The Victorians and Sport (review)

The strength of this book lies in its entertaining details: we're told, for instance, that the great cricketer W. G. Grace earned £120,000 over the course of his career (129); that, in the 1890s, Scottish and northern English football clubs were part-owned by working men; and that Queen Victoria was a patron of the Highland Games. While providing such details in The Victorians and Sport Mike Huggins is careful to show the broad cultural ramifications of his topic—as when he describes the popularity of sport on film in the Victorian era. In 1896 the Derby was recorded, processed by the next day, and then shown in the music halls of West End London, where the audiences demanded that it be replayed twice. Within a half decade films had been made of "Henley, Cowes and Carnavon regattas, fencing, polo at Hurlingham, gymkhanas, lawn tennis and a meeting of the Devon and Somerset Staghounds mixed with football, boxing, badger-digging and tug-of-war" (166). Huggins's discussion of funerals, particularly that of Tom Sayers, is likewise stimulating. A British boxing champion between 1849 and 1859, Sayers was considered "one against whose honesty there never was a shade of suspicion" (187). Pubs and shops shut along the route of his entourage while flags flew at half-mast. A public holiday was declared and crowds fought their way into Highgate Cemetery to see him laid to rest. Signs en route read "Peace to England's Champion," and a large Graeco-Roman tomb adorned with a carved bulldog marked his grave. Reading this almost a century and a half later, while the commotion surrounding George Best's funeral was played out in Belfast in 2005, simply emphasised the importance of studying sporting culture in a historical and social context.

The book is imaginatively structured. Huggins divides the book into nine broadly-themed chapters, including "Class and Sport," "The Media," "Stars," and "Loyalties," each of which reads like a stand-alone essay. A section on "Money" was particularly layered as it moved beyond the issue of payments for players and the financing of clubs to examine what would come to be called "sports hospitality" in the contemporary world. Huggins argues that "publicans were almost always amongst the most entrepreneurial members of the Victorian leisure industry" (114). They sponsored events by providing space for them, advertising them, and even by supporting contestants while they trained. In return they attracted custom to their establishments and made money from organising betting. The most successful of these entrepreneurs realised that hospitality was the key to making a fortune from sports, and they clubbed together to provide top quality facilities such as Sandown Park. This was a sensible response to consumer demand, as it is evident that hospitality was central to the experience of the spectator in the Victorian period. A letter from the 1860s, for instance, complains about "the rickety benches and wretched fare at the Oval or Lords . . . give us a fair chance of a comfortable seat, with wholesome food and drink at a moderate price" (117).

However, while the detail provided here is thick and absorbing, the analysis is thin and unsatisfying. The discussion of the "hero" would have benefited from reference to Eric Hobsbawm's model of the "social bandit" or to A. W. Singham's work on the "hero" and the "crowd" in order to direct the reader to links between sport and wider social history. Some reference to the large body of work on the social history of newspapers would also have helped the author avoid jarring statements such as "the media were active in constructing the very meaning of sports, since what people understood of them were [sic] largely shaped by the way they were represented" (142). The reader does not have to be theoretically sophisticated to see the problems with such an assertion. Sources proving that readers took their opinions of sport directly from the press might have made Huggins's assertion that...