R Rackets, Rugby, and the Rest

Rackets, Rugby and the Rest

Interest in sport has been constant from the College’s earliest days, a preoccupation reflected in volumes preserved among the Rare Books.

The College has been collecting Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack almost from the time of its inception: John Wisden established his annual series in 1864, and the earliest of the College’s 143 volumes dates from 1866. The 19th century was the era when many sports adopted regulated codes; before that, sport was more loosely defined, as we can see from Joseph Strutt’s 1853 book The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England. There, in addition to recognisable games in their earlier forms, such as cricket and football, we find descriptions of ‘Wrestling and other Gymnastic Sports’, ‘Hood-man Blind’, ‘Badger-baiting’, and ‘Sporting with Insects’. But with the systematisation of sport, not least in Britain’s schools, a new era dawned, one documented by the celebrated Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes, a 32 volume set of books published between 1885 and 1920, mostly under the editorial direction of Henry Charles FitzRoy Somerset, 8th Duke of Beaufort, a politician and former soldier who had served as a young man with the very old Duke of Wellington.

Beaufort’s vision of what constitutes sport differs from our modern understanding in several points. There are books dedicated to Big-Game Hunting, a topic that reveals the colonialist spirit of the time, as well as volumes on Coursing and Falconry, Boating and Racing and Steeple-Chasing. But Beaufort was also open to new developments, such as the invention of the bicycle, and the volume on Cycling, written by William Coutts Keppel, Earl of Albemarle in 1887, includes images of men and women exploring the scope of the new vehicle. Other games enjoyed by both sexes included Skating and Figure-Skating, Tennis and Billiards, and Major William Broadfoot’s volume on the latter includes lithographic plates that evoke the atmosphere of country house weekends from a lost age. Equally memorable are the plates in John Moyer Heathcote’s book on skating, where the advised item of safety equipment appears to be the top hat. Another new sport is described in 1902’s Motors and Motor-Driving, in which the author, Alfred Harmsworth, recommends introducing new cars to your horses. But if this all seems genteel, see the daredevil courage of the tobogganist inventing the discipline of the skeleton on the Buol Run at Davos.

The Badminton volume on Cricket from 1888 was written by Allan Gibson Steele, an England international, and provides a history of the sport with chapters devoted to umpiring, wicketkeeping, fielding and the mysteries of bowling and batting. For the game of rugby, alas, we must search in the volume dedicated to Football by Montague Shearman who includes the oval-ball game in a section squeezed between chapters on Association Football and Australian Rules. Published in 1899, Shearman’s book relies mainly on photographic illustrations, but due to the long exposures of Victorian cameras, moving ball scenes have been achieved by trickery in the dark room. Foul play!