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| British Public Schools and the History of Sport Michael Proudfoot |
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| 1 What links these three events? | |||
| 1. | .The Battle of Waterloo, 1815, and the final defeat of by Napoleon by the Duke of Wellington. | ||
| 2. | The first World Cup for football, held in Uruguay in 1930 (and, memorably in Korea and Japan last year). | ||
| 3. | The first Modern Olympic games, in Athens, in 1896 (and to be in Athens again next year,2004) | ||
| In this lecture, I shall argue that there are connections between each
of these three events and British Public Schools.But I shall further argue
that some of the connections are commonly misrepresented and misunderstood. 2 Great Britons poll. But to take the Battle of Waterloo first of all. Earlier this year well-publicised poll conducted on behalf of the BBC to discover who the British people thought to be the greatest Briton of them all came up with the perhaps unsurprising conclusion that Winston Churchill was the No.1 choice. But a poll conducted 150 years ago, in 1853, would undoubtedly have come up with another war leader as the greatest Briton of them all -The Duke of Wellington, the Iron Duke, Arthur Wellesley, 1769-1852.While Churchill was famously educated at one of the two most famous English Public Schools, Harrow, the Duke of Wellington went to the other, and even more famous school, Eton College. Wellington was the national hero, because of his series of victories over Napoleon, culminating, after Napoleon's dramatic escape from his exile on the island of Elba, with Napoleon's final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo.The Duke of Wellington famously said "The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton". This saying is usually taken to mean that the British, under Wellington, were able to defeat the French, under Napoleon, at Waterloo, because of the discipline and ethos of organised games and sports, learned by the officers on the playing fields of Eton. 3 The Battle of Waterloo was won... . But we should be sceptical of this interpretation. Why? Well, it seems improbable that Wellington ever actully said that 'the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton'. He had been dead for three years when, in 1855, Charles Montalembert credited him with some such remark in his De l'Avenir politique de l'Angleterre. By that time the Public Schools were already in a process of radical transition. The Duke of Wellington, then the Honourable Arthur Wesley, was at Eton from 1781 to 1784, aged 12-15, and it is on record that he was an idle and dreamy boy who took no part in organised sport. There was, in fact, little in the way of organised sport at Eton at that time. The activities to be seen on the playing fields appeared to the uninitiated to be more like free-for-all fights than games; and so, indeed, they often were. Football,of a sort, was played, and so was cricket- entirely organised by the boys for their own entertainment, along with a host of more informal games like hopscotch, marbles or battledore (an early version of badminton), at all of which his fellow Etonians passed their time in the hours outside the classroom. Some games took advantage of particular architectural features of the school, like fives (still played today) against the walls of the chapel and the Wall Game also still played today, by, among others, the Royal princes. |
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