In a recent study of British military medicine, Mark Harrison found it hard to think of any other aspect of military life that had been so poorly served in histories of the British armed forces. If there is another it might be sport, which over the last century and a half and particularly during the years with which this study deals, 1880–1960, took up a good proportion of the time and energies of many serving sailors, soldiers and later airmen. It has certainly been left out of the accounts of most writers on military history who have, perhaps unsurprisingly, had more warlike themes on their minds. Edward Spiers, in a number of authoritative studies of the Victorian and Edwardian army, only occasionally alludes to the role of sport, usually as a part of that package of reforms designed to improve the lot of the ordinary soldier in part to provide a stimulus to recruiting in the last decades of the nineteenth century, or as one of the activities that soldiers could enjoy in rear areas and garrisons even on active service in the imperial ‘small wars’ of that period.