Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (69 page)

In the early days of the sport, brewers had patronized the clubs, lending support and facilities to working men. With the commercial possibilities of the game seemingly infinite, instead of football being played where the drink was, the drink followed the game. The teams no longer - at least in the short term - needed the financial backing of the publicans. Sunderland had used a field owned by the Blue House inn, but the £10 rent was steep, so the club simply moved, no longer dependent on the backing of the pub. Wolves quarrelled with its pub landlord and also moved to a new ground. Arsenal was different in that its move, from Woolwich to Highbury, was based not on a dispute, but on demographics: it suspected (correctly, as it turned out) that north London, with better transport links, would provide more spectators and therefore more gate money for the club. Everton’s story was more typical. John Houlding, a brewer, part-owned the Anfield ground, conveniently located next door to his Sandon Hotel, which had the sole right to sell refreshments at the matches. In 1890-91 Everton won the League Championship, making over £1,700, and Houlding wanted some of it. He raised the rent on the ground, and then he and the team fell out noisily. When no resolution seemed possible, Everton picked up and moved to Goodison Park (whereupon Houlding started a new club, Liverpool FC, on the old site). In the opposite direction, Spurs moved its pitch to the White Hart inn when the inn gave the club good terms.

That the White Hart inn enticed a club to play nearby showed good business sense: the pubs recognized the commercial importance of football. The size of the crowds kept on growing: there seemed no limit to the number of people who wanted to watch the game. Between the 1889-90 and 1913-14 seasons, the crowds at First Division English League matches rose from an average of 4,600 per match to an average of 23,100. In 1892 there were 32,810 spectators at the FA Cup final - and there would have beenmore had Kennington Oval had larger capacity. In 1893 the final was played at the Fallowfield Athletics Ground in
Manchester, and 45,000 paid to watch (several thousand more broke down the barriers to watch without paying). In the 1890s the final moved back to London, and in 1895 45,000 went to Sydenham to watch Aston Villa play Wolverhampton Wanderers. (In 1905 Sydenham would get its own team, Crystal Palace, named for Paxton’s building, located in the suburb for half a century.) Even more telling than these one-off events, it was estimated that by 1909, on any Saturday afternoon across England alone, around 1 million people were attending football matches, and once more it was the railways that had made this possible.
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This transport element, the football excursion train, was essential for the players as well as the spectators, making out-of-town fixtures feasible even for those men in full-time employment. In 1879 Glasgow Rangers’ players left Glasgow after work on a Friday evening, arrived in Manchester at 4 a.m., played a match on Saturday afternoon, and returned to Glasgow that night. The train companies, understandably, were even more interested in the spectators. In the 1880s the North Greenwich line admitted that it no longer had the capacity to transport all of Millwall Rovers’ fans; the Great Eastern had to install extra-wide doors at White Hart Lane to allow the speedy dispersal of Tottenham Hotspur fans, arriving as they were at five-minute intervals before each match; by 1901, at the Crystal Palace, half of the 110,000 fans were carried to the match by train. Many fans belonged to Final Clubs, in which up to 10,000 members paid a weekly subscription that was then used to buy bulk excursion fares to transport fans to the Cup final.
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More and more breweries saw the proximity of a football ground as a major commercial asset for a pub. Pubs were key places where the Saturday-night football specials were hawked, and in turn these newspapers carried heavy advertising for pubs in general and different brewers in particular. In Portsmouth the magistrates were unwilling to license a new pub for Brickwood’s brewery as the company had four beer-houses in the city already; Brickwood’s found it commercially expedient to close these four beer-houses down in order to obtain a licence for the one football pub. Likewise Whitbread thought it worth giving up one pub in order to open another next to the White Hart inn. And the breweries did more than just link themselves by location: many invested in the clubs as shareholders. Overall by 1911 14.9 per cent of shareholders in Association clubs were in the drinks trade, holding 6.9 per cent of all shares; in Scottish football, the 11.3 per cent of drinks-industry shareholders
owned 31.2 per cent of shares. Breweries also found alternative means of financial investment: some lent clubs money to buy or improve their grounds; others bought the grounds themselves and leased them back to the clubs. Watford was rescued by Benskins, a local brewer; Manchester United became entirely dependent on Manchester Breweries’ chairman John Davies, while Liverpool was in the same financial situation with John Houlding.
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Very soon the clubs were as heavily dependent on the great brewers as they had once been on individual publicans.

For, as teams became more successful, they became harder to manage by part-time administrators, who could not give them their full attention. In the 1881-82 season alone, the administration of Blackburn Rovers required fifty-seven committee meetings to be held, not including meetings of the various subcommittees. The Lancashire FA’s secretary sent 4,000 letters in 1882-83. These jobs were full-time, beyond any doubt. What businessmen had that working men did not were the two things that all administrators needed: time and money. In 1884-5, the year before Bolton Wanderers became fully professional, its balance sheet showed entries for financial outlay on new stands and on the ground, and payments for ‘Rent, rates, ground and gatekeeping, police, accounts’; uniforms; ‘Printing, posting, advertising’; ‘medical attendance on players’; ‘Players’ insurance’ and half a dozen other categories of a similar nature.
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Some teams raised funds through lotteries, bazaars, raffles and prize draws. But, like Arsenal, most found limited-liability companies the way forward, and most of their shares were bought by professional men. Blackburn Rovers had 93 shareholders in 1897, mostly cotton manufacturers, mill managers and publicans; by 1914 there were 241 shareholders, with one brewer owning 150 shares and two cotton manufacturers owning another 150 between them. Bolton Wanderers listed journalists, jewellers, publicans, brewers and bleachers as shareholders in 1895; by 1914 one brewer had 400 shares. Preston North End was also owned mostly by the drinks trade: twenty-six publicans or licensed victuallers, six brewers. Manchester City in 1894 had as shareholders two brewers with 50 and 100 shares, an innkeeper and a secretary with 20 shares each, and a publican and a brewer with 10 shares each; the other 209 shareholders had just one or two shares each.

The future was visible in the finances of Manchester United, which had been formed from the defunct Newton Heath club, which had gone into bankruptcy in 1902, when most of its shares were owned
by working-class men. By 1908 John Davies, the managing director of Manchester Breweries, held 100 shares - 40 more than the next six directors put together. Of those six, he employed three directly, while two more had commercial links to his brewery. By 1913 the new ground at Old Trafford had been opened, and the club was on its way to a century of pre-eminence. The connections between football and the drinks industry went on and on: in 1897 15 per cent of Blackburn Rovers’ shares were owned by the drinks trade; by 1909 West Bromwich Albion had £700 in debentures with Mitchells and Butlers brewery, while two other breweries had £500 and £100 worth. Wolverhampton Wanderers’ new ground, dressing rooms, offices and covered stands in Molyneux had been laid out by Northampton Brewery Co., which charged a rent of only £50 a year.
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No one was in any doubt by now that football was business - big business, just as racing was.

After looking at these two professional sports, one upper class in origins, one working class, both developing out of older forms of sport, of gambling, and of ritual community life, it is time to turn to another sport, one that was created in the late nineteenth century entirely from scratch. This was a sport that relied for its existence on new technology, that found its early popularity exclusively in the middle classes, and that had gained its adherents with barely any competitive elements: cycling.

At the end of the eighteenth century, for many of the middle class sport was considered either a working-class pastime, and therefore almost indistinguishable from riots, or an upper-class one, in which case many thought it closely resembled dissipation. In the nineteenth century that began to change, as the middle classes started to appropriate elements of sports for their own purposes, facilitated by the spread of public-school educations to a wider tranche of the prosperous and professional. At the beginning of the century these schools had themselves for the most part regarded sport as nothing but a necessary evil. Samuel Butler, the bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, was the headmaster of Shrewsbury School from 1798 to 1836. In those thirty-eight years he had moved the school from a dying institution to an educational powerhouse (his most famous pupil was Charles Darwin). But he thought games were beneath contempt - football, he sniffed, was ‘only fit for butcher boys’.
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A few decades on, another reformer, Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby School from 1828 to 1842,
also had little or no interest in organized games, but now he recognized them as useful, serving as an outlet for boyish aggression. Other schools increasingly saw sports as a way of inculcating Arnold’s educational and moral reforms: games gave boys the illusion of self-management while fostering teamwork and discipline. In the 1840s Charles Kingsley wrote that ‘There has always seemed to me something impious in the neglect of perfect health, strength and beauty…I could not do half the little good I do do…if it were not for that strength and activity which some consider coarse and degrading.’
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Here was a combination to suit the middle-class palate - sport mixed with both piety and self-improvement. Games had become health-giving, they were ‘manly’, and they were improving.

All this long preceded the arrival of the first two-wheeled object with a mechanical crank operated by pedals, not yet named the bicycle. The earliest ancestor, usually known as a velocipede, appeared in Paris in 1867. Previous prototypes had been, rather than forms of selfpropulsion, no more than aids to walking (the way a scooter still is). In 1868 a young man, Rowley Turner, visited his uncle Josiah Turner in Coventry. Josiah Turner was an engineer who ran the Coventry Sewing Machine Co. With the sewing-machine business in a slump, he was persuaded by his nephew’s enthusiasm to switch production over to manufacturing these novelties - for which, by happy coincidence, his nephew had an order for 400 for a Parisian firm. The company was quickly renamed the Coventry Machinists Co., and began to turn out velocipedes. These machines had a vogue in France, and a - very brief - moment in the USA. But it was in Britain, with its highly developed metalworking trade, its good selection of newspapers that were interested in sport, and its elaborate road network, that bicycling took off. By 1869 a Liverpool agent was importing cycles from the USA; a local club had been established, and had sponsored a race between Chester and Rock Ferry. Further races were staged at the Crystal Palace, while the Agricultural Hall in Islington had trick-cyclists. In this first wave of interest, cycles were seen as objects to be ridden by professionals for the spectators’ amusement: a crowd of 4,000 was claimed for road races in Birmingham.
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But that same year a technical improvement began to move the bicycle towards recreational status. In 1869 James Starley, the foreman of the Coventry Machinists Co., produced an improved model, known
as the Ordinary. Starley had made steering easier by getting rid of the tiller which had previously manipulated the front wheel, and replacing it with handlebars. He reduced the driving wheel to 122 centimetres and encased it in rubber to cushion the ride - previous models had been known as ‘boneshakers’ for a reason. Finally he perched the cyclist high above the dust kicked up by horses and carriages. Enthusiasm was spread by the club, still in the late nineteenth century the most common social grouping. In 1870 the Pickwick Bicycle Club and the Amateur Bicycle Club were formed in London, and over the next decade were soon joined by at least a dozen more clubs. Young men, clerks and shop assistants, particularly enjoyed the spice of danger in cycling: it gave them an aura of masculinity, of virility, which they appreciated. Lower-middle-class white-collar work was popularly supposed to be the province of weaklings, and cycles and cycling clubs were a very visible counter to this image.

By 1875 further modifications to the Ordinary made the front wheel larger once more, at about 152 centimetres, while the back wheel was only 40 centimetres, the two radically different sized wheels giving the machine the nickname the penny-farthing. In 1880 springs were added to the seat, and the frame was hollowed out to lessen the weight of the machine. The next two important technological advances, which took the bicycle away from the hobbyist and gave it to the world, followed swiftly. In 1876 Starley produced the Safety Bicycle. The rider was now no longer perched high above the road, in danger of a headlong fall. Instead, both wheels had been made almost the same size, and the rider could touch the ground while seated. It was easier to respond to untoward circumstances, especially now the cyclist could mount from a standstill, rather than the running start that had been necessary before, and could stop merely by putting his feet down. The Safety Bicycle ‘set the fashion to the world’ (Starley’s motto), but what spread that fashion and made the cycle a routine means of transportation rather than an odd hobby was an invention that came entirely separately. In 1888 the Dunlop pneumatic tyre appeared on the market and was immediately fitted to the bicycle, giving a smoother ride and increasing the machine’s possible speed by 30 per cent. In 1891 Edouard Michelin refined this innovation by producing a tyre that, in case of a puncture, could be mended by removing its inner tube alone.
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This meant that punctures could be dealt with by a single cyclist by the side of the road, rather than
needing a mechanic with specialized tools. It also reduced costs by a large margin.