CHAPTER XIX.

GREAT BRITAIN.

While the _Turnverein_, or popular gymnastic society, was spreading over Germany, and systems of school gymnastics were being developed in that country and in Sweden, a variety of sports and organized games had become an established feature of life in the English public schools and universities.[156] As might be expected, these different types or phases of physical training have later begun to react upon each other, and each has been copied in more or less modified form in other countries. Most European states now have societies modelled after the German _Turnverein_, and the gymnastics of Spiess won friends among educational authorities far beyond the bounds of Switzerland and Hesse. We have found the playground movement making headway in Germany and Denmark, but shall also see the Swedish system of school gymnastics gain a foothold in England, as it had already done in Denmark.

In the first chapter of his “Athletics and Football” (The Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes) Montague Shearman has reviewed the history of athletic sports in England. He attempts to show “that competitions in running, jumping, and hurling of heavy weights are not only indigenous to the land, but have been one of the chief characteristics of both town and country life in England as far back as chronicles will reach; and that athletic sports, though they have had their days of waxing and waning, have always been a feature of life in ‘Merrie England.’” Young Londoners in the reign of Henry II (1154-1189) practised “leaping, wrestling, casting of the stone, and playing with the ball,” together with other exercises, in open spaces set apart for their use near the city. We have seen (p. 55) that Sir Thomas Elyot, in _The Boke_ published in 1531, refers to lifting or throwing the heavy stone or bar, wrestling, running, swimming, handling the sword and the battle-axe, riding, vaulting, and shooting in a long bow. Some idea of the universal prevalence of vigorous forms of recreation in the early part of the seventeenth century we gain from a passage in Robert Burton’s _Anatomy of Melancholy_. Writing of exercise as a cure (Partition 2, section 2, member 4), he first considers hunting and fishing, and then goes on to say that “many other sports and recreations there be, much in use, as ringing, bowling, shooting (archery), which Ascham recommends in a just volume (_Toxophilus_, 1545) ...; keelpins, tronks, quoits, pitching bars, hurling, wrestling, leaping, running, fencing, mustering, swimming, wasters (fencing with wooden swords), foils, football, balloon, quintain, etc., and many such, which are the common recreations of the country folks; riding of great horses, running at rings, tilts and tournaments, horse-races, wild-goose chases, which are the disports of greater men....” The ordinary occasions for the pastimes of the common people were Sundays and church festivals, and the numerous country fairs. Joseph Strutt’s volume on “The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England,” published in 1801, gives an entertaining description of town and country recreations practised “from the earliest period to the present time,” and it also reflects the general interest in such matters at the opening of the nineteenth century.

When we come to the particular forms of active sport or pastime which have been popular in Great Britain at one time or another we are amazed at their number and variety. Activities once practised as a necessary part of daily life survive in the sports of hunting, shooting, falconry or hawking, fishing with rod and line, and archery, and the same is true of walking, mountaineering, rowing and sailing, swimming, skating, and the like. The primeval joy of combat has been furnished by wrestling, boxing, fencing with foil and sabre, single-stick and quarter-staff. Man has matched himself against man in foot-races, broad and high jumping, weight-throwing and putting the stone or shot, the hammer-throwing and caber-tossing of the Scottish highlands, and the pole-vaulting which probably had its origin in contests between messengers whose calling required them to cross ditches and hedges with the help of jumping-poles. The game of bowls has been traced back to the thirteenth century or farther, and curling has been popular in Scotland for three centuries or more. Skittles, quoits, and hockey or shinny (shinty) have been played time out of mind. Golf was a formidable rival of archery in Scotland as far back as the middle of the fifteenth century; but English interest in the sport is comparatively recent. Polo was not introduced from the East until about fifty years ago. Tennis and fives, racquets and squash racquets have long had their devotees, and lawn tennis is now added to the list. Cricket, while it existed in England as long ago as 1600, did not become widely popular until towards the middle of the next century; but football “is undoubtedly the oldest of all English national sports. For at least six centuries the people have loved the rush and struggle of the rude and manly game” (Shearman).

Certain ones of these sports are common to several or many countries, and no nation has a monopoly of games; but Great Britain has been preëminently the home of such pastimes, and nowhere else have they won such an enthusiastic following among all classes of society or affected so large a part of the population. In variety of sports cultivated, elaborate attention to details, and the perfection of play attained in games like cricket and football she was long without a rival. Price Collier, in the chapter on sports in his “England and the English from an American Point of View” (New York, 1909), quotes some figures which “an accepted authority upon all matters of sport in England has compiled as to the investment and expenditures upon sport by the forty odd millions of inhabitants of Great Britain. His estimates, when they have been criticized, have been criticized mainly because they were too low.” From these figures Collier concludes “that some $233,066,250 are invested permanently, and $223,887,725 spent annually for sport.” He goes on to say: “Travel by train or motor anywhere in England and you see games being played—particularly if it be a Saturday—from one end of the country to the other. The open spaces of England seem to be given over to men and some women batting, kicking, or hitting a ball. The attendance at games on a Saturday is very large.... Even at the beginning of the football season the gate receipts show an attendance of more than 200,000 people. When the big and final games take place, I have calculated that out of the male adult population of England and Wales on a great football Saturday one in every twenty-seven is in attendance at a game of some sort, and this leans to the error of being too few rather than too many.”

Foreigners visiting England, and particularly men interested in education and brought into contact with the athletic life of the great public schools and Oxford and Cambridge Universities, could not fail to be impressed by such facts as we have mentioned, and to report them in the books which were the outcome of their travels. The influence of English practices on Koch, Hermann, and Hartwich, pioneers of the playground movement in Germany, and Raydt’s journey of 1886 and the volume embodying the result of his observations (1889) have been already cited (Chapter XIV). Professor Törngren, from the Central Institute of Gymnastics in Stockholm, visited England in 1877 and published a volume on school games shortly after (p. 162). The results of a later visit (1889) are reported in the _Tidskrift i Gymnastik_ for 1890 (3: 145-195). English customs, also, seem to have been partly responsible for starting the playground movement in Denmark (p. 194). Paschal Grousset, the French journalist, recorded his impressions in “La vie de collège en Angleterre” (Paris, J. Hetzel, 1880), writing under the _nom de plume_ “André Laurie.” Pierre de Coubertin, who began his visits to England in 1884, has done the same in his “L’éducation en Angleterre: collèges et universités” (Paris, Hachette, 1888). Chapters II-IV in the volume on Physical Education of the Young by Professor Angelo Mosso, the Turin physiologist (German translation, 1894; French translation, 1895) reveal his indebtedness to English experiences. In the United States we have had Caspar Whitney’s “A Sporting Pilgrimage” (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1894), and John Corbin’s “School Boy Life in England” (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1898) and “An American at Oxford” (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1902).

To an outsider, attempting to review the earlier history of physical education in England, it seems that apart from her outdoor sports, in the form they have assumed at the public schools and universities, her greatest contribution has been made through the teaching and writings of Archibald Maclaren, for many years proprietor of a gymnasium at Oxford. He was born in 1819 or 1820[157] at Alloa, a seaport on the north bank of the Forth, in Scotland. His daughter writes that she believes his father was the minister of a neighboring kirk, and the boy was brought up a Presbyterian. At the age of sixteen or a little older he went to Paris, and for some years was a student of fencing and gymnastics there. He also studied medicine; but was most interested in physical training, and determined to reform gymnastics, make a real science of it, and put it on a plane where it belonged as a part of education. He therefore settled in Oxford, and opened a fencing school in Oriel Lane, afterwards converting it into a gymnasium. In 1858 he erected a building of his own, the University Gymnasium, on Alfred Street at the corner of Bear Lane.[158]

An interesting sidelight on Maclaren’s qualities of mind and heart is afforded by certain events which belong to this period. William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, poet- and painter-to-be, entered Exeter College, at Oxford, in January of 1853, and both young men soon began to frequent the fencing rooms on Oriel Lane. J. W. Mackail[159] recalls how “between them and Maclaren himself, a man in the prime of life, cultivated and full of enthusiasm, a mutual intimacy and liking sprang up, and grew into a warm friendship. Three or four times in the term they would go and dine with him in Summertown....” And Lady Burne-Jones[160] speaks of Maclaren as a “man of the highest character and with warmth and tenderness underlying reserve of manner. His home at Summertown, then a small village separated by a stretch of country road from Oxford, was a sanctuary seldom opened to the outer world.”[161] She calls him one of the truest friends her husband ever had, and one whose eyes discerned his pupil’s genius from the first.[162]

About 1860 Maclaren was asked to work out a system of physical education for the British army. The result was “A Military System of Gymnastic Exercises for the Use of Instructors” (London, H. M. Stationery Office, 1862), “approved by the General Commanding in Chief and to be adopted at all stations where the means of carrying it out may be provided,” according to a general order issued in February, 1862. Already, in 1861, a gymnasium built on the plan of the Oxford one had been erected at Aldershot, and Maclaren himself has described[163] the next step in carrying out the plan of the military authorities. “Two detachments of non-commissioned officers, under the command of the officer (Major Hammersley) selected by the authorities to direct its introduction (_i.e._, the Maclaren system) and conduct its future extension—an officer specially selected for his high qualifications for the difficult work of introducing into the Army a new and hitherto entirely untried institution—were sent to Oxford to be qualified as instructors, and thence removed to Aldershot to form a normal school for the preparation of other teachers, and form the center of the military gymnastic system.

“The first detachment of non-commissioned officers, twelve in number, sent to me to qualify as Instructors for the Army were selected from all branches of the service. They ranged between nineteen and twenty-nine years of age, between five feet five inches and six feet in height, between nine stone two pounds and twelve stone six pounds in weight, and had seen from two to twelve years’ service. I confess I felt greatly discomfited at the appearance of this detachment, so different in every physical attribute; I perceived the difficulty, the very great difficulty, of working them in the same squad at the same exercises; and the unfitness of some of them for a duty so special as the instruction of beginners in a new system of bodily exercise.... But I also saw that the detachment presented perhaps as fair a sample of the army as it was possible to obtain in the same number of men, and that if I closely observed the results of the system upon these men, the weak and the strong, the short and the tall, the robust and the delicate, I should be furnished with a fair idea of what would be the results of the system upon the Army at large. I therefore received the detachment just as it stood, and following my method of periodic measurements, I carefully ascertained and registered the developments of each at the commencement of his course of instruction, and at certain intervals throughout its progress.”[164]

To this period belong Maclaren’s article on “National Systems of Bodily Exercise,” published in _Macmillan’s Magazine_ for February, 1863 (VII: 277-286), and another on “Military Gymnasia” which appeared in