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Religion and the Rise of Sport in England
Hugh McLeod
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Published: October 2022
Subject: Religious Studies

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To Moira
Religion and the Rise of Sport in England
Hugh McLeod
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192859983.001.0001
Published: 2022 Online ISBN: 9780191953286 Print ISBN: 9780192859983
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Acknowledgements 
Published: October 2022
Subject: Religious Studies

Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
This book began to take shape when I gave the Hulsean Lectures in Cambridge in 2008, and I would like to
thank the people whose generous hospitality and e cient organization did so much to make my two weeks
in Cambridge so enjoyable, especially Clare Daunton, Martin Daunton, Eamon Du y, Peter Harland, Jeremy
Morris, and John Pollard. I would also like to thank those who attended the lectures and whose questions
and comments were consistently stimulating, including, as well as those already mentioned, David Ford,
Boyd Hilton, Graham Howes, Peter Mandler, Stuart Mews, John Nurser, Jim Obelkevich, Jane Ringrose,
Brian Stanley, Graham Stanton, and David Thompson. In 2017 I was invited to give a lecture on ‘Sport and
Religion’ at Lund University in honour of King Carl Gustaf, who, together with Queen Silvia, was
participating in the university’s 350th anniversary celebrations. This gave me a chance to re ect on the
theme more generally. I was invited to give the Hensley Henson Lectures in Oxford in 2021. These never
happened, because of the Covid pandemic. However, I am grateful for the stimulus this invitation gave me to
nishing the book.
Many other people have helped me by discussing the book, answering questions, and sending me copies of
their own work. I would specially like to mention Rex Ambler, Uta Balbier, Clyde Bin eld, Andrew Bradstock,
Douglas Davies, Marjet Derks, Geo Ellis, Clive Field, Alan Fox, Richard Fox, Yashmin Harun, Anders Jarlert,
Peter Marsh, Alexander Maurits, Martin Nykvist, Jim Ormandy, Stephen Pattison, Judith Pugsley, Doug
Reid, John Samways, Mike Snape, Nick Watson, and Andrew Wing eld-Digby. I would also like to thank the
anonymous reviewers of my manuscript.
Sections of the book were the basis for papers at numerous conferences and seminars, and I would like to
thank all those who took part in these events.
Many members of my family have asked pertinent questions, lent me books, or provided introductions to
potential informants. By far my greatest debt is to my wife, Moira, who has read every chapter and has been
p. viii an unfailing source of ideas, critical comment, help, and encouragement.
List of Illustrations

1.1 ‘The Dinner’ by Thomas Rowlandson, 1787. Reproduced by
permission of the Yale Center for British Art. 24
2.1 ‘The Sporting Parson, no. 11,’ by Hablot Knight Browne, undated.
Reproduced by permission of the Yale Center for British Art. 38
4.1 ‘A Bannu Football Team’, date of photograph unknown. From T. L. Pennell,
Among the Wild Tribes of the Afghan Frontier (London 1909). 88
4.2 ‘School Fleet on the Way through Srinigar,’ date of photograph
unknown. From C. E. Tyndale-Biscoe, Building Character in
Kashmir (London 1920). 90
4.3 ‘Mr A. K. Yapp’, Programme of Leicester YMCA, 1906–7.
YMCA Archive, A49, Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections,
University of Birmingham. Reproduced by permission of the
Director of Special Collections. 95
4.4 Sackville Street Derby Primitive Methodist Football Team, 1909.
Reproduced by permission of Derby Local Studies Library. 96
5.1 ‘Womanly Women who Cycle: Mrs Ormiston Chant’, Cycling,
20 July 1895. 118
5.2 Jack ‘Kid’ Berg at Madison Square Garden, 1931. Reproduced by
permission of Alamy. 132
5.3 ‘Cycling Notes’, Clarion, 28 March 1896. 135
5.4 ‘Village Cricket’, artist not known, date not known. 139
6.1 ‘From the Mining Districts’, Punch, 3 March 1855. Reproduced with
permission of the British Library. 152
7.1 Dronfield Free Church Football Club, 1950–1. Photograph in
possession of Richard Fox. Reproduced by permission of Richard Fox. 177
8.1 Statue of Stanley Matthews, Stoke-on-Trent, unveiled 1987. Photograph by
Judith Pugsley, 2021. Reproduced by permission of Judith Pugsley. 206
9.1 ‘Westside Football Club: Men’s First Team’, 2020–1. Reproduced by
permission of Geoff Ellis and West Side Church. 219
9.2 ‘Westside Football Club: Ladies Team’, 2020–1. Reproduced by
permission of Geoff Ellis and West Side Church. 220
9.3 Frenford and MSA Women’s Football Club, date of photograph
not known. Reproduced by permission of Yashmin Harun and
Muslimah Sports Association. 234
List of Abbreviations

Bell’s Bell’s Life in London
BB Boys’ Brigade
BWSF British Workers’ Sports Federation
CIS Christians in Sport
FA Football Association
IJHS International Journal of the History of Sport
LCC London County Council
LMA London Metropolitan Archives
MFH Master of Fox Hounds
NCRO Northamptonshire County Record Office
NU Northern Union
SIH Sport in History
YMCA Young Men’s Christian Association
YWCA Young Women’s Christian Association
Introduction

In 1820 Christianity appeared to be a dominant force in English society. The
Established Church of England enjoyed wealth and political power, as well as
considerable moral influence, and Methodism was a fast-growing mass move-
ment. Meanwhile the world of sport was often on the defensive in the face of
religious attack. By 2020 it seemed that the roles had been reversed. Sport was
an inescapable presence, lauded by governments as the key to national pres-
tige and individual health, the subject of saturation coverage in television and
newspapers. Outstanding athletes were not only household names—they
were also very rich. Meanwhile, the Christian churches appeared to be in
retreat—partly because of the growth of other religions, but more especially
because of the growing numbers of people with no religion.
Of course, the story is more complicated—and more interesting. In the
early nineteenth century, sportsmen often found ways of resisting or evading
religious attacks, and this was only one of the areas in which the power of the
churches was less all-embracing than it appeared. In the early twenty-first
century, all religions have had to adapt to and react to the very large place
occupied by sport in contemporary society; but this has been a two-way pro-
cess, as sporting authorities and individual athletes have continued to draw
on the resources of religions.
Both religion and sport can exercise power in society through the moral
authority they are believed to carry, through the prestige of ‘star’ athletes or
‘pulpit princes’, through their influence in politics or the media, and of course
because of the passionate attachment of large numbers of individuals. They
have often been in competition with one another for people’s scarce resources
of time and money and can even be in direct conflict. On the other hand, they
can be mutually supportive, and both religion and sport have been very will-
ing to make use of one another. Each of these kinds of relationship has been
seen in modern England.
The relationship with sport offers a vivid reflection of the various phases in
England’s religious history from the Evangelical hegemony of the first half of
the nineteenth century, the growing religious liberalization of the later
nineteenth century, and the ‘diffusive Christianity’ of the first half of the
2 Religion and the Rise of Sport in England
twentieth century, through to the late twentieth and early twenty-first cen-
tury, which have seen increasing secularization, the advent of the multi-faith
society and a resurgent Evangelicalism.
In the history of sport, religion has had both a positive and a negative role.

In the first half of the nineteenth century religious condemnation played a
part in the decline or demise of many sports, though others successfully
resisted. In one area of continuing conflict between many in the religious
world and many followers of sport, namely the prevalence of gambling, the
religious attacks were comprehensively defeated. The more positive contribu-
tion of religion to sport was at its highest point in the later nineteenth and
early twentieth century when churches and Christian youth movements made
a major contribution to the sporting boom of the later Victorian and
Edwardian years. Since the 1960s one might argue that the ever-greater com-
mercialization of sport has gone hand in hand with secularization, and in
some respects that is true—for example, sport made a major contribution to
the collapse of the British Sunday in the later twentieth century. On the other
hand, commercialization has also gone hand in hand with globalization and
has led to the arrival of many fervently Christian or Muslim athletes from
other parts of the world. The increasing religious diversity of the English
population has itself sometimes brought religious issues to the fore, and the
rapid growth of sports chaplaincy suggests that sport needs religion as much
as religion needs sport. And while ‘religion’ as conventionally understood
uses sport for its own purposes, and ‘sport’ as conventionally understood uses
religion, there is also the question of whether sport is itself a religion—as
some sportspeople claim jokingly, while others make the claim in all
seriousness.
Whatever one’s view on claims of this kind, religion and sport are certainly
alike in the fact that they both can form intensely felt loyalties and identities,
and each has been, and is, a central part of the day-to-day life of many people.
I first became interested in the relationship between religion and sport
about twenty-five years ago when I was looking at the so-called crisis of faith
in later Victorian England. I was struck by the fact that churchgoing was in
clear decline by about 1890 at a time when there was a great boom in playing
and watching sport, and I wondered if there was any connection. Indeed,
some historians have suggested that the two trends were connected. On the
other hand, I was well aware that churches were themselves contributing to
the national passion for sport by forming clubs and presenting Christian
youth with sporting role models. Equally, the public schools, which were
Introduction 3
generally credited with an important role in the earlier stages of the boom,
were nearly all headed by Anglican clergymen. Furthermore, few histories of
sport failed to mention the influence of what was called muscular Christianity,
and especially of the novelists, Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes.

In the resulting book,1 I made a first attempt at resolving this problem.
A few years later, I returned to the theme, looking at the rising interest in sport
in the Nonconformist chapels and in Sunday Schools, as well as attempting a
comparison of the inter-connections between religion, politics, and sport in
various parts of Europe.2 In 2008 I was invited to give the Hulsean Lectures at
Cambridge and chose as my theme the relationship between religion and
sport in England during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. I saw it as a
romantic drama, akin to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It began with
repulsion, which gave way to a growing attraction, and then to a co-habitation
(not yet a marriage), but ended with a (mostly friendly) separation.
I was then diverted into another project. But I had not forgotten one of the
questions which had been put to me: ‘What happened after this “separation”?’
In returning now, I am trying to answer this question, as well as giving fresh
consideration to the Victorian and Edwardian periods, developing important
themes which I earlier neglected. The religious focus will be principally on
Christians, and especially Anglicans and Nonconformists, though I shall look
more briefly at Catholics, and I shall also consider Jews, Muslims, and those
who claimed that sport was their religion. I will define as a sport any which
was regarded as a sport by those practising it. This includes some which were
condemned as barbaric by many people both at the time and since, and some,
such as recreational cycling, which would fall outside some definitions of
sport. I have made no attempt to be either comprehensive in the range of
sports discussed or balanced in the amount of space devoted to each sport:
some sports receive much more extended treatment than others, whether
because they are more significant for my main arguments, or because they are
the subject of relevant literature.
1 Hugh McLeod, Religion and Society in England 1850–1914 (Basingstoke 1996), pp. 88–90, 138–9,
150–1, 197–200.
2 Hugh McLeod, ‘ “Thews and Sinews”: Nonconformity and sport’, in David Bebbington and
Timothy Larsen (eds), Modern Christianity and Cultural Aspirations (Sheffield 2003), pp. 28–46;
‘Sport and the English Sunday School 1869–1939’, in Stephen Orchard and John H. Y. Briggs (eds) The
Sunday School Movement (Milton Keynes 2007), pp. 109–23; ‘Religion, politics and sport in Western
Europe, c.1870–1939’, in Stewart J. Brown, Frances Knight, and John Morgan-Guy (eds), Religion,
Identity and Conflict in Britain: From the Restoration to the Twentieth Century (Farnham 2013),
pp. 195–212.
Sport and Religion in Modern England: An Overview
The development of modern sport in England may be roughly divided into

four periods. In each of these phases Christians, and indeed Jews and more

recently Muslims, have played a part—sometimes, as in the second phase,
very conspicuously, and at other time less visibly. In either case, they have
adapted to the opportunities and the threats which each period has presented.
In the first phase from about 1790 up to about 1860 an older sporting world
continued, and sometimes, as with the field sports of the gentry, it flourished,
but there were also important new developments. One was the publication of
the first sporting newspapers. Another was the increasing number of profes-
sional events attended by large numbers of spectators. The dominance in
England of competitive sports, with betting playing a major role, contrasted
with the situation in many parts of continental Europe, where for much of the
nineteenth century the most widely practised and most prestigious sport was
gymnastics, closely associated with a patriotic agenda of forming disciplined
and physically fit young men, able to defend the fatherland.
In the eighteenth century, the dominant section of the Church of England
had been those known as High Church: Protestant, but strongly opposed to
any kind of Calvinism; closely attached to the Anglican Prayer Book; con-
cerned for decency, order, and tradition in church and society; committed to
paternalist social relations, and to defence of the powers and privileges of the
Established Church. In the 1830s the High Church began to move in a new
direction with what has come to be known as the Oxford Movement, because
many of its founders were academics or parish clergymen in the High Church
stronghold of Oxford. At the time they were more often known as Tractarians
or Puseyites. They were initially spurred to action by what they saw as the
secularizing policies of the Whig governments of Grey and Melbourne,
which, they feared, might culminate in a persecution like that during the
French Revolution. Their answer was to go beyond the idea of the church as a
branch of the state, to rediscover the identity of the Church of England as the
English branch of the universal church, in continuity with the medieval and,
above all, with the early church and the Church Fathers, whose authority they
revered. The liking of some in the movement for more elaborate ritual, richly
decorated church buildings, processions, and music led them to be dubbed
‘Ritualists’. The movement would have an enormous though increasingly dif-
fuse influence on the Church of England in the second half of the nineteenth
century and the first half of the twentieth, and it frequently developed in ways
unintended by the founders.
Introduction 5
But in the first half of the nineteenth century the growing religious force
was the Evangelicals. They were growing both within the Established Church
of England, and even more strongly in the Dissenting (or Nonconformist)
churches. After increasing gradually from around the middle of the eight-

eenth century, these churches enjoyed explosive growth in the years from
about 1790 to 1850. In the industrializing districts of northern England and
the Midlands they attracted large sections of the lower-middle and working
classes, as well as lesser numbers from higher in the social scale. These more
affluent groups were especially attracted by the small but influential body of
liberal Unitarians. But by far the largest section of Nonconformity were the
Methodists, split into numerous branches including most notably the
Wesleyan and Primitive Methodists. The Baptists and the Independents or
Congregationalists were also growing fast. Until 1828 Dissenters were
excluded from holding public office, but after the reform of local government
in 1835 they quickly became a dominant force in the government of many
towns and cities, though it took longer for them to achieve a significant repre-
sentation in Parliament.
In the first half of the century Evangelicals, whether Anglican or
Nonconformist, enjoyed considerable political influence and even greater
social and cultural influence. Many of them had a very critical view either of
sport in general or of the sports which were popular at the time, and as well as
abstaining themselves, they often tried to prevent others from practising any
sport which was considered cruel, brutal, dangerous, or immoral. In this
period relations between the worlds of religion and of sport were at their low-
est level.
My second period, between about 1860 and 1900, saw the great Victorian
sporting boom, including an enormous increase in the numbers of those
playing or watching sport, as well as the invention of new sports such as lawn
tennis. The boom began in the 1860s with men of the upper-middle class, and
these years saw the formation of many cricket, football, athletics, rowing, and
gymnastic clubs by business and professional men. From the 1870s men of
the lower-middle and working classes were increasingly involved, and by the
1880s a small but steadily growing number of middle-class women were going
to gyms, playing tennis and golf and, by the 1890s, cycling. In this period the
amateur ideal came to have a widespread prestige and influence, though it
was frequently a source of conflict. In some sports it remained a powerful
influence until the later twentieth century, though in a few, notably associ
ation football, its importance was short-lived. Connected with this ideal was a
widespread condemnation of the betting which was seen as interfering with
the honest pursuit of victory without concern for the monetary gains result-
ing from victory—and sometimes from defeat. However, betting continued to
be integral to one of the most widely popular sports, horse racing, and indeed
it was greatly increasing from the 1880s.

In 1885 the Football Association (FA) legalized professionalism and in
1888 the Football League was formed. Very soon professional football was
attracting large crowds, and the FA Cup, in particular, generated huge excite-
ment. The other major spectator sports were cricket and rugby. Rugby under-
went its ‘Great Split’ in 1895 when the Northern Union (NU), which
recognized the need to provide ‘broken-time’ payments to the players, many
of whom were miners and mill workers, broke away from the strictly amateur
Rugby Football Union. Following various changes in the rules, the Northern
form of the game became the separate sport of rugby league. Cricket already
had in the nineteenth century and for long retained some unusual features. It
was probably the only sport where elite players included both professionals
and amateurs, and where both the elite and those playing on Saturday after-
noons were drawn from a wide range of social backgrounds. The system of
county cricket, which came to dominate the upper levels of the sport, was
controlled by amateurs, many of them from the aristocracy and gentry. The
same was true of the MCC, with its base at the Lord’s ground in London,
which remained until the 1990s the dominant institution in English cricket.
But the North and Midlands saw something akin to NU rugby, as clubs were
formed based on a single town, and enjoying a fervent local following. Both
county and league cricket attracted substantial crowds, as did the Test Matches
against Australia and South Africa. In the late Victorian years, sports which
had originated in England and Scotland spread across the Atlantic and into
other parts of Europe where they began to challenge the dominance of
gymnastics.
In this second phase, the later decades of the nineteenth century, a rap-
prochement between the worlds of religion and sport was underway. While
the more conservative branches both of the Anglican and the Nonconformist
churches were still powerful, there was a gradual process of liberalization.
From around 1850 Anglicans began to speak of a third force beyond the two
historic wings of the High Church and the Low Church or Evangelicals. This
was the ‘Broad Church’, which was open to critical study of the Bible and
questioned literalistic readings of the sacred text. By the 1870s similar trends
were evident in Nonconformity. The other important development in the
Church of England was the growth in numbers and influence of the Anglo-
Catholics (as those in the High Church tradition were increasingly called).
Introduction 7
Anglo-Catholics were extremely diverse in belief and practice, but the points
most relevant to the relationship between religion and sport were their con-
tribution to the growing anti-puritanism of the later nineteenth century and
the prominence of Anglo-Catholic clergy among the so-called slum priests

working in city parishes during that period, many of whom actively pro-
moted sport.
This was the era of what contemporaries called muscular Christianity.
Initially it was the more liberal wings of the various churches which led the
way in bringing the worlds of religion and sport closer together, but soon
other sections of the churches were joining in. The later nineteenth century
saw a great expansion of British overseas missions, assisted by the extension
of British rule over large areas of Africa and Asia. By the 1890s the affinities
between Christianity and sport were so widely accepted that missionaries and
teachers in Christian schools played an important role in the diffusion of
British sports to other parts of the world. The same period also saw an increas-
ing religious pluralism in English cities— though rural areas were little
affected by the new developments. The relatively small Catholic and Jewish
communities were reinforced by immigration respectively from Ireland, espe-
cially from the 1840s, and from the Russian empire especially from the 1880s.
Liverpool and other parts of Lancashire, as well as some parts of London,
became Catholic strongholds, and large Jewish communities were formed in
London’s East End and on the north sides of Manchester and Leeds.
The third period, between about 1900 and 1960 saw a big growth of wom-
en’s sport. In England, the sporting enthusiasm of young women of the upper
and middle classes continued to grow, causing consternation among some of
their elders and becoming the subject of critical articles in the reviews. And
by about 1900 young women of the lower-middle and working classes began
to be involved too. Women’s sport then grew rapidly in the interwar years,
with hockey, netball, tennis, swimming, and cycling being especially popular.
The other major development in this period was the internationalization of
sport, including the diffusion of Western (principally British and American)
sports to all parts of the world, the growth of international competition,
including most notably the revival of the Olympic Games in 1896, and the
promotion of sport by governments and by newspapers and radio as a source
of national identity and prestige. Internationally, the growth of women’s sport
was reflected in their increasing participation in the Olympics from 1924
onwards, though until 1956 the proportion of women among the athletes
never exceeded 10 per cent and only in the 1970s did participation by women
increase more rapidly.
1930 saw the first football World Cup. The four ‘home’ nations (England,
Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland), while continuing to compete among
themselves, refused until 1950 to take part in the global event, though they
also less frequently played against other countries. Cricket was slowly inter-

nationalizing in the interwar years, with New Zealand, the West Indies, and
India being added to the Test Match nations. As boxing under the
Queensberry Rules took the place of bare-knuckle contests in the later nine-
teenth century, most leading fighters were initially from Britain, the British
colonies, and the United States, but the interwar years also saw world cham
pions from France, Germany, and Italy. During this period attendance at
sporting events reached unprecedented levels. In England, the years immedi-
ately after World War II saw the peak of attendances both in cricket and in
football.
This was the era of American domination of many international sports,
including athletics, swimming, golf, tennis, and boxing, as well as those such
as basketball which had been invented in the United States. After World War
II the Americans faced increasing competition from Australia in tennis and
swimming and from the countries of the Soviet bloc in athletics. The Soviet
Union participated in the Olympics for the first time in 1952, and they
together with other communist-ruled countries, provided formidable compe-
tition to the athletes and gymnasts of the West, and ensured that the political
significance of the Games remained a primary concern.
In this third phase from the end of the nineteenth century up to the 1960s,
churchgoing, both Anglican and Nonconformist, was gradually falling, but it
remained generally agreed, at least until the 1960s, that England was ‘a
Christian country’. The characteristic religious tendency in this period was
what the historian Jeffrey Cox has called ‘diffusive Christianity’.3 Cox applied
it to the working class but it could be applied more widely at a time when
regular church attendance was declining in all classes, I will suggest that the
taken-for-granted position of the church in many areas of social life was
reflected in their large role in recreational sport, as well as in the continuing
use of Saturday as the main day for professional sport, and the rarity of pro-
fessional sport on Sundays.
The fourth period from around 1960 to the early twenty-first century has
seen the commercialization of sport reaching previously unimagined levels.
According to Garry Whannel, who has described a ‘remaking of British sport’
between 1965 and 1985, the most important factor has been television and
3 Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society, Lambeth 1870–1930 (Oxford 1982), p. 93.
Introduction 9
the possibilities opened up by the televising of sporting events.4 Some key

developments took place in the 1960s, though this process has gone much
further since then. One was the abolition of the maximum wage in football in
1961 and another was the beginnings of elite-level Sunday cricket in 1966.

Professional sport on Sundays had been very rare before that. The first
Football League game on a Sunday came in 1974. The decade saw a consider-
able increase in the sponsorship of sporting events. On the one hand, declin-
ing income from gate money meant that the authorities of the various sports
were on the look-out for new sources of income. On the other, televised
sporting events offered outstanding opportunities for advertisers. Cricket
abolished the distinction between amateurs and professionals, which had
indeed become of very limited practical significance, in 1962. One by one, the
sports where the distinction had greater practical significance followed suit.
Tennis did so in 1967; in athletics amateurism was gradually eroded in the
1970s, but effectively came to an end in 1982; rugby union, where amateurism
had been partly sustained by the long-running feud with rugby league, finally
succumbed in 1995. The biggest changes came in the 1990s, and again televi-
sion and sponsorship by businesses played key roles. The most important
development was the establishment of football’s Premier League in 1992 in
connection with BSkyB television. This led to an enormous increase in the
money available to the leading football clubs and enabled them to attract out-
standing players from all over the world. The dominant interest of television
now meant that football could be played on every day of the year but one—
Christmas Day still being sacrosanct. One product of this new era has been
the ‘sports icon’, able to enjoy a lavish lifestyle not only through the direct
rewards for their sporting achievements but more through associating their
names with products ranging from running shoes to perfumes.
This period also saw the internationalization of sport go much further.
After decades of domination by Americans and Australians, Wimbledon
champions were now coming from a wide range of (European) countries.
There is a similar pattern in golf, though Americans continue to be dominant.
African and Asian countries began to be major players in the Olympics and
in football’s World Cup, and in the early twenty-first century India had
become the dominant force in cricket. Most of the major team sports estab-
lished men’s and women’s world cups in the later twentieth century.
4 Garry Whannel, ‘The unholy alliance: Notes on television and the remaking of British sport
1965–85’, Leisure Studies, 5 (1986), pp. 129–45.
In this fourth phase, from the 1960s, we see four major religious trends.
First there were accelerating processes of secularization, reflected not only in
further drops in church attendance and the rising numbers of people with no
kind of religious affiliation but also, so far as the relationship between religion

and sport is concerned, by the increasing prevalence of Sunday sport. Second
there was the emergence of the so-called multi-faith society. This was mainly
the result of immigration by Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists from the
1950s onwards—though some of the growth, especially of Buddhism, was
through conversions. This had paradoxical effects on the place of religion in
society. On the one hand it undermined claims of Christianity to privileged
status. On the other hand, it also undermined those who wanted a privileged
status for Secularism, not least because the various ethnic and religious
minorities were key players in the politics of many cities. Third there was a
resurgence of Evangelicalism, partly through immigration from the Caribbean
and Africa, but more especially through the impact from the 1970s of the
Charismatic Movement. And fourth there was the growth of what were called
‘alternative spiritualities’, which included the claim that each individual had
the right to find their own ‘path’, drawing from a diverse range of sources.
The Historical Debate
Few historians have explored the relationship between religion and sport in
nineteenth-century England, and even fewer have looked at the twentieth
century. The historians who have written on this theme agree that religion is a
part of the history of sport, but they are completely disagreed as to what that
part is.
Four questions have provoked debate: How do we explain the rise of ‘mus-
cular Christianity’? How significant was the role of religion in the sports
boom, and was its significance brief or longer lasting? Was the role of the
churches in the sports boom proactive or reactive? And behind many of these
other questions is the big question of the relationship between the rise of
sport and secularization.
To start with the first question: muscular Christianity began in 1857 as a
joke by a reviewer of Kingsley’s novel, Two Years Ago. Kingsley disliked the
term, but it soon won general acceptance, and it has remained in use right up
to the present day. Most historians would agree that a mix of factors was
involved, but there is a basic division between those who see muscular
Christianity principally as a religious movement and those who see other
Introduction 11
factors as more significant. The first view has been advanced notably by
Norman Vance, as well as by Dominic Erdozain, who has especially high-
lighted the influence of these ideas on the Young Men’s Christian Association
(YMCA), and by Malcolm Tozer whose main concern has been their influ-

ence on the public schools.5 The second view has been presented most fully
by the contributors to Donald Hall’s collective volume.6
Vance, like Kingsley himself, dismisses ‘muscular Christianity’ as a trivial-
izing epithet. He prefers the term ‘Christian manliness’, which places more
emphasis on the social vision and liberal theological message of these writers,
as well as their insistence that muscularity is in itself of little value unless
combined with moral purpose. As Hughes would write in the 1870s, ‘a great
athlete may be a brute or a coward, while a truly manly man can be neither.’7
Kingsley and Hughes belonged to the liberal wing of the Church of England,
and Kingsley in particular was repelled by anything he regarded as ‘mani-
chean’. This included asceticism, contempt for the body, and any attempt to
separate the spiritual from the secular. Their polemics were directed against
two of the most influential movements within the Anglican Church, the
Evangelicals and the Tractarians. They accused the former of puritanism and
the latter of a sacerdotalism which served to separate the clergy from the
people. Instead, they wished to celebrate the goodness of the body and of the
natural world, as God-given, and the obligation to work for a better world.
Their promotion of sport and physical recreation of many kinds was a prod-
uct of their own love of the open air and of sporting contest, but also it was
part of their agenda for a different kind of Christianity and a different kind of
society.
In questioning Vance’s term ‘Christian manliness’, intended to highlight
the Christianity, Hall prefers ‘muscular Christianity’ because it highlights the
physical. He sees this movement as a response to the ‘intensification’ of ‘the
gender power struggle’ as well as the challenge to ‘ruling class male’ power. He
sees the body as a metaphor for these various forms of power. Beginning with
Thomas Hughes’ novel, Tom Brown’s School Days, he suggests that the subject
of the novel is the white, upper-class, heterosexual male body in a patriarchal
society, which denigrates or excludes all other groups and is often contrasted
5 Norman Vance, Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and
Religious Thought (Cambridge 1985); Dominic Erdozain, The Problem of Pleasure: Sport, Recreation
and the Crisis of Victorian Religion (Woodbridge 2010); Malcolm Tozer, The Ideal of Manliness: The
Legacy of Thring’s Uppingham (Truro 2015).
6 Donald E. Hall (ed.), Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge 1994).
7 Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ (London 1874), p. 26.
with ‘the caricatured bodies of lower-class, Irish and non-European men’.8

The principal themes, he suggests, are masculinity, sexuality, and gender rela-
tions. The authors also highlight the social origins of Hughes and Kingsley as
members of the gentry, with tendencies to be critical of the business class and

sympathetic towards, but also distanced from, the working class, and their
fervent patriotism (also discussed by Vance). As one of the contributors,
C. J. W.-L. Wee notes, there is a strong national and imperial dimension to
Kingsley’s work, which presents the idea of a united English nation, under-
pinned by Protestantism and a vigorous masculinity.9 The contributors to
Hall’s volume do not so much refute, as ignore, Vance’s emphasis on the spe-
cifically liberal Christian inspiration of muscular Christianity, so it is not
entirely clear how far the intention is to argue that Vance’s argument is wrong
or irrelevant, or whether it is to show that there is a wider context and other
perspectives are also needed.
As regards the second question, the contribution of religion to the sports
boom, both in the short term and in the longer term, an influential view is
that of Peter Bailey. In his history of the ‘rational recreation’ movement, he
argues that religion had an important role in the early stages of the sports
boom but that this was a temporary phase. From the 1850s clergymen, mainly
Anglican, were providing leisure facilities of various kinds intended both to
ameliorate the lives of working-class people and to divert them from harmful
recreations, focused especially on drinking and betting. They wanted to
encourage other kinds of leisure, beneficial to mind or body, such as attend-
ance at concerts and lectures, walking in parks, and participation in healthy
sports. Facilities for these things were often very limited and most working-
class people lacked the money to pay for them. The churches often had the
resources to pay for free or low-cost facilities, and at least until the 1870s
these were gratefully received. Bailey suggests that working-class membership
of church clubs was ‘instrumental’ ‘calculated to obtain certain benefits often
unobtainable from the resources of working-class life’.10 However there were
always possible tensions. Some of the football teams started by clergymen
broke away from church control. Similarly, working men’s clubs, initially
established by clergymen or pious laymen, eventually declared independence,
8 Donald E. Hall, ‘Introduction’, in Hall (ed.), Muscular Christianity, p. 6.

9 C. J. W.-L. Wee, ‘Christian manliness and national identity’, in Hall (ed.), Muscular Christianity,
pp. 66–88.
10 Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for
Control, 1830–1885 (London 1978), p. 178.
Introduction 13
the main issue often being the provision of alcoholic drinks on the premises.11
However, Jack Williams has shown in a series of studies of the interwar years
that the major involvement of churches and chapels in amateur sport
continued long after the 1880s.12 I shall also argue that a nuanced view of

relationships between churches and working class is needed, which highlights
their complexity and the diversity within both the working class and the
religious world.
The third question is whether churches had a proactive role in the sports
boom or whether they were jumping on a bandwagon which was already well
on its way. Most historians, whatever their overall perspective, have noted
that sport was seen by many churches as an effective means of recruiting new
members, and the formation of a football team or the provision of a gym on
church premises was thus a recognition of the fact that sport was already a
part of life for many people, especially teenage boys and young men. Some
historians have argued therefore that the adoption of sport by the churches
was reactive and essentially opportunist, rather than driven by any real enthu-
siasm. This is the view of the historian of leisure, Hugh Cunningham, who
argues that by the 1870s, ‘the churches were accommodating to society rather
than changing it’: ‘Leisure called the tune and the churches danced to it.’13
Similarly, the historian of religion, Callum Brown, suggests that ‘from the
evangelical standpoint, muscular Christianity was no more than an experi-
ment and not a fundamental change to a dominant negative discourse on
male religiosity.’ The purpose of church-based sport was ‘to contain, capture,
restrain and discipline masculinity’.14
The opposite view has been argued by the historian of leisure in
Birmingham, Douglas Reid, who suggests that the role of the churches in the
rise of sport, at least up to the 1880s was often proactive, with churches and
chapels frequently acting as pioneers.15 He recognizes considerable differ-
ences both between denominations and within denominations in attitudes to
recreation and specifically to sport, with much of the opposition coming from
Evangelicals, whether Anglican or Dissenting. He notes some examples of
clergy who promoted leisure for fear of losing their congregation, rather than
seeing it as anything good in itself. However, Reid, as well as rejecting the idea
11 Bailey, Leisure and Class, pp. 106–19.

12 See, for example, Jack Williams, ‘Churches, sport and identities in the North, 1900–1939’, in Jeff Hill
and Jack Williams (eds), Sport and Identity in the North of England (Keele 1996), pp. 113–36.
13 Hugh Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution (New York 1980), pp. 181–2.
14 Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (2nd edn. London 2009), pp. 97–8, 107–8.
15 Douglas Adam Reid, ‘Labour, Leisure and Politics in Birmingham, ca. 1800–1875’ (University of
Birmingham PhD thesis, 1985).
that there is any necessary conflict between the church and secular amuse-
ments, goes on to argue that some influential clergy were ‘moulding’ rather
than ‘reacting to’ public opinion.16 Seeing the 1850s as a turning-point, he
highlights the role of two prominent clergymen, the Anglican J. C. Miller at

the historic parish church, St Martin’s, and the liberal Dissenter George
Dawson at the non-denominational Church of the Saviour. Reid notes that
church sports club were often started by the young men of the congregation,
rather than being directly established by the clergy, but he also mentions the
examples of clergymen who were themselves sports enthusiasts, and who
took the leading role.17
Also relevant here is the work of historians of the public schools such as
J. A. Mangan and Malcolm Tozer.18 From the later 1850s onwards these
schools were building gymnasia and including in their curriculum increas-
ingly large amounts of sport, especially cricket and the various codes of foot-
ball. Most of the headmasters and many of the assistant masters in these
schools were clergymen and though the motives for their promotion of sport
varied, many of them were inspired by some form of muscular Christianity.
The big question behind many of the debates is the relationship between
the rise of sport and secularization. We can see three basic positions. John
Lowerson has claimed that there was a direct connection, and that by the last
part of the nineteenth century sport was taking the place of religion in many
people’s lives.19 A second view is that of Jack Williams, who argues for the
continuing importance of the links between religion and sport at least up to
the 1920s and 1930s. Williams’s book on cricket in the interwar period
includes a chapter on religion, and he sees the prominence of church teams as
evidence that the extent of secularization in the early twentieth century has
been exaggerated, though he also comments that a decline in the number of
church cricket and football teams in the 1930s may have been a cause of secu-
larization, in so far as these teams had been a route into the churches.20 His
work parallels that of historians such as Callum Brown, who minimizes the
extent of secularization before the 1960s,21 and Michael Snape who, without
16 Reid, ‘Labour, Leisure and Politics’, pp. 132–5.

17 Reid, ‘Labour, Leisure and Politics’, pp. 102–7, 115–18, 136–9, 163 note 267.
18 J. A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School (Lewes 1986); Tozer,
Manliness.
19 John Lowerson, ‘Sport and the Victorian Sunday: The beginnings of middle-class apostasy’, in
J. A. Mangan (ed.), A Sport-Loving Society: Victorian and Edwardian Middle-Class England at Play
(London 2006), pp. 179–97.
20 Jack Williams, Cricket and England: A Cultural and Social History of the Inter-War Years (London
1999); Williams, ‘Identities’, p. 127.
21 Brown, Death, pp. 9–10 and passim.
Introduction 15
entering the debates over the sixties, has highlighted the influence of ‘diffusive
Christianity’ both at home and at the front during the two world wars.22
A third view, which overlaps with the first, but approaches the question
from a different angle, is that of Dominic Erdozain. Drawing especially on the

example of the YMCA, which he sees as representing wider trends in British
Christianity in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he argues
that the churches underwent an inner secularization. This was partly because
of the increasing time devoted to sport which, he suggests, diverted Christians
from more important tasks. But he sees more subtle processes at work even in
those churches which still gave primacy to preaching and worship. The mis-
take, he suggests, was to present sport not as a relatively unimportant extra,
but as integral to the church’s mission.
The literature on the relationship between religion and sport is far more
extensive in the United States than in England. The main reason for this has
been the prominence of Evangelicals in American sport since the 1970s,
which has prompted a succession of books and articles both on the current
relationship between religion and sport and on its longer history. The writers
have included journalists, sporting professionals, ministers of religion, and
academics in many disciplines.23 Much of the writing has been by sporting
Evangelicals addressing other sporting Evangelicals. But there has also been a
more critical literature, written both by Evangelicals and by others, who have
voiced concerns about what one critic called ‘sportianity’.24 On the other
hand, William J. Baker in his history of ‘Religion and Modern Sport’, takes a
more distanced view of contemporary concerns and controversies. He ranges
very widely, going back (briefly) to the early Christians and beyond, before
concentrating on the modern United States. He includes Catholics and
Muslims, as well as many kinds of Protestant. His theme is that intimate rela-
tionships between religion and sport have been the norm and that periods of
conflict have been the exception. He goes further, arguing for a close inter-
connection between religion, sport, and patriotism in the United States. My
emphasis here, however, is on the fluctuating nature of the relationship
between religion and sport in England, sometimes antagonistic, sometimes
mutually supportive, sometimes more distanced. The ‘ “fit” of faith and sport’,
22 Michael Snape, God and the British Soldier (London 2005), p. 58.
23 For example, Shirl Hoffman (ed.), Sport and Religion (Champaign IL 1992); Tony Ladd and
James A. Mathieson, Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestants and the Development of American
Sport (Grand Rapids, MI 1999); Christopher H. Evans and William R. Herzog II (eds), The Faith of
Fifty Million: Baseball, Religion and American Culture (Louisville, KY 2002).
24 Frank Deford, ‘Religion in sport’, ‘The Word according to Tom’, and ‘Reaching for the stars’,
Sports Illustrated, 19 April, 26 April, 3 May 1976.
to use Baker’s terminology,25 has never been quite as tight in England as in

the United States—though it came closest to that in the later part of the nine-
teenth century.
I shall return to all of the debated questions, while also opening up other

issues, so far unexplored. In doing this I will draw mainly on four kinds of
primary source. I have used Anglican and Nonconformist local church
records, mainly from London and the Midlands and mainly from urban areas.
I have found church magazines a particularly rich source. I have used the cen-
tral archives of the YMCA, the Young Women’s Christian Association
(YWCA) and Sunday School Union. I have made extensive use of local and
sporting papers in the British Newspaper Archive, especially for the nine-
teenth century and the first half of the twentieth, though after about 1950 the
numbers of newspapers accessible through the archive falls fast. And, for
the most recent period, I have drawn especially on the national press and on
the websites of religious organizations and of sports associations and clubs.
25 William J. Baker, Playing with God: Religion and Modern Sport (Cambridge 2007).
1
‘’E Mun Be Baited, It’s a Rule’

Old and New Sporting Worlds
The Old Sporting World
In spite of new trends which pointed to the future, an older sporting world
was still alive in England, and in some respects flourishing around 1800. This
had both an elite and a plebeian branch. The elite branch, belonging to the
aristocracy and gentry, together with some of the larger farmers, was devoted
principally to hunting. This meant above all fox hunting, though hares and, in
some regions, stags and otters were also hunted. In the more plebeian branch
the highlights were linked with holiday seasons, such as a wakes week in
the summer or autumn, Shrove Tuesday, or Whit Monday—thus the name
‘calendar sports’. But there were also sports practised in a less organized way
on Sundays or on summer evenings. In this older sporting world, the clergy
patronized the recreations of their social inferiors and participated in those of
their social equals. The historic connections between popular recreations and
the church and with its calendar continued, but only in attenuated form.
Robert Malcolmson contrasts this with Catholic Europe where ‘the Church’s
participation in these festivities remained vigorous and of fundamental
importance.’1 Many of the sports practised by working men and youths on
Sundays or on summer evenings had no religious significance at all.
The role of the clergy in calendar sports was limited to that of a patron.
This was most conspicuous in the wakes week, the main occasion for sporting
contests in many parishes, both rural and industrial. This traditionally began
on the Sunday following the feast-day of the patron saint of the parish.
Malcolmson has shown that there was a strong seasonal dimension to the
scheduling of wakes, as they took place at times of the year when agricultural
work was less intensive. So although the date was often chosen because of the
patronal festival, there must have been many instances where the saint’s day
1 Robert W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society 1700 to 1850 (Cambridge

1973), p. 74.
occurred at an inconvenient time in the year, and a completely different date

was chosen.2 The festival began with a church service that was said to be
unusually well attended—partly because of family members now living else-
where who returned for the wakes.3 A Newcastle clergyman and antiquarian,

Henry Bourne, provided in 1725 a good summary of the main features of the
celebrations:
The Inhabitants deck themselves out in their gaudiest Clothes, and have
open Doors and splendid Entertainments for the Reception and Treating of
their Relatives and Friends, who visit them on that occasion from each
neighbouring Town. The Morning is spent for the most Part at Church. . . . The
remaining part of the Day is spent in Eating and Drinking; and so is also a
day or two Afterwards, together with all Sorts of Rural pastimes and
Exercises, such as Dancing on the Green, Wrestling, Cudgelling, &c.4
While the patronal festival provided the occasion for the celebrations, and the
service in the parish church was the essential starting-point, Bourne was con-
cerned that the original Christian significance of the day had become largely
obscured. After the religious observances in the morning, the church was
reduced to a small supporting role. For example, in the very popular Stamford
bull-running, patronized by many of the town’s elite but finally suppressed in
1840, the bells of St Mary’s church tolled as the bull entered the town.5
Major occasions for calendar sports included Shrove Tuesday and Ash
Wednesday, associated especially with street football; Easter Monday and
Tuesday, also a common time for football, and Whit Monday and Tuesday,
which were times for races, wrestling, morris dancing, and the holding of
fairs.6 Other favoured days may have been more localized. For example, in
Wokingham in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the annual
marketplace bull-baiting, for which the parish overseers provided the bull,
took place on St Thomas’s Day (December 21).7
The street football involved a game with unlimited numbers of participants
on either side with each of the teams representing a different village or a dif-
ferent district of a town, and each side aiming to carry the ball to the opposite
end. A typical example was Derby where the sides represented, respectively,
2 Malcolmson, Recreations, p. 18. 3 Malcolmson, Recreations, p. 19.

4 M. F. Snape, The Church of England in Industrialising Society: The Lancashire Parish of Whalley in
the Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge 2003), p. 28.
5 Malcolmson, Recreations, pp. 47–8. 6 Malcolmson, Recreations, pp. 31–3, 83–4.
7 Emma Griffin, England’s Revelry (Oxford 2005), pp. 64–5.
Old and New Sporting Worlds 19
St Peter’s, the main parish on the south of the town, and All Saints’, the leading
parish on the north side, though each was reinforced by players from other
parishes or from surrounding villages. Play was robust with injuries being
common and considerable damage being done to town-centre shops. Keith

Snell has highlighted the way in which football and cricket matches between
neighbouring villages or pugilistic encounters between the champions of
those villages could become a focus for local rivalries and antagonisms.8 The
other side of this coin, as Michael Snape argues, is that football in eighteenth-
century Lancashire reinforced a strong sense of identity with the parish and
sometimes with the parish church. He cites the case of King Charles the
Martyr Day at Downham, which began with a sermon and distribution of
alms, followed by a football match against a neighbouring parish. He gives the
example of one clergyman in the mid-eighteenth century who was ‘custodian
of the town’s football’, and another in the later part of the century who would
produce a football at the end of the afternoon service and kick it into the
neighbouring field.9 In the case of Derby the contest reflected and reinforced
parish identities within a growing industrial centre. The many attempts to
close the game down finally succeeded in 1846. At the time there were bitter
feelings between those on either side of the argument.10 In later years the
football came to be seen as part of the town’s ‘heritage’ and in 1884 a local
paper published the reminiscences of a well- known player, William
Williamson, nicknamed Tunchy Shelton, who was then living in an alms
house. He said his ribs had never fitted properly since he broke them in the
football. He was a Peterite and his father had also played for St Peter’s
before him:
You know it was a sort of what is called caste. There’s many a hundred dying
for their caste as there is religion and I would have gladly died rather than
give up St Peter’s and so would many another, and some have died for it. All
the lads and lassies were either St Peter’s or All Saints, and the women were
worst of all. . . . Nearly every one was the same high and low. The little chil-
dren in St Peter’s parish would sing in the streets ‘Roast Beef and Potatoes |
For the Bells of St Peter’s | Pig muck and carrots | For the Bells of All
Hallows.’
8 K. D. M. Snell, Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales
1700–1950 (Cambridge 2006), pp. 55–6.
9 Snape, Church of England, pp. 31–2.
10 Anthony Delves, ‘Popular recreation and social conflict in Derby, 1800–1850’, in Eileen and
Stephen Yeo (eds), Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 1590–1914 (Brighton 1981), pp. 89–127.
He once had a fight with a man who said he turned his coat: ‘I would not have
turned my coat to save my life and I would not now.’11
There were also calendar sports involving animals. Throwing at cocks trad
itionally took place on Shrove Tuesday, and usually took place in churchyards:

the participants threw missiles at a tethered cock, and the man who succeeded
in killing the bird was able to take it home. In many places, Easter Monday
was as closely associated with bull-baiting as Shrove Tuesday was with foot-
ball or throwing at cocks. Thus the sense of bitter grievance encountered by
those who tried to stop such events. ‘’E mun be baited—it’s a rule,’ was the
response of aggrieved inhabitants of Ellesmere in 1813 when agents of the
Earl of Bridgewater tried to suppress the annual baiting. As Bob Bushaway
argues, the defence of ‘custom’ was one aspect of a ‘contractual framework’
whereby landlords and clergy ‘accepted certain duties and responsibilities’
and ‘in return received due recognition . . . and compliance’.12 In the early
nineteenth century, bull-baitings would become a frequent occasion for con-
flict between a reforming clergyman, driven to challenge traditions which he
saw as ‘shameful’ and ‘wicked’, and parishioners tenacious in defence of time-
honoured custom.
Many popular sports were localized. For example, in Lancashire a running
game called prison bars was popular. Stoolball was especially associated with
Sussex, though Emma Griffin cites an example from Yorkshire.13 Cricket and
football were played in all parts of the country. Football was a mainly plebeian
game, sometimes patronized but seldom practised by elites—though Adrian
Harvey notes some exceptions.14 As well as the annual set-piece matches,
informal games or sometimes matches between the youth of neighbouring
communities took place throughout the year. All of Sunday, but most often
the afternoon, potentially provided times for sport, though a vicar’s son from
the Yorkshire Dales writing in the 1860s recalled that the young men of the
parish would gather for football after service on Sunday evenings.15 It should
be noted that although Sabbatarian restrictions increased with the growing
strength of Evangelicalism in the early and mid-nineteenth century, there
were also many clergymen, especially those of High Church, or later Broad
11 ‘Tunchy Williamson Interviewed’, Cutting from Derby Express, Derby Local Studies Library (BA
796.33 MSS).
12 Bob Bushaway, By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England 1700–1880 (London
1982), pp. 1–4, 22.
13 Griffin, Revelry, pp. 48–51.
14 Adrian Harvey, Football: The First Hundred Years, the Untold Story (Abingdon 2005), pp. 53–4, 72.
15 Griffin, Revelry, pp. 45–51.
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of 14000 miles, a
carriage and two women
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
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are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.
Title: 14000 miles, a carriage and two women
Author: Frances S. Howe
Release date: August 31, 2023 [eBook #71527]
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Sentinel Printing Co, 1906
Credits: Fiona Holmes and the Online Distributed Proofreading

Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced
from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14000

MILES, A CARRIAGE AND TWO WOMEN ***
Transcriber's Note
Page 74—enthusiatically changed to enthusiastically
Page 127—lettter changed to letter
Page 215—Pemigewassett changed to Pemigewasset
Page 263—hime changed to home
Page 271—spic changed to spick
Ready for a Seven Hundred Miles Drive.

See page 265.
14000 MILES
A CARRIAGE AND TWO
WOMEN
BY FRANCES S. HOWE
“AWAY, AWAY FROM MEN AND TOWNS
TO THE WILDWOOD AND THE DOWNS.”
—Shelley
PRIVATELY PRINTED 1906
Copyright, 1906, by
Frances S. Howe.
sentinel printing co.

fitchburg.
FOREWORD.
Many of these informal reports of more than 14,000 miles’ driving
were written for the Boston Evening Transcript some years ago, and
the later letters for the Leominster Daily Enterprise. They cover an
unbroken series of summer and autumn journeys, which have never
lost any of the freshness and charm of that first little trip of two
hundred miles along the Connecticut. A drive across the continent,
or even on the other side of the water would seem less of an event
to us now than that first carriage journey. This volume is a response
to “You ought to make a book,” from many who have been interested
in our rare experience.
F.C.A.
F.S.H.
Leominster, Mass.
CONTENTS.
I. Summer Travels in a Phaeton, 1
II. Chronicle of the Tenth Annual Drive, 16
III. Old Orchard and Boston, 32
IV. Moosilauke and Franconia Notch, 48
V. Connecticut, with side trip to New Jersey, 73
VI. Dixville Notch and Old Orchard, 91
VII. Catskills, Lake George and Green Mountains, 109
VIII. Narragansett Pier and Manomet Point, 127
IX. White Mountains and Vermont,
(A Six Hundred Miles Drive.) 137
X. By Phaeton to Canada,
(Notes of a Seven Hundred Miles Trip.) 153
XI. Outings in Massachusetts, 173
XII. Bar Harbor and Boston, 190
XIII. Dixville Notch and the North Shore, 211
XIV. The Kennebec Journey, 228
XV. On Highways and Byways, (1894 TO 1904.) 241
XVI. Lake Memphremagog, 252
POSTSCRIPT. Buggy Jottings of Seven Hundred
Miles Driving, Circuit of the New England States. 265
14000 MILES
CHAPTER I.
SUMMER TRAVELS IN A PHAETON.
“We were a jolly pair, we two, and ladies at that; and we had decided
to go, amid the protestations of the towns-people and the remarks of
Madam Grundy that it was not proper, and that there were so many
tramps it was not prudent for two ladies to take a trip with their horse
and carriage along the North Shore. Nevertheless, we take our lives
in our hands, and ‘do the trip’ in a large comfortable, roomy buggy,”
etc.
A letter in the Boston Evening Transcript, under the heading “Along
the North Shore,” from which the paragraph above is taken, so aptly
describes a part of one of our journeys, that we cannot resist the
temptation to tell you something of our travels, which our friends no
longer consider daring and experimental, but a thoroughly sensible
and delightful way of combining rest and pleasure.
In the summer of 1872, “we two, and ladies at that,” made our trial
trip, with the consent and approval of family friends for our
encouragement, and the misgivings and fears of those outside to
inspire us with caution. Tramps were not in fashion, and I have
forgotten what was the terror of those days. Like the “other two,” we
were equipped with a pet horse—safe, but with no lack of spirit—a
roomy phaeton, with lunch basket, wraps, books, fancy work and
writing materials all at hand. Our bags, with rubber coverings, were
strapped underneath the carriage. Some cautious reader may like to
know that we did not forget to put in the “box” a wrench, a bottle of
oil, strong cord, etc., for emergencies. Of course we had a map, for
geography was not taught very practically in our school days, and we
should be lost without one. We made no definite plans beyond the
first day, but had vaguely in mind, if all went well, to drive through the
valley of the Connecticut River.
Our first day’s ride took us around Wachusett. We did not delay to
climb its woody slopes, for we had many times visited our little
mountain, and knew its charms by heart. It was new scenes we were
seeking, and we were eagerly anticipating the drive along the
Connecticut, fancying that much more beautiful and romantic than
the familiar hills. It was not until we reached the hot, sandy roads,
and were surrounded by tobacco fields, with rarely a glimpse of the
river, that we realized that valleys are most enjoyable when seen
from the hill-tops. The peculiar charm of the view from Mt. Holyoke
we can never forget. A picture like that of the Northampton
meadows, with the silvery river winding through them, we have found
on no other hill or mountain-top.
If this trial journey had proved our last, we would like to recall it in
detail; but, as it has been succeeded by others more extended, we
must hastily pass by the novelty of our first crossing the Connecticut
by ferry, the historic points of interest in old Deerfield, the terrific
thunderstorm just after we left Greenfield, the Broad Brook drive as
we neared Brattleboro, the profuse quantity of lovely maidenhair
ferns by the roadside, dripping with the morning rain, our lunch on
the shore of Lake Spofford, and so on to Keene and Jaffrey.
How can we so hastily pass over the ascent of grand old
Monadnock? Perhaps we enjoyed it all the more for the repeated
protests of the youthful proprietor of the Mountain House, who
assured us the feat was impossible, as the heavy showers which we
had so much enjoyed in our morning drive had converted the path
into a series of cascades. The mists which had entirely concealed
the mountain were just breaking away, and we made the ascent in
the face of warnings and water, yielding to no obstacles. Before we
left the summit it was mostly clear, and we thought little of our moist
condition or the difficulties of the descent before us as we feasted
our eyes, watching the showers as they moved on from village to
village in the valley below, leaving a burst of sunlight in their wake.
Our descent was rapid, notwithstanding difficulties, and when we
reached the hotel, so delightfully located on the side of the mountain,
we forthwith decided to prolong our stay. After a cosy supper, for we
were the only guests, we repaired to the rocks to watch the sunset
clouds, which are rarely finer. It was mild, and we lingered while the
darkness gathered, until the mountain looked so black and lonely we
did not like to think we had stood on that peak alone only a few
hours before. While we watched, the clouds began to brighten, and
soon the moon appeared in her full glory, making the whole scene
one of indescribable beauty. The next day was Sunday, and a
lovelier day never dawned. The peculiar Sunday quiet pervaded the
very atmosphere, and we sat on the rocks reading, writing and
musing all day, enjoying such a season of rest as one seldom
experiences.
Two days more passed, and we were safe at home, after an
absence of only ten days, and about two hundred miles’ driving, but
with delightful recollections, which cannot be forgotten in a lifetime.
This trial trip was so successful that when another summer came it
was taken for granted by our friends that we should try again, and
we started, equipped as before with map, but no plan—only an
inclination to face north. Following this inclination took us through
many thrifty towns and villages, and gave us delightful drives over
hills and through valleys, until we found ourselves spending a night
with the Shakers on the top of a high hill in Canterbury, N. H. The
brothers and sisters were unsparing in their attentions, though strict
in certain requirements. We left them next morning, with a generous
Shaker lunch in our basket, and turned our horse toward Alton Bay.
As Brother George and Sister Philena assured us, it was the longest,
roughest and loneliest ten miles’ drive we had ever taken. The round
trip on Lake Winnipiseogee the following day was a delightful
contrast.
We now began to study our map, for we had not even a vague idea
where next. We started at last, not anxious, but aimless; and after
wandering several days in obedience to the will of the hour, landed
on Wells Beach; we passed Sunday on York Beach; then drove on to
Portsmouth, where we left our horse for a day to visit the Isles of
Shoals. The places of resort and interest as we followed the coast to
Gloucester, Rye, Hampton, Salisbury, etc., are well known. After
refreshing ourselves at Gloucester with rowing and moonlight
bathing we returned to Newburyport, where we saw the homes of
Lord Timothy Dexter, Harriet Prescott Spofford, and others of note.
An excursion on the Merrimac in a barge, and the drive by the river
road to Bradford and Haverhill, we found very pleasant. It was in this
vicinity that, for the first time, we were received ungraciously. The
good landlady of an old-fashioned inn reluctantly received us, after
rebuking us for the abuse of our horse, little knowing how much
more thoughtful we were of him than of ourselves. He looked tired
that night, for the seashore had not agreed with him, and I think had
her knowledge extended so far, she would have reported us to the S.
F. T. P. O. C. T. A. However, after cross-examination, she conducted
us to a room spotlessly clean, the floor covered with the choicest of
braided mats, and two beds mountain high, but expressly enjoined
us “not to tumble but one of them.” We left the next morning laden
with good advice, which, carefully followed, returned us safely home
ere many days, with our horse in better condition than when we
started on our journey.
Of course we were ready to go again the next year, this time starting
southerly, spending nights in Northboro, Franklin, Taunton and
Tiverton Stone Bridge. Thus far the scenery and roads do not
compare favorably with those in New Hampshire; but when we
reached Newport, we were compensated for lack of interesting
driving.
Margery Deane tells your readers all one needs to know of this place
of places. So we will find our way to New Bedford, leave our horse
and take a look at Martha’s Vineyard for a few days. Our first
impression of the “Cottage City” was that of a miniature Newport; but
this every one knows all about, so we will go on to Plymouth, where
we saw everything worth seeing. Plymouth Rock would have
satisfied us more fully had it looked as it does in the pictures of the
“Landing,” instead of being out in the midst of dry land, with a
pagoda built over it, and inscriptions to remind one that it is not an
ordinary flagstone.
We found much that interested us in Marshfield, Hingham, and
Milton with its Blue Hills. We have not forgotten a night at the
homelike Norfolk House, and an afternoon devoted to the famed
residences in Watertown. We drove to Point Shirley one morning
during our stay near Boston, and on returning gave our journey
another historic touch by going to the top of Bunker Hill Monument;
and still another a few days later, as we visited the old battle-grounds
in Lexington and Concord, on our way home.
Before another summer, whispers of tramps were heard, and soon
they were fully inaugurated, making us tremble and sigh as we
thought of the opposition that threatened us. A revolver was
suggested, in case we persisted in facing this danger, and finally as
go we must, we condensed our baggage that it might be out of sight,
and confidently took the reins, having no fear of anything ahead, so
long as our greatest terror—a loaded revolver—was close at hand,
not “hidden away in one corner under the seat,” but in a little pocket
made on purpose, where it could be seized without delay when our
game appeared. As we shall not refer to our “companion” again,
never having had occasion to use it, we will say here that it is no
longer a terror but a sort of chaperone, in whose care we rest
secure.
Our driving this season was within the limits of our own State, and
we have yet to find anything more truly beautiful than western
Massachusetts, with its Berkshire hills and grand old towns,
Stockbridge, Lee and Lenox. Our map was on a small scale, and the
distance from Pittsfield to the Hudson River looked very short, so we
ordered good care for our horse, and took the six o’clock train one
morning for Hudson, where we met the boat for New York. The day
was perfect, and our enjoyment complete. We reached the city at
dusk, and next thought to surprise a friend, twenty miles out, in New
Jersey, where we received a joyous welcome. The next day we
devoted to New York, returning by night boat to Hudson, and before
nine o’clock the following morning, after forty miles by rail again, we
resumed our driving from Pittsfield, delighted with our side trip of
nearly four hundred miles, but oh! so glad to be in our cosy phaeton
once more. The homeward route was full of interesting details, which
we must leave.
Centennial year came next, and we made our shortest trip, driving
only one hundred and fifty miles in New Hampshire in early autumn.
The tramp terror increased at home and abroad, and when summer
came again our “guardians” looked so anxious, we said nothing, and
went camping instead of driving. A party of twelve, on the shores of
Lake Wachusett, with royal accommodations in the number and size
of tents and hammocks and three boats at a private landing, diverted
us at the time. But, as the season waned, we pined, and before
October was gone we were permitted to revolve around the “Hub” for
two weeks, supposed to be quite safe, while so near the centre of
civilization. It was like a June day when we sat on the rocks at
Nahant, and like November when dreariest, as we drove around
Marblehead Neck, and watched the ocean so dark and angry; while
the chill winds pierced our thickest wraps only a few days later. We
shall not soon forget our drive from Cambridge to Hingham in the
severest northeast storm of the season, or our delight on the rocks at
Nantasket, after this three-days’ storm cleared, and we felt the
dashing spray. Our “Hub” journey was none the less interesting for
being familiar, and we did not omit the attractions of Wellesley on our
way home.
Early in the following July, the New Hampshire tramp law having
come to our rescue, we once more turned our faces toward the ever
beautiful Lake Winnipiseogee. We renewed our acquaintance with
the Canterbury Shakers, and as we always avail ourselves of
whatever is new or interesting in our path, stopped over for a day at
Weirs Landing to witness the inauguration of the Unitarian grove
meetings. After the opening of this feast of reason we were of one
mind, and without delay provided good board and care for our horse
for a week, and settled down to three and four services a day. After
the accomplishment of this feat we visited points of interest about
Centre Harbor. In accordance with our usual good fortune we had a
perfectly clear day on Red Hill, and appreciated all Starr King has
written of its charms. The day spent at Ossipee Falls and Cascades
gave us unbounded pleasure. We reveled in the rough walking and
climbing, and after exploring above and below the falls, we were all
ready to enjoy the lunch our hostess had prepared for our party,
which we spread on a huge rock in the narrow gap. Our horse rested
while we climbed, and the ten miles return drive to Centre Harbor
required our utmost skill. On the following day we drove to Concord,
N. H., a distance of forty miles. After spending a few days with
friends in this charming place, we drove on, passing a night at the
Mountain House, Monadnock, to refresh the memories of our first
visit there, and breathing the pure air of Petersham, Barre and
Princeton as we journeyed towards our own beautiful Leominster.
After these seven years’ wanderings, we were considered virtually
members of the great “Order of Tramps,” and from that time to the
present we have had full and free consent “to go to our own
company”; and when we boldly proposed crossing the Green
Mountains to pay a visit to friends near Lake Champlain, all agreed it
would be a delightful thing for us to do. We closely followed the
familiar railroad route through Keene, Bellows Falls and Rutland; it
was a glorious drive all the way. At one time we seemed buried in
the mountains without any way of escape, but we had only to follow
our winding road, which after many twistings and turnings brought us
to Ludlow. The next night we were safely over the mountains, and
soon were with our friends.
Our week in the cosy town of Benson, surrounded by high hills, must
be left to your imagination. We will only tell you of a visit to Lake
George. A party of fifty, we started at six o’clock one morning, in all
sorts of vehicles. Four miles’ jolting up and down steep hills took us
to Benson Landing, Lake Champlain, and in course of time (a dozen
people in a heavy two-horse wagon, and two other vehicles on a
scow, towed by two men in a row-boat, is by no means rapid transit,)
the several detachments of our party were safely landed on the
opposite side. And then, what a ride! We never dreamed that the
narrow strip of land between Lake Champlain and Lake George, only
four miles across, could give us so much pleasure. At first we held
our breath, but soon learned that the driver and horses were quite at
home, and gave our fears to the winds as they galloped up hills
almost perpendicular only to trot down again to the sound of the
grating brakes, the wheels going over great rocks on one side one
minute and down in a deep rut on the other side the next. We many
times congratulated ourselves that we joined the party in the big
wagon, instead of driving our good Charlie, as first planned. The
steepest pitch of all brought us at last to the shore of the beautiful
Lake George, at a point about ten miles south of Ticonderoga, where
the boat was to meet us by special arrangement.
Only those who have experienced it can realize what we enjoyed on
that bright day, as we glided over the mirror-like waters, enraptured
with the loveliness surrounding us.
After a few hours’ rest at Fort William Henry, we were ready for the
return sail. As we landed, our driver stood by his horses, eager for a
start; a few of us expressed our willingness to walk for a while,
possibly remembering the last fearful pitches in that rough road, as
well as the beautiful cardinal flowers and ferns we desired to gather.
After a walk and run of nearly two miles, the driver summoned us to
the wagon, just before we reached the pitch we most dreaded and
were hastening to avoid. We obeyed, and now galloped on until we
reached Lake Champlain again, and took breath while we slowly
ferried across in the gathering twilight. Our remaining four miles was
a glorious moonlight drive. As we entered the village it seemed
impossible that we had been away only since morning, for we had
seen and enjoyed so much.
The next day we turned our thoughts homeward. Not wishing to
return by the same route, we ventured into New York State, and after
two or three days reached Saratoga Springs. All frequenters of this
resort can easily imagine our routine there—the drive to the lake at
the approved time, etc. The roving spirit so possessed us that we left
the scene of gayety without regret, and on we went over the hills to
take a look at Bennington on our way to North Adams. We drove
over Hoosac Mountain, but have yet to see its charms; the mist
concealed everything but our horse. We waited two hours at a
farmhouse near the summit for fair weather, but in vain. As we
started in despair the clouds parted for an instant, giving us glimpses
into the valley, then united and came down upon us in a deluging
rain. Our dripping horse carefully picked his way down the steep
mountain, and when we reached the level road the water was nearly
a foot in depth for some distance. We splashed along quite happy,
for this was not half so aggravating as the fitful mist of the morning,
which every moment promised to clear away. The rest of our journey
was pleasant, but uneventful.
As we reviewed the drive of four hundred miles, we felt we must
have reached the climax within our limits. But no! we added another
hundred miles, and extended our time to nearly a month on our next
trip.
Lacking definite plans as usual, we drove to Lake Winnipiseogee
once more, thinking another session of the Grove meeting at Weirs
would be a good beginning. When the glorious week ended, there
was seemingly an adjournment to the White Mountains, and as we
had faithfully attended these meetings from the first, it was clearly
our duty to follow; so on we drove, resting our horse at Plymouth,
spending the night at Campton Village, and next day visiting in turn
the attractions of the Pemigewasset Valley, the Flume, Pool, Basin,
Profile and Echo Lake. Passing on through the beautiful Notch, night
overtook us at Franconia. On our way to Bethlehem, the following
morning, we left our horse for an hour and walked up Mt. Agassiz,
which well repaid the effort. With the aid of a glass we traced the
drive before us, through Bethlehem’s one long street, past the Twin
Mountain House and along the Cherry Mountain road, turning until it
nearly described a half-circle, and finally reaching Jefferson.
We realized far more than Mt. Agassiz promised. We were leaving
the beauties of the Franconia Mountains and nearing the grandeur of
the White Mountain range, and in many respects it was the most
impressive drive of our journey. The last four miles from Jefferson to
the Highlands, just at sunset facing Mts. Washington, Jefferson,
Adams and Madison, was beyond description. Here we spent
several days; for three reasons: We had surely found the
headquarters of the “adjournment,” for we met many Weirs friends;
then, too, we were floating about on the northerly margin of our map,
and could go no farther in that direction, and lastly, we were waiting
for a favorable day for Mt. Washington.
One of these waiting days we spent on Mt. Adams; two of us, out of
our party of seven, registering our names in the “little tin box” at the
summit.
It was an exhausting climb of four miles, up the roughest and most
beautiful path imaginable, marked out by the Appalachian Club. We
encountered four hailstorms, and suffered extremely from cold on
that August day, but the five minutes’ perfectly clear view more than

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Religion and the Rise of Sport in

England David Hugh Mcleod

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Subject: Religious Studies

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

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contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Subject: Religious Studies

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Sport and Religion in Modern England: An Overview

The development of modern sport in England may be roughly divided into

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the possibilities opened up by the televising of sporting events.4 Some key

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The Historical Debate

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with ‘the caricatured bodies of lower-­class, Irish and non-­European men’.8

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8 Donald E. Hall, ‘Introduction’, in Hall (ed.), Muscular Christianity, p. 6.

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11 Bailey, Leisure and Class, pp. 106–19.

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16 Reid, ‘Labour, Leisure and Politics’, pp. 132–5.

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to use Baker’s terminology,25 has never been quite as tight in England as in

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The Old Sporting World

1 Robert W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society 1700 to 1850 (Cambridge

occurred at an inconvenient time in the year, and a completely different date

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2 Malcolmson, Recreations, p. 18. 3 Malcolmson, Recreations, p. 19.

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Title: 14000 miles, a carriage and two women

with ‘the caricatured bodies of lower-class, Irish and non-European men’.8