ten Drunks and a Parson: The Victorian Professional Cricketer Reconsidered’, Sport in History, vol. 25, no. 1 (2005), pp.60-76. 4" Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire Penguin, rev ed. 1999, p. 55. ! So by the mid-nineteenth century sport in Britain had lost much of its aristocratic social cachet, and the class polarisation of society had created a vacuum that left sport temporarily in the hands of a fringe of small capitalists such as William Clarke - a petty bourgeoisie of bat, ball and boxing - who saw themselves as part of a new mass entertainment industry of music halls, penny dreadfuls and titilating Sunday newspapers.! ! This was not to last. The national and cultural significance that sport had acquired in the Napoleonic era - when boxing had become in exemplar of the supposedly British national characteristic of ‘fair play’ - meant that it was too important to be left in the hands of marginal profiteers or the lower classes. The growing self-confidence of the middle classes led to their growing cultural assertion across British society. The formation of the Football Association (1863) and London’s Amateur Athletic Club (1866) was part of the same process of middle-class consolidation that saw the creation of the British Medical Association (1856) and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (1868).5 ! ! In particular, a new conception of the nature and meaning of sport was beginning to be articulated in Britain’s private schools, which themselves had begun to change to meet the needs of an industrialising nation and its expanding empire.6 In the worldview of the Muscular Christians who came to dominate many elite British schools, sport had an 5" For an overview of this period, see K.T. Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation 1846-1886, Oxford, 2000. 6" There is a considerable literature on the public schools in this period, most notably J.R. Honey, Tom Brown’s Universe. The Development of the Victorian Public School, London, 1977, J.A. Mangan’s Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School, London, 1981 and M. J. Bradley and B. Simon (eds) The Victorian Public School, London, 1975. intrinsic meaning and message that transcended mere play.7 Amateurism, reinvented as the principle that one did not receive payment for playing sport, was at the heart of this moral universe. It had two core components: a belief that sport should not be played for material reward and the idea that ‘fair play’ should govern the conduct of games.8 It is worth reiterating the fact these were essentially non-contentious reiterations of common sense. The vast majority of games of all types were played as unremunerated recreation. And no sport could be played without a mutual recognition by its participants of the unwritten laws of on-field behaviour. But the repackaging of these ideas under the rubric of ‘amateurism’ meant that they could also be used as an ideology of control and exclusion, dressed up as a moral imperative for sport. ! ! The chronology of amateurism highlights how it emerged in direct response to working- class influence in sport. Since the eighteenth century, both rowing and athletics had considerable working-class participation, rowing due its importance to dockers before the development of modern stevedoring techniques. To curb this influence, the 1861 Rowing Almanack excluded absolutely ‘tradesmen, labourers, artisans or working mechanics’ from its definition of amateur. The Amateur Athletic Club, the forerunner of the Amateur Athletic Association, explicitly excluded anyone who was ‘a mechanic, artisan or labourer’ from its definition of an amateur.9 ! 7" For a discussion of this relationship, see, Dominic Erdozain, The Problem of Pleasure: Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian Religion, Woodbridge, 2010. 8" For a detailed discussion, see Richard Holt, ‘The amateur body and the middle-class man: work, health and style in Victorian Britain’, Sport in History, vol. 26, no. 3 ( 2006), pp. 352-69. 9" For these and many other examples of amateur regulations, see appendix two of Vamplew, Pay Up and Play the Game, pp. 302-7. ! In cricket, the subordination of the professional to the amateur was rigidly enforced as the MCC sought to destroy the influence of the touring professional sides such as the All England XIs in the 1860s and 1870s. Under the MCC, professionals travelled separately, used different dressing rooms and entered the field through their own gates. Social segregation within the same team was rigidly enforced.10 ! ! The question of social class became especially acute with the unprecedented explosion of soccer and rugby in the 1880s. The fear that the working class would ‘swamp’ football, either consciously or through sheer weight of numbers, was palpable among the leaders of the two games: ‘why should we hand [rugby] over without a struggle to the hordes of working men players who would quickly engulf all others?” asked the dual cricket and rugby international Frank Mitchell.11 Moreover, working-class culture continued to treat sport as a form of entertainment. Payment for play was an expected outcome of sporting success. Confronted by a growing number of clubs in the English north and midlands who paid their leading players, the Football Association (FA) had a brief but vigorous debate about professionalism.

Load more