Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The growth of service sport, 1880–1914
- 2 Officer sports and their critics, 1880–1914
- 3 Sport in the Great War
- 4 The amateur era, 1919–39
- 5 Soldiers, sailors and civilians
- 6 A different kind of war
- 7 The national service years: the summit of military sport?
- Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The growth of service sport, 1880–1914
- 2 Officer sports and their critics, 1880–1914
- 3 Sport in the Great War
- 4 The amateur era, 1919–39
- 5 Soldiers, sailors and civilians
- 6 A different kind of war
- 7 The national service years: the summit of military sport?
- Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
[In the autumn of 1885 the 2nd Battalion moved to Pembroke Dock] a very pleasant station, with lots of hunting, fishing and shooting and enjoyable weekends in Tenby. But it was a dreary spot for the men. During the winter of 1885–86 I was the Acting Adjutant of the Battalion and, with a view to providing recreation for the men, I managed to hire a fairly level field near the Barracks – an amenity not easily come by in that hilly country. Further I purchased all the essential requirements of football, really nothing but goalposts and some balls … Now it is hardly believable, but it is an absolute fact that only some 47 years ago hardly a man in the Battalion could be persuaded to come down even to kick a ball about, still less to take part in a game.
‘Reminiscences of Lt. Gen. Sir Gerald Ellison KCB, KCMG’, The Lancashire Lad. The Journal of the Loyal Regiment (North Lancashire) (April 1933), p. 10In a recent study of British military medicine, Mark Harrison found it hard to think of any other aspect of military life that had been so poorly served in histories of the British armed forces. If there is another it might be sport, which over the last century and a half and particularly during the years with which this study deals, 1880–1960, took up a good proportion of the time and energies of many serving sailors, soldiers and later airmen. It has certainly been left out of the accounts of most writers on military history who have, perhaps unsurprisingly, had more warlike themes on their minds. Edward Spiers, in a number of authoritative studies of the Victorian and Edwardian army, only occasionally alludes to the role of sport, usually as a part of that package of reforms designed to improve the lot of the ordinary soldier in part to provide a stimulus to recruiting in the last decades of the nineteenth century, or as one of the activities that soldiers could enjoy in rear areas and garrisons even on active service in the imperial ‘small wars’ of that period.
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- Information
- Sport and the MilitaryThe British Armed Forces 1880–1960, pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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