Darts in England, 1900–1939. A Social History (review)

Pub games and sports are one of the few areas of popular recreation that have largely escaped the scrutiny of academe in recent decades, and Patrick Chaplin is to be thanked for taking what is arguably the most important of these activities so seriously. This admirably and resourcefully researched volume, rooted in a doctoral thesis, takes as its central theme the transformation of darts “from a casual pub game at the turn of the twentieth century into a popular, codified, and, to some extent, cross-class recreation by the mid-1930s” (p. 3). Very much in the spirit of leisure history as it has developed from the 1970s it seeks “to make sense of darts as part of English society” (p. 17).

Chaplin begins by discussing the origins of darts and its role in the public house before 1918. The modern game is shown to have emerged from the long established ‘puff and dart’ and a fairground version of a purely throwing game imported from France in the mid-nineteenth century. One of Chaplin’s most significant conclusions here is that darts in the drink place was a relative rarity much before 1900 and, indeed, that pub games more generally were far less common than we have imagined; he argues that “one reason for the continued high level of drinking was that there was little to do in the majority of public houses” (p. 53). There are, however, perhaps just enough hints elsewhere in the text—evidence of the game in pre-1914 Bolton and a claim for the existing popularity of darts by a writer in Hotel Review in 1924 (pp. 126, 82)—to act as a stimulus for the research into this earlier period that may yet challenge this view. Chaplin then explores the critical role played by breweries in the establishment of darts leagues from 1925, linking the growth of darts to the movement for public house improvement whereby brewers, faced by powerful new rivals within the inter-war leisure industry, sought to find ways of holding and attracting customers in more welcoming properties that offered greater variety of entertainment. The book finally considers the role and function of the game’s putative governing body, the National Darts Association (NDA), the emergence of the small but resourceful service industry that grew up around the pastime and, finally, the ‘darts craze’ of the 1930s. Arguing for increased involvement by women and above all by social groups beyond the working class (encouraged, perhaps, by a brief game between King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Slough Community Centre in 1937), Chaplin argues for the game becoming “a dominant part of popular culture of the English middle and upper classes” by the end of the decade (p. 205). This seems a rather dramatic claim and one that would require far greater attention to what happened in the future. ‘Crazes’ are exactly that and often leave little long-term legacy.

This is an informative and generally highly successful exploration of the subject. Although commercial interests in the form of brewers, dart and dartboard manufacturers and the News of the World, sponsors of an extremely important individual championship from 1927, are shown to be of central importance, Chaplin resolutely and convincingly refuses to see darts as “simply the product of pressure from elite interests.” He stresses the impact of pressure and resistance from below and argues for ‘a more complex social interaction’ than is often posited in inter-war leisure history. The difficulties of the NDA in establishing itself outside of the south-east of England, is another good example of that resistance. As this also demonstrates, the book has suggestive material on the geography of darts which remained decidedly English for much of the period and clearly grew far later in much of the north than popular memory might suggest. Chaplin also shows sensitivity to gender issues. The book’s claim to be a ‘social history’ is, however, slightly misleading in both positive and negative ways...