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Conclusion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2012

Tony Mason
Affiliation:
De Montfort University, Leicester
Eliza Riedi
Affiliation:
University of Leicester
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Summary

Nowhere in civil life does sport play such an important part as in the Army.

The Army; the Finest Job in the World (recruiting pamphlet c. 1936)

One of the major conclusions of our work must be simply to emphasise the sheer quantity of sport in the British military between the 1880s and 1960 – a much greater quantity than any previous authors have acknowledged. Consider the career of Eric Harrison of the Royal Artillery. At Woolwich, which he entered in 1912, Harrison was a notable athlete, captained the college rugby team and played rugby for the Army, Blackheath and Kent. In his last term he was promoted above his contemporaries because of ‘our Padre’s preaching of the Rugger Gospel and its influence on the Commandant towards the Captain of the XV’. His sporting ability having unexpectedly failed to override his poor marks to get him into the mounted Royal Field Artillery, in early 1914 he joined the Royal Garrison Artillery at Shoeburyness. Here he played a lot of army football ‘and Southend, then in the Second Division [of the Southern League], asked whether I would consider playing centre forward for the season 1914–15’. His team won the Eastern Command Athletics Championships, and he was asked to run for England against Scotland and Ireland in the 120 yards hurdles. The Great War restricted his sporting activities, but when he was moved to a staff job at Beauquesne he was able to go riding in the afternoons ‘usually with the intent of riding down partridges or hares’. After the war Harrison played for the Mother Country in the Imperial Inter-Services Rugby Tournament. He was selected for the 1920 Olympics team for the 440 yards hurdles, only to be diagnosed with heart trouble and forbidden to run; in 1924, his doctors having allowed him to run sprints, he reached the semi-finals of the 110 yards hurdles at the Paris Olympics. As the Captain of a Mountain Battery on Salisbury Plain his main energies were devoted to hunting (he became master of the RA Harriers), shooting, fishing and point-to-point racing. At the Staff College in the mid-1920s he ran the College Drag and played hockey for England. Posted to Meerut, he took up pig-sticking, ran the Lahore Hounds (which hunted bagged jackals but tried to keep this quiet) and did a good deal of big-game shooting. Back in England before the war his career choices seem to have been governed largely by the opportunities for hunting in any post offered him. He had had, he reflected in old age, ‘a very lucky life’.

Type
Chapter
Information
Sport and the Military
The British Armed Forces 1880–1960
, pp. 253 - 263
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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  • Conclusion
  • Tony Mason, De Montfort University, Leicester, Eliza Riedi, University of Leicester
  • Book: Sport and the Military
  • Online publication: 05 December 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511781124.009
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  • Conclusion
  • Tony Mason, De Montfort University, Leicester, Eliza Riedi, University of Leicester
  • Book: Sport and the Military
  • Online publication: 05 December 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511781124.009
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Conclusion
  • Tony Mason, De Montfort University, Leicester, Eliza Riedi, University of Leicester
  • Book: Sport and the Military
  • Online publication: 05 December 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511781124.009
Available formats
×