Manly and Muscular Diversions: Public Schools and the Nineteenth-Century Sporting Revival (review)

Manly and Muscular Diversions: Public Schools and the Nineteenth-Century Sporting Revival, by Tony Money; pp. xii + 191. London: Duckworth, 1997, £18.95.

A great deal has been written in recent decades on the role of the British public schools in the nineteenth-century sports revival. Much of this has built on the ground first broken by J. A. Mangan's Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School (1981), with its treatment of the surviving mediaeval institutions and the role of new foundations. Tony Money is the archivist of one such Victorian newcomer, Radley College, built by the River Thames in Berkshire. His interest lies more in the specifics of public school games provision than in issues arising in a wider educational and cultural debate.

The book begins with a general outline history of team games, deeply rooted in an antiquarian approach, and it moves on to the Victorian experience, seen very much from within the schools themselves and in terms of play itself rather than the place of sport within an overall ideal of education. The central part of the text is taken up by descriptions of games with distinctive and sometimes exclusive public school affiliations--fives (a handball game), cricket (the roots of which lay elsewhere), football, and boating. Each case is dealt with largely in terms of the experience of individual schools. Finally, the author relates the emergence of squash and, very briefly, golf, for which he claims a major role for his own school. A brief chapter takes us into the twentieth century, mixing regret at the decline of an athletic culture he sees as having been destroyed from within and a pride in the continued maintenance of some lingering traditions. In that lies the key to this work's purpose: to serve as an additional prop for an almost antiquarian maintenance of tradition. The book is well-produced and illustrated and its strength lies in its extensive use of quoted documents. It is only briefly illuminated by an awareness and discussion of the wider issues current now for some two decades, so its value for active historians is mainly as a resource for other interpretative work. It should appeal most to those who themselves work in public schools or who wish to strengthen nostalgia for their purposive youth.

John Lowerson
University of Sussex

John Lowerson is Reader in History at the University of Sussex and has published extensively on the history of leisure. His books include Sport and the English Middle Classes, 1870- 1914 (1993). He is currently preparing a book on amateur operatics and musical taste.

...