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Games, Greek and Pluck

Classicism, Masculinity, Elite Education and British Sport, 1850–1914

by Andy Carter (Author)
©2025 Monographs XII, 330 Pages
Series: Sport, History and Culture, Volume 13

Summary

Public school education in the second half of the nineteenth century was completely dominated by classics and sport. Rejecting the view that these were competing strands resulting in friction between aesthetic scholars and athletic philistines, this book shows how classicism and athleticism were closely entwined. Using primary sources, such as school magazines and memoirs, it considers how classical ideas shaped the elite British male’s view of his place in the world and his attitudes to masculinity, gender, race, class and duty. At the heart of this process were a comparatively small number of classically-educated men who influenced the reorganisation and reform of games between 1850 and 1914 laying the foundations for modern sport. This book explores their overlapping social networks, and the ways in which they sometimes co-opted ancient history, as they tried to retain control of the sporting landscape and promote an ‘amateur ideal’ based on a past that never really existed.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Contents
  • List of Tables
  • List of Abbreviations
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1 Classics in the Public School: Exclusivity, Excellence and Indifference
  • Chapter 2 Manliness, Masculinity and Morality: Ancient Graeco-Roman Influences on Education
  • Chapter 3 ‘At Home at Oxbridge’: British and Irish Literature on Ancient Sport
  • Chapter 4 Warre, Welldon, Etonian Classicism and Victorian Sport
  • Chapter 5 Henley, Class and Classics
  • Chapter 6 The Hellenisation of the Modern Olympics
  • Conclusions
  • Sources and Bibliography
  • Index

Introduction

This is a book about connections. On the one hand, it looks at the chain of events whereby a shortage of literate clerks in late medieval and early modern England indirectly led to the foundation of the modern Olympic Games and certainly contributed to the perception that they were a ‘revival’ of something from antiquity rather than a new innovation. More tangibly, it looks at the connections between the men that controlled and shaped much of British sport between 1850 and 1914 and how their outlooks, attitudes and decisions were shaped by their shared educational background and immersion in ‘classical’ culture.

From the late eighteenth century until the early twentieth century, a classical education was seen as the mark of a gentleman. The role of public schools was to provide their pupils with the knowledge and manners to pass as such with other members of their own class while simultaneously projecting their social superiority, and implied natural leadership, to those lower down the social scale.1 By the mid-nineteenth century, parliament was dominated by former public schoolboys, and few cabinet ministers had not attended both a public school and an Oxbridge college. The leadership of both the Liberal and Conservative parties came from a small network who knew each other through family relationships, country house parties, gentlemen’s clubs, public schools and university colleges.2 They were a remarkably homogenous group, largely composed of aristocrats and the social rank just below them, many of whom were politicians, lawyers or clergymen.3

Power was primarily based on landed wealth. John Bateman’s survey, The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland, published in 1876, revealed that just 363 people owned about a quarter of the country, all with holdings in excess of 10,000 acres each. Of these, 246 were hereditary peers with inherited estates.4 The middle-class members of this political class were often the younger sons or grandsons of titled aristocrats and, as yet, comparatively few came from more humble backgrounds or nouveaux riches industrial wealth. Additionally, the teaching staff at most public schools, and both major universities, in the early to mid-nineteenth century were required to be ordained Anglican clergymen. Many of these were also the sons or descendants of landed gentry and thus shared a common background and outlook to their charges. The most talented and engaged pupils often forged deep lifelong relationships with their tutors at school and university and would continue to visit them, asking for their advice and support throughout their adult lives. In this way schoolmasters like Edmond Warre of Eton and university dons like Benjamin Jowett of Balliol College, Oxford, both of whom numbered numerous politicians, churchmen, senior civil servants and leading academics among their former pupils, were able to exert considerable influence well beyond the cloisters and playing fields of their colleges.

By the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign, the leading public schools had transformed themselves from endowed schools, primarily intended to provide worthy local boys of good character with a free or subsidised education, into exclusive establishments at which the vast majority of places were fee-paying, and the pupils were neither local nor necessarily particularly worthy.5 In the early part of the nineteenth century, these schools gained an increasingly unsavoury reputation for violence and debauchery. Masters often struggled to maintain control beyond the classroom, and the towns which hosted public schools often came to resent their pupils’ propensity for riotous behaviour, criminal damage, poaching and failure to pay bills. Things came to a head in the 1840s, with a series of school riots, some of which involved pupils brandishing firearms.6

The solution, adopted by Harrow and Marlborough in the early 1850s and soon followed by the others, was to introduce a regime of near compulsory sport in which boys could burn off excess energy and aggression.7 Sport in the public schools was not new, most played cricket and some form of football, with riverside schools, like Eton and Westminster also having a rowing tradition, but until the 1850s these had been minority interests among pupils. In the second half of the nineteenth century, almost all boys would be expected to take part in sports, often for several hours a day. The culture of public schools became one in which classics ruled inside the classroom and the new cult of athleticism ruled outside. This was to have a profound and permanent impact on sport. By the 1860s, the first generation of athleticised public schoolboys had carried their devotion to organised games outside, first to the universities and then to the wider world. This in turn necessitated the creation of administrative bodies to standardise rules and playing conditions. The sporting landscape was revolutionised and new clubs founded as former public school and university men sought to continue playing sport after leaving full-time education.

Not surprisingly, the organisations which sprang up to administer British sport in the late nineteenth century were dominated by former public school pupils. In 1880 for example, the Football Association was controlled by Arthur Kinnaird (Eton), Francis Marindin (Eton) and Charles Alcock (Harrow), the President of the Rugby Football Union was Arthur Guillemard (Rugby), the Amateur Athletics Association was presided over by the 7th Earl of Jersey (Eton), assisted by Bernard Wise (Rugby) and Montague Shearman (Merchant Taylors’), the All England Tennis Club was run by Julian Marshall (Harrow), the Swimming Association of Great Britain by Dr Hunter Jackson Barron (Charterhouse) and the President of Marylebone Cricket Club was Sir William Hart-Dyke (Harrow).8 In 1912, former public schoolboys still presided over a number of sporting bodies including the Football Association (Arthur Kinnaird, Eton), Amateur Athletics Association (Montague Shearman, Merchant Taylors’), Amateur Rowing Association (Gilchrist Maclagan, Eton), Lawn Tennis Association (Lord Desborough, Harrow), Marylebone Cricket Club (where Lord Desborough, handed over to the 9th Duke of Devonshire, Eton) and the National Cyclists’ Union (Arthur Balfour, Eton).9 These were men who shared a common background which predisposed them to see many aspects of life, including masculinity and class, via a classical lens. This inevitably shaped their views in dealing with the struggles for control which played out in many sports between the 1880s and the outbreak of the First World War. These often manifested themselves as contests between amateurism and professionalism, although the reality was that many so-called ‘amateurs’ made handsome livings from generous ‘expenses’, while at the other end of the scale many honest sportsmen found themselves banned for professionalism over the smallest of cash prizes, or because their employment in a manual role was deemed to give them an unfair advantage. The ancient past was co-opted into this debate and was used to both inspire elite amateurs and justify the exclusion of working-class professionals.

The research for this book began by considering British approaches to ancient sport in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, and the extent to which they were intended to, and actually did, influence attitudes to contemporary sport. It was prompted by a paragraph in Greek Athletic Sports and Festivals, in which the author, E. Norman Gardiner, broke off from introducing sport in the ancient world to rail against the alleged shortcomings of the Football Association, accusing them of tyranny ‘conducted in the interests of various joint-stock companies masquerading as Football Clubs’ and claiming that, ‘Under these circumstances the history of the decline of Greek athletics is an object-lesson full of instruction.’10

At first glance, Gardiner’s comment seems odd. Football was a modern team game whereas ancient Greek sport, with few exceptions, concentrated on solo events. Furthermore, Gardiner’s talk of amateurs, professionals and joint-stock companies employs terminology that would have been incomprehensible to ancient Greeks, placing sport in an explicitly commercial context. Gardiner maintained that ancient Greek sport was the antithesis of commercialism, tracing its roots to aristocratic funeral games and religious festivals such as the Olympics. However, while he maintained that the zenith of ancient Greek sport around the fifth century BCE was pure, he also thought it subject to a slow and steady decline from that point forward. Throughout his work, Gardiner repeated this theme, which he blamed on the rise of a professional class of sportsman.11 For Gardiner, sport under the Romans was barely sport at all, and he saw sportsmen of the Roman period as little better than slaves, forced to entertain large crowds in purpose-built stadia. Gardiner directly equated this with modern sport and predicted it would undergo a similar decline in moral and physical standards in a population ever more obsessed with spectator sport and the partisan hero-worship of their favourite sportsmen.12

Gardiner was not alone in drawing parallels and warnings for modern sport from antiquity. His work was the culmination of an intense period of British academic studies of the subject beginning with John Pentland Mahaffy in 1875 and continuing with the work of Percy Gardner and others throughout the 1880s and 1890s.

Mahaffy emphasised the connections between Greek sporting dominance in the ancient world and British sporting dominance in his own time. In Mahaffy’s view, the Anglo-Saxon gentleman amateur was the heir of the aristocratic Greek sporting hero and the ancient world had much to teach the modern sportsman about the pitfalls of organised sport. Importantly, Mahaffy drew a distinction between athletic and agonistic competition, directly equating them with amateurism and professionalism.13 Percy Gardner, who had been closely associated with Mahaffy for many years as a member of the Hellenic Society, took a similar line and established a second enduring myth to accompany Mahaffy’s invention of the Greek gentleman amateur, ‘the idea that ancient sport was specialised and corrupted, and thus in decline from the fourth century BCE on’.14

Gardner was also concerned by the increasingly important part that sport had come to play in education, claiming that athleticism was demanding too much time and attention in public schools and universities.15 Gardner’s remarks here put his thinking, and that of Mahaffy and Gardiner, into context. They were writing at a time when sport was going through an unprecedented period of change, combined with an enormous surge in popularity. British sporting culture had been revolutionised by the emergence of organised team sports in the public schools in the 1850s. This new movement of athleticism, prompted by a combination of the practical requirement to improve discipline in boarding schools and the spiritual inspiration of muscular Christianity, rapidly spread through the public schools and was carried forward into the universities as schoolboys became undergraduates. Although cricket and some other sports were established in many schools beforehand, Tony Mangan dates the advent of athleticism in the public schools to 1853, with the foundation of the Harrow Philathletic Club and George Cotton’s Circular to Parents at Marlborough.16 Within a decade, the need for a common code had led to the foundation of the Football Association, and within twenty years rugby had broken away, international matches had been established in both codes and hundreds of clubs were in existence, with players from all social backgrounds. Sports created, or at least heavily revised, in elite educational establishments and initially dominated by teams from the same background became increasingly open, causing anxiety and conflict in some quarters.

The period between 1875 and 1910, when Mahaffy, Gardner and Gardiner were writing, was a time in which public schools and Oxbridge were dominated by classicism and athleticism. Classics dominated the syllabus at most public schools and knowledge of Latin and ancient Greek was a requirement for entrance to Oxford or Cambridge.17 At the same time, sport had come to be such a dominant force in public school and university life that some parents selected schools based on their sporting rather than academic records, and the graduate who possessed one or more varsity ‘blues’ was at a distinct advantage when seeking employment as a schoolmaster.18 Furthermore, Oxbridge culture in the late nineteenth century was arguably more socially elite than academically elite. Most students entered as ‘commoners’, which is to say they paid their own way and would most likely take an ordinary rather than an honours degree. Many had no intention of ever taking any exams and treated university as a dining and sports club. Oxford had 1,482 students in 1858 and had grown to 3,091 by 1900 and Cambridge was of a similar size.19 Given that both universities spread these students across about twenty colleges, the communities were actually quite small and the opportunity to play sport at a reasonably high standard correspondingly common. Consequently, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain was a society whose leaders in academia, politics, church and the military were often closely linked via bonds forged on the playing fields.

Class, Classicism and Gender

The idea of class, and social-exclusion based on class, is central to this study. By the early nineteenth century, access to public schools, originally intended to educate boys from a wide cross-section of society, was increasingly limited to the better-off.20 The sports which subsequently developed in the public schools from the mid-century onwards were to be zealously guarded with a form of amateurism designed not so much to stamp out the practice of awarding prize money as to limit access to certain sports and competitions to those from an acceptable social class.21 Social-exclusion was generally justified by the education and profession of the individual. However, at the same time, the idea of the gentleman amateur was based on a supposed model of ancient aristocratic amateurism rooted in the class structures of ancient Greece. While this suggests, particularly to those familiar with the work of David Young and others, that such thinking was based on a cynical manipulation of history to justify contemporary social exclusion, it is also important to remember that for public schoolboys immersed in an entirely classics-based educational system such beliefs might be genuinely held.22

Karl Marx’s view of class as a hierarchical pyramid with aristocratic landowners at the top, capitalists in the middle and the working class at the bottom provides a simple and readily understood framework for broadly defining layers within society. This Marxist framework is remarkably like the class structure of Greek city states in the Archaic (700–480 BCE) and Classical (480–323 BCE) periods when males were divided into three classes, πλούσιοι (plousioi), πένητες (penêtes) and πτωχοὶ (ptochoi), with similar boundaries.23 Marx’s early life was steeped in classicism. He grew up in Trier, a city with extensive Roman remains, learned ancient Greek as a schoolboy and wrote his university dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus.24 Marx regarded Aristotle as the greatest thinker of antiquity and was familiar with the section in Politics which dealt with the inhabitants of Greek cities, dividing them by occupation and wealth.25 It therefore seems likely that both Marx and the nineteenth-century scholars who looked at the history of ancient sport went through a similar process in mapping ancient class divisions to their own time.

However, a three-tier model cannot adequately deal with the complexities of social differences and barriers between the classes because the middle and lower classes are so large and varied, having their own internal barriers, to require further sub-classifications. People in Victorian Britain were more likely to think of themselves as belonging to a rank or order than a class as such. People spoke of the middle and working classes rather than the middle or working class, precisely because they were understood to contain many bands.26 Ronald Neale suggests that a middling class sat between the middle and working classes, with the latter further subdivided into proletarian and deferential layers.27 Neale’s five-tiered class model is useful in distinguishing between the well to do members of the middle class, who initiated and codified the amateur sport revolution in the public schools and universities from 1850 to 1875, and the members of the middling classes to whom they increasingly delegated the day to day running and administration of their sports in the final quarter of the century.28 As Norman Baker observed, a prominent role in administering sporting organisations was taken on by members of many of the new ‘professions’ which emerged in the nineteenth century.29 Not only were these highly motivated and well-organised individuals prepared to take on the onerous task of sports administration, they were sensitive to their own position in society, deferential to those above them and acted as effective gatekeepers between the middle class and the lower orders.30

The possession of a classical education was central to middle-class identity in the nineteenth century. As the century wore on, and the public school sector rapidly expanded to meet the demands of the new middling class, they too enthusiastically adopted the trappings of classicism as a means of cementing their status and differentiating themselves from the common man. As John Chandos remarked, this classicism often went no deeper than to provide a selection of Greek and Latin quotations which could be dropped into conversation as evidence of social status but it was a powerful marker of difference.31 Thomas Arnold, who many later Victorians regarded as an unimpeachable source of pedological wisdom, was particularly influential in encouraging the elevation of Greek over Latin as the more important element of classical education, his reasoning being that Roman historians were unreliable and prone to scandalous exaggeration, whereas Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon were always impartial.32 Arnold’s reasoning may have been naïve, or it may have masked the less altruistic motive that Greek was a more effective bastion of elitism than Latin. As education permeated downwards, a reasonably literate working man might master Latin if he so desired but Greek was more of a challenge.

The rarity of knowledge of ancient Greek and its strange alphabet gave the language a mystique in the popular imagination. In low-class circles, more often than Latin, Greek was associated with extreme, other-worldly intellectual prowess and arcane, even sinister arts.33

The dominant position of Classics in the curriculum meant that ideas and values directly imported from ancient Greece dominated the way in which middle-class males thought of themselves and other men. Sport was the arena in which boys could learn and demonstrate manly virtues and appreciate the value of comradeship. The school magazines that chronicled the growing culture of house and school sports matches were filled with accounts of cricket and football transformed into feats of Homeric valour.34 Taking a lead from ancient poets and sculptors, the public schoolboy learned about masculine beauty and the love that could exist between men. Given that the nineteenth-century public school was overtly and avowedly Christian, such love was expected to be a Platonic and brotherly love, rather than anything sexual, but in that exclusively male environment transgressions were inevitable and homosexuality was not uncommon.35 Such was the homosocial nature of the public school and universities that boys, who might have left home at age 7 and spent the next fourteen years or so in an all-male environment, often found it difficult to relate to women. The fact that women in ancient Greece were marginalised and excluded from political and commercial life only served to reinforce these difficulties by encouraging the idea that women were naturally intellectually, physically and emotionally inferior, and many former public schoolboys struggled to develop the depth of friendship, even with their own wives, that they had with old schoolfriends. John Tosh felt that this explained why so many middle-class men were devotees of clubs and societies; they needed the comfort of an all-male environment to retreat to from the alien unfamiliarity of family life.36

Given that sports clubs within public schools and universities were initially created in an entirely male environment, the issue of female participation in sport did not arise, and as football, rowing, and athletics clubs spread out from educational establishments into wider middle-class society they did so as specifically male-only spaces. The homosocial model of sport inherited from public schools and colleges was reinforced by the example of the ancient Greeks, who had forbidden females to take part in the Olympics, making it a capital offence for married women to attend.37 In Victorian England, the attitude to female spectators was somewhat different and while some professional sports were seen as unsuitable for ladies to watch, public school and university sport, particularly rowing and cricket, provided a useful social space in which families of similar status could mingle. The only role open to women in this male-dominated sporting environment was to act as decorative prizegivers. At Much Wenlock, while visiting William Penny Brookes’ Olympian Games, Baron Coubertin was enchanted by the tradition of having pretty girls presenting the victors’ wreaths and medals, and he saw this as an appropriate role for women in his revived games.38 Had it been solely Coubertin’s decision, this would have been the only role open to women in the modern Olympics and as late as 1914 he was still trying to outlaw female participation in the games because he felt that, ‘It was not seemly for women to take part in open contests before the public’.39

Late-Victorian attitudes towards women’s participation in sports were also linked to the issue of class. Ladies’ constitutions were assumed to be delicate and therefore strenuous effort was to be avoided lest they damaged their health and reduced the likelihood of being able to have children. Not only did this ignore the reality that childbirth was far more stressful and strenuous than anything women were likely to encounter on the sports field, it adhered to a standard which was only applied to middle- and upper-class women.40 Working class women were often involved in heavy labour, either in domestic service or in industrial or agricultural roles, but such women had little or no access to sporting opportunity and the kind of sports generally considered genteel enough for females, such as tennis, golf and croquet, were economically beyond their reach.

Women were not only widely considered too delicate to take part in many sports, their ability to cope with the intellectual rigours of Greek was also called into question. The novels of George Eliot, presumably inspired by real-life experience, feature a recurring theme of insecure male characters characterising women as being incapable of learning Greek.41 This reflected the reality up until the 1860s, that if girls received any formal schooling at all, it focussed on ‘accomplishments’, which is to say furnishing a young lady with a range of skills in music, dancing and painting that might make her a more attractive marriage proposition, as well as teaching subjects such as modern languages and geography which were considered too ‘lightweight’ by many boys’ schools.42 Those few girls who did study Greek, far from being recognised for their talent as their male counterparts would be, were regarded with a suspicion bordering on repulsion by some members of the upper classes who saw them as betraying their natural role as ‘angels in the house’ to become ‘madwomen in the attic’.43 In the wake of the Taunton Commission, girls’ schools spent less time on accomplishments and more on a broad liberal education, but with modern languages generally occupying the position held by Greek and Latin in boys’ public schools.44 This, combined with the tendency for girls’ schools to focus on dancing and deportment rather than sport, meant that they had little culture of classicism or athleticism.

Classicism and the Language of Sport

That some elements of the vocabulary of modern sport are classical in origin is obvious but the way in which ancient Greek and Latin terms have survived, and in some cases changed in meaning, tells us much about the development of sport in the nineteenth century.

The words ‘athletic’ and ‘athlete’ in their wider sense apply to any sport involving physical exertion, and certainly when historians of ancient sport talked about athletics, they included fighting events and even equestrianism, as well as running and throwing.45 Similarly, when the terms were adopted for use in modern sport, they were not solely limited to the context of track and field, and when Victorians talked of athleticism in their schools and universities the term covered most sports with the exception of hunting, shooting and fishing.

However, there is an irony in the adaptation of the word athletics in its nineteenth-century sense. The word athlete is based on the ancient Greek άθλητὴς (athletes), literally meaning ‘one who competes for prizes’.46 Whilst, on the one hand, this accurately describes the serious gentleman amateur, who competed, not only for the love of the game but to strive to be the best, it also proved to be problematic over time. Early public school and university sportsmen saw no moral problem in competing for valuable trophies, or even cash prizes for that matter, but as class-based tensions between amateurs and professionals came to the fore later in the century, the use of the terms athlete and athletics might have been called into question. Certainly, Gardiner equated άθλητὴς with modern professionals and blamed them for the decline in ancient sport, but by the time he made that point the word was firmly established in modern use.47 Mahaffy had earlier made the distinction between athletic and agonistic competition, claiming that the former applied to competition for prizes, as for example was the case at the Panathenaic Games, whereas the latter was for honour only, which was supposedly the terms under which the ancient Olympics took place.48 By this logic, agonistics rather than athletics might have been a much more comfortable term for Victorian gentleman amateurs. However, Mahaffy’s assertion was inaccurate insofar as the concept of ἀγών (agon), which meant contest or struggle, was pervasive in Greek sport, but as Johan Huizinga pointed out, it was also central to notions of ancient Greek masculinity and success in politics and war. The effort expended on, and prestige to be won, at one of the great panhellenic festivals was no less than that to be gained on the battlefield, such was the importance of sport to the Greeks.49 In contrast the Roman concept of games, ludus, is less serious being much more related to play and entertainment.50 Roger Callois, in his critique of Huizinga’s work chose a different interpretation and used the term ludus to represent the most serious level of games. Callois’ view was that the most serious sport took place in an entirely separate sphere of time and space to everyday life with its own rules and rituals which do not apply in the real world. This was true of Roman sport which was deadly serious, in that it was often literally a matter of life and death for the participants, but which was also clearly distinguishable from everyday life.51 Gideon Dishon has used Callois’ work to draw parallels between this view and the place of team games within the Victorian public school.52 However, I would argue that Callois’ model does not apply to public schools because, as with elite males in ancient Greece, there was no discernible boundary between sport and other aspects of life.

Whether the name of the Harrow Philathletic Club was suggested by pupils or was the idea of their headmaster, Charles Vaughan, is unknown, although as the club was officially a pupil-led initiative we should assume the former. That the club was named philathletic, as opposed to philagonistic, perhaps implies that winning prizes was deemed more important than merely taking part, and certainly the provision of a number of trophies was one of the club’s earliest priorities.53 Of course, nobody at Harrow in 1853 would have foreseen the bitter disputes over amateurism and professionalism which were to erupt over the following decades. In 1898, James Cotton Minchin wrote of Harrow’s earlier sporting heroes, ‘This was an aristocracy of the finest cricketers and “footer” players that the School could for the time produce.’54 Certainly, some of Harrow’s players were literally members of the British aristocracy, but Cotton Minchin was using the word in its original sense, ἀριστοκρατία (aristokratia), meaning ‘rule of the best’, where the element ἄριστος (aristos) alluded to excellence and was linked to the spirit of ἀρετή (arete), a term which not only implied excellence, but moral virtue, and which was deeply embedded in ancient Greek attitudes towards both sport and education.55 These attitudes, or at least a Victorian English approximation of them, were also instilled into the pupils of nineteenth century public schools by virtue of their almost entirely classical curriculum. The opening chapter looks at how classics came to dominate the public schools and set them apart from other educational establishments.


1 John Chandos, Boys Together: English Public Schools 1800–1864 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 159.

2 Angus Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture: ‘Habits of Heart and Mind’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 117–118.

3 Ibid., 268.

4 Angus Hawkins, Modernity and the Victorians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 69.

5 Martin Stephen, The English Public School (London: Metro, 2018), 14.

6 Alicia C. Percival, Very Superior Men: Some Early Public School Headmasters and Their Achievements (London: Charles Knight, 1973), 260–261.

7 J. A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 18.

Details

Pages
XII, 330
Publication Year
2025
ISBN (PDF)
9781803746142
ISBN (ePUB)
9781803746159
ISBN (Softcover)
9781803746135
DOI
10.3726/b22052
Language
English
Publication date
2024 (December)
Keywords
Public Schools Classics Rowing Class History of Sport Classical Reception Social History History of Education 19th Century Britain Olympic Games Victorian Studies Sociology of Sport
Published
Oxford, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, New York, 2025. XII, 330 pp., 9 tables
Product Safety
Peter Lang Group AG

Biographical notes

Andy Carter (Author)

Andy Carter completed his PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University. He previously gained a BA in History and Archaeology from Bangor University and an MA in Public History from Royal Holloway, University of London. He is also the author of Beyond the Pale: Early Black and Asian Cricketers in Britain, 1868-1945.

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Title: Games, Greek and Pluck