MATERIAL CULTURE, COLLECTIONS AND MUSEUMS

An essential aspect of golfing heritage is the legacy of material culture from the three centuries or so that the sport has been played in Britain. This is broad and covers most of the categories outlined in Hardy et al's (2009) recent typology. To the fore is playing equipment, with golfers changing over time from using fully wooden clubs to those with metal heads and (later) shafts and now the oxymoronic ‘metal wood’. The ball that they strike with these implements has developed from the 18th-century version, stuffed with feathers, through the 19th-century gutta-percha to the rubber core, invented in the early 20th century and the basis of the modern golf ball, each of them promising the user longer distance and greater control. Then we have prizes: the Claret Jug, denoting the connection of golf with alcohol, awarded to the winner of the Open Championship; the medals for club champions attached to the shaft of a club displayed in the clubhouse; and the plethora of engraved spoons given to those who overcame their handicap in the monthly club tournament. As for sportswear, club regulations have usually reinforced social convention in terms of golfing attire. Edwardian men played in suits and ties while women wore long skirts and bonnets. These are brought to us in photographs and film, the latter capturing bodily movement, an essence of sport.

In the period 1875-1914 several major British sports became highly commercialised. This was acknowledged by contemporary observers. As early as 1885 horse-racing was seen as ‘becoming, everyday, more of a business than a sport’ and, less than a decade later, ‘Scottish football [could not] be described as anything else than a big business’. Its counterpart south of the Border was thought by one critic to be ‘as sordid a concern of commerce as Pears’ soap, or the electric light', and William McGregor, the founder of the Football League, acknowledged that early twentieth-century soccer was ‘a big business. The turnover of some of our clubs is considerably larger than the turnover of many an important trading concern. ’ Even cricket, considered by the run-making intellectual, C. B. Fry, to be ‘a cult and a philosophy inexplicable to … the merchant minded’, had ‘become more or less a gatemoney business’.

The question, however, is what sort of businesses had the firms in the sports industry become, or, more precisely, what were their ultimate objectives. There is a major debate among economists of modern sport on this issue. Almost without exception studies of North American sports clubs have argued that they were either profit- or wealth-maximisers, but in Britain many clubs, particularly in football and cricket, have exhibited long-term operating losses, which suggests that either they were highly inefficient profit-maximisers or that some other goal had priority over profits.

Constant insecurity was the hallmark of a career in professional sport. Every day the professional sportsman faced the possibility that there would be no work tomorrow: losing in a tight finish, a poor afternoon in the field, being the victim of a nasty tackle could all lead to non-selection. Accentuating the anxiety was the annual trauma of contract renewal, for few employers in the sports industry were willing to ‘guarantee’ work for more than a year. In horse-racing a few outstanding riders managed to obtain retainers for a two- or three-year period, but most were for a single season. The majority of jockeys, however, did not hold retainers and had to join the demeaning, and often demoralising struggle for mounts on a day-to-day basis. In soccer the retain-and-transfer system operated on an annual basis - in 1891 the Football League Management Committee specifically forbade the signing of players for more than one season at a time - and, if not retained, the unwanted footballer had to hope that some other club would be willing to pay for what was a rejected product. Sheffield Wednesday did concede one of their players a two-year contract after he had been a first-team regular for a couple of seasons, but when this led to further demands a board decision was made not to sign any player for longer than twelve months. Cricketers, too, generally obtained only annual contracts, sometimes with a guaranteed number of matches, though in 1898 Willie Quaife, Warwickshire's star batsman, after several requests and a threat to go to league cricket, persuaded the county to grant him a five-year engagement.

Everyone knows that British soccer fans are hooligans. Those in doubt need only consider an incident after a Scottish Cup Final played, almost inevitably, between the Glasgow duo of Rangers and Celtic. These clubs are soccer's representatives in the religious bigotry which permeates Scotland, Celtic being a Catholic-based side and Rangers a hard-line Protestant team who between 1914 and 1984 have selected only two Catholic players, one non-practising and the other by mistake. With both religious and local supremacy at stake the fans of these clubs have a large emotional attachment to their teams and any threat to their football can have serious consequences. At full time in the game the scores were level and the spectators eagerly anticipated extra time as had been falsely advertised in the press. When it became apparent that the match was not going to continue, angry fans began to invade the pitch. Eventually some six thousand of them were fighting each other, assaulting the police, pulling down barricades and goalposts, setting fire to the payboxes, and attacking the firemen who came to deal with the blaze. One hundred and eighteen people finished up in hospital and only by a miracle was no one killed. A typical day in the life of a modern football hooligan?

In the course of two centuries or so the British economy had been transformed and with it the nature of popular sport. In the pre-industrialised economy working hours were determined primarily by the agrarian calendar, but, although this meant that there was ample time for recreation, energy scarcity rendered participant sport both an irregular and a minority activity. For the majority, sport was something to watch rather than to play, but their poverty prevented them from being paying spectators. Then, although agricultural improvements increased the supply of energy, most of this was expended initially on the extra work effort demanded by the agrarian, and especially the industrial, revolutions. New work patterns also reduced the amount of discretionary free time available to the working class. Additionally, employers sought to discredit traditional sports as being adverse to productivity; and both urbanisation and enclosure reduced the space available for playing games. Nevertheless, traditional sports persisted into the nineteenth century mainly because neither urbanisation nor structural change within the economy had reached levels at which they could not be accommodated. By the mid nineteenth century, rising incomes and improvements in transport technology were laying the foundations for future developments, and in later decades substantial gains in working-class spending power, growing urbanisation, and the concentration of free time into Saturday afternoons, encouraged entrepreneurs to market gate-money sport on a regular basis. Indeed, although further increased supplies of energy facilitated greater sports participation, mass spectator sport became a growth point in the late Victorian economy.

Work in pre-industrialised Britain was more intermittent than it is today: for most workers there was no such thing as a regular working week or even a regular working day. A major reason for this lay in agriculture's dominance of economic activity. Work effort on the land would be greatest at planting and harvesting and less intense during other times of the arable year. Hedging, ditching, dung-spreading and threshing provided some winter and springtime employment but nowhere near the level obtaining from May to September. Similarly, in pastoral agriculture there would be peaks of activity associated with sheep-shearing and the autumnal slaughter of livestock. Agrarian pursuits were also subject to seasonal and irregular climatic influences: certainly in winter, frost, snow, heavy rain and fewer daylight hours reduced the amount of outdoor work which could be done.

Other economic activities were also subject to seasonal and irregular fluctuations. All trades, of course, suffered from the problem of demand - both its limited absolute level and its vicissitudes - but additionally there were specific supply side constraints. Processes utilising agricultural products would, within the limits set by the ability to hold stocks, fluctuate with both the aggregate and the seasonal supply of those inputs. The winter climate also enforced idleness on many trades, particularly where overland or seaborne transportation of goods was required. Hence building, quarrying, coal-mining, fishing, seafaring, repairing roads and shipbuilding, among others, reduced their level of activity as the weather worsened.

Beginning in the mid eighteenth century the British economy underwent a structural transformation as industry came more into prominence. In turn industrialisation had an impact on popular recreation as it called for new work patterns. Admittedly, hard and sustained effort had been demanded by agriculture at harvest time, but in industry, particularly factory industry, the pressure was less seasonal and more unrelenting. What was required in industry was regular hours and, above all, long hours. Unit overhead costs could only be reduced if the growing volume of machinery and other capital equipment was intensively employed, particularly as in some industries the initial physical productivity gains of the new methods of production over the old were not significantly large. Even in industries which were relatively unmechanised economies could be obtained by task specialisation and labour synchronisation. Admittedly, with work being collected at long intervals, there was enough slack in the domestic system to tolerate members of the production chain working different hours, but, where the work force was more concentrated, embryo assembly lines could often be operated and, for such a cooperating or integrated labour force, productivity was much higher when they worked the same hours.

It was no easy task to persuade a labour force to accept the new work discipline. Indeed initially it was difficult enough to get workers into the factories at all. Not only was working from dawn to dusk, six days a week, virtually throughout the year, alien to traditional work patterns but, for many, industrial employment would involve geographical as well as occupational mobility.

One line of inquiry into the causes of different economic attitudes within the sports industry is to examine who owned and controlled the constituent firms. Much of the background of those involved remains to be traced at the local level, but, as the sports industry was not immune from the general incorporation movement in British industry, some aggregated information can be provided here on shareholders and directors in sports enterprises, particularly English and Scottish soccer clubs. The data presented concentrates on occupations, though, of course, these can be utilised as a guide to social class.

For the purposes of analysis eleven broad categories of occupation were distinguished: aristocracy and gentry; upper professional; lower professional; proprietors and employers associated with the drink trade; other proprietors and employers; managerial and higher administration; clerical; supervisors, foremen and inspectors; skilled manual workers; semi-skilled manual workers; and unskilled manual workers. The allocation of shareholders and directors to these categories met with some problems, though none severe enough to vitiate the analysis. No occupations were given for the very few female shareholders, so where possible - with apologies to feminist readers - they were allotted to the category of the male resident at the same address. The most serious problem was the blurring of the demarcation lines between groups. The professional groups were reasonably unambiguous, but lower management and higher supervisory occasionally overlapped and there was some difficulty in distinguishing skilled manual workers from the semi-skilled, particularly where localised specialist trades were concerned.

In the quarter century from 1830 the sports scenario began to change significantly. On the one hand, a shift in the locus of political power led to the national outlawing of brutal animal sports and a clampdown by many local authorities on football, pugilism and other traditional and violent sports. On the other hand, the spread of the railways and a rise in working-class spending power pointed the way to future developments.

The increased political strength of the middle-class reformers enabled them to influence legislation against traditional recreations. The Highways Act of 1835 illegalised street football; a series of Acts outlawing brutal sports culminated in the abolition of public cock-fighting in 1849; and four years later betting shops were also placed beyond the legal pale. At a narrower geographical level, municipal authorities increasingly legislated to control those popular recreations which were deemed unsuitable to a modern urban environment, its property and its commerce. Over time the threshold of what would be tolerated was progressively raised, and what was accepted was more closely supervised and regulated.

Nevertheless making laws was one thing; enforcing them quite another. Neither parliamentarians nor aldermen bore the brunt of implementation. That task lay with local control agents - the police - who in many areas were a relatively new institution. Their intervention into working-class leisure was clearly resented by men and women who felt humiliated by the ‘move-on’ system which hit at the traditional freedom of assembly in the streets.

Power relationships in commercialised sport were skewed against the professionals. Admittedly some top-class jockeys found that they held the reins, partly because they were frequently proved right in their choice of race tactics, but also because ‘the supply of men between 7 stones and 8 stones possessed of the needful skill and experience [was] extremely limited, and [so] people think it diplomatic in consequence to put up with this, that and the other’. These men could always find employment with a rival owner and hence their peccadillos were often tolerated by employers who would not have accepted similar behaviour from others in their pay. Generally, however, the pendulum of sports power swung towards the employers, men whose notions of industrial relations were dominated by paternalism: employees would be looked after if they behaved themselves and they should be grateful for what they were given.

Clubs could be ‘good’ to their players. The provision of leisure facilities at the ground, winter employment, excursions, and the payment of doctors' and hospital bills, often in excess of what a player obtained in wages, all testify to that. Individual examples of club generosity include Sheffield Wednesday sending the injured Robertson, accompanied by his wife, to the seaside to recuperate; Leicestershire doing the same for the consumptive Jayes and later paying for his sojourn in a Swiss sanitorium; and Lancashire financing the long-serving Richard Pilling's journey to Australia in an attempt to beat the respiratory affliction which eventually killed him.