Sport and the Military: The British Armed Forces 1880-1960.
Ward, Paul
Sport and the Military: The British Armed Forces 1880-1960, by Tony
Mason and Eliza Riedi. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010. ix,
288 pp. $90.00 US (cloth), $32.00 US (paper).
The Duke of Wellington did not claim that the Battle of Waterloo
was won on the playing fields of Eton, yet, as this book shows, many in
the British armed forces did believe that playing sports made for a more
effective fighting force. Mason and Riedi's detailed and well
researched book explores the role of sport in the military across the
late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book is largely
chronological providing a narrative account of the emergence of
organized sport in the British Army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air
Force.
The first chapter examines the period up to the First World War,
and the authors show how the development of military sport coincided
with a movement to elevate the "moral and intellectual
standard" of Britain's servicemen. The chapter analyzes
boxing, football (soccer), rugby and cricket, among other sports, as
they were played across the services both at home and throughout the
Empire. As Lieutenant G.C. Harrison concluded in 1912, "wherever
there is an English community one can invariably get a game played in a
good sporting spirit" (p. 31). A second chapter reveals differences
between the ranks as it explores officer sports, such as polo,
fox-hunting, and pig-sticking, which showed the continuing hold of the
aristocracy upon important components of the social life of the forces.
"We were hunting five and six days a week," revealed one
officer stationed at Aldershot in the 1880s (p. 52). A government report
in 1902, in the wake of Britain's poor performance in the South
African War, decided that while officers were physically fit, their
intellectual state was less satisfactory. Yet sport continued to be seen
as a way of improving soldiering despite such conclusions and the death
of 36 officers in polo accidents between 1880 and 1914.
Chapter three analyzes sport in the changed circumstances of the
Great War, when the forces were reshaped into a citizen army. At the
same time sport was transformed from spontaneous and improvised into a
compulsory activity for all troops. Matches and tournaments were used
for recruiting purposes and also to relieve the boredom of an army that
spent most of its time away from the front-line. The extent of wartime
sport can be gauged by the employment of six engravers producing medals
for sporting competitions in France alone. The war also brought the
issue of amateurism versus professionalism to the fore, as the officer
corps encouraged the playing of sport for sport's sake, and money
prizes were withdrawn from military competitions. With the return of
peace in 1918, military sport flourished. In 1918 the Army Sport Control
Board was established (with one for the navy formed in 1919 and for the
RAF in 1921). This organization of sport brought an assertion of the
purpose of sport to produce good soldiers according to a public-school
model based on amateurism. While the war had decimated the British
aristocracy, the forces still allowed them a haven in a heartless and
democratic world. Horses continued to be provided to officers even after
the mechanization of the cavalry and the RAF Beagles Association aimed
to have a pack of hounds at every RAF base. Despite the dominance of the
aristocracy, sport also provided an important meeting ground for
soldiers and civilians, as chapter five shows. Soldiers played in front
of civilian crowds, played against and in civilian teams, as well as
performing in civilian competitions as individuals. The Marquis of
Exeter of the Grenadier Guards, for example, won the 400 meter hurdles
at the 1928 Olympics and Sergeant Ferris ran in three Olympic marathons,
winning a silver medal in 1932.
The sixth chapter considers the Second World War and returns to the
theme of sport in a mass army. One major difference with the Great War,
was that most British servicemen were stationed in Britain until the
1944 re-invasion of France and, in this circumstance, sport thrived. It
was then readily exported to theatres of war across the world as
Britain's forces struck out to fight on the road to victory. The
final chapter of the book continues this theme as Britain maintained
conscription into peacetime. Such famous sporting names as Derek
Ibbotson (athletics), Brian Clough (football), and Fred Trueman
(cricket) undertook national service. This seems to have democratized
sport in the armed forces, though the spirit of amateurism remained
paramount.
This is an impressive book based on extensive archival research,
but without becoming too dense. It is filled with real stories of
individual servicemen and a few servicewomen too. It concludes that
there was an awful lot of sport in the British military and that the
forces provided a good home for amateurism. The authors do wear their
arguments very lightly. It is clear that those in control of sport in
the forces believed the claim about Waterloo and the playing fields of
Eton. It is also clear that class continued to matter in the armed
forces, and upper-class identity could be expressed through sporting
practice and success. But non-aristocratic service men also enjoyed
sport and asserted their own agency through its practice. In the wake of
the Second World War, it seems that the armed forces reflected societal
and political changes and it would have been useful for such conclusions
to be related more to developments across wider British society. This in
turn would have enhanced the significance of what is already a very good
book, making it an exercise in social history rather than a study more
narrowly focused in the military history of sport.
Paul Ward
University of Huddersfield
