The Playing Fields of Empire

In Europe, new forms of sport were also linked to the needs of expanding empires. Men who were to conquer and administer 'alien' territories and peoples would have to be fit in both body and mind. Physical exercise channelled into forms that minimised the risk of death or serious injury improved the body; team sports accustomed the mind to cooperating more or less selflessly for the greater good.

In Britain, the future builders of empire were trained in public schools which encouraged the systematisation of two major sports: cricket and the various forms of football. While cricket emphasised notions of chivalry, rugby football inculcated the great imperial virtues of unselfishness, fearlessness and self-control. 'In the history of the British Empire it is written that England has owed her sovereignty to her sports', the headmaster of Harrow proclaimed in 1895.

What of the subjects of British sovereignty? Richard Holt (Sport and the British, Oxford, 1989) claims that 'sport played a major role in the transmission of imperial and national ideas'. Writing of cricket, in particular, he argues that 'what began as a manly exercise for a master race slowly came to be a kind of common language superficially obscuring divisions of ethnicity, religion, and economic interest'. Sport was an aspect of the 'cultural power' through which the British Empire imposed and maintained itself more cheaply than it could have done by military might alone.

In colonial New Zealand, rugby football rather than cricket came to perform such a function. It both encouraged loyalty to the Crown amongst white emigrants and helped assimilate a Maori elite into the 'British way of life'.

Rugby was quickly taken up at Hawke's Bay's Te Aute College, where six members of the Native team had been pupils. Here the trinity of study, work and games was consciously utilised to 'build character'. But while sport encouraged rulers and ruled to develop shared beliefs and ideas, it also underlined the social space that separated them.

Rugby in 1888

19th Century Sport

'A sudden outburst of Joy on getting the 1st Goal of the Tour'.
Illustrated London News

'The Two Umpires'.
Illustrated London News