There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night –

Ten to make and the match to win –

A bumping pitch and a blinding light,

An hour to play and the last man in.

And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,

Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,

But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote

“Play up! play up! and play the game!”

——, Henry Newbolt, Vitae Lampada (1897)

Introduction

For as long as human societies have existed, people have always enjoyed playing sports. The inhabitants of Ancient China played a game that was similar to soccer which people play today.[1] Ancient Greece had their Olympic Games and the Romans had their gladiatorial combats. The Byzantine Empire had its chariot races and on occasion its supporters even acted like modern-day football hooligans, if the Byzantine writer, Procopius, is to be believed.[2]

The upper classes in early modern England enjoyed hunting or cricket, while those of a more humble station in life often played a rather rough version of football, or ‘mob football’, in which a ball was kicked through the streets and where the games could last for hours. There were also sports which all classes enjoyed watching together: in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, for example, bare-knuckle boxing, or pugilism, matches were attended by high and low.

Most people played or watched sports for enjoyment; athletes were rarely paid and there was little sense of a higher purpose behind the playing of sports. Sport and fitness did not even form a significant part of the school curriculum in the early part of the century. The importance placed upon sport changed in the mid-Victorian period, however, with the reform of the public schools and the expansion of the British Empire, when the ideology of athleticism—strength, speed, power, resilience, and stamina—was promoted among public schoolboys by their teachers and to the public-at-large in popular literature.

The Role of the Public Schools

Many public schools today lay claim to an ancient and historical heritage. King’s School in Canterbury claims, with some justification, that it was established in the year 597. Many more schools were set up during the late medieval and early modern era as a response to the Reformation under Henry VIII. Where youths might have once been instructed by the Catholic Church in an abbey, after the Henry’s break with the Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries, youths would now be instructed by tutors in schools affiliated with the newly-established Church of England. Yet by the eighteenth century, the public schools’ reputation was at rock bottom. The curriculum, which in the 1700s did not include sport, was dominated by the classics.

A classical education was a good idea during the Reformation, when a familiarity with the works of Ancient Greek and Roman poets, satirists, and political commentators was highly valued, but it was altogether unsuitable for the ‘polite and commercial’ world of eighteenth-century England, and if the lads managed to learn anything meaningful, their behaviour left much to be desired and bullying was rife. As a result, Georgian Britain’s upper middle classes largely avoided sending their sons to these places and preferred to educate their children at home, not only because of the bullying, but because the colleges were had a reputation as hotbeds of vice and moral depravity.

The attitude towards public schools was perfectly summed up by the philosopher, John Locke (1632–1704), who argued that if a virtuous young lad was placed with other lads who were prone to misbehaving then his good character would be corrupted, and Locke’s assertions were not entirely unfounded. The memoirs of William Hickey (1749–1830), who attended Westminster School, reveal that by the age of 14, after the school day had finished, he and his fellows often visited taverns and brothels and knew by heart many lewd and bawdy songs. The boys at some of these schools rose in revolt on more than one occasion. At Rugby School in 1797, a riot broke out when the headmaster decided that sixth form students should pay for the damage they had inflicted on a local tradesman’s property. At Eton College in 1818, the boys rose rebelled against the headmaster, John Keate, proceeding to smash up the desks and windows. On more than one occasion the militia had to be called to some of these schools to control the boys. It’s truly unsurprising that the tutors at these schools were often harsh taskmasters and did not flinch from meting out corporal punishment to unruly boys.

Dr Thomas Arnold at Rugby

Things started to improve when Dr Thomas Arnold was appointed as the headmaster of Rugby School in 1828. In terms of what boys were taught, he did not amend the curriculum in any significant way, and it was still dominated by the classics until the 1860s. His main concern instead was to improve the boys’ behaviour by giving them a good moral education and the reputation of his school. He achieved this by allowing the students a limited degree of self-governance through the development of the prefect system, which would teach the lads to take responsibility for their actions, and Arnold’s tenure at Rugby was fictitiously chronicled by Thomas Hughes in Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857). Arnold also permitted the boys to play team sports, although these were not initially a formal part of the syllabus.

Other public schools soon followed Arnold’s lead in ensuring the boys’ morals were improved and gradually other institutions placed a greater emphasis on sport and exercise. A pioneer in this regard was G. E. L. Cotton (1813–66), a former pupil of Arnold’s at Rugby who went on to become the Headmaster of Marlborough School. Under Cotton’s tenure, team games became a formalised part of the school curriculum which would allow boys to exhaust themselves on the pitch instead of rioting and going about town and visiting taverns and brothels like Hickey and his pals did in the preceding century. Schools such as Harrow soon followed Cotton’s lead, although it would take a Royal Commission in the 1860s to fully reform all of the schools by suggesting some practical changes updating the schools’ curricula and moving away from the classics and also the formalisation of team games.

The reforms worked and, by the 1870s, the public reputation of the schools had recovered and they became places which were respectable enough for the sons of the upper middle classes to be educated. For most young middle-class boys, their education did not stop at leaving school for many of them went on to attend university. A ‘special relationship’ between the public schools, Oxbridge (where many boys went after finishing their schooling), and imperial service soon developed. The qualities cultivated in young boys at the above institutions were deemed to be good for the empire because they produced men who were not effeminate but brilliant, brave and tough soldiers, and many of whom would be natural leaders due to their participation in team games and athletics.

Athleticism and the Defence of the Realm

Physical education might have been pioneered at places like Eton and Harrow, but the games ethic was deemed to be useful to society as a whole because fit and healthy soldiers would be better able to win battles. Lest we give too much credit to the mid-Victorian public schools for this idea, however, we should note that some writers in the earlier part of the century had aired similar sentiments. In Pierce Egan the Elder’s Life in London and Sporting Guide in 1824, for instance, the following poem warned that, should any foreign power ever attempt to invade Britain, the invaders could expect to be met by tough British boxers:

While such heroes as those are Britannia’s boast,

We might still bid defiance to each foreign host;

And should our proud foes dare assault Britain’s shore,

They might get as good millings as they’ve had before.

Then Britons rejoice and make the air ring,

In praise of our heroes, brave Langan and Spring.[3]

Two such boxers were the Irishmen Messrs Langan and Spring who became celebrities briefly in 1824 when they smashed all opposition and won various accolades. Writing Boxiana (1813–29), Egan the Elder argued that pugilism, or bare-knuckle boxing, was one sport which might help working men toughen up for the army lest they become effeminate:

It is of the very last importance to ENGLAND as a nation, my Lord, that not one particle of this real greatness should ever be frittered away from squeamishness of DISPOSITION or EFFEMINACY … in order to prevent a WELLINGTON … from ever experiencing the want of a body of brave men to direct.[4]

Walter Scott likewise recognised the seeming connection between an athlete’s strength and endurance in a match or in the ring, and success on the battlefield when he spoke of the 15 stone pugilist, John Shaw (1789–1815), as a hero and ‘an emblem of English manliness’.[5] Yet it was not enough to simply be brave on the battlefield, admirable though that quality was. One had to be able to remain cool under pressure, to form a strategy for fighting, and to be able to fight bravely and fight well, which is why Egan often appropriated the language of the battlefield and applied it to that of the ring and turf:

It might be asked, what is an admiral without tactics? Or, a General without scientific precision? And where it has appeared, that downright force has succeeded once—skill, it will be found, has produced victory a hundred times; courage would degenerate into mere ferocity, if not tempered with judgement.[6]

Such sentiments in popular culture, and in particular in the emerging field of sports journalism, were easily merged with the ideology coming out of the public schools as a result of Arnold’s and others’ reforms. Those who did not attend the public schools were still urged to strive for the same levels of physical perfection as the boys from the public schools. A writer covering Rugby School’s athletic sports in the Boys’ Own annual in 1865, for example, urged

many, many hundreds of English lads in other less distinguished spots [to] take pattern and example by the discipline and skill evinced by their brethren, and add fresh impetus to flagging spirits or degenerating vitality.[7]

Gilbert Jessop, writing in The Book of School Sports (c. 1920), told youths that World War One was won on the playing grounds of Eton but also at ‘every ground where a game is played’.[8] If youths of any social rank ensured they were physically fit, so these writers reasoned, they would be able to ‘Play Up! Play Up! And Play the Game!’

Athleticism, Fiction, and the Defence of the Empire

The connection between sporting prowess and being a good soldier was found in practically every literary work by George Alfred Henty, the most imperialist of any writer at this period. In his novel entitled At the Point of the Bayonet: A Tale of the Mahratta War (1901), a young English boy living in India during the eighteenth century is told by his tutor that he has been concentrating too much on his studies and not balancing out his sedentary activities with exercise:

“I wish you to resume your former habits, to exercise your body in every way, so that you may grow up so strong and active that, when you join your countrymen, they will feel you are well worthy of them. They think much of such things, and it is by their love for exercise and sport that they so harden their frames that, in battle, the bravest peoples cannot stand against them.”[9]

Boys who were physically fit would be ideal candidates to serve the empire in what could often be hostile and dangerous environments and able to take on any mission, no matter how dangerous.

Henty was a prolific novelist who between 1864 and his death wrote a total of 122 books. All of them were historical novels and in one way or another were heavily imbued with imperial ideology, although it should be noted that although they were set in the past they were barely historicised. A flavour of the imperialist tone of his works can be seen when one examines the titles of some of them such as

• Under Drake’s Flag: A Tale of the Spanish Main (1883);
• By Sheer Pluck: A Tale of the Ashanti War (1884);
• With Clive in India: The Beginnings of an Empire (1884);
• The Young Colonists: A Tale of the Zulu and Boer Wars (1885);
• True to the Old Flag: A Tale of the American War of Independence (1885); and
•  Maori and Settler: A Tale of the New Zealand War (1891).[10]

Henty’s novels, much like those written by Kingsley and Ballantyne before him, often featured a schoolboy hero who finds himself caught up in some event that was pivotal in the rise of the British Empire, thrust into the midst of battle alongside famous men from imperial history. With Clive in India tells the story of young Charlie Marryat who lives in Yarmouth in the eighteenth century. After his father’s death, in view of their greatly reduced circumstances, Charlie’s uncle decides to recommend him as a writers’ apprentice to the board of the East India Company (a writer in the historical East India Company was stationed in India and served the equivalent function of an accountant).

While Charlie is thankful to his uncle for securing him a position in the honourable company, he has his sights set on bigger things, namely a cadetship because he prefers ‘a life of activity and adventure against one as a mere clerk’. Charlie gets his wish and obtains a commission as an officer in the Company’s army, where he serves under the famous Robert Clive. Charlie’s life, in fact, mirrors that of the historical Clive, who was originally a ‘factor’ in the Company’s offices before he became a military leader.

The reader first meets Charlie before he sets out for India, and at the beginning, Henty gives us a glimpse of young Charlie’s athletic ability:

He was slight in build, but his schoolfellows knew that Charlie Marryat’s muscles were as firm and hard as those of any boy in the school. In all sports requiring activity and endurance, rather than weight and strength, he was always conspicuous. Not one in the school could compete with him in long distance running, and when he was one of the hares there was but little chance for the hounds. He was a capital swimmer, and one of the best boxers in the school.[11]

Charlie is one of the best athletes in the school. He has mastered a number of sports including swimming.

Becoming Lords of Creation

It was not only modern heroes who were good at swimming, for some writers delved into the medieval past to seek out stories of heroic swimming matches. The legendary warrior Beowulf was one such example. The original tale of Beowulf survives in a manuscript that can be dated between the tenth and eleventh centuries, although the saga likely existed before that in oral tradition, perhaps as early as the eighth century.

As was to be expected, the hero of Beowulf was possessed of uncommon martial prowess and bodily strength. With such scholarship as this being reprinted right into the late-Victorian era, it is no surprise that imperialist writers in this latter period appropriated such tales of chivalry and strong heroes and subtly superimpose the public school value of athleticism onto them as H. E. Marshall did when she wrote one of her usual type of pro-establishment stories which reimagined the story of Beowulf for a younger audience in 1906.

One of the episodes in Beowulf’s early life, as recorded in the original tale, which sees him in a swimming contest with Breca the Bronding and receiving a ‘prize’ afterwards, was perfect material for pro-imperial writers to subtly convey the imperial ideal of athleticism to younger readers by appropriating this tale from the distant past.[12] In the original tale, which was retold by Victorian writers, Beowulf returns home from his adventures in foreign lands and becomes ruler of his people. He is then mortally wounded after a fight with a dragon; on his deathbed, Beowulf is said by H. A. Guerber to have instructed his followers to ‘maintain the honour of their race so that the name of [Beowulf] Gaete should still be known far and wide among all men as the symbol of courage and loyalty’.[13]

Swimming was therefore an excellent aid in the development of physical fitness, and it had a historical legitimacy. With good reason, The Boys’ Own stated that,

Swimming [is] an exercise which has every possible recommendation in its favour and not a single drawback. It is easy, it is healthful, it is inexpensive, and it is equally suitable for both sexes … to be unable to swim is a discredit to a human being. It is positively humiliating to be at the mercy of a few feet of water, and no one can take his place as lord of creation when he can lose his life by falling into a pond or getting out of his depth when bathing.[14]

The notion that Englishmen should be ‘lords of creation’ is a reflection of a contemporary idea which held that, if the English had a God-given right to rule over other less civilised nations, then the people who were in charge of the empire should strive for physical perfection. From the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) onwards, some intellectuals began to incorporate aspects of Darwinian thought into their philosophies of empire and outlook on international history. Notable among these were Walter Bagehot’s Physics and Politics (1874), which argued that, in international history, stronger and more militarily advanced nations tended to dominate allegedly weaker ones.

Towards the end of the Victorian period, Benjamin Kidd in Social Evolution (1894) and Control of the Tropics (1898) argued that Anglo-Saxon ‘race’ was the ‘master race’. The most disturbing branch of this theory was put forward by Karl Pearson (1857–1936) who argued in his works that the decimation of ‘backward’ indigenous societies was to be applauded, and he gloated about the fact that members of the Anglo-Saxon ‘race’ had driven native Americans and aborigines from their lands.

As research by Paul Crook has found, however, Pearson’s views were distasteful to many of even the most committed Victorian imperial ideologues.[15] There was certainly a belief in English exceptionalism at the time. Many people did indeed believe that Europeans were in some way culturally, if not biologically, superior in some way to the indigenous peoples of the empire, and that this superiority had to be maintained. Yet very few subscribed to the fundamentalist social Darwinist theories espoused by the likes of Pearson.

European Warrior-Athletes

The heroes of popular literature did not have to strictly be of British heritage; those of European heritage were often viewed in just as positive a light as British heroes. Rider Haggard’s Eric Brighteyes, for example, is the purported history of an Icelandic king named Eric (so-called ‘Brighteyes’ because of his piercing blue eyes) the novel begins with a substantial introduction detailing the history of sagas in the Icelandic language. In the preface, Haggard is at pains to point out the affinity of race and culture between the English-speaking peoples and the ‘heroic warriors’ of northern Europe from the dark ages when he refers to ‘our Scandinavian ancestors’.[16] And Eric was portrayed as a tough and strong youngster:

For he was strong and great of stature, his hair was yellow as gold, and his grey eyes shone with the light of swords … even as a lad his strength was the strength of two men; and there were none in all the quarter who could leap or swim or wrestle against Eric Brighteyes.[17]

The same type of admiration could be given, in a qualified manner, to men such as Giuseppe Garibaldi, the hero of Italian unification. G. A. Henty’s Out with Garibaldi: A Story of the Liberation of Italy (1901) tells the story of a young English lad called Frank, whose Italian mother was a childhood friend of Garibaldi’s, and who at the beginning of the novel is a pupil at Harrow. An Italian relative regales Frank in his youth with romanticised stories of the defence of the Roman Republic in 1848, and the family are in regular contact with Garibaldi throughout his years as an outlaw. By the time Frank reaches the age of sixteen, it is the year 1860 and his mother receives a letter from the Italian hero inviting him to serve with him in Italy. Frank immediately sets out to join Garibaldi and participates in some of Garibaldi’s most thrilling adventures, although before he does decide to go, in true Edwardian public schoolboy style, he does express regret at missing the football season.[18]

Nevertheless, his fervent sense of duty to the idea of liberty for the Italians means that Frank never really considers not joining with Garibaldi. However, this is of course the story of an Englishman going to help the southern Italians throw of the yoke of the absolutist Bourbon monarchy, almost as if to say that it could not have been achieved without the help of the British. After all, as another novelist implied in The Robbers’ Cave: A Tale of Italy (1882), Italians were viewed by some other British writers as naturally idle and devoid of that ‘manly English spirit’ which allegedly had made the British the masters of creation.[19]Henty makes it clear in his novel that the Italians are essentially one rung below Englishmen on the racial ladder, and Frank’s grandfather only approves of his father’s wedding to his half-English, half-Italian mother on account of the fact that she can pass for an Englishwoman.[20]

In the racial hierarchy, the Teutonic ‘race’, which comprised those people who were of primarily Anglo-Saxon descent, were the ‘master race’. Underneath the Teutonic ‘race’ were Latin peoples such as the Italians and the Spanish who were allegedly prone to idleness but certainly whiter, and therefore above, ‘races’ such as Asians and those of African descent.

The Love of the Chase

Besides swimming, there were other ways in which imperial warriors might prove that they were masters of the natural world, namely through the hunting of wild animals. Hunting was historically a pastime enjoyed by the British upper classes, and the right to hunt was jealously guarded especially after the Norman Conquest in 1066. Anybody familiar with tales of Robin Hood will know that a common occurrence in retellings of the legend throughout the centuries is the outlaw’s defiance of authority by hunting the king’s deer in the royal forests.

By the early nineteenth century, in England itself, hunting was still considered as a sport that was predominantly the preserve of the gentry and aristocracy. In the far-flung corners of the empire, however, hunting was not restricted to the aristocracy or gentry for it soon became an activity in which British people from relatively humble stations in life could participate—humble compared to the aristocracy at any rate. Lord Roberts of Kandahar, in his best-selling biography Forty-One Years in India (1897), records that in the 1860s, even junior officers such as himself were permitted to enjoy the hunting season in Peshwar, and he continued to enjoy hunting until the very end of his career in India.[21]The love of the chase found expression in popular fiction. In H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), readers were first introduced to the famous Allan Quatermain, who in the first chapter was laid up in bed with an injured leg writing his memoirs. While the prospect of first encountering a hero laid up in bed is hardly an inspiring sight, readers soon learn the reason why Quatermain is in this position:

I am laid up here at Durban with the pain in my left leg. Ever since that confounded lion got hold of me I have been liable to this trouble, and being rather bad just now, it makes me limp more than ever. There must be some poison in a lion’s teeth, otherwise how is it that when your wounds are healed they break out again, generally, mark you, at the same time of year that you got your mauling? It is a hard thing when one has shot sixty-five lions and more, as I have in the course of my life, that the sixty-sixth should chew your leg like a quid of tobacco.[22]

Allan was not a public school boy but an ageing and rugged man who has led an active life. He learnt the basics of reading and writing—nothing too ‘effeminate’—but has spent most of his time since his youth engaged in various professions such as diamond mining and hunting big game. Likewise, as an adult officer in the East India Company army, Charlie Marryat from With Clive in India demonstrates his bravery by hunting a lion:

Then the bushes were burst asunder, and the great yellow body hurled itself forward upon Charlie. The attack was so sudden and instantaneous that the latter had not even time to raise his rifle to his shoulder. Almost instinctively, however, he discharged both of the barrels; but was, at the same moment, hurled to the ground, where he lay crushed down by the weight of the tiger, whose hot breath he could feel on his face. He closed his eyes, only to open them again at the sound of a heavy blow, while a deluge of hot blood flowed over him … Charlie drank some brandy and water, which Hossein held to his lips. Then the latter raised him to his feet. Charlie felt his limbs and his ribs. He was bruised all over, but otherwise unhurt, the blood which covered him having flowed from the tiger.[23]

Stephen Mosley notes that hunting was encouraged among all ranks of people because it promoted the qualities that were valuable for colonialists at the frontiers of the empire: bravery, endurance, and marksmanship.[24] While Allan Quatermain’s boast of having shot ‘sixty-five lions and more’ may seem a bit of an exaggeration to modern readers, it was in actuality at the more modest end of British hunters’ records. As Mosley further observes, Sir John Hewitt, the Lieutenant-Governor of the United Provinces in India, alone shot over 150 tigers before his retirement in 1912. The numbers of animals shot by European colonialists often ‘ran to excess’, in Mosley’s words, and by the early 1900s, sport hunters themselves were increasingly concerned about the dwindling numbers of big game stocks. This led in turn to the signing of the Convention for the Preservation of Wild Animals, Birds, and Fish in Africa in 1900, which sought to encourage colonial governments to place limits on hunting. Other novels by other writers feature a variety of hunting scenes where the hero gets the better of a bear, a lion, a tiger, or even an elephant. It was not only over elements such as water that the British imperialist should make himself master, therefore, but also over the animal kingdom.

Fitness to Serve in Inhospitable Climes

The colonies could be dangerous places. Sierra Leone was, from 1807, given the nickname of ‘the white man’s grave’ due to the fact that many Europeans succumbed to malaria and yellow fever. The effectiveness of quinine in treating the former would not be fully realised until 1854, when Dr William Baikies made an expedition up the Niger River with some explorers and pioneered its use. Young soldiers’ athletic abilities would serve them well not only while hunting but also more generally when it came to serving in the harsh and inhospitable environments.

There was a steady stream of articles in boys’ periodicals and popular fiction in which the boy heroes had to be fit and tough to survive the searing heat of Africa or Australia or the snowy wilds of northern Canada. An article entitled ‘Captain Sturt’s Last Journey’, which appeared in the Young England Annual, recounted the final exploration of the eponymous colonial administrator who, in 1844, set out with a party of explorers to chart the interior of New South Wales in Australia. This was a brave feat in view of the scorching heat which almost killed the adventurers. Had they not been fit and healthy, the article implies, they would most certainly have died. In the end, Sturt never actually accomplished his mission. Nevertheless, the excursion is presented in literary accounts as a victorious defeat: Sturt could have pressed on and certainly possessed the ability to do so, but as he was such a good man and ever attentive to the needs of those under his charge, he gallantly conceded defeat to the elements to spare the lives of his men.

Charlie Marryat in With Clive in India was slight of build but could run fast. Sometimes it served colonial adventurers better to be strong as well, as it does for Allan Quatermain in King Solomon’s Mines. This is a ‘Lost World’ novel, a genre was originally pioneered by Margaret Cavendish in The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World (1666). Cavendish’s novel was truly ground-breaking, featuring as it does an exploration into the North Pole in which the adventurers encounter a technologically advanced society who have mastered the use of submarines as well as “fire bombs” which are dropped from the air by flying men (The first movie adaptation of Rider Haggard’s She, released in 1935, pays homage to Cavendish by having the adventurers find Ayesha’s kingdom not in Africa but on an expedition to the North Pole).

In King Solomon’s Mines, Allan and another two explorers venture into uncharted territory in Africa to rescue one of their associates who has gone missing. It is the explorers’ strength and athletic abilities which enable them to escape some pretty hair-raising predicaments. As a reward for helping to overthrow the tyrannical ruler of the lost kingdom, Kwala, the explorers are promised access to the fabled mines of King Solomon which are said to be full of treasures beyond men’s wildest dreams. The mines are only accessible, however, by travelling through a series of deep caverns in the mountains which surround the lost kingdom. Yet their guide, a mad old woman named Gagool, who was the confidante of the deposed Kwala, betrays them; she does indeed lead them into the cavern of treasures, but neglects to tell them the minute they pick up any item the door will slam shut. Quatermain and his fellows find themselves trapped in the cavern. While the men have a few moments of panic, the men soon calm themselves down, maintain a ‘stiff upper lip’, and ration out the water and the last of the food. They realise that there must be a way out of the caves as air is coming into the caverns from somewhere. As luck would have it, Quatermain and his men find a trapdoor on the ground with a heavy wrought iron ring around it to enable the door to be opened, but it is almost too heavy for the explorers. Yet it is an obstacle which they can overcome if they all work as a team:

“Heave! Heave! It’s giving!” gasped Sir Henry; and I heard the muscles of his great back cracking. Suddenly there was a grating sound, then a rush of air, and we were all on our backs on the floor with a heavy flag-stone upon the top of us.[25]

The protagonists’ strength which helps them in this fateful hour. Rider Haggard finished this passage by saying: ‘never did muscular power stand a man in better stead’.

The Active Christian Gentleman

Quatermain was not a very learned man nor was he particularly well-read, but he knew parts of the Old Testament by heart. All good men of the empire were supposed to be good Christians. The development of pupils’ physical health, therefore, proceeded in tandem with the development of their moral health. The public schools achieved this by incorporating a strong evangelical Christian element into their curricula. It was Arnold who originally posited the necessity for a strong religious component in educational instruction when he set about reforming Rugby school. In a letter to one of his associates, he wrote that

With regard to reforms at Rugby, give me credit, I must beg of you, for a most sincere desire to make it a place of Christian education. At the same time my object will be, if possible, to form Christian men.[26]

When Arnold recruited new teachers, while his reforms to his own school’s sports programme were limited, he still had a clear sense of the type of man needed to instruct boys:

What I want is a man who is a Christian and a gentleman, an active man, and one who has common sense and understands boys.[27]

The boys were to be active in both a physical and a spiritual sense and physical fitness would not only make them good soldiers but would simultaneously enable them to spread the gospel in the hostile environments that they were sent.

This sense that young men should desire to become not just soldiers but soldiers of Christ and the empire found its way into popular literature. One of the most famous imperial warriors, General Charles Gordon (1833–85), was described by his biographer, Eva Hope, as ‘a true soldier of the Lord Jesus Christ’.[28] Gordon was indeed a deeply religious man: his personal copy of the Bible, currently held in the Royal Collection, contains numerous marginal notes on religious matters which are indicative of his fervent religious convictions. Gordon was what we might call an independent Christian, for he did not profess an attachment to any particular denomination, but as Paul Mersh notes, maintained friendships with and respect for Roman Catholics, Methodists, Anglicans, and Presbyterians.[29] He imagined the theological world in purely military terms, viewing all Christian denominations as separate ‘regiments’ o the Christianity as a whole. While Gordon’s ‘broad church’ view of Christianity was uncommon, there were some journalists back in England who on occasion spoke in similar terms of the existence of a ‘Church of the British Empire’, which was an idea posited by H. Carlisle in 1887.[30]

The Missionary and the Banner of Christ

It was not only the army and explorers that would benefit from athletic development and Christian instruction, or ‘Muscular Christianity’, for missionaries also had to ensure that they were physically up-to-the-task of surviving in harsh environments as part of the imperial civilising mission: claiming new lands and continents for Christ would see the allegedly ‘savage’ people of the colonies, whose religious practices the British viewed as barbarous, to become enlightened.[31]

It is for this reason that a missionary such as David Livingstone could be lauded as a hero of the empire as much as any soldier, as John Roberts intimated in 1870 when he wrote that Livingstone was

a truly great man … a living lesson which the youth of our country cannot take too closely to heart.

His efforts in establishing three Christian missions in the ‘dark continent’ of Africa, furthermore, ‘may be regarded as … the fitting crown of his heroic and glorious career’.[32] Although not a military man, Livingstone’s deeds at least equalled the heroism of any soldier. Young England magazine, in an article entitled ‘The Courage of the Missionary’, in 1905 expanded upon this idea by saying that

[The missionary] goes out to plant the banner of Christ on hostile territory, or at all events, neutral territory. He is a scout and a pioneer, attacking force and army of occupation, all in one … they go out on long tours through the country, sleeping on the floors of native houses, enduring the most severe physical fatigue, exposed now to great frosts, now to terrible summer heat.[33]

The importance of learning to swim is again highlighted in this article. The anonymous author of the article says that ‘when the rains come on [missionaries] have to be ready to swim the rivers they cannot ford … truly it needs a heroic heart to be a missionary’.[34] The British imperialist had to make himself ‘lord of creation’, not only to serve the empire but to serve God as well, and often those interests were deemed to be synonymous.

Calling on God in their Hour of Need

Being a good Christian soldier also had other benefits, according to Victorian popular fiction authors. Christians believe that they have a relationship with their God through prayer. Imperial adventurers would in theory be able to call on God in their hour of need in the hope that they might be saved from certain death, and they could be assured of his assistance. The colonial environment could be dangerous for imperial adventurers for a number of reasons such as a hostile local population or diseases.

There were also dangerous animals in the far flung corners of the British Empire. Some fictional adventurers certainly got the better of lions and tigers. Lions were strong, ferocious yet noble beasts. They could be tamed and relatively easy to kill, with a rifle at any rate. Usually the animals were drugged by the Sahib’s servants before the hunt began (‘Sahib’ was a term by which Indian servants addressed their British colonial masters). But there was one type of animal which still managed to strike fear into the hearts of even the most resolute and brave adventurer: the serpent. In Heroes of the Empire (1906), we see such a situation play out when two men named George and Joseph are travelling through the jungle of an unspecified colony:

“Lad,” said Joe solemnly, “there is one deathbed repentance in the Bible, and only one, and I heard a good minister say that one was given us that none might presume and that none need despair.”

“The words were hardly out of his mouth before I stood face to face with death! We had been tramping through a bit of marshy ground, and I was leading, when from the bough of a tree, like a flash of lightning, came the head of an enormous serpent.

“I stood paralysed, and then came Joe’s voice from behind, clear and distinct: ‘He is also able to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him,’ and in that moment of dire extremity I gave myself to Christ forever … as I stood there, a wonderful thing happened. The snake uncoiled its huge body from the limb of the tree and glided away untouched.”[35]

The symbol of the serpent has long held a special place in cultures where Christianity is the dominant religion as a dangerous animal. It was, after all, a serpent who beguiled Eve in the Garden of Eden. Many English readers, until the late nineteenth century, might never have encountered a snake in real life. They were animals who were known chiefly through their representation as dangerous and deadly creatures in popular literature. For example, in the 1830s, Charles Knight’s Penny Magazine featured several detailed illustrations of snakes, either in the midst of attacking prey or surrounding a charmer. Similarly, the cheap true crime magazines The Illustrated Police News and The Police Gazette loved a good deadly snake story. Two of G. W. M. Reynolds’s penny bloods, The Mysteries of London (1844–48), and Wagner the Wehr-Wolf (1846–47) depict fearsome encounters with snakes. Similarly, in a genre of literature known as Australian ‘outback’ fiction, snakes feature prominently: Henry Lawson’s short story set in the outback entitled ‘The Drover’s Wife’ (1892), published later in While the Billy Boils (1913), features a woman defending her family from a fearsome snake.

While there was a specially constructed Reptile House built at the Zoological Gardens in London in 1849, where visitors could come face-to-face with these animals, this would have been an expensive and time-consuming trip for many readers in other parts of the country to undertake. In spite of the scientific research carried out at the Zoological Gardens after mid-century, snakes remained a frightening animal in the popular imagination, especially when many of their representations in popular literature depicted them as fearsome creatures. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution had, by the time that that passage was written, been known for quite some time. Atheism was also gaining traction, but the most respectable colonialist trusted in God for deliverance, and deliverance would be granted.[36]

Sport and Victory on the Battlefield

Hunting animals may have been fine sport but fitness was promoted because ultimately the British wanted tough and better soldiers which would ensure that they were victorious on the field of battle. According to an anonymous writer in Peter Parley’s Annual, Robert Clive was a strong, physically fit young man and, as a result, there was no physical obstacle which he could not overcome.[37]The Boy’s Own Paper, in one of its many articles on fitness advice, sniped at overweight and bookish boys who would ultimately be of no use to the country in its hour of need:

We always feel very sorry when we see in a crowd of restless youngsters the typical fat boy who, although perhaps only fourteen or fifteen, pulls the scale down at eleven stone or thereabouts; the sort of lad who lolls in the playground, looking out of his sleepy eyes and wondering what merit the other fellows can see in their games … Fortunately for Old England, this is not usually the stuff of which her boys are made, the boys who in some time will be called upon to protect her shores or interests at home or across the seas.[38]

One of the most explicit connections between sport and imperialism at this time was Henry Newbolt’s poem which told young lads to ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game!’ The association between sport and imperialism meant that in contemporary literary works warfare while the field of battle was presented as though it was a football match, as a poem from an 1865 issue of the Radleian reveals:

A hero we may style

The Chief in any game,

A hero in a playful war,

But a hero all the same.

A hero who at football,

All boldly meets the foe,

And ever risking broken limbs,

Still fear can never know.[39]

The Sport of War

There was little in any late-Victorian or Edwardian fictional work which made young readers aware of the hardships, dangers, killing, maiming, and mental trauma involved in fighting in the front line. Warfare was, therefore, depicted as a fun activity that was likened to a game in numerous literary works. The Boys of the Empire, for example, referred to ‘the Game of War’.[40] In Henty’s Tales of Daring and Danger (1890), a young midshipman, after a naval battle against the Chinese, remarks: ‘Has it not been fun!’[41] A most explicit depiction of war as a sport came in Robert Baden-Powell’s Sport in War (1900):

“What sort of sport did you have there?” is the question with which men have, as a rule, greeted one on return from the campaign in Rhodesia; and one could truthfully say, “We had excellent sport.” For, in addition to the ordinary experiences included in that head, the work involved in the military operations was sufficiently sporting in itself to fill up a good measure of enjoyment.[42]

Baden-Powell served the empire in both India and South Africa. Baden-Powell began his career as an army scout where he led reconnaissance missions. In the heat of a battle against, he would survey the field, go behind enemy lines if necessary, to report back to his commanders what was occurring. Doing this would have allowed his superiors to change their strategy if necessary. A high level of physical fitness was obviously required for this role, as it is for modern army scouts. In his book, Baden-Powell recounts the type of missions he was sent on and he made it all sound rather exciting:

There was no drawing up of opposing forces in battle array, or majestic advancing of earth-shaking squadrons to the clash of arms; but you had to approach a koppie or peak of piled-up granite boulders, where not an enemy was visible, but which you knew was honeycombed with caves and crannies all full of watching niggers firing guns of every kind and calibre. You were expected to climb up this loop-holed pyramid to gain the entrance to its caves, which was somewhere near the top, and if you were lucky enough to escape an elephant bullet from one side or another, or a charge of slugs from a crevice underfoot, you had the privilege of firing a few shots down the drain-like entrance to the cave, and of then lowering yourself quickly into the black uncertainty below.⁸⁸

Baden-Powell regretted that in the midst of the action he never appreciated these kind of tasks for the ‘sport’ that that they were, although he did note that many of his comrades appreciated it for its proper worth’. After all, according to Baden-Powell, being fired at by an enemy was just like a game, apparently, as he said that

there was a “glorious uncertainty” about it, such as could not be surpassed in any other variety of movement.[43]

Baden-Powell rose through the ranks of the British army to become a commander. He became a national hero back in England due to holding the town of Mafeking for seven months while it was under siege from the Boers during the Second Boer War. When Baden-Powell returned to England in 1903, he revised one of his previous books, Aids to Scouting (1899), which was originally written for an adult readership, and targeted it towards children by simplifying it. The book was a success and its principles were adopted by both teachers and the leaders of youth organisations such as the Boys’ Brigade.

One of the reasons that the book was successful was because of the national concern over the health of the nation that was being aired by government officials and in the press. At the beginning of the Second Boer War, army recruiting officers found that many of working-class volunteers had to be rejected because they were unfit and often malnourished. George W. Steevens was alarmed at this perceived national degeneracy, but it was also unsurprising due to the working classes’ poor living conditions:

It would be difficult indeed to credit the full horrors exhibited by such districts as Lancashire or the Black Country at the end of the nineteenth century. There the wildest flights of hyperbole were equalled and exceeded by dismal truth, and the sun was literally obscured at noonday. A host of ungainly chimneys loaded the air with poisonous fumes which oppressed the hardiest species of vegetation. The inhabitants, penned up by day in close factories or the dimmer and more stifling obscurity of mines, herded by night in crowded tenements, were pale, sickly, and meagre … In sport, as in its analogue, war, the British degenerated with frightful rapidity.[44]

The working classes were not healthy. As well as being underfed, they lived in smog-filled cities which sometimes obscured the sun. This led to many children getting rickets, caused by a Vitamin D deficiency, leading to irregular bone growth and developing symptoms such as the ‘pigeon chest’ and ‘bow legs’. If England’s future working-class soldiers were not taught the value of physical fitness, if its soldiers did not practice ‘manly’ exercise, then the elites feared that the British nation would degenerate and that the country might lose its place as a world power. The British Empire could fall just like all of the empires preceding her had done, and parallels with Ancient Rome were drawn in The New Sporting Magazine in support of this point:

“As long as the Coliseum stands, Rome shall stand,” was the sublime exclamation of an enthusiast, on viewing the amphitheatre of Titus, which was called by that name, but they were not the words of a Roman. Certain, however, is it that when licentious farce, effeminate music, and splendid pageantry, usurped the place of the chaster Muse, and those manly exercises for which the country had been conspicuous, the sun of Roman glory soon set.[45]

There was very little said about improving the living and working conditions of the working classes, and the onus was often placed upon the latter to ensure that they improved themselves. For novelists and journalists to emphasise the importance of keeping fit was all well and good. What was needed, therefore, was a movement which would encourage youths to keep fit and also train future imperial soldiers by teaching them real life skills that would enable them to survive in the great outdoors, but it had to be enjoyable. After all, there were other less respectable pastimes that might soon divert youths’ attentions if they were not given wholesome activities to enjoy, such as the reading of penny dreadfuls, public houses, and running in gangs.

A few years later, in 1907, therefore, Baden-Powell formally established the modern Scouts Movement. Some scouts groups had existed before this date in local areas but the new national movement would enable children from up and down the country to keep fit and healthy, learn survival skills, and be taught to be good (patriotic) citizens. In spite of its inclusive aims, however, it was often only the children of the middle and lower middle classes who joined the Scouts, which is unsurprising given that many children and adolescents from poorer backgrounds were still expected to work part time in factories.

Conclusion

Athleticism was promoted in the public schools but the dissemination of the ideology into popular literature for young readers would, it was hoped, encourage those from outside the narrow middle-class ranks of the public school to become fit and healthy soldiers, ready to serve the British Empire in any capacity when called upon. Yet while the heroes of late-Victorian literature were fit and healthy young men whose athletic abilities serve them well during the course of their imperial service, the literary heroes of the empire also knew that they had to be good sports. These characters were, for the most part, chivalrous and, in concert with their Christian beliefs, they had to be committed to the principle of fair play—of fair play and chivalry we shall learn in a succeeding article.

References

[1] This is a précis of a chapter from my book: Stephen Basdeo, Heroes and Villains of the British Empire: Their Lives and Legends (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2022).

[2] Procopius, The Secret History, cited in Saša Milojević, et al., Youth and Hooliganism at Sporting Events (Belgrade: Ministry of Education, 2013), pp. 21–2.

[3] ‘A New Song on Spring and Langan’, Pierce Egan’s Life in London and Sporting Guide, 20 June 1824, 165.

[4] Pierce Egan, ed., Boxiana; Sketches of Modern Pugilism, 6 vols (London: Sherwood, Neeley and Jones, 1813–29), III, p. v, cited in David Snowden, Writing the Prizefight: Pierce Egan’s Boxiana World (Bern: Peter Lang, 2013), p. 130.

[5] Walter Scott, The Letters of Walter Scott, ed. by H. J. C. Grierson, 12 vols (London: Constable, 1933), IV, p. 80.

[6] Pierce Egan, ed., Boxiana; Sketches of Modern Pugilism, 6 vols (London: Sherwood, Neeley and Jones, 1813–29), I, p. 254.

[7] The Boys’ Own Volume of Fact, Fiction, History, and Adventure: Christmas 1865 (London: S. O. Beeton [n. d.]), p. 447

[8] Gilbert Jessop and J. B. Salmond, The Book of School Sports (London: Thomas Nelson [n. d.] c. 1920?), p. 10.

[9] G. A. Henty, At the Point of a Bayonet: A Tale of the Mahratta War (London: Blackie, 1902), p. 8.

[10] He did occasionally branch out from writing fiction with such overtly imperialist themes by publishing novels set during the Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815), the Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and 1745, and even the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, as he did in A March on London (1898). Although he usually found a way to pepper his non-imperial novels with little bits of militarism; in A March on London, for instance, Wat Tyler, Jack Straw, and the rebels march against their king not only because they are unhappy with the poll tax but also because they were fighting ‘above all’ for the right to serve in their country’s army. The latter point, of course, was pure fiction, as the historical Wat Tyler demanded an end to the poll tax, the abolition of serfdom, and the right to buy and sell in the marketplace, but the rebels never demanded the right to serve in the army.

[11] G. A. Henty, With Clive in India; or, The Beginnings of an Empire (New York: Scribner and Welford [n. d.]), p. 9.

[12] H. A. Guerber, Myths and Legends of the Middle Ages (London, 1896; repr. London: G. Harrap, 1909), p. 5.

[13] Ibid., pp. 16-17.

[14] Boys’ Own Volume of Fact, Fiction, History, and Adventure: Christmas 1865, p. 357.

[15] Paul Crook, ‘Social Darwinism and British “new imperialism”: Second thoughts’, The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 3: 1 (1998), 1-16

[16] H. Rider Haggard, Eric Brighteyes, 2^nd Edn (London: Longman, 1891), p. x.

[17] Haggard, Eric Brighteyes, p. 11.

[18] G. A. Henty, Out with Garibaldi: A Story of the Liberation of Italy (London: Blackie, 1901), pp. 64-6.

[19] A. L. O. E., The Robbers’ Cave: A Tale of Italy (London: Blackie, 1882), pp. 14-15.

[20] Henty, Out with Garibaldi, p. 19.

[21] Frederick Sleigh Roberts, Forty-One Years in India from Subaltern to Commander in Chief: New Edition Complete in One Volume, rev. ed. (London: MacMillan, 1901), p. 542.

[22] H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines (London, 1885; repr. London [n. d.]), pp. 9-10.

[23] Henty, With Clive in India, pp. 213-4.

[24] Stephen Mosely, The Environment in World History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010)

[25] Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, p. 194.

[26] Thomas Arnold, ‘Letter to Rev. Tucker, 22 March 1828’, in The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, ed. by Arthur Penryn Stanley (New York: Appleton, 1846), pp. 71-2.

[27] Arnold, ‘Letter of Inquiry for a Master’, in Stanley, p. 91. Emphasis added.

[28] Eva Hope, The Life of General Gordon (London: Walter Scott, 1885; repr. Edinburgh: Nimmo [n. d.]), p. 32.

[29] Mersh, Paul, ‘Charles George Gordon (1833-1885): A Brief Biography’, in The Victorian Web, ed. by George P. Landow http://www.victorianweb.org [accessed 3 June 2018]

[30] H. Carlisle, ‘The Church of the British Empire’, Murray’s Magazine, 2: 8 (1887), 145-64.

[31] Pictorial Sport and Adventure: Being a Record of Deeds of Daring and Marvellous Escapes by Field and Flood (London: Frederick Warne [n. d.]), p. 184.

[32] John S. Roberts, The Life and Explorations of David Livingstone, LLD. (Boston: D. Lothrop, 1881), p. i.

[33] Young England: An Illustrated Magazine for Boys; Twenty-Sixth Annual Volume, 1904–5 (London: Alexander and Shepheard, 1905), p. 468

[34] Ibid

[35] Heroes of the Empire (London: John F. Shaw [n. d.]), p. 26.

[36] Bracebridge Hemyng, Jack Harkaway After Schooldays: His Adventures Afloat and Ashore (London: E. J. Brett [n. d.]), p. 29. The hero, Jack travels the world in a merchant ship. A reticulated python is found on board the ship but Jack is the only one who is strong and ‘manly’ enough to kill it (reticulated pythons are perhaps the world’s longest snakes and are able to reach a length of 32 feet and a weight of 25 stones in some exceptional cases). His bout with the serpent makes Jack the hero of the ship as ‘the men made way for him, and a hearty cheer broke out. Such a cheer as only Englishmen, in their admiration of manly courage, can give.’

[37] ‘Robert Lord Clive, Baron of Plassey’, Peter Parley’s Annual: A Christmas and New Year’s Present for Young People (London [n. d.]), p. 119.

[38] ‘How to Get and Keep Strong and Active’, The Boy’s Own Paper, 6 October 1894, 14.

[39] The Radleian (1865), cited in J. A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism (New York: Viking, 1986), p.45.

[40] ‘The Progress of the British Boy’, The Boys of the Empire, 21 May 1888, 252.

[41] G. A. Henty, Tales of Daring and Danger (London: Blackie, 1890), p. 133.

[42] Robert Baden-Powell, Sport in War (London: William Heinemann, 1900), p. 3.

[43] Ibid., p. 8.

[44] George W. Steevens, Things Seen: Impressions of Men, Cities, and Books, ed. by G. S. Street (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1869), p. 27.

[45]  ‘On the Antiquity and Advantages of Field Sports’, The New Sporting Magazine, 2: 9 (1832), 157-64.