Good sports
Hugh Massingberd
Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School J. A. Mangan (Cambridge pp.345, £25) It would appear from this somewhat overpriced book that the cult of athleticism virtually began at Harrow in the 1850s, and it is perhaps fair to say that it continued to flourished there longer than at most other public schools. Certainly, from my own experience, in the early 1960s the cult was still going very strong indeed. I was in a notably 'keen' house and no one, alas, admired the 'flannelled fools and muddied oafs' more than myself, although my own cricket talents took me no further than the fringes of the 3rd XI. It was a long time before it dawned upon me that there were more important criteria in assessing people than ability at playing games.
For this 'intensive and comparative' work Dr Mangan has concentrated upon half-a-dozen 'case studies': Harrow (Great Public School), Stonyhurst (Denominational School), Marlborough (Proprietary School), Uppingham (Elevated Grammar School), Lancing (Woodard School) and Loretto (Private Venture School). It would be idle to complain that this is an `academic' book but the 'thesis' language will surely put off many people who might otherwise have enjoyed the subject. According to Dr Mangan, the Eton v. Harrow match is 'a focusing mechanism, mnemonic agent and value filter par excellence.' The text proper only covers 219 of the 345 pages; the rest is given over to diagrams and statistics, verbatim reports of tedious documents, the lyrics of too many school songs (you only have to hear, let alone sing, one to get the message), and copious notes. I could get my own back by belabouring Dr Mangan for a quite unacceptable number of mistakes in names, dates and so forth, but I will restrict myself to the observation that he ignores Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy's The Public School Phenomenon, which, for all its flaws, surely merits a mention in 28 pages of Bibliography.
Nevertheless, Dr Mangan must be congratulated on an impressive piece of work, a most worthwhile examination of a neglected field, though he might just have touched on the role of the preparatory (or private) school — another neglected subject. For all its academicism, the book is often illuminating. Dr Mangan makes it clear that the ball was not started rolling, as one might have supposed, by Dr Arnold of Rugby; rather, he highlights the contribution of such headmasters as Vaughan of Harrow (whose departure as a result of blackmail over homosexuality is slightly glossed over), Cotton of Marlborough, Thring of Uppingham, Watford of Lancing and the appropriately nutty Almond of Loretta (the `Wesley of the public school system'). Organised games really came about as a means of school discipline; as Mrs Cotton said 'wholesome sports took the place of poaching, rat-hunting and poultry-stealing'. Although the tyranny of compulsory games took longer than is generally thought to be enforced, the traditions ossified remarkably swiftly. The `close' at Clifton in which there was that 'breathless hush' was, of course, not hallowed by centuries but brand new.
While having discreet fun with the excesses of over-enthusiasm among the masters, Dr Mangan shows they were mere ly fulfilling the parents' wishes. 'You've not got to earn your living, you know, so you need not work your eyes out: I'd much rather you got into the Eleven,' Lord Verniker advised his son in Everley's Friend ship, a novel written by Welldon of Har row. Athleticism was felt to be good training for the Empire, though it could be put to bizarre use, as when two officers were each determined to be the last to leave the Lucknow Residency in the Mutiny. As Michael Edwardes relates, the loser `could not stand the trick of a shoulder to shoulder, learnt on the Harrow football fields.'
Dr Mangan gives a vivid account of how 'the worship of muscle became steadily en crusted with symbols and rituals of prostra tion and power which exalted the athletic, excited the devout and stigmatised the heretical.' He is right to stress the para mount importance of the 'house' as opposed to the school. 'A boy, who at 19, can rule a house at a public school, at 50 can rule a nation,' said one housemaster. At Uppingham, boys were whipped to exhort them to cheer louder at house matches. Dr Mangan singles out Edward Bowen, who wrote those sentimental Harrow Songs and believed that `the best boys are on the whole the players of games', as the epitome of the ethos. Dr Mangan illustrates the `sym bolism' with a story of how G. C. Cottrell, killed before the Lord's Match, was buried with his cap. Effectively shocking use is made of the 'Great War' obituaries that linked 'symbols of summer afternoons with the bloody agonies of trench warfare'.
Although he touches on the aesthetic reaction — citing Blunt, Betjeman and MacNeice who were all new boys together at Marlborough — Dr Mangan does not Pay enough attention to the point about the survivor within the system, the detached, phlegmatic school-boy as typified by Nicholas Jenkins, for example, in The Music of Time. Nonetheless, Dr Mangan manages to present an admirably balanced picture, pointing fairly to 'Virtue as well as vice in the ideology'. As he says, there was, 'at times, decency, sense and soundness in the enunciation of moral principle. There was visionary idealism as well as myopic naivety in the exhortations of the committed, the aspirations of the innocent and the preaching of millenarians . .
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