A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (36 page)

Golf was not the only gentler game to become characteristic of Victorian Britain. Archery enjoyed a vogue in the early and middle part of the reign. Once again, this was an activity that demanded skill and practice but which involved only the upper body, and was thus suitable exercise for ladies. A more sociable pastime was croquet, a game derived from the old French
pell mell
that had been played in England since at least the time of Charles II. Like golf, this was a sociable, peripatetic activity, but required far less space and, significantly, could be played by men and women together (as a result of which it could become highly flirtatious). ‘Lawn croquet’ was – as was usual with Victorian sporting passions – thoroughly organized
and endowed with a set of rules; the Croquet Association, its governing body, was established in 1896. It also, like so many other games, found a spiritual home, in this case at Hurlingham in London.

Another game had, by the later decades of the century, attained an immense popularity and importance. Tennis was, until the 1870s, still the traditional ‘real’ game that had been played since the Plantagenets. It had complex and arcane rules, and was played in an indoor space such as can still be seen at Hampton Court. In 1873 an army officer, Major Walter Wingfield, invented a game that he called
sphairistike
which rapidly developed into the more familiar lawn tennis. The game was fast and skilful, required minimal equipment and was suited to a (relatively) confined space. It was equally suited to men, women or a combination of both, with matches between two players or four. The game spread like wildfire throughout Britain, for, the ‘weekend’ having come into fashion, it was an ideal means of killing time socially at country houses in summer. Crossing oceans, it became equally popular in Europe, in America and throughout the British Empire. Within four years of Major Wingfield’s invention, the All England Croquet Club, based at Wimbledon, had added to its title the words ‘Lawn Tennis’, and held the first world tennis championship, an event it has been hosting ever since. Such was the game’s popularity that croquet was swiftly pushed aside.

Billiards was not a British invention, though ‘snooker’ was a game, and a word, bequeathed to the world by Britons. The term in fact meant a first-year cadet at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. Used in the context of an officers’ mess to mean an amateur or beginner (one officer is said to have remarked that ‘We are all snookers at this game’) it enjoyed considerable vogue in the Indian Army. The same was true of
polo, a game played in ancient India and Persia but organized with the usual thoroughness by Anglo-Saxons. It perfectly suited the high spirits of young officers stationed in Indian garrisons where there was very little else to do. As readers of Winston Churchill’s memoirs will know, several hours every day were devoted to practising and playing, and it was effectively compulsory to have a passion for it. It was taken up by civilians too, and made its way through the English mercantile community to Argentina, where it is still avidly played – yet another British sporting legacy to have put down roots far from home.

A rare example of traffic flowing in the other direction – an unexpected sporting manifestation that was largely confined to the north of England – was baseball. This game, similar to the old English game of rounders, had been organized in the United States in 1839. Sixty years later it was so popular in parts of England that there was a league of professional teams, as well as a number of amateur clubs – indeed the football stadium in which Derby County plays is to this day called the Baseball Ground. It has not been established when or why this sport took root in industrial Britain, nor is it known how or why it declined. A silver trophy in the museum at Stockton-on-Tees bears witness to the prestige it once enjoyed in that area.

Whatever the origins in England of this transatlantic import, native English games continued to proliferate. The public schools had produced the game of fives – a type of contest that involved ricocheting a ball, propelled either by the hand or by various forms of bat, around a court that was either completely enclosed or open at one end. As with other games, each school had its own version that was dictated by local conditions. The most famous of these was, and is, the Eton game, which was played between two of the buttresses of College Chapel. The shape of the ‘court’ was dictated not only
by these but by the jutting, at the left-hand side, into the playing-space of the stone banister from a flight of steps. The game was successful, popular and much imitated. The school itself built rows of fives courts, and the design has been copied internationally. In each instance, the same jutting banister has been included.

From fives developed two games that have outdistanced it in popularity: racquets and squash. Both were developed at Harrow. Racquets was a fast game played with a hard ball in an enclosed court, and required a certain amount of courage. It achieved a slightly wider popularity, during the sports craze of the mid-century, through the efforts of public-school old boys, who had courts built in a few locations in London, but it remained – as it has ever since – confined to these schools and to those who attended them. Squash, on the other hand, is played all over the world. A game for two or four players, it uses a rubber ball and racquets similar to, but smaller than, those used for tennis. It was played – again by the middle of the century – by boys unable to get into the racquets court, who amused themselves by hitting a rubber ball off an outside wall (the ball ‘squashed’ when impacting on this).

As well as inventing, adapting and playing games, the British copiously wrote about them.
Wisden
, the annual bible of cricket, was begun in 1864 by a cigar merchant of that name, and the
Football Annual
, a similar volume dealing with the other most popular game, began at roughly the same time. The
Badminton Library
, a series of exhaustive reference books on all major and minor sports, was published throughout the later Victorian decades and rapidly gained the reputation of being the ‘last word’ on questions relating to the subjects. Sets of these were an essential component in the libraries of gentlemen’s clubs and country houses. Though subsequent works of reference have been as authoritative, none has been as thorough.

Given British dominance of the world of sport, it might seem surprising that it was a Frenchman – Charles, Baron de Coubertin – who founded the modern Olympic Games. Coubertin, however, a somewhat eccentric character who was a passionate anglophile, was a great admirer of the English public schools and their ethos. He made, in fact, a pilgrimage to Rugby School chapel in 1883 to see the tomb of Thomas Arnold, and fell on his knees beside it in a kind of trance, lost in a sense of deep reverence. His own country had been defeated in war and he believed its future salvation lay in training French youth by the same methods the Doctor had used. Though he failed to make headway with this notion, thirteen years later he presided over the first modern Olympic Games at Athens, and his inspiration was once again the playing fields of Rugby.

Once the machine age had produced greater, and more widespread, leisure it was the British who more or less single-handedly organized the ways in which it could be profitably used. It has proved a more lasting legacy than the nation’s military and economic ascendancy.

During the second half of the nineteenth century two important elements came together to create a revolution in communications. The first was a massive increase in the amount of material published. The second was a massive increase in the number of people able to read. Rapid advances in printing techniques made possible for the first time publishing for a mass market, while the Education Act of 1870 provided, almost overnight, a colossal reading public. In addition to this, following the reforms of 1867 and 1884, this wider public had political power that could be influenced and exploited. The implications of this changed for ever the style and content of journalism and the role of the written word in British life.

From the 1840s onwards, greatly improved machinery enabled newspapers, and other printed materials, to be produced
more quickly, more cheaply, in greater quantities and with greater sophistication than ever before. Illustrations could be reproduced with much greater clarity, and by the end of the century it was possible to reproduce photographs and coloured pictures, a fact that was to give rise to a plethora of illustrated weekly papers. The writing and presentation of news also underwent great changes. From the earliest printed periodicals in the seventeenth century until the latter decades of the nineteenth, the format of newspapers had remained essentially the same: though there might be a decorative ‘masthead’, with bold lettering, a royal coat of arms or even an engraving, the outside of the paper was considered to be of little importance. The front and back pages were used for columns of advertisements because they were regarded as mere wrapping, while the news itself was on the inside pages. Even here, news items were not announced through headlines or bold type, but simply placed in columns according to whether they were domestic or foreign news. The stories were difficult to find amid the bland and uniform layout, and the type was so small that it must have strained the eyes.

A random sample – the
Morning Star
(no relation of its present-day Communist namesake) for 6 July 1857 – may serve as an example. It is four pages long and its name, set between two decorative stars, is in Gothic script. The front page is entirely given over to advertisements for performances at London’s theatres, cheap excursions on the Great Western Railway and life insurance. Half a column is given over to advertising coal from different collieries. There is also an intriguing miscellany of other goods and services: ‘Water your garden with flexible tube, from 2d per foot’; ‘Try Rogers’s improved method for Fixing Artificial Teeth’; ‘Swimming learnt in an hour’; ‘Crimean Tents – A large quantity, available for gardens, lawns &c, to be SOLD’; ‘Where shall we dine? –
at the SALUTATION TAVERN, 17, Newgate Street’; ‘Washing in Earnest’. Lively though these sometimes are, they are not eye-catching in the way we would expect. Inside, the news is a good deal less interestingly presented: ‘Parliamentary Business for the Week’; ‘Foreign News’ (‘The Insurrection in Italy’, ‘The Ballot in the United States’). Admittedly there is almost a whole page on ‘The Glasgow Poisoning’ and the trial of Mary Smith, one of the century’s most important criminal cases, but it is presented without any attempt to draw the reader’s attention or hold his interest. The back page is divided, more or less equally, between theatre reviews and financial news.

Only gradually did this format change, but while daily papers remained conservative in their approach, other periodicals broke new ground. There already existed weekly papers – some of them small enough in format to fit in the pocket – and these had engraved illustrations, on their covers and inside. Such decoration was unheard of in national newspapers, but was popular with the public. A young printer, Herbert Ingram, decided to launch a weekly newspaper that would be heavily illustrated with engravings, and in May 1842 the first issue of the
Illustrated London News
appeared.

It was an instant success. Its masthead featured a beautiful and detailed view of the London skyline, and its sixteen pages – all copiously illustrated – dealt with the campaign in Afghanistan, an exploding steamboat in America, a train crash in France, the candidates for the presidential election in the United States and a costume ball at Buckingham Palace. This first issue, costing sixpence, sold 26,000 copies. It marked the beginning of a new era in journalism, for it enabled the pubic to see the news as well as reading it – an impact similar to that of
televised news in a later era. The pictures were usually drawn from descriptions of events, and often owed much to the artist’s imagination, but as use of the camera became more widespread, a few subjects – such as machinery at the Great Exhibition – could be engraved from photographs, and the subject could be shown with a good deal of accuracy. The
ILN
quickly spawned imitators, for there were enough national and world events to fill the pages of rivals.

Some of the pictures in the
ILN
were huge. A depiction of a battle, or a royal occasion, could fill the centre-spread, and even more ambitious proportions could be attained by having folding pages. The detail and vividness of these images made them extremely popular, and important events (such as the Duke of Wellington’s funeral in 1852) provided scope for special editions that not only showed the public what happened but provided them with a beautiful keepsake. The large illustrations were – as they were intended to be – hung or pinned on the walls of millions of homes, providing a significant influence on the taste of the broad public. A painting from the Crimean War shows a hut in which officers spent the winter outside Sevastopol. Its wooden walls are entirely covered with engravings taken from illustrated papers. Many of these same pictures, expensively coloured, mounted and framed, can be bought today. They have helped define for us an image of Victorians filling their homes with jingoistic visions of imperial glory. Though pride in these achievements will undoubtedly have played its part, it is worth remembering that such pictures represented state-of-the-art news reporting and a triumph of printing technology.

Over the following decades – for it was only towards the end of the century that technical advances made possible the inclusion of photographs in papers – these engraved illustrations became almost an industry in themselves. Imagination
continued to guide the artists who drew them (after all, one could not depict a fire or an earthquake in some distant country by any other method) but to a surprising extent they were also based on observation. This was especially the case with military campaigns. Throughout the American Civil War, the Zulu War, the Gordon relief expedition and the Boer War, artists accompanied the armies and sketched the fighting. The ‘specials’, as these men were known, travelled the world and were as used to the rigours of campaigning as any veteran soldier. They shared all the dangers of the battlefront, and might even join in the fighting, since they often carried a revolver for protection. The extent to which they saw war ‘from the sharp end’ is witnessed by the case of the most famous of them, Melton Prior. A household name in Victorian Britain, Prior was known to colleagues as ‘the screeching billiard ball’ because of his high-pitched voice and shining, bald pate. During an attack on British troops in the Sudan, their commanding officer yelled at Prior to keep his head down because its gleam was attracting enemy fire!