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ASSISTING MRS TOMMY ATKINS: GENDER, CLASS, PHILANTHROPY, AND THE DOMESTIC IMPACT OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN WAR, 1899–1902*
- ELIZA RIEDI
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- The Historical Journal / Volume 60 / Issue 3 / September 2017
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- 08 March 2017, pp. 745-769
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- September 2017
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Despite the well-established historiography examining the South African war's impact upon British society, little attention has been paid to the plight of British soldiers’ families or to the charitable efforts mobilized to maintain them in the absence of adequate state support. This article, focusing on the key charity in the field, the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Families Association (SSFA), examines the SSFA's wartime policies and considers how the Association's actions influenced subsequent state policy-making. It explores the motivations and attitudes of its middle-class, mostly female, volunteers, on whose sustained commitment the work of the SSFA depended. In analysing the sources of the SSFA's funding, it considers how class and regionality shaped public giving to patriotic philanthropy. Finally, it investigates how perceptions of soldiers’ wives and mechanisms for their support in the First World War were affected by the South African war experience. Overall, the article aims both to demonstrate the importance of philanthropic aid to soldiers’ families in understanding the domestic impact of this imperial war, and to trace the longer-term effects on the development of policies towards servicemen's dependants.
Sport and the Military
- The British Armed Forces 1880–1960
- Tony Mason, Eliza Riedi
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- 05 December 2012
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- 04 November 2010
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On battleships, behind the trenches of the Western Front and in the midst of the Desert War, British servicemen and women have played sport in the least promising circumstances. When 400 soldiers were asked in Burma in 1946 what they liked about the Army, 108 put sport in first place - well ahead of comradeship and leave - and this book explores the fascinating history of organised sport in the life of officers and other ranks of all three British services from 1880–1960. Drawing on a wide range of sources, this book examines how organised sport developed in the Victorian army and navy, became the focus of criticism for Edwardian army reformers, and was officially adopted during the Great War to boost morale and esprit de corps. It shows how service sport adapted to the influx of professional sportsmen, especially footballers, during the Second World War and the National Service years.
List of illustrations
- Tony Mason, De Montfort University, Leicester, Eliza Riedi, University of Leicester
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- Sport and the Military
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- 05 December 2012
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Contents
- Tony Mason, De Montfort University, Leicester, Eliza Riedi, University of Leicester
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- Sport and the Military
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- 05 December 2012
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- 04 November 2010, pp v-v
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7 - The national service years: the summit of military sport?
- Tony Mason, De Montfort University, Leicester, Eliza Riedi, University of Leicester
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- Sport and the Military
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- 05 December 2012
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- 04 November 2010, pp 217-252
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Summary
There was one certain way to escape the routine of the Army and that was to excel at sports. Anyone who reached a high standard at football or rugby, anyone who could run or jump and especially anyone who could box, was assured of a few short cuts … In the British Army, squad competes against squad and regiment competes against regiment. The Army competes against the Navy and Air Force and the Combined Services compete against the World – or they did in those days. The horizons of an Army sportsman knew no bounds.
Tony Thorne, Brasso, Blanco and Bull (London: Robinson, 2000), pp. 50–1.It will be clear by now that sport in its many forms had become a well-established part of service life well before the end of the Second World War. Its importance was to be underlined when conscription was reintroduced by the National Service Act of 1947. The loss of India had not only diminished the size of the Empire but deprived the British armed services of a large pool of manpower. As the British government had no intention of giving up the rest of the Empire, sailors, soldiers and airmen were needed to man bases in many areas of the world. The 1947 Act stipulated that all males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six would serve for one year. The rapid onset of the Cold War changed the context of national service with first the crisis over Berlin in 1948 and then the outbreak of war in Korea in 1950 emphasising the need for further increases in the manpower of the armed forces. The government agreed to extend the period of service to eighteen months in November 1948; in September 1950 it was increased to two years. By the time of the Festival of Britain in 1951, half of the manpower of the British army was made up of national servicemen. Conscription could have become a permanent part of the British way of life as it was in many other countries such as Belgium, France and Italy. That it did not was probably mainly due to the development of nuclear weapons with Britain relying first on the American deterrent and then on their own atomic bomb and the V-Bomber force to deliver it after 1955.
5 - Soldiers, sailors and civilians
- Tony Mason, De Montfort University, Leicester, Eliza Riedi, University of Leicester
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- Sport and the Military
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- 05 December 2012
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- 04 November 2010, pp 144-177
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I don’t think that before I came to Hampshire, I had ever talked to a soldier. They were a race apart to me.
William Pickford, Secretary of Hampshire Football Association in his ‘Veterans’ Column in the Portsmouth Football MailDavid French has recently reminded us that one of the ideas behind the reforms of the army in the second half of the nineteenth century was to raise the status of the regular soldier in the eyes of the rest of the population. French has pointed to the paradoxical attitudes held by many late Victorians who embraced a ‘pervasive popular militarism’ largely based on the role of the army and navy in constructing and maintaining the British Empire while at the same time having a very low opinion of those soldiers and sailors who made up the bulk of the other ranks in both services. While toy soldiers and Boy’s Own stories of imperial adventures were popular among the young, the older generation were excited by the exploits of military heroes such as Gordon, Roberts and Baden-Powell. Moreover military parades and regimental bands were often part of public displays which appealed across class, generation and locality. But the ordinary soldier was often criticised for drunkenness, hooliganism and sexual immorality. Largely recruited from the lowest of the low, they were not respectable and often refused entry to parts of theatres, coffee shops, hotels and even some public houses. When R. J. Kentish joined the Royal Irish Fusiliers he thought the men ‘giants’ but noted that ‘they had the … habit of drinking an average of at least 15 pints of beer per man on pay-days’, which ‘occasioned much crime and a … very long orderly room daily’. The Cardwell-Childers reforms of the 1870s aimed to embed regular infantry regiments within their county and city communities with the establishment of a permanent depot and a clear, geographical recruiting area. The hope was to develop a shared sense of identity between civilians and their local regiments. This chapter will explore the relationship between the development of modern organised sport in Britain between the 1880s and the 1930s and the growth and role of sport in the armed services. Sport was one of the ways in which regiments might mix more or less freely with their civilian neighbours. The aim of this chapter will be to look in more detail at these sporting relations, first at the local level, then at the level of the key national sporting organisations such as the Football Association, the Amateur Athletic Association and the Rugby Football Union. We will try to explore military influences on civilian sport and attempt to estimate the impact of civilian sport on the military.
2 - Officer sports and their critics, 1880–1914
- Tony Mason, De Montfort University, Leicester, Eliza Riedi, University of Leicester
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- Sport and the Military
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- 05 December 2012
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- 04 November 2010, pp 50-79
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The Duke of Wellington said that Waterloo was won on the playing- fields of Eton. Of … the South African War it has been said that the guns at Sannah’s Post were captured on the polo-ground at Hurlingham; that Magersfontein was lost at Lords; that Spion Kop was evacuated at Sandown Park; and that the war dragged on for 32 months in the Quorn and Pytchley coverts – because the British officer was accustomed to look upon war as a branch of sport.
‘W. T.’ to the Editor, The Times, 2 June 1916Before 1914 criticism of sport in the army focused overwhelmingly on officer sports. In the aftermath of the Boer War officer recruitment and education were among the key topics addressed by army reformers. Officer sport – and especially polo – was attacked as a major contributing factor in the ‘extravagance’ that restricted commissioned ranks in the cavalry to those with substantial private incomes, and defended on the grounds that it promoted officer-like qualities and acted as a form of military training. Tim Travers has suggested that the Edwardian period saw the ‘convergence and frequent conflict’ of two ideals of war – the new ‘technical, functionally competent, professional ideal’ and the ‘traditional, gentlemanly, amateur ideal’. For the cavalry, Brian Bond, Edward Spiers, Gerald DeGroot and the Marquis of Anglesey have charted how the movement towards reform of cavalry doctrine in the first years of the twentieth century was rapidly thwarted by the ‘forces of reaction’. A key aspect of this reaction was what Spiers has called the ‘gentlemanly officer tradition’. The officer corps was, almost entirely, made up of those who could claim to be ‘gentlemen’. As a group they cherished a heroic and chivalric concept of war, valued ‘character’ and morale over intellect and professional training, and attached a high importance to sporting activities. The Edwardian debates over the place of sport in the officer lifestyle, hitherto largely unexamined, therefore provide a revealing sidelight on the ethos of the pre-1914 army. This chapter explores the role of equestrian sport in the ‘gentlemanly officer tradition’ and describes the prolonged and ultimately futile campaigns before 1914 to restrict it in the cause of a more diverse and meritocratic officer corps.
6 - A different kind of war
- Tony Mason, De Montfort University, Leicester, Eliza Riedi, University of Leicester
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- Sport and the Military
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- 05 December 2012
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- 04 November 2010, pp 178-216
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Some of you chaps who had a rough time during the war may consider that because we were footballers we had a much better time. So we did, and I should be the last man to deny it.
Ron Burgess, Football – My Life (London: Souvenir Press, 1952), p. 62Recently a number of historians have emphasised that from the point of view of the fighting man there were at times striking similarities between the Second and First World Wars. Trench warfare and ‘shellshock’ were not confined to the Great War; the experience of combat was often equally traumatic; and at times (especially in Normandy) casualty rates equalled or even exceeded those of the Western Front. Yet these similarities should not perhaps be overstated. One significant difference in the Second World War was the concentration of hundreds of thousands of servicemen in Britain between Dunkirk and D-Day; another was the much higher proportion of non-combatant soldiers. These men, most of whose war service was characterised largely by boredom and frustration, represented a rather different morale problem from that seen in 1914–18. The Second World War also saw a much greater recognition by government of the importance of civilian morale. These factors produced somewhat different approaches towards sport than had been seen in the first war, when professional football in particular had come under attack as frivolous and unpatriotic. In 1939–45 it was largely accepted that professional sport could help lift the morale of servicemen, war workers and civilians alike. It was only after the fall of Singapore that wartime sport came under attack both in the Daily Express and in Parliament as demonstrating the ‘smugness’ and ‘complacency’ that were undermining the war effort, and the restrictions subsequently introduced (effectively confining sport to weekends) were gradually eased as the war situation improved.
In the armed forces’ attitudes towards sport both similarities and differences can be seen between the two wars. To a considerable degree the uses of sport by the services in the Second World War did replicate those seen in the Great War. Despite the introduction of increasingly sophisticated psychological testing for officer selection the army’s faith in sport as a measure of officer qualities seems, at least in the early days of the war, to have burnt almost as brightly as ever. According to Tony Pawson, when he was interviewed for officer training soon after Dunkirk, ‘“I see you captained the Winchester College cricket team. What was your batting average?” was the only query from the General presiding. “108, Sir”. “Splendid, just the sort of man we want”.’
Introduction
- Tony Mason, De Montfort University, Leicester, Eliza Riedi, University of Leicester
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- Sport and the Military
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[In the autumn of 1885 the 2nd Battalion moved to Pembroke Dock] a very pleasant station, with lots of hunting, fishing and shooting and enjoyable weekends in Tenby. But it was a dreary spot for the men. During the winter of 1885–86 I was the Acting Adjutant of the Battalion and, with a view to providing recreation for the men, I managed to hire a fairly level field near the Barracks – an amenity not easily come by in that hilly country. Further I purchased all the essential requirements of football, really nothing but goalposts and some balls … Now it is hardly believable, but it is an absolute fact that only some 47 years ago hardly a man in the Battalion could be persuaded to come down even to kick a ball about, still less to take part in a game.
‘Reminiscences of Lt. Gen. Sir Gerald Ellison KCB, KCMG’, The Lancashire Lad. The Journal of the Loyal Regiment (North Lancashire) (April 1933), p. 10In 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.
Select bibliography
- Tony Mason, De Montfort University, Leicester, Eliza Riedi, University of Leicester
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- Sport and the Military
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Index
- Tony Mason, De Montfort University, Leicester, Eliza Riedi, University of Leicester
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- Sport and the Military
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- 04 November 2010, pp 283-288
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Acknowledgements
- Tony Mason, De Montfort University, Leicester, Eliza Riedi, University of Leicester
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- Sport and the Military
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- 04 November 2010, pp viii-x
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Frontmatter
- Tony Mason, De Montfort University, Leicester, Eliza Riedi, University of Leicester
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- Sport and the Military
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- 04 November 2010, pp i-iv
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1 - The growth of service sport, 1880–1914
- Tony Mason, De Montfort University, Leicester, Eliza Riedi, University of Leicester
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- Sport and the Military
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- 05 December 2012
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- 04 November 2010, pp 15-49
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What a change in a few years! Football has emptied the barrack rooms (shall it be said the canteens also?).
Captain E. G. Curtis, ‘Football in the Army: Its History and Records’, in The Book of Football (London: Amalgamated Press, 1906), p. 100The later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw marked improvements in the conditions of service of both ordinary soldiers and the lower deck of the navy. Problems of recruitment and retention (most marked in the army but also experienced by the navy as the service expanded dramatically at the turn of the century); rising expectations in civil society of the services as an employer; the need for better-educated servicemen as naval and military life became increasingly technological; and, in the navy, an increasingly assertive lower-deck movement all combined to create a slow but definite impetus for reform in both arms. In the army the introduction of short service (six years followed by six years in the reserve) made soldiering a more attractive option. Flogging was abolished in 1881; military prisons were reformed; progressive improvements were made in the conditions of barrack accommodation; married quarters and separation allowances were granted for those few soldiers’ wives who were ‘on the strength’; diet and messing arrangements were improved; even the basic rate of pay was raised, marginally, in 1898, with further improvements in 1902. From the later nineteenth century and especially after 1900 sailors too benefited from more generous leave, better food, better barracks ashore, less brutal punishment and improved prospects of promotion; in 1912 they were granted the first rise in their basic pay in sixty years.
Conclusion
- Tony Mason, De Montfort University, Leicester, Eliza Riedi, University of Leicester
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- Sport and the Military
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Nowhere in civil life does sport play such an important part as in the Army.
The Army; the Finest Job in the World (recruiting pamphlet c. 1936)One of the major conclusions of our work must be simply to emphasise the sheer quantity of sport in the British military between the 1880s and 1960 – a much greater quantity than any previous authors have acknowledged. Consider the career of Eric Harrison of the Royal Artillery. At Woolwich, which he entered in 1912, Harrison was a notable athlete, captained the college rugby team and played rugby for the Army, Blackheath and Kent. In his last term he was promoted above his contemporaries because of ‘our Padre’s preaching of the Rugger Gospel and its influence on the Commandant towards the Captain of the XV’. His sporting ability having unexpectedly failed to override his poor marks to get him into the mounted Royal Field Artillery, in early 1914 he joined the Royal Garrison Artillery at Shoeburyness. Here he played a lot of army football ‘and Southend, then in the Second Division [of the Southern League], asked whether I would consider playing centre forward for the season 1914–15’. His team won the Eastern Command Athletics Championships, and he was asked to run for England against Scotland and Ireland in the 120 yards hurdles. The Great War restricted his sporting activities, but when he was moved to a staff job at Beauquesne he was able to go riding in the afternoons ‘usually with the intent of riding down partridges or hares’. After the war Harrison played for the Mother Country in the Imperial Inter-Services Rugby Tournament. He was selected for the 1920 Olympics team for the 440 yards hurdles, only to be diagnosed with heart trouble and forbidden to run; in 1924, his doctors having allowed him to run sprints, he reached the semi-finals of the 110 yards hurdles at the Paris Olympics. As the Captain of a Mountain Battery on Salisbury Plain his main energies were devoted to hunting (he became master of the RA Harriers), shooting, fishing and point-to-point racing. At the Staff College in the mid-1920s he ran the College Drag and played hockey for England. Posted to Meerut, he took up pig-sticking, ran the Lahore Hounds (which hunted bagged jackals but tried to keep this quiet) and did a good deal of big-game shooting. Back in England before the war his career choices seem to have been governed largely by the opportunities for hunting in any post offered him. He had had, he reflected in old age, ‘a very lucky life’.
4 - The amateur era, 1919–39
- Tony Mason, De Montfort University, Leicester, Eliza Riedi, University of Leicester
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- Sport and the Military
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The Army Sport Control Board has … been constituted to encourage and assist sport in the Army by eliminating the taint of professionalism and gambling which resulted so often in unhealthy antagonism rather than healthy rivalry … by providing the facilities for universal participation by officers and other ranks; [and] by ensuring that the game is played in the proper spirit for the game’s sake and for the side, remembering that this great war has been won by all from nations to platoons ‘playing for the side’.
Games and Sport in the Army (Issued by the A.S.C.B.), 1919The inter-war years were difficult ones for the services, especially the army, yet curiously propitious for service sport. For most of the period the armed services remained small, subject to increasing financial stringency, and unclear about the roles they were intended to serve. The Ten Year Rule, laid down in August 1919 and renewed in 1928 on a rolling basis, stated that no major war was to be expected within the next decade. Until it was abandoned in 1932 the services were subject to repeated economic cuts of which the army bore the brunt. The Geddes Axe of 1922 led to the disbanding of twenty-two infantry battalions, while the cavalry were reduced, in part by amalgamations, from twenty-eight to twenty regiments; the national crisis of 1931 brought all servicemen and officers a 10 per cent pay cut. Rearmament began only in 1934 and was hamstrung by continuing uncertainty about the army’s priorities. How far, if at all, should it prepare for a commitment on continental Europe? Or should it confine itself to the ‘limited liability’ of imperial defence? These were not circumstances to encourage a forward-thinking, professional army. For the Royal Artillery, Bidwell and Graham chart a decline from pre-war professionalism and a successful adaptation to the challenges of the Western Front to an organisation that by the 1930s was marked by conservatism, suspicion of innovation and, for officers, adherence to a narrow social code that included ‘an affectation of professional ignorance’. The causes of this deterioration included uncertainty about the Artillery’s future role, understaffing, poor prospects of promotion, and the deficiencies of officer education. One of its main symptoms was the ‘swingletree factor’ – an obsessive interest in horses (the Artillery was overwhelmingly horse-drawn for most of the inter-war period) coupled with a striking lack of interest in gunnery.
3 - Sport in the Great War
- Tony Mason, De Montfort University, Leicester, Eliza Riedi, University of Leicester
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- Sport and the Military
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- 04 November 2010, pp 80-111
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The assiduous and organized cultivation of sport, and what is more important the spirit of sport, has become one of the most distinctive marks of the British Army, and it will be a task worthy of the greatest historians to record what this sporting spirit has done, not only for the British Army, not only for the British Empire, but for the whole civilized world during the present war.
Field, 16 March 1918Sport has provided some of the most abiding images of the Great War. The impromptu football played between British and German soldiers during the 1914 Christmas Truce, the British troops kicking footballs across No Man’s Land at Loos and at the Somme, still resonate in the public memory. For the British army the war marked the point at which sport, hitherto widely popular but unofficial in the armed services, became formally integrated into the military system, both as ‘recreational training’ and as an officially sanctioned form of leisure for other ranks. The British example was followed by other Allied forces – by the Dominion armies, by the United States and, despite considerable initial scepticism, by the French. The experience of the First World War had an enduring influence on the organisation and ideology of modern British military sport. When in 1931 General Harington declared that the war had been won by ‘leather’ in the shape of footballs and boxing gloves he was only expressing in exaggerated form the official recognition of sport’s military value. This chapter traces the process by which sport in the British army was transformed from a mainly spontaneous and improvised pastime in the early stages of the war into a compulsory activity for troops out of the line by the last months of the conflict. It examines the ways in which sport was seen to have military utility in improving fitness, relieving boredom, providing distraction from the horrors of war and building morale, officer–men relations and esprit de corps. Finally it demonstrates how the amateur model of sport, promoted energetically but largely unsuccessfully by army sports reformers before 1914, came to be imposed on service sport on the Western Front.
WOMEN, GENDER, AND THE PROMOTION OF EMPIRE: THE VICTORIA LEAGUE, 1901–1914
- ELIZA RIEDI
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- The Historical Journal / Volume 45 / Issue 3 / September 2002
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- 22 November 2002, pp. 569-599
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The Victoria League, founded in 1901 as a result of the South African War, was the only predominantly female imperial propaganda society in Britain during the Edwardian period. To accommodate women's activism within the ‘man's world’ of empire politics the League restricted its work to areas within woman's ‘separate sphere’ while transforming them into innovative methods of imperial propaganda. Through philanthropy to war victims, hospitality to colonial visitors, empire education, and the promotion of social reform as an imperial issue, the League aimed to encourage imperial sentiment at home and promote colonial loyalty to the ‘mother country’. The League's relationship with its colonial ‘sister societies’, the Guild of Loyal Women of South Africa and the Canadian Imperial Order, Daughters of the Empire, demonstrates both the primacy of the self-governing dominions in its vision of empire, and the importance of women's imperial networks. The Victoria League illustrates both significant involvement by elite women in imperial politics and the practical and ideological constraints placed on women's imperial activism.
Options for an Imperialist Woman: The Case of Violet Markham, 1899-1914
- Eliza Riedi
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Recent years have seen growing interest both in the influence of the British Empire on metropolitan culture—what John M. MacKenzie described as “the centripetal effects of Empire”—and in the relationships between gender and imperialism. Early studies of European women and imperialism described the activities of women as “memsahibs,” travellers and colonists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, challenged the notion that “women lost us the Empire,” and began to analyze the roles of white women in the “man’s world” of imperial rule. More recently attention has been drawn by Vron Ware, Barbara Ramusack and Antoinette Burton to the complex relationships between British and colonized women and, by Burton especially, to the ambiguities of “imperial feminism.” Nevertheless, apart from the well-documented female emigration societies, and the isolated study of Flora Shaw, colonial editor of The Times, by Helen Callaway and Dorothy O. Helly, the considerable activities of women as imperial propagandists have received little attention. This article traces the imperial activism of Violet Markham, the daughter of a Northern industrialist and sister of a Liberal M.P. who, roused from the aimless existence of Victorian young ladyhood by the Boer War, spent much of the Edwardian era promoting the cause of the British Empire. Through a study of her imperial career it explores the options available to an imperialist woman in an era when women were barred from formal politics, and when imperial politics in particular were considered a “masculine” preserve, and considers the obstacles—practical, ideological and psychological—which confronted her.