Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (67 page)

This did not mean that the idea of fully accessible open spaces for the masses had entirely vanished. London led the way by setting aside money to purchase lands for public parks: the land for Primrose Hill park was bought from its ground landlords, Eton College, for £20,236 in 1846; Victoria Park was laid out in east London in 1849; Battersea Park was purchased for more than £100,000 in the 1850s. But little happened outside London at first. In 1844, Preston was the one town in Lancashire to have a public park. Though in 1840, £10,000 had been set aside in a general fund for the provision of public parks, nearly twenty years later, only Manchester and Bradford had come forward, Manchester requesting £3,000, and Bradford £1,500.
⁵¹
Instead, many parks outside London were bought and laid out by charitable institutions or private philanthropists: the Duke of Norfolk gave Sheffield its first park in 1847; Sir Titus Salt created a park in Saltaire; both Hull and Halifax had parks donated by private benefactors; Middlesbrough’s Albert Park was funded by a local ironworks.
⁵²
Although the creation of public parks was a slow change, and for the most part funded by private enterprise, still by the second half of the century it was accepted that some public land must be kept for the working classes’ use. There
had been riots when Epping Forest was threatened with enclosure and deforestation in 1849, and when in 1882 it was finally opened to the public it was Queen Victoria herself who performed the opening ceremony.
⁵³

Many of these parks, however, were for families, for decorous walks, for listening to the music played in the bandstands, for socializing in general. They were not for games-playing. Games instead still tended to be played on land owned by pubs, as had been the case from the sixteenth century. Publicans and innkeepers arranged the matches and held both the prize money the gambling stakes for a variety of games: skittles, bowls, wrestling, cricket, pedestrianism (foot races). Football was not originally a pub sport.

The origins of football are wreathed in myth - partly because ‘football’ was a generic term for various sorts of throwing, carrying and kicking ball games. One kind of football, and possibly the earliest, took the form of one of those ritual games that were played in each locality by a certain group of people (for football it was the young men of the community) at a certain time, usually Shrove Tuesday. This was not absolute - in Devonshire the annual football game was on Good Friday, in parts of Nottinghamshire it was on Easter Tuesday, in Kirkham, Lancashire, on Christmas Day
⁵⁴
- but in general village football was a Shrovetide game. Some parishes played the game over an entire village - between the east and west districts of a parish, perhaps; some played ten or fifteen a side; some restricted the players to parish residents, others welcomed anyone who wanted to join in. Derby can provide one example of the form the annual village game could take. The Derby match was, in theory, played between two parishes, St Peter’s and All Saints, but in practice anyone in the area could take part, and many travelled to Derby every year just to play. The match started at two o’clock on Shrove Tuesday in the town marketplace, with, by the very early nineteenth century, between 500 and 1,000 a side, such was its fame. The aim was to get the ball to a goal a mile outside the town - to the gate of a field on one side, and to the wheel of a watermill on the other. The side that was aiming for the field found it helpful to head for the River Derwent and then swam with the ball if they could manage it: there was a good landing place fairly near the goal. Their rivals, on the other hand, tried to start up the watermill to prevent a goal being scored. A frequent tactic by both teams, if they saw no way through their rivals’
defence, was to hide the ball until dusk, or remove its stuffing and smuggle it out under someone’s shirt.
⁵⁵

Yet while this type of game certainly existed - and today continues to be played at Shrovetide in a few communities, such as Ashbourne, in Derbyshire - it was not the direct ancestor of football as the sport is known today. This type of football most likely developed out of a more impromptu game, a kickabout, that was played on rough ground, or during fairs and on market days. This football had none of the ritual elements of the annual game, and was played in an informal manner by anyone who wanted to in the villages, and, later, when enclosure and industrialization put common land at a premium, in the same pub grounds as other sports. By the 1830s and 1840s pub football teams were issuing challenges in
Bell’s Life
, just as other pub teams did. There were announcements made by football teams from the Grapes and the White Lion pubs near Dudley, the Bee Hive in Rugby, the Hole in the Wall in Blackburn, the Horns in Penistone, the Blue Ball at Thurslestone - and many more.
⁵⁶
In 1865 the local postal directory for Sheffield listed thirteen clubs, of which eleven had their addresses at pubs. Other pub teams included Newton Heath, based at the Three Crowns, Oldham Road, Manchester (later it changed its name to Manchester United). Everton was based in its early days at the Queen’s Head pub, in Everton village; West Bromwich Albion in 1879 used the White Hart inn and the Roebuck for changing. As late as 1894 three professional clubs - Gainsborough Trinity, Nottingham Forest and Manchester City - were still using pubs as changing areas, and then walking to their grounds.
⁵⁷

Some teams did not even have the organization that pub support provided: they were established simply by groups who played in the street together, and they tended to take their names from their neighbourhoods: in Blackburn there were the Red Row Stars, the Gibraltar Street Rovers, the Cleaver Street Rovers and the George Street West Rovers. In Stirling, of the sixty-eight teams known to have existed between 1876 and 1895, forty-two had neighbourhood or street names.
⁵⁸
Many of those who supported football came from Methodist or other Nonconformist backgrounds: they saw football as a substitute for attending sports such as racing and pugilism, where there was a heavy betting and drinking element. Other teams were therefore formed by schools, churches or chapels, as a way of keeping the local boys occupied and out of trouble: the Droop Street Board School, in Kentish Town in
London, was the starting point for Queen’s Park Rangers.
⁵⁹
Yet even these teams often had links with groups like pubs or clubs. A Church of England school team from Wolverhampton (later the Wolverhampton Wanderers) was based only geographically in a church group: its financial support came not from the school itself, but from the father of one of the players, who was a publican, and a local businessman. The Christ Church Football Club, in Bolton, was established by the Revd J. F. Wright, but after four years the team gave up his schoolroom as their meeting place and moved to the Gladstone Hotel, renaming themselves the Bolton Wanderers.

Aston Villa’s beginnings show how complex the ‘origins’ of a team could be. Aston Villa is usually referred to as a church team, and it did have links to the Bible class of the Aston Villa Wesleyan Chapel in Lozells, Birmingham, but the field the team played on belonged to a butcher, and the changing-room facilities were provided courtesy of a publican. Furthermore, in 1870 Aston Villa was still functioning as much as a social club as as a football team: it held regular meetings on Monday evenings at a coffee house in Aston High Street, and in 1883 the members continued to enjoy music on ‘quiet social evening[s]’. Equally, Tottenham Hotspur could be said to have had pub origins, as it was supported by the brewery that owned the White Hart pub, which gave it access to the land near the lane the pub was situated on. Yet the team also received support from the local YMCA.
⁶⁰

Other teams were more straightforwardly formed in the workplace, either by a group of like-minded men (such as the employees of the Woolwich Arsenal) or with the encouragement of their employers, who thought team sports were character-forming. West Ham was originally named Thames Ironworks, drawing its men from the A. F. Hills shipyard; West Bromwich Albion was the team from Salter’s Spring Works; Stoke City was a railway team (as late as 1912 twenty-seven out of the thirtyeight clubs in the Crewe and District League were railway sponsored).
⁶¹
In Birmingham, of the 218 teams mentioned in the local press between 1876 and 1884, 84 were linked in some way to religious groups, 13 were named after pubs, and 20 were formed at or by local works or factories.
⁶²

Sporting clubs in general did much to make football a coherent force, and it was often at a cricket club, whose members wanted some winter sport, that football began to raise its profile beyond the working classes and schoolboys. Between 1840 and 1850 two county cricket clubs,
Leicestershire and Surrey, had football matches in the winter, with Leicestershire changing its name as early as 1840 to the Leicestershire Cricket and Football Club. In 1849 the Surrey Football Club was formed within the Surrey County Cricket Club, which had been set up at Kennington Oval in 1845. Football teams that grew out of cricket clubs included Sheffield, Sheffield Wednesday, Accrington, Darwen, Preston North End and Sheffield United.
⁶³

Other clubs were formed when former schoolboys met to continue playing the game they had enjoyed at school. The Sheffield club, founded in 1857 and possibly the first purely football club to be established, was set up by ex-students of the Sheffield Collegiate School. It was, noted the
Sheffield Daily Telegraph
in 1867, a more prestigious club than many, ‘due to the character of the members…[who] are almost exclusively of the middle class’.
⁶⁴
The Forest Club was started
c.
1859 by a group of boys who had played together at Harrow, and in Scotland the Edinburgh Academicals was founded in 1857-8 by members of the Edinburgh Academy.

The main impediment to football being played throughout the country was the lack of a single set of rules. Racing had had rules imposed on it from the top by the Jockey Club, but there was no overall body to do the same for this more working- and middle-class game. Football was played at many schools, but each school had its own version of the game, with its own rules. When the various clubs played, be they pub, works, church or socially based, for the most part the rules had to be agreed between the teams before each match, including establishing how many would play on each side. In the early days of the game, that number was part of the announced challenge that appeared in the newspaper. In 1838, in one of the many advertisements of this type,
Bell’s Life
printed the challenge: ‘A match at football will be played at the cricket ground, Leicester, on Good Friday next, between eleven (principally printers) from Derby and the same number from Leicester. The winners to challenge an equal number from any town in England, for a purse not exceeding £25.’ As time went on, there was no more consistency in the numbers playing, and the teams usually ranged from twelve, to eleven, down to six a side. In 1844
Bell’s
reported, ‘A football match took place on Hampton Court Green on Tuesday last between 12 men of the F and 12 men of the D troop of the 13th Light Dragoons for a supper, which, after a severe struggle, was won by the D troop. Between
30 and 40 sat down to an excellent “spread” at the Toy Tap.’ Even as late as 1859, at Lord’s, the 3rd Battalion the Grenadier Guards beat the 2nd with twenty-five on each side, led by Captains Jarratt and Coulson (the rest of the teams were made up from the ranks). A week later there was a rematch, this time fifteen a side, with six officers taking part.
⁶⁵

In 1858 a letter was published in
Bell’s Life
putting forward the suggestion that schools should all adopt the same rules, so that they could compete against each other. This engendered a lively, opinionated correspondence, all contributors highly partisan, all refusing to accept any rules except the writer’s own. Frederick Lillywhite (see p. 204) wrote to concur with the original suggestion. He thought it would be highly advantageous if his next
Guide to Cricketers
could include the ‘rules of all the sports and athletic games which are enjoyed in this country’. In part, he no doubt genuinely wished for standardization, but as a businessman he saw that it would bring commercial opportunities. The following year, no more conformity had been reached, so his
Guide
published the Eton laws; and by 1862 his brother, John Lillywhite, was selling at his Cricket Warehouse ‘F
OOT
B
ALLS
and the L
AWS
, as played at Eton, Harrow, and Rugby; boxing gloves, quoits, hockey sticks and balls, and all articles for winter sports’. In 1863 ‘the laws now in use at all the schools’ were available alongside ‘Boxing gloves, footballs…rackets, hockey-sticks and balls, dumb-bells, &c.,’ at his newly expanded and renamed Cricket and British Sports Warehouse.
⁶⁶

The question of standardization was becoming urgent, and in 1863 a dozen clubs and groups of old boys, mostly from the south-east and London, met to attempt to agree ‘some set of rules which the metropolitan clubs should adopt among themselves’. They called themselves the Football Association, and they were pleased to discover that Cambridge had codified a set of rules which included regulations on the offside rule, permissible forms of tackling, goals and goal kicks. Hands, these rules warned, ‘may be used only to stop a ball and place it on the ground before the feet’.
⁶⁷
Two months after this announcement, Lillywhite was announcing, ‘The F
OOTBALL
A
SSOCIATION
- The P
OCKET
L
AWS
of the above are now ready, price 6
d.
, per post 7
d.
, and in a few days will be ready, the Laws on sheet varnished, with rollers for the Club Room, price 1s., per post 1
s.
2
d.
Published only (by authority) by J
OHN
L
ILLYWHITE
, Cricket, Football, and British Sport Warehouse’
⁶⁸
(and yet again the name of the shop had changed to reflect the popularity of the new sport).