The Army Isn’t All Work: Physical Culture and the Evolution of the British Army, 1860-1920 by James D. Campbell (review)

In the officer’s mess at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, there is a series of watercolours by Lionel Edwards executed for the 1913 edition of Edwin Alderson’s Pink and Scarlet, or Hunting as a School for Soldiering, depicting episodes of war and sporting equivalents. The most amusing, perhaps, is the equation made between turning one’s horse over to the groom for feeding after the hunt, and turning one’s soldiers over to the sergeant for feeding after a route march. Victorian and Edwardian military memoirs are also redolent of the analogies made between war and sport such as John Bisset’s Sport and War (1875), James Willcocks’s The Romance of Soldiering and Sport (1925), Neville Lyttelton’s Eighty Years: Soldiering, Politicos, Games (1927), and Henry Beauvoir de Lisle’s Reminiscences of Sport and War (1939). All four authors reached general rank as, indeed, did Alderson. As it happens, none of these memoirs figure in the bibliography of James Campbell’s monograph on the development of the Army Gymnastic Staff, which was formed at Aldershot in 1860, and of scientific physical training within the army. He does draw, however, upon Robert Baden Powell’s many books and has searched out a variety of primary sources in British national and regimental archives.

Campbell is a little unlucky in that Tony Mason and Eliza Reid published Sport and the Military: The British Armed Forces, 1880-1960 in 2010, although his own work is based upon his earlier MA thesis for the University of Maine back in 1997. Campbell is at pains, therefore, to emphasise that while Mason and Reid deal only with sport, his focus is upon physical culture, and the relationship of institutionalised physical training to the increasing professionalisation of the army. Inevitably, perhaps, Campbell is drawn back frequently to sport and we get some well known stories such as the footballs handed out to the four companies of the 8^th Battalion, The East Surrey Regiment by Captain W P Neville being kicked out across No Man’s Land on July 1, 1916, emulating Rifleman Frank Edwards of the 18^th (County of London) Battalion, The London Regiment (London Irish Rifles) at Loos on September 25, 1915. Campbell also recounts in outline, but without precise detail, how Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Montresor halted the 2^nd Battalion, The Royal Sussex Regiment to hand out the medals won by B Company in the regimental cricket competition held prior to mobilisation on August 29, 1914 during the retreat from Mons: Montresor was killed on the Aisne on September 14, 1914.

Where Campbell is breaking new ground, however, is in his attempt to relate the army’s development of physical training to the other more recognised advances in professionalism. Some key figures emerging are the first long-serving Superintendent of Gymnasia, Frederick Hammersley; George Fox, who was Inspector of Gymnasia from 1890-97, and went on to be Inspector of Physical Training for the Board of Education; and Sir Reginald Kentish, who was to head the Army Sport Control Board in 1918, and went on to found the National Playing Fields Association. Campbell traces the evolution of physical training science in the army through such means as the debate on the Swedish ‘Ling’ system and the emergence of the first army manual of physical training in 1908. When increasing attention has been drawn to the creation of the army’s tactical manuals during the Great War, it can be noted that SS 137 Recreational Training appeared in 1917, and the provision of sports grounds was mandated in SS 152 Instructions for the Training of the British Armies in France in 1918. Interestingly, SS 137 prohibited monetary prizes for sports competitions, the victors in boxing matches in particular having been so rewarded, in one case with a purse of uncut diamonds. Indeed, Campbell suggests...