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

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, (FA) had a brief but vigorous debate about professionalism. In 1885 it decided to adopt the MCC model and allow professionalism under tightly controlled circumstances: no professional player could be

involved in the running of a club or the administration of the sport.12

10 The best account of amateurism in cricket remains Derek Birley, The Willow Wand, London, 1989.

11 Frank Mitchell, ‘A Crisis in ’, St James’s Gazette, 24 September 1897

12 For the fullest account of the debate see Dave Russell, ‘From Evil to Expedient: The Legalization of Professionalism in English Football, 1884–85’ in Stephen Wagg (ed.) Myths and Milestones in the History of Sport Palgrave, 2011, pp. 32-56. Yet, though the professionals were to be strictly subordinated to football’s middle-class leadership, it was a different matter on the field of play. After the legalisation of professionalism in 1885, no middle-class club ever again appeared in the FA Cup final. The amateurs could no longer consistently compete against the professionals. Despite claims to the contrary, winning was as vital to the middle classes as it was to the working class, and their failure to compete successfully against those they viewed as their social inferiors was a powerful impetus to the growth of the amateur ideology.

It was the fear that rugby would also succumb to working-class domination that animated the leadership of the Rugby Football Union (RFU). The huge influx of working-class players and spectators into rugby in the north of England seemed to threaten the control of the middle class leadership of the RFU. As RFU president Arthur Budd argued, the experience of soccer was a warning:

only six months after the legitimisation of the bastard [of professionalism] we see

two professional teams left to fight out the final [FA] cup tie. To what does this all

end? Why this - gentlemen who play football once a week as a pastime will find

themselves no match for men who give up their whole time and abilities to it. ...The

Rugby Union committee finding themselves face to face with the hydra have

determined to throttle it before he is big enough to throttle them. ... No mercy but

iron rigour will be dealt out.13

13 Arthur Budd, ‘The Game’ in Football Annual, London, 1886, p. 52. Although followers of Norbert Elias have argued that RFU’s attitude to professionalism was due to its leadership being less confident about its social status than the supposedly

more aristocratic FA leadership, this is not the case.14 Both opposition to and support for professionalism within soccer could be found in the FA’s leadership in the early 1880s. In reality, the difference in attitude was due to timing. The FA adopted the only viable model of professionalism available to them, that of the MCC’s tight control of the professional player. But the RFU leadership believed that the FA’s approach had failed to stop

professionalism’s advance.15 The changing nature of attitudes can be seen in the person of

N.L. ‘Pa’ Jackson, the sports journalist and leader of Corinthians F.C., the supposedly pristine-pure representatives of amateur soccer. Although he became famous as a vehement opponent of professionalism, he had actually seconded the motion that led to the FA’s legalisation of payments to players in 1885.

Thus the debate over professional sport in the late nineteenth century was a reflection of the wider debate in British society about the rising power and growing self-confidence of the working class. From the mid-1880s Britain was wracked by rising class conflict that led to the creation of a new wave of trade unions for unskilled workers and the formation of socialist organisations. The alarm of the RFU and many others about the direction that mass spectator sport was taking was a microcosm of a widespread middle-class fear of the working class. Amateurism was redefined and invented as a moral code as a solution to this fearfulness. And, for certain sections of the middle classes throughout the British

14 As is argued in Eric Dunning and Kenneth Sheard, Gentlemen, Barbarians and Players, 2nd Edition, Abingdon, 2005.

15 The debate is discussed in Tony Collins, Rugby’s Great Split, London, 1998, pp. 41-51. Empire, the emphasis of the amateur ethos on obedience before authority and its ability to regulate who could and could not play were among amateur sport’s more positive and

attractive features.16

1 November 2012

16 Some aspects of this are discussed in J.A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism, Harmondsworth, 1986.