First, a confession. In my twenties and early thirties I worked in the primary sector of English education. I was a reading specialist. This involved:

• guidance to other teachers about teaching beginning reading and higher order reading skills.
• I helped them match the reading demands of their reading books and textbooks to the reading ages of their pupils.
• Teaching ‘Readability’ as important for progress.
• So when I started working in HE I was very conscious of the reading demands of texts offered to students.

Later in my career, after working in teacher training and for OFSTED I did a doctorate and started a career as an academic historian.

I quickly realized that my sports history students were often unused to sustained reading. To do well they had to develop their information literacy, analytical, and writing skills. But I did not know answers to some basic questions.

• Did other history lecturers have a single set text for students, as I had seen in America? I wasn’t sure.
• What sorts of reading should I offer to them? Textbooks such as those of Martin Polley or Jeff Hill had rather different reading demands, with Polley’s more accessible.
• What about the sorts of material I was reading myself? Each year I accessed a huge amount of text, from monographs, peer reviewed articles and primary sources to much secondary internet material. But some of those texts were very challenging and difficult to understand. They were hard for students to access.

Certainly the journal articles I sometimes saw on reading lists were hardly easy to read.

The demands of these texts can be assessed using a variety of readability tests, such as the Fog Index, Flesch Reading Ease or the SMOG index. Most of these were American in origin. They took in factors such as sentence length, poly-syllabic words or specialist vocabulary.

Most articles in the main sports history journals demanded graduate level reading skills. Only the best of my undergraduate students had higher order reading skills: of skimming, scanning and intensive reading. Fewer still understood the specialist vocabulary. They often relied on journal abstracts to avoid the text.

But even the abstracts are relatively demanding of readers.

Comparing the abstracts of works of two leading sports historians: Wray Vamplew and Doug Booth

( I personally have a high regard for both, and enjoy reading their work)

Doug Booth

Doug’s five abstracts vary in order of difficulty
Geographical Research 53, 4 (2015) age 18-19
Sport in History 26.1 (2006) is for age 21-22
Rethinking History 16, 4 (2012)is for age 21-22
Rethinking History 18, 4 (2014) definitely post-graduate
Quest 65, 4 (2013) is higher still.

Wray Vamplew

He tends to have short abstracts. So I have selected longer ones
Sport in Society 19, 2016 post-graduate
International Journal of the History of Sport (IJHS) 32, 15 (2015) post-graduate
IJHS 31 18 2014 post-graduate
Sport in Society 19 2016 higher post-graduate
IJHS, 30,14 (2013) highest post-graduate

Even their abstracts clearly place surprisingly great demands on student readers.

This suggests that whilst my handouts took readability into account and I tried to find secondary reading of a variety of levels, I am certain I did not do enough. The first paragraphs of my text above are deliberately couched below undergraduate level, at a reading age of 15 years.

• But I’m wondering if academic colleagues do take reading demands into account when working with their undergraduate students and offering reading lists.
• What do they do?
• What textbooks, if any do they use?
• Do they differentiate in their reading lists to offer more accessible texts first?
• It would be fascinating to find out.

Some time ago I was asked by a racing friend who saw me as an expert on racing’s history, if I knew how many flat- racing jockeys there were in the decades before jockeys were licenced by the Jockey Club. To be honest I could only give a fairly general answer. Wray Vamplew, an academic scholar who wrote The Turf back in 1976, and who more years than I care to remember ago had taught a course I took on statistical methods, and first introduced me to racing’s history, has always argued for the importance of quantification. So, I wondered, merely out of intellectual curiosity, if I could actually establish a figure for any one year? It made sense to pick a census year, so I picked 1861.

It sounded an easy task. As ever, once I thought about it, complication set in.

• Should I focus on all reported races?
• Flat races and steeplechases?
• Should I include ‘gentlemen’ riders (those described with various titles, Mr or Esquire) or just the more supposedly professional riders with just surnames or surnames and initial?
• Should I focus just on English flat racing or include Welsh and Scottish racing as well? I was not sure initially. There were lots of local races at that time unrecognised by the Jockey Club, so I thought it best to exclude them.

Eventually I decided to begin with the Racing Calendar, and focus as far as I could on flat race professionals. There were relatively few races in Scotland and Wales so I initially included them. In terms of other sources, I searched across the period from the end of the racing season in 1860 through to the end of 1861 as my data base.

Source 1:  The Racing Calendar

The racing recognised by the Jockey Club was all listed in Charles and James Weatherby’s Racing Calendar (London, 1861). Easy I thought. The simplest way would be to open it and carefully compile an alphabetical list of all jockeys who rode. But there were almost 1400 races, and some races could have over twenty jockeys riding. So going through the entire calendar for one year did not take minutes, or even a few hours, but a long time. And when I had finished, my eyes were out on stalks and I did not want to check it. What if there were errors?

The annual Racing Calendar which gave results of the more important race meetings in Britain, was first published by Weatherby in the 1870s but even early in the 1820s the Racing Calendar’s results of each meeting listed horses, owners, placings weights carried and other details, but usually only the name of the jockey riding the winner. This changed slowly, and increasingly Weatherby’s Racing Calendar contained names of nearly all riders.

A problem soon emerged. In 1861 the Calendar usually listed all the jockey who had ridden, but many names were still surnames. Initials were rare. It meant that the same jockey’s name might have been spelt differently at different races, or that several jockeys might have had the same surname.  This made accurate identification sometimes problematic, making the data quite heavily compromised.

Source 2: the Census Enumerators’ Returns

The 1861 Census was taken on the night of Sunday 7th April 1861, intended to cover all in a particular dwelling that night, and so the 1861 Census enumerators’ returns offered another way of looking at jockeys. Its occupational data could be searched. It was unlikely to cover many ‘jockeys’, since young ‘stable boys’ were often also put up because of their light weight. Maybe it would identify a core group?  Having published some work myself on the census, I knew the occupational column of the returns should offer some possibility of identifying those individuals who had been perceived by household heads as primarily ‘jockeys’ when filling in the initial forms. The census has been viewed as pretty reliable.  Despite P.M. Tillott’s (1972) exploration of the many sources of potential inaccuracy in the 1851 and 1861 books, he also pointed out much of the data was unambiguous and that many ambiguities were trivial and easily remedied. The on-line site findmypast.uk perhaps offered a way of searching for jockeys in the 1861 census by inserting ‘jockey’ as a keyword in the Census category for 1861. This listed 1479 results for England alone, eight for Wales and 5 for Scotland.

Triumph was short-lived. As I started to go through the data, I quickly discovered that the list that emerged included many inns and public houses (the ‘Horse and Jockey’) and many addresses such as ‘Jockey Road’ with ‘Jockey’ in the title. Moreover, in some training stables, such as Edward Gill’s Belleisle in Richmond, Yorkshire, John Forbert’s at Spigot Lodge, Middleham, or Henry Goater in Littleton, Winchester, all stable staff were described as ‘jockey boys’.  In other training stables some were clearly jockeys and others were variously grooms, assistants, stable grooms, helpers, stable boys or lads. In John Coates’ stable at Lord Zetland’s Aske Hall, Yorkshire, all his staff were supposedly jockeys.

The transcripts provided by the site were not always accurate and had to be checked against the original record. At Malton, George Harrison was called George Houson. One horse trainer was described as a ‘nurse trainer’. One horse-breaker was called a ‘house broker’. Not all jockeys may have been involved in racing. John Mortimer, staying at the Stag Inn, Pembroke, turned out to be a circus jockey.

Currently, only 122 English jockeys have been located from the census using findmypast.co.uk by searching for ‘jockeys’, or exploiting other nominal data to locate jockeys.  Clearly the vast majority of those who rode were being described in other ways, as other forms of stable staff. It has proved possible to locate with certainty only a few of these, because of the general lack of forenames in the sources.

How old were they?  Jockeyship was very much a young man’s game.  Joseph Shaw, in James Dover’s Cannock Chase, Hednesford stables, was only ten years old. Over two-thirds (69 per cent) were between eleven and twenty-one years old. 25 per cent more were between twenty-two and thirty-one years old.

Where did they live? The vast majority of those currently identifiable were actually living in training stables on census day, with clusterings in North Yorkshire, Newmarket, the south Downs and Berkshire.  Others were ‘boarders’ or ‘lodgers’. Thomas Aldcroft, winner of the Derby in 1853, and first choice jockey for Lord Glasgow, was boarding with former jockey Tommy Lye in Middleham. William Boyce aged 42, and described as married, who could still win 4 races in 1861, was living singly as a boarder at the Wool Pack Inn, Doncaster.  Thomas Johnson aged 30 was living in a lodging house in Ledbury with 22 other lodgers, almost all labourers or hawkers. Whether he was the T. Johnson who won two races that year is unclear.  Some lived with relatives. William Atkinson, aged 24, who did not win a single race that year, was living with his sister and her husband at Malton.

It was usually only the older and more successful who were married and living with their family. John Charlton, aged 33, a former Derby and Oaks winner, who won 20 races in 1861 despite suffering from consumption, lived at Malton with wife, relations and two servants. Sam Roger was a jockey and trainer and in his stable at Lowther House Newmarket were four servants, no jockeys but a mixture of ‘stable lads’ and ‘stable labourers’, of very similar ages. The actual distinction was unclear. John Wells, aged 26, champion jockey in 1853 and 1854 was living in Newmarket with his wife and two servants. A very few were ‘visitors’. Henry Custance, for example, aged 19, lightweight winner of the 1860 Derby despite having to ride with twenty-two pounds of lead to make the weight, born in Peterborough, was visiting a Peterborough grazier on census night.

One puzzle was my failure to locate George Fordham, the champion jockey of 1861. He was racing at Northampton and then Croxton Park the previous week. He raced at Epsom on the Thursday after the census day. Was he enumerated? If so, where? Nearly all the George Fordhams listed in the census were agricultural labourers and none was born in 1837 as the jockeypedia,co.uk site says. One possible identification was a George Fordham, ‘gentleman’, listed as a boarder at the Old Ship Hotel in Brighton, but he was recorded as aged twenty-one and from Essex. The area had seen Fordham’s early riding successes however.

Ruff’s Guide to the Turf

William Ruff, the turf correspondent of Bell’s Life first published his Ruff’s Guide to the Turf (London) in 1842 and by the 1850s the spring edition contained an ‘Alphabetical List of the Jockeys, their Addresses, Lowest Weights, Names of their Masters…’. At the beginning of 1861 it listed 130 trainers and 124 jockeys, and all but four were supposedly ‘articled’ to a stable. The term ‘articled’ was ambiguous -meaning either attached in some way to a stable, or apprenticed to a stable.  Some of these names could be tracked on the on-line census, and various trainers’ enumerators returns listing their staff added more. Some newspapers covering racing in more detail also provided lists of jockeys, their addresses, masters and lowest riding weight.  The Sporting Life, for example, on December 22, 1860 gave 84 jockeys.

Merging total data available thus with Ruff’s material provided a list of 199 ‘jockeys’. Most were very young, and where identifiable often still described in the census as stable boys or similar. But the list also included leading jockeys such as George Fordham, John Wells, James Goater and Harry Grimshaw.  Their weights showed the importance of light weight in jockeys. Seventy of them weighed less than five stones, forty-eight more less than six stones, twenty-seven more less than seven stones, and thirty-five less than eight stones. Only nineteen of those listed, the supposed ‘heavyweights’, weighed eight stones or more.

Their location was interesting. The list was dominated by trainers from certain key areas, and it was clear that trainers’ sons who were good riders could become jockeys. Newmarket was certainly a key jockey centre. But the limestone hills around the Cotswolds (Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Berkshire etc), such as Lambourn, Ilsley, Compton, or Wantage, was another. Others included: in North Yorkshire, Richmond and Middleham; in Sussex, Findon, Lewes, Michel Grove; in the south Epsom, Stockbridge and Kingsclere; on Cannock Chase, Hednesford. I tracked down a wide range of race horse trainers from a list I had compiled from the research for my book Flat Racing and British Society 1790-1914 (London, 2000). It was clear that some of the trainers listed in Ruff’s Guide and elsewhere at that time, such as Ascot, Tarporley Beverley or Aintree, did not advertise their jockeys. Was this due to cost?

The Press

The press offered a final source of information. The most useful source, outside my happenchance surveying, were the newspapers’ occasional comparative lists of jockeys for the interest of their readers. This may have been heavily reliant on the Racing Calendar, and so merged data from some jockeys with the same surname. Assembler error can also have crept in because immensely time-consuming. Newspaper reports varied in details provided. The Era, 25 November 1860, listed 252 winners of races and steeplechases in the United Kingdom but unfortunately did not distinguish between them. On the 1^st December 1861 the same newspaper separated out flat races and listed 127 winning jockeys in Great Britain. The Sporting Life, 23 Nov. 1861 listed 190 ‘jockeys’ from England, Scotland and Wales that had won at least one race that season so far. What were the reasons for this discrepancy?  Twenty-one jockeys had won twenty or more races, thirteen had won between ten and nineteen, seventy had won between two and nine races, and eighty-six had won only a single race. Unfortunately, these lists often contained many jockeys with only surnames and no other details. Winning jockeys got the best focus. The York Herald listed the top twenty-nine winning jockeys of the past five years on 1^st December 1860.  The Sporting Life listed the thirty-three winning jockeys of the past five years on the 27 Nov 1861.

Such material provides a useful data set. It showed yet again how dominant the leading jockeys were.

Conclusion

The number of jockeys listed in some way during 1861 is therefore still unclear. Currently my list contains 369 jockeys. Given the time this took, I suspect I have made some transcription errors. Some further jockeys may be still undiscovered. I will still have missed some, but there is an important further caveat.  There was a significant proportion of examples where several jockeys shared surnames, but reportedly had different initials. The extent of journalistic reporting error is unclear.  Some may have been sons of jockeys, and others, the brothers of jockeys. Currently there are thirty-one examples where two jockeys shared the same surname. Six examples where three shared a surname, and Adams, Broderick, Fordham, French, and Harrison had four sharing a surname.

During lockdown I’ve started work on my next book on sport and English culture in the eighteenth century. This was an increasingly proto-modern period which featured a range of sports, some popular in urban contexts, such as horse racing, cricket, cock fighting or pugilism, some rural activities such as hunting, shooting and fishing, and more localized sports from Cumberland wrestling to cudgelling, single-stick or forms of ‘football’. The other day, missing visits to the pub, and having an interest in visual representations of sport, I idly wondered whether the attractions of such sports were reflected in eighteenth-century tavern, inn and alehouse signs exhibited outside their buildings. Signs indicated identity and location to the public.  The ‘well accustomed and convenient inn’ at Headon, in Holderness in 1798, for example, was ‘known by the sign of the Horse and Jockey’.

Easy question I thought. These places were cultural institutions, with about 20,000 of them in 1577 and far more as the population rose. Innkeepers were amongst early sponsors of sport, along with their other functions of providing refreshment, lodging, and trading and meeting activities. Perhaps pub signs reflected sporting culture too. My interest was further piqued by a long article I had read on ‘Signs’ in the Scots Magazine, 2 December 1794, which claimed that

‘a sign is sometimes an indication of the favourite pastimes and amusements of the landlord, or the prevalent sports for miles around…thus “The Cricket Players” and such like diversions are very common upon every road’.

Was that correct? Answers proved far more elusive than I expected in this era of self-isolation. Evidence was scattered, fragmentary, and thinly available.

I began by looking on-line at Google Books, but nearly all its listed books on inns and taverns either didn’t offer previews, or like Dunkling and Wright’s Dictionary of Pub Names (1987) focused more on modern pubs. The most useful proved a book by Jacob Larwood and John Hotten, History of Sign Boards (1867). They believed that ‘signs relating to sport and the chase’ were ‘relatively common’, though what that actually meant statistically was unclear. Amongst a number of sporting references they suggested that amongst animal signs ‘the Bull and Dog was one of the most common, derived like the Bull and Chain from the favourite sport of bull baiting’. It referred (disapprovingly) to the ‘common sign of The Two Fighting Cocks’.  The Horse and Groom and the Horse and Jockey were ‘most prevalent’.  The Running Horse was ‘also very common’. The Bat and Ball was ‘a common sign for public houses frequented by cricketers’. Dog and Gun, Dog and Pheasant, Dog and Partridge were also ‘very common’. Unfortunately its casual generations did not discriminate clearly between earlier signs and those of the mid-nineteenth century.

 

Maybe local histories would provide examples? Paul Jennings’ The Local: A History of the English Pub (2008) covered this earlier period too rapidly to help. Few local histories accessible on line seemed to address early public houses. T.S. Baylis’s very full account in Evesham Inns and Signs (2006) provided details of local signs which showed they fell into categories such as agricultural, countryside, commemorative, descriptive, ecclesiastical, heraldic, patriotic or trade and craft. Here again there was little attempt to discriminate chronologically, and sporting signs proved very rare: Hare and Hounds, Horse and Jockey and Horse and Groom (eighteenth century jockeys were often described as ‘grooms’).

Licensees of alehouses, inns and taverns had, naturally, as the name indicates, to be licenced by local Justices of the Peace at Quarter Sessions. Any surviving Quarter Session records for the period might have been fruitful sources but were held at Archives and Record Offices so were inaccessible. Occasional collections like R. Atkinson’s editions of Quarter Sessions Records of the North Riding (1899) were only in snippet view on-line. Things were made more difficult still when I realized that while some premises kept the same sign for a long time, others changed signs with the landlord. One public house in Gosport, Hampshire, began as The Fighting Cocks, then became the White Hart, and was the Half-Way House by the 1780s. Some may have succumbed to magistrate pressure.  After County Durham magistrates began refusing to allow licences to ale house keepers involved in petty horses races or cock-fighting in the early 1780s, a Bishop Auckland publican changed the name of his premises from The Fighting Cocks to The King’s Arms.  At Bishop Burton in Humberside, a tavern in a horse-racing area, which had been the Horse and Jockey, kept the racing tradition by changing to Altisidora when the locally-owned mare won the St Leger in 1813. A few merged two visual images, such as the pub in Sandgate, Newcastle in the1740s, which had the sign of the Bell and Fighting Cocks.

 

Perhaps on-line newspaper searches of the British Newspaper Archive, British Library Newspapers, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection or the Times Digital Archive using signs listed in the secondary literature might prove more fruitful?  I did spend a couple of days trying this. The difficulty here was that London, some regions, and towns such as Newcastle, Stamford or Ipswich were much better covered by surviving newspapers than others, and this distorts any statistical generalisations that can be made.  There were occasional felicitous findings. In February 1806 the wholesale London brewers Brown and Parry listed almost 250 premises selling their malt beer. Of these only a very few had any sporting links. There was a Fox and Hounds in Bethnal Green; the Cock or Black Cock which figured four times, an Angler in Old Street, and two Horse and Groom premises.

But there did prove to be some very tentative patterns, although establishing any chronology is still impossible. There is space here for just a few examples. The most widespread name across the period up to 1810 was linked to cockfighting, including words like cock, gamecock or fighting cock. Examples in the 1720s and 1730s, as for example from Northumberland and Durham, often specifically referred to The Two Fighting Cocks, but more commonly thereafter the sign became The Fighting Cocks, though there was a Three Fighting Cocks at Cirencester in 1774. Other areas where the name appeared regularly included Yorkshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. Some premises, like Oakham in Rutland, had mains as well. Names were well scattered, with examples from London, southern counties like Hampshire, Wiltshire, Kent and Surrey, as well as more midland areas such as Birmingham or Northamptonshire. However, many could have kept their name even when there was little local interest.

Hunting pub signs also featured regularly. The Fox and Hounds could be found at locations such as Richmond (Yorks), Kirk Merrington (Durham) and Colchester (Essex) before 1750 and grew in popularity afterwards across the country. There are probably examples to be found from Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire, where leading hunts like the Quorn surfaced, but these counties are not well covered in early newspaper collections. More common still were examples of hare hunting, in the form of Hare and Hounds inns, found in Northumberland, Durham, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Suffolk and Sussex before 1750. Here again, as newspaper coverage grew, examples could be found across England. There were occasional examples of inn signs showing a huntsman: a Huntsman and Horn in the Isle of Wight in 1735, and the Huntsman or Huntsman and Hounds, as for example in East Sussex, by around mid-century.

When I was a boy, quite a few coal miners in the pit rows of County Durham kept canaries. Canaries had been taken down the pits from circa 1913 as they were affected by carbon monoxide or methane gas before the pitmen and so gave early warning to those below.

But the working-class links to canary-keeping and breeding go back before that date. The Victorians took canary-keeping to new heights. Canaries were engaging in manner, active, and easy to keep. They were quickly domesticated.  By the 1850s the birds could be found in a variety of colours and shapes, including golden-orange Belgians, yellow Norfolks, Yorkshire spangles, and London fancies. As Britain shifted from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban world, one way that people, men, women or children, could retain a little piece of country in the town was through keeping of a cherished caged canary in their parlour, as an affectionate pet. In a wide range of cultural texts they were depicted as willing captives, excellent singers, and charming and cheerful companions. They were claimed as helping to guide domestic behaviour. Children watching their canary, thought one writer, would learn invaluable lessons of kindness, love and patience, and would help turn potentially socially and morally adults into proper citizens.

Initially the more commercial world of the bird fancier, whether of poultry, pigeons or canaries was largely that of the small trader operating in weekly markets in the mid-nineteenth century. These people sometimes imported birds. German canaries were more valued because their song was much sweeter, though in reality German breeders, largely based in Tyrol and the Hartz, knowing that canaries mimicked songs, taught their birds to sing before exporting them.

But by the 1860s, as the fashion spread in Britain, artisans, small tradesmen, weavers, hairdressers, cottage gardeners, and others in more sedentary occupations working from their own premises began doing some amateur breeding to augment their earnings, keeping one or two breeding cages, sited to catch the morning sun. Canaries laid three to five eggs per brood from spring onwards. Caring for the birds was a relief from the monotony of work, and the selling of a pair of birds or more could be profitable. But breeding could be risky. There were setting-up costs:  breeding cages were not cheap, and feed such as millet, hemp, or pieces of apple needed regular purchase. It took space, since breeding cages were often somewhere round four feet by three feet. So breeding taught some self-denial, using money that could have been spent in other ways. There were dangers: illness, parasites, or attacks by cats or rats if they could gain access.

Quite quickly, however, as demand grew some men became more involved in breeding for show, or breeding to sell. Those breeding for show for exhibitions were more concerned with appearance, and ‘improving the breed’. Some shows would stipulate a specific model standard beforehand with breeders breeding to it. In the 1870s at the general ornithological shows taking place in larger cities like Glasgow, canaries were playing a larger role. In 1873 at the ornithological show at London’s Crystal Palace at Sydenham thirty-five out of the seventy-seven classes were for canaries. With the British fondness for associativity, clubs such as the Huddersfield Canary Breeders Society quickly began to form and this further encouraged numbers of canary breeders. By the 1880s these clubs and societies were particularly popular in the midlands at larger towns such as Derby, Nottingham, Derby, Coventry or Northampton, in Yorkshire and Lancashire, and in West Scottish towns like Glasgow or Paisley. Specialist canary shows soon followed.  At these ‘amateur’ shows, prizes were often symbolic, silver cups or watches, but also sometimes small amounts of money, perhaps a pound or ten shillings. So winning gained some pecuniary reward, but also gained local and sometimes national status. Newspaper reports suggest some were less than honest, plucking feathers or dyeing plumage to improve appearance.

Publicans, always alert for profit, played a leading role in encouraging these canary clubs. They would offer small prizes for a Sunday show, but ensure that the birds were kept there for two or three days, attracting custom. They would offer free premises for monthly meetings, but demand some sort of minimum spend on food and drink. One Norfolk publican, Henry Spelman, getting involved himself in the 1870s through to the 1890s, expanded his breeding and needed ever-larger space for his cages, buying and selling birds, and competing at leading competitions, as well as holding annual competitions at his inn.

There appear to have been relatively few large-scale breeders. London was a large market, with much demand for birds.   Because of the high status of the Norfolk breed, Norwich and its surrounding villages and hamlets was the most important location for commercial canary breeding, with many thousands of small breeders, and, from 1873 onwards, annual exhibitions like the Norwich Alliance and East Anglian Ornithological Association. With Norwich being this key canary breeding centre, it perhaps was only natural that the town’s football club became know as “The Canaries”. By the 1880s Messrs Yallop and the Mackley brothers had become leading figures, operating from Norfolk on a large scale across Britain, exhibiting successfully at major competitions, and importing and exporting birds with breeders in Germany and Belgium.

At this level top-quality birds bought to breed from or for exhibition were expensive, though prices varied with fashion and changes in demand, within a range from perhaps £8 to a pound or two. Some artisans were happy to pay these prices. But pet birds were much cheaper, just a few shillings for perhaps ten years of companionship and pleasure. Canary-keeping has been an overlooked part of working-class cultural life, and its wider social and economic impact is yet to be explored.

 

 

 

 

The other day I read a academic paper in a mainstream history journal by David Armitage and Jo Guldi called ‘The Return of the Longue Durée: An Anglo-American Perspective’

 

It was a harsh reminder that thinking across longer time scales has largely disappeared from the radar of most British sports historians just as it is starting to return to mainstream history. There have been few ambitious surveys of British sport over several centuries for some time. Richard Holt’s Sport and the British (1989) managed to cover over two centuries, and some histories of particular sports like rugby or football have managed much the same. Tony Collins Sport in Capitalist Society (2013) managed to get beyond Britain over 200 years.

I guess that such a task is now harder.   There is less freedom of research choice in universities, Metrics, funding and structural rationalizing are all against it. A work of synthesis is now less highly rated in university assessment than a high status article, or a research monograph. And you would need to know one hell of a lot to even attempt it. So it would be hugely difficult, not least since sporting knowledge is expanding at such a rapid rate.

Yet back in the  1950s and1960s there were famous mainstream historians like Fernand Braudel offering insightful and sustained theoretical reflections about historical continuity and change across the longue durée.

It would be really interesting to see some modern attempts at synthesis, some attempt to tackle Britain’s sporting  continuities and changes over a longer  time, pick out some key organising concepts and so provide a richer contextual background against which archival information, events, and sources can be interpreted.

It is a massive challenge of course. Sorting out a possible chronological structure would be hard enough. Where would one start? The Reformation perhaps? Then a proto-modern period from the 1660s to when? When did the Industrial Revolution begin to really bite? Did a sporting ‘revolution’ first take off in the 1860s or later?  Was there actually any great divide at all? And what about the twentieth century?  I’ve recently been writing chapters for Bloomsbury’s Cultural History of Sport. Its final book of six starts at about 1920, but is that any more than administrative convenience? Maybe every historian tackles sport’s chronology from individual perspectives, depending on the aspect being covered.

And how easy is it anyway to summarize change?  Over the past four centuries British sport has consistently experienced change.  Each sport has had its own change trajectories.  There are a whole host of sporting temporalities. Some are certainly influenced by broader social, cultural, political and economic factors. But maybe we do not sufficiently recognise the way sport has also been influenced by fashion, and the resultant peaks and troughs of popularity.

And what key concepts would we focus on? I spent half an hour yesterday trying to think of a key organising concept for each potential period. For example I chose ‘gambling’ as a key factor in the growth of sport in the proto-modern period.  For  early modernity I chose ‘associativity’, and in later modernity notions of ‘identity’. I was quite happy for all of a minute, until I realized that all three concepts could be found in all three periods, and that every other historian might have different ideas.  Damn!!!!

Last week I attended the three day 22nd Congress of The European Society of Sports Historians (CESH) at Bordeaux, running from 29th to 31st October, and chaired its annual general meeting. CESH attracts leading sports historians from across Europe and beyond. This year it was held in association with the French society Carrefour d’Histoire du Sport.

It drew over 160 participants from eighteen different countries, with presentations allowed in English, French or German, as well as groups of undergraduate students from France and Spain.
The theme of the Congress was Sports History and Patrimonial Dynamics.
It strikes me that this emphasis sports’ heritage is of increasing importance right across Europe, often contributing powerfully to individual and community identities. In Britain sporting heritage has become much more relevant to the formal heritage sector in recent years. It might be in the nature of virtual museums or actual buildings like the National Football Museum at Manchester or Newmarket’s Palace House: The National Heritage Centre for Horse-racing & Sporting Art. It might be in the form of National Sporting Heritage Day or local community activities. Amongst the many fascinating presentations was one by Justine Reilly, the Director of Sporting Heritage, who showed how it was involved in a wide range of activities from a recent three year Arts Council England funding programme to the development of a national data base of sporting collections’.
While I was there I had the pleasure of awarding a Fellowship of the Society to another British academic, Professor David Day of Manchester Metropolitan University, for his distinguished contributions to the history of sport.

All historians are now living in a digital age, and having to come to terms with digital technology. Some of us find it a real challenge to our scholarship. Last week I re-read the excellent collection Sport History in the Digital Era edited by Gary Osmond and Murray Phillips, and Dougherty and Nawrotski’s Writing History in the Digital Age. It made me realize just how far things had moved on in terms even of my own use of digital material from the time I wrote my first book on horse racing, Flat Racing and British Society 1790 to 1914 (2000) to my most recent one Horse Racing and British Society in the Long Eighteenth Century (Boydell, 2018).
Young researchers reading this may not even be aware that to use newspaper material then I had to comb long series of actual newspapers at the then Colindale British library. Each year’s volume had to be ordered separately and arrived on a trolley about half an hour later, then physically read page by page. To go through just one regional newspaper for six months of racing news could take a full morning. References were often limited, scattered and easy to miss. Some newspapers were on rolls of film, which had to be scrolled through. To read printed material I had to search actual library shelves in London, Cambridge, Manchester, Edinburgh and elsewhere. I had to visit the National Archives in London and county archives right across the country and look through their card and microfishe catalogues before actually ordering up any material. To analyse data I had a card index.
But my recent book on the long eighteenth century was so different in its approach.

Use of newspapers has changed. It has certainly given me a completely new sense of eighteenth century print culture, now that thousands of newspapers, magazines and periodicals are available on line. My regional lending library, Lancashire County Libraries has an on-line digital site which gave free access inter alia to British Library Newspapers from 1730, and the Times Digital Archive from 1785. I could purchase access to other searchable sites such as Gales’ 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection or Eighteenth Century Collections on Line. Digital scanning was so easy, so long as I was careful to generate a multiple range of potential keywords: ‘races’ for example, threw up horse races but also material about ethnicity. The word ‘jockey’ had multiple meanings in the early eighteenth century and was further problematized through its fashion featuring as a ‘jockey cap’.

But searching opened up new research opportunities, so long as I retained my awareness of the broader context. So for example, it was easy to compare the number of horse races across time in a single English county reported in the contemporary racing calendars with those in the regional press. There were often twice as many race meetings reported, a reminder that racing calendars only reported the more socially prestigious meetings. I was able to take existing chronology of racing’s development backwards: finding a Newmarket Jockey Club was in existence well before its claimed start in the 1750s, for example. Because on line newspapers had regional coverage I was able to see how far the cultural popularity of racing and its coverage varied from region to region very easily: very popular in Yorkshire, Durham or Suffolk, but gaining little interest in Wales or Devon.

When I was studying jockeys and training grooms I could use their name coupled with associated words like ‘races’ or ‘Newmarket’. Because jockeys’ names were regularly recorded in the surviving Newmarket match book from 1744 to 1769.I was able to put the material on an Excel table, and identify for each jockey when they rode, on which horse, for which owner and in which racing colours, and have some possibility of finding them elsewhere. The ability to search for wills on line, as for example, in the National Archives, turned up fascinating data on the wealth on death of leading jockeys, their ownership of land, their families and the high status of their witnesses and executors. Further material could be found on owners, breeders, and racing officials. Digital genealogy platforms such as Ancestry and Find My Past often helped track down their social origins. The very detailed advertisements for meetings provided important material about the complex changes in racing’s codification, regulation and administration.

Fully searchable court records such as Old Bailey Online, which covered the period from 1674 onwards, also proved useful, showing how race meetings surfaced in evidential discourse regularly: as a time to date from, as offering opportunities for employment and various forms of criminality such as robbery or pickpocketing, and showing the way some criminals followed race meetings and fairs through the summer.

Culturomics approaches allowed me to track broad cultural trends to accompany these more qualitative approaches. Searching newspapers allowed me to track mentions of the ‘thoroughbred’ horse right through the long eighteenth century, from its first appearance round 1720 in newspapers like the Stamford Mercury. Such broad trends could also be tracked using the content of Google books and the piece of software known as Ngram Viewer, which tracks the normalized frequency against the date of publication, providing statistical and graphical representation. This showed peaks in the 1720s, between the 1740s and 1760s and a greater increase in the later 1780s. The word ‘jockey’, little used before the 1720s, really took off from the1750s as Newmarket racing expanded.

Alongside such material was the proliferating amount of material on the internet in terms of historical resources for horse racing as the past circulated into the present. Google is awash with racing material. There were excellent visual representations of racing and horses in sites such as the fully searchable collections of the Yale Centre for British Art or the Royal Collection Trust which helped give an insight into the way artists such as Stubbs or Rowlandson responded to demand for racing pictures. There were material remains shown on line in museums like the Palace House National Horse Race Museum at Newmarket. The site jockeypedia.co.uk maintained over 2000 jockey biographies. The Equine History Collective links equine knowledge into the larger concerns of historical research. And there were many, many more

But I still needed traditional qualitative analysis to back this up. Those of a deconstruction mind-set like Doug Booth have tended to see ‘fragments’ as the appropriate form of post-modern cultural analysis. Admittedly it is much easier to explore, and I can enjoy that too, but it is good sometimes to take a wider view of a long past sporting world such as earlier racing, something that might have a appeal beyond the fairly narrow community of deconstructive sports historians. So I travelled the country, from Scotland to Devon, visiting archive departments, searching urban records, gentry archives, letters and diaries for references. I had faced problems of typography, print and typeface in looking at newspapers, but they palled before the challenges of palaeography, spelling, and syntax in written texts of the period. And I visited ancient racecourses and training grounds, to get a stronger sense of place.

The change has been frightening for those of us beyond retirement age. And I still need lessons!!!!!!

Surprisingly few historians have ever gone racing. Even fewer have placed a bet. Fewer still realize that for well over 200 years horse racing was widely regarded as England’s national sport. Loved by royalty, it was only post-1918 that soccer overtook it. Horse-racing is still the second most important social and economic sport in the United Kingdom.
Surprisingly, although there had been many books on racing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, no scholar had looked at its origins in any detail or explored how and why it come to take a leading place in British national life
So why did I write my forthcoming book, Horse Racing and British Society in the Long Eighteenth Century (Boydell, 2018) https://boydellandbrewer.com/horse-racing-and-british-society-in-the-long-eighteenth-century-hb.html

(A puff by Emeritus Prof. Allen Guttmann of Amherst College is on the cover, incidentally).

It was almost accidental. I came to the world of academic history late in life, after leaving school at sixteen and lighting out over Europe, Africa and the Middle East, Did my doctorate at the age of fifty-four. As a leisure historian I wrote books and articles on a wide range of topics, from Victorian vices to the world of sport. I knew that from the nineteenth century British racing was dominated by the Jockey Club, drawing its members from the aristocracy and landed gentry. Its historians always claimed that the Club, based at Newmarket and London, was first founded at the beginning of the 1750s.
Quite accidently, when early newspapers began to be digitized and put on-line, I discovered references to a Newmarket Jockey Club with a much earlier existence going back to the 1720s if not beyond. This sparked my interest and raised further questions. But deciding to research the origins and cultural history of early racing was risky.
This was not my period.
It was way outside my comfort zone.
There was a huge volume of unstudied material too, including newspapers, gentry archives, diaries and letters, racing art and urban records from racing towns like York and Chester.
The findings were even more illuminating that I had hoped.
Racing had a highly complex relationship with broader British society.
I had not realized how important the annual racing week was in the leisure calendar of so many county and large market towns during the eighteenth century, helping foster consumerism and the urban renaissance. For many women of the middling classes for example, the racing was almost incidental, but was looked forward to for weeks before with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. It offered many social opportunities; socializing with the titled and the county set, attending assemblies, balls, the ordinaries or the theatre, appearing in the grandstand, and dressing up, demonstrating status and conspicuous consumption.
Racing was equally significant politically. The early Jockey Club was much more than a racing club. Its members were mostly Protestant, Whig and committed to the defeat of Stuart Catholicism, and were usually MPs or otherwise leading figures in the political elite, like the Duke of Bolton. Racing played across divisions of Whig and Tory, court and country or Hanover and Jacobite in complex ways. Hanoverian sons demonstrated their independence against their father by spending money racing. Race meetings were sites of assembly for political discourse where prospective and current parliamentarians lobbied for support, exploited the dynamics of patronage, or used attenders as focus groups.
Conventional histories often portrayed honest, aristocratic Jockey Club members facing dishonest, cheating working-class blacklegs who were corrupting the gaming world. The real situation proved much more complex. There was dishonesty and honesty at all levels of the gaming world, and many examples of cross-class gaming alliance and odds manipulation in the embryonic betting market. Horses could be deliberately run to lose as well as to win.
It became very clear that racing had been the first proto-modern sport, changing over the period from a marginal and informal interest for some of the elite to become the most significant leisure event of the summer season. The way rules and racing organisation developed over times proved fascinating too. The research also shed light on the hitherto hidden world of racing’s key professionals: jockeys, trainers, bloodstock breeders, stud grooms and stable hands. I had not previously been aware that many jockeys and trainers were literate, numerate, socially mobile, handling large sums of money and sometimes wealthy enough to be landowners and leading figures in their communities.
All in all, this book changed my own views radically about the early racing world.

This post responds to Peter K. Andersson’s Journal of Victorian Culture article ‘How Civilised were the Victorians’.

Andersson’s argument that scholars have devoted disproportionate attention to the disciplining and civilizing discourses of the Victorian period is highly welcome. Certainly Elias and Foucault have attracted substantive though I suspect often merely ritual reference. But the reasons for the sustained scholarly attention to such discourses are less clear, given that as Andersson points out, the Victorian period was multifaceted and complex. Of course university English and History departments represent themselves as civilising places and as such have always accorded higher status to and rewarded such studies. And I suspect that the need to defer gratification in order to further a scholarly career means that the two discourses have appealed to many scholars, some of whose backgrounds may have been similar to those Victorian cultural groups giving which gave more emphasis to civility and restraint such as–the self-improving rationalist and secular reformist groups or perhaps the religious reformist leisure cultures rooted in nonconformity and the evangelical Church of England.
Like Andersson, I found the same in-balance a few years ago, when I began to research my recent book Vice and the Victorians (London: Bloomsbury 2015). Vice is a fluid and slippery concept, and its discourses and language certainly needed much exploration, as did its relationship to virtue, respectability and social reform. But in reading the secondary material on vice’s themes, however defined, it was clear that the balance of scholarly work had been on the social and moral reform of ‘vice’ rather than vice itself. Across the Victorian period there were regular debates over gambling, the drinking of alcohol, and sexual pleasures outside marriage, all with peaks and troughs. But in secondary work there was plenty of emphasis on temperance and much less on drinking culture. There was a good deal ofmuch material on the problematics of working-class gambling and anti-gambling reform but almost nothing on the substantial extent of the enjoyments of gambling by the Victorian middle classes, despite the popularity of the London Stock Exchange Derby sweep, and many other office sweeps on major races, or the existence of legal credit betting offices across Britain catering for middle-class betting, or the significant numbers of the middle-class attending race meetings. There was a substantial literature on prostitution, on Munby, on the Contagious Diseases Acts, W.T. Stead, the vigilance associations, and on Oscar Wilde’s problems, but less on some other aspects of sexual behaviour.
Likewise, the Victorian press gave much coverage in its columns to sermons, anti-vice organizations, activities, publications, reports and political meetings, attacking and attempting to repress behaviours deemed problematical, and regularly reported the prosecutions of evil-doers. The reformist groups were culturally powerful, vociferous and possessed cultural capital and much zeal, even if active members were relatively few in number. They dominated the literary sources that survive. So anything seen in print by others was usually phrased in a manner calculated not to cause offence to readers, most certainly, though that did not stop editors or novelists addressing such material in careful ways. The police might appear to have been active in imposing certain types of values, but they saw working-class behaviour through working-class eyes and the practical realities of policing meant that they responded to behaviour contingently. A particular response would be situational, but also dependent on the attitudes of senior officers, the local bench, or pressure coming from complaints in the press. Middle-class drunks might be put in a cab and sent home after a tip was proffered. Local policemen, it is also clear, often ‘read’ local behaviour and appearance in ways often quite different to the readings offered by outside reformers.
Then as now what people said publicly, and how they behaved privately, were not the same. Andersson talks about ‘civilizing masks’ (452);, Peter Bailey talked about more about roles and performances, of people calculatedly adopting the surface trappings of appropriate behaviour and appearance for a particular context. Either way, we need to do more to explore the backstage of Victorian life, but far more broadly than at present, right across the spectrum of class, but also in terms of other forms of identity, including gender, generation, Tory or Liberal political orientation, attitude to faith, and ethnicity. As Andersson says, ‘plebeian women were seldom given a voice… in Victorian studies’ (442) but the same goes for middle-class unrespectable women. We need to do more to identify which groups might have been repressed and constrained and to what extent, and when and where they were and were not, and amongst which groups
Certainly the issues of civility and restraint were situational, most effective in certain occupational contexts, amongst members of a church congregation or in respectable homes with respectable neighbours. They were culturally contested, incorporating contradictions and involving multiple, diverse and individual responses and interpretations. There were, for example, spatial contexts where repression had less effect. These included not just the slums, so often discussed, but music halls and variety theatres, sports and pleasure grounds, racecourses and fairs, places being away from home, in distant towns, and the seaside or foreign lands.
Andersson makes another appeal, for Victorian studies to extend its toolbox of methodologies and sources to place more emphasis on visual material. Many visual sources have, as he points out, yet to be explored. Many Victorian magazines, from The Day’s Doings to Punch, include many pictures and cartoons which hold up to readers’ amusement the less civilized behaviour of their middle-class readers.

Likewise, Victorian narrative paintings, such as Frith’s Derby Day, like many of the painters themselves, often subvert the dominant discourses. Frith’s Derby Day shows the large crowd bent on gambling, eating and drinking, flirting and other sensual pleasures, with no sense of moral danger, even if he also draws on ideas of physiognomy, phrenology and social types in his representations.
There is a wide range of available methodologies available for exploitation, including semiology, discourse analysis, content analysis, psychoanalysis, content analysis or audience and reception studies, alongside the more usual use of visual sources as empirical evidence. There is much out there waiting to be explored: early film, advertisements, book illustrations, flags, standards, paintings, photographs, engravings and cartoons and material objects such as gravestones or clothing. Since reading Andersson’s material I can feel the enthusiasm building to revisit this material and read this much more against the current grain.

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I’ve just got back from the Annual Congress of CESH, held this year in Florence, outstanding for its Renaissance, art, architecture, sculpture and university studies. There were delegates from right across Europe, north Africa, USA and Japan. I’m always impressed by the way mainland European academics seem to have so many languages at their fingertips. I chaired presentations that were in Spanish, Italian, English and French, for example. Questions came in a variety of languages, including English, but the speakers were often well able to understand and respond. It seems a great shame that by and large British academics don’t attend, though this year northwest scholars from Manchester Metropolitan University came out to Florence, as did Wray Vamplew from Edinburgh. Given that the reputation of British scholars is quite high in Europe, and their work is widely read there, the reasons for our very limited attendance are less than clear.
Is it that European scholarship and academic mores are rather different? Is it a question of cost? Our perhaps more limited language skills? Or is the same suspicion of Europe that is expressed in much of the British press?