and Manliness
While the aristocracy’s political ascendancy declined, its domination of the nation’s sporting life remained strong. Noblemen financed and gave tone to British sport. It has always been integral to British culture, and its contribution to the national self-image and character has been enormous. We are proud to be a sporting nation, although now winning has become subordinate to participation. Yet, until recently, the word ‘sportsman’ signified more than a mere participant; it implied that a player adhered to the rules, practised self-control, was indifferent to adversity and was guided by a personal code of honour which prized fairness. Sportsmanship was a distillation of old chivalric ideals.
Nerve and tenacity mattered as much, if not more than technical skill. A ‘game’ (another revealing word) gentleman amateur was worthier of admiration than the professional who trained rigorously and in the process may have absorbed some of the ungentlemanly techniques of ‘gamesmanship’. This was why, in 1803, the patrician MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) insisted on the distinction between ‘gentlemen’ and ‘players’ (i.e. professionals) which was perpetuated in changing rooms and on team lists until 1963. The tension between these two approaches to sport and the spirit which animated them was a theme of the 1981 film Chariots of Fire, which follows the training of British athletes before the 1924 Olympics. The hurdler Lord Burghley represents the amateur tradition, while the sprinter Harold Abrahams seeks professional coaching, which the old guard (two Cambridge dons) find distasteful.
Burghley, who became sixth Marquess of Exeter in 1956, later entered public life as a Conservative MP and was Governor of Bermuda between 1943 and 1946. Shortly before, he had represented the Ministry of Aircraft Production in Australia where he won many hearts, according to George VI’s private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles. ‘A lord, an MP, an MFH [Master of Foxhounds] and an Olympic hurdler – worked wonders.’1 Sporting aristocrats had always won popular affection, mostly masculine. They possessed a dash and verve, and, in their earlier incarnations as Regency Corinthians and early Victorian plungers, had a taste for devilment and fast living. They aroused a more or less suppressed envy among those constrained by prevailing moral conventions.
Sport transcended social barriers and sporting peers mixed freely and cheerfully among inferiors who shared their passions. The sporting journalist Charles Apperley, who wrote as ‘Nimrod’, overheard the following exchange at Newmarket during the 1820s.
‘What do you bet on this race, my lord?’ says a vulgar-looking man, on a shabby hack . . . ‘I want to back the field,’ cries my lord. ‘So do I,’ says the leg [turf swindler]. ‘I’ll bet five hundred to two hundred that you don’t name the winner,’ cries my lord. ‘I take six,’ exclaims the leg. ‘I’ll bet it you,’ roars my lord.
The stake was then doubled and the pair agreed the wager.2 In 1851 the fourteenth Earl of Derby and future Conservative Prime Minister was seen at another racetrack ‘in the midst of a crowd of blacklegs, betting men and loose characters of every description, in uproarious spirits, chaffing, rowing and shouting with laughter and joking . . . as completely at his ease in contemplating the racecourse as in championing the cause of Altar & Throne’.3 Tories were always well represented among the sporting aristocracy.
The traditions, conventions and philosophy of the sporting world did not spring into existence ready-made. They had evolved during the eighteenth century under the influence of the aristocracy and, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, that version of the aristocratic ideal as practised in the post-Arnoldian public schools. The latter catered for the Victorian upper middle class which joined forces with the aristocracy to impose discipline and regulations on the often anarchic and unruly culture of many sports and bring them within the pale of respectability.
The upshot was the creation of voluntary national bodies like the Football Association, founded in 1863, and the formulation of rules that were universally imposed. These new authorities were modelled on the aristocratic MCC and Jockey Club, founded in 1787 and 1750 respectively. The reorganisation of the sporting world was a prelude to its commercialisation, which was underway by the 1880s.
The ‘reform’ of sport during the middle years of the nineteenth century was to a great extent a reaction to the drunken commotions which marked many sporting events. Every form of contest was a source of gambling, which made sport a magnet for the criminal underworld. Sport may have provided fun for all classes, but it was a seedbed for moral licence. This was how it was portrayed from the pulpit with the most vigorous denunciations coming from plebeian and middle-class nonconformists, for whom just about every form of entertainment was a form of depravity. Lawmakers took a purely pragmatic line, treating sport (particularly bare-knuckle prizefighting) and its murky peripheries as a mainspring of crime and a constant threat to public order.
The aristocracy could find itself in very bad company, not that this troubled many sporting peers. In 1842 the sixth Viscount Chetwynd was charged with organising a prize fight in rural Bedfordshire and obstructing a local magistrate who vainly attempted to halt it. Among Chetwynd’s twelve co-defendants was a former champion of England, ‘Blind Burke’. Each was fined forty pounds.4
Boxing had become fashionable among the nobility during the second half of the eighteenth century, and bouts between champions and contenders attracted huge unruly audiences. A ‘large contingent of the rabble’ joined the two thousand who had paid half a guinea each to watch ‘Big Ben’ thrash Johnson in a field near Wrotham in Kent in 1791. There were smaller ‘bye-battles’ in which the boxers discarded any rules and were judged by ‘cognoscenti’ to be mere ‘violent, straightforward brawls with much bloodshed and very little skill’.5
Railways increased the numbers of spectators and opportunities for mayhem. In November 1855 the ‘staunchest Corinthian supporters of pugilism’ gathered with humbler fans at Fenchurch Street and Shoreditch Stations for trains which took them to Birmingham and a bout between Morris Roberts and ‘Young Harrington’. They slugged it out in a fight that went to 142 rounds and lasted for just over three hours. By the end, Roberts was blinded by blood and Harrington was unconscious, but many ‘gentlemen’ were impressed by his ‘plucky’ performance and gave him money. The match had been illegal and the arrangements for it clandestine. Three weeks before, the police had stopped a fight between George Baker and the ‘New Black’ held on a hillside near Tilbury in Essex.6
Defenders of boxing claimed that it was demotic and distinctly British. In 1818 the sporting journalist Pierce Egan noted that ‘distinction of rank’ was ignored by followers of the ‘fancy’. It was ‘congenial to the soil of liberty’ and a bulwark against incipient decadence, particularly among a nobility which seemed to be sliding into wimpish foppery. ‘The English character may get too refined, and the thorough-bred bulldog degenerate into the whining puppy,’ warned Egan. There was no chance of this so long as royal princes and peers not only sponsored prizefighters, but regularly took exercise in the new boxing academies and sparred with the veteran pugs who ran them.7
This was broadly the view of Lord Palmerston, who, in 1860, described the recent Sayers–Heenan championship fight as an exhibition of British manliness and tenacity which had made a favourable impression on the French. Perhaps so, but the Evangelical MP Lord Lovaine spoke for many others when he characterised the bout as a barbaric spectacle which had shamed a progressive Christian nation and attracted the most depraved sections of society. This was, of course, essentially a high-minded middle-class perspective on prizefighting, but it was one that modern Corinthians had to acknowledge. It was left to one, the volatile eighth Marquess of Queensberry, to initiate reform from within and above, and so bring boxing within the compass of public tolerance. The result was the Queensberry rules of 1867, which, among other things, introduced gloves, and they became the universal regulations for modern boxing.
Horse racing faced similar problems. They were gradually overcome by the efforts of a handful of no
blemen working through the Jockey Club. By the 1870s it had secured control over the day-to-day governance of racing. (It still does; in 1998, and following a precedent first set over a hundred and seventy years before, the Jockey Club ‘warned off’ [i.e. exiled from ‘the Turf ’] two figures judged to have brought racing into disrepute. Peers still have a powerful say in the Club; in the 1990s they made up two-fifths of its 112 members.8)
There had always been a close psychological affinity between the aristocracy and the successful breeding of horses. The thoroughbred racehorse was a perfect expression of the aristocratic principle; its superiority was the consequence of the transmission of ability and virtue through bloodlines. Heredity was everything: an ideal horse and an ideal peer were the products of their ancestry. In an age which discounts or even rejects such genetic theories, they remain entrenched in the world of racing. Interestingly, a modern anthropological dissection of this world indicates that it is inhabited at all levels from owners to stable lads by people who feel that racing is somehow ‘in their blood’, and that there are, as in the aristocracy, interlinked dynasties of trainers and breeders whose expertise is hereditary.9 Modern racing remains a detached universe which preserves elements of deference and respect for rank that are rarely found elsewhere.
Racing was inseparable from gambling. It had been an aristocratic pastime since the Middle Ages and there are account books which record peers’ winnings and losses among regular daily expenditure.10 Games of hazard killed boredom and offered aristocrats and anyone else who played them the opportunity to make a favourable impression on the beau monde by acquiring a reputation for audacity, indifference to risk and a disdainful nonchalance in the face of often crushing adversity. The same qualities which marked out the gentleman on the battlefield distinguished him at the gaming tables. All gamblers were subject to the gentleman’s code of honour; accusations of cheating and non-payment of gambling debts were among the commonest causes of duels.
In the 1790s one illegal London gaming hall had a shooting range attached at which card-sharps daily practised their marksmanship with pistols. Its purpose was explained to rich young men who had been lured into playing by free food, wine and brandy, lost heavily to the sharps and then contemplated welshing.11 Gambling strongly appealed to callow young aristocrats anxious to acquire the image of a devil-may-care Corinthian and many came a cropper. In 1816 the sixteen-year-old Lord Beauchamp was inveigled into the quarters of the Honourable Augustus Stanhope of the 12th Light Dragoons, who then took £8,000 from him in an evening’s play. Stanhope’s superiors judged fleecing the naive to be ungentlemanly conduct and he was court-martialled and cashiered.12
Racing peers gambled on and off the track. During the prosecution of the proprietors of a London gaming hall (and brothel) in 1844, the third Marquess of Conyngham, a twenty-four-year-old officer in the Life Guards and racehorse breeder, confessed to twice losing £500 in an evening’s play. He did not mention any winnings, but these losses may have shocked his Irish tenantry. Their rents contributed to his annual income of £50,000, and so his bad luck at the tables was a bagatelle.13
Conyngham died solvent, so he presumably knew when to stop. Others did not and the complementary addictions to betting and bloodstock could prove ruinous. They did for the fourth Marquess of Hastings, whose short life reads like the scenario for a contemporary Christian novel written to warn the young of what God has in store for reprobates. At Eton, Hastings was feckless, idle and irresponsible: he once released a sackful of rats in a ballroom, which created a horror-struck panic among ladies in crinolines. Hastings later eloped with Lady Florence Paget after her engagement to Henry Chaplin, a landowner and breeder of crack thoroughbreds. The two men became racing rivals, and in the 1867 Derby, Chaplin’s Hermit beat Hastings’s horse and lost its owner £102,000. His attempt to recoup his deficit in the next year’s Derby failed and Hastings faced bankruptcy. He died, aged twenty-six, and his final words epitomise the sang-froid of the true plunger: ‘Hermit’s Derby broke my heart. But I didn’t show it, did I?’14 He was the last of his line.
There had been a strong suspicion of chicanery about the fixing of the odds for Hastings’s horse. Scandals had bedevilled the early nineteenth century Turf and, indirectly, they tainted its aristocratic patrons. The principal cause was money: the proliferation of betting and the sums involved had led to various forms of race-fixing, including the poisoning of several horses in 1812, for which a groom was hanged. ‘Unprincipled miscreants’, all connected with betting, were contaminating the Turf, according to Charles Apperley. The remedy, he thought, lay in the hands of ‘Noblemen and gentlemen of fortune and integrity’, who had a duty to ‘elbow’ the intruders from ‘ground which ought to be their own’.15 The same solution was suggested by Judge Alderson when he presided over the case which followed the substitution of a horse which had won the 1843 Derby. The ploy of substituting horses (common enough at the time) was exposed, but Alderson blamed its success on the inertia of men who ought to have known better: ‘If gentlemen would associate with gentlemen, and race with gentlemen, we should have no such practises. But, if gentlemen will condescend to race with blackguards, they must expect to be cheated.’16
Matters were already in hand thanks to the intervention of Lord George Bentinck, a strong-willed Jockey Club member, bloodstock breeder, amateur jockey and duellist. A protectionist Tory in politics, Bentinck was a radical on the racetrack, where he introduced numerous reforms, including the strict supervision of starts and a fair system of handicapping. Bentinck also waged war against illicit bookmakers and their accomplices and introduced measures to charge spectators and control crowds. Losing ground in the political world, the aristocracy retained and exercised its authority on the Turf. The law assisted: the 1853 Betting Act cracked down on betting houses and opened the way for the modern licensed bookmakers who strove for a respectability which was embodied in the later euphemism ‘turf accountant’.
It was not just the honour and prestige of the racing aristocracy that had been compromised by criminality; their livelihoods had been threatened by systematic deception. Bentinck had pocketed £100,000 from betting, over five times the amount he had received in prize-money.17 When the thirteenth Earl of Eglinton retired from breeding horses in 1855, it was calculated that they had netted him an average of £4,000 annually over twenty years.18 Between 1873 and 1883 Lord Falmouth made £212,000 and sold his stud for £150,000.19
These were returns on investments in bloodstock, premises and staff which only the richest peers could afford, although during the second half of the century there was a growing number of businessmen and industrialists who took up racing. James Merry, a Scottish ironmaster, was one who had Derby winners in 1860 and 1873. Nevertheless, the capital and the prestige of the aristocracy remained vital to the Turf. In 1911, The Tatler announced that, after a few wins, the ninth Duke of Devonshire was rekindling his interest in racing, which was welcome news since ‘men of the stamp of the duke are badly wanted’.20
There was a chilly disdain for the Turf among early Victorian hunting men. After a brief membership of the Jockey Club, the famous sportsman Thomas Assheton Smith resigned. ‘He loved the straightforward honesty of a fox hunt, but observed that the chicanery of racing was uncongenial to him.’21 ‘Racing is for rogues,’ declared R. S. Surtees’s hero Jorrocks, a common and understandable view of the Turf before its reform.
Fox hunting had been an eighteenth-century craze which quickly captured the imagination of landowners of all ranks. It both demanded and cultivated qualities to which gentlemen aspired: fearlessness, nerve and audacious horsemanship. In ‘stiff country’, observed Charles Apperley, ‘a man has nothing to do but to throw his head over and follow it’.22 Admiration and honour were bestowed on the rider who kept ahead and took his jumps, come what may. Impetuosity and insouciance marked out the heroes of the chase: the third Marquess of Waterford rode his horse into the Kilkenny Club House, guided it upstairs, jumped the dining roo
m table and then returned to the street. He was killed by a fall in the field in 1859.23 Masters of Foxhounds enjoyed immense local prestige and many went to great lengths to put on lavish entertainments at meets. In the 1820s the Goodwood pack was said to have cost £19,000 a year to maintain. The ‘splendour’ of Lord Sefton’s ‘establishment gave spectators more the idea of an imperial hunting party in a foreign country than that of an English pack of foxhounds’ noted Apperley.24
As with racing, there was a distinctly aristocratic obsession with bloodlines, both of hunters and hounds, whose potential in the field was determined by their ancestry. There was a delightful poetry in their names; Juliet, Jingle, Jollity and Jealousy were among Sir Bellingham Graham’s pack in the 1820s. They ran ahead of a field which included a Shrewsbury surgeon and lawyer, who, Apperley noted approvingly, ‘will charge as large a fence as most people’. In Leicestershire, Apperley was impressed by that ‘capital sportsman Mr George Marriot, the draper’, whose broken bones testified to his pluckiness.25 Hunting was aristocratic in tone, but enthusiasm transcended social barriers and it was always open to anyone who could ride and afford to keep, or hire, their mounts. By the 1870s ladies were joining the chase, thanks to the three-pommelled side-saddle and the ‘safety skirt’. They soon proved they could equal or surpass men in stamina and pace.
Horse racing, hunting and shooting confirmed the aristocracy’s traditional image of itself as fit, tough, adventurous and jauntily indifferent to risks. These were manly qualities, invaluable in war, and worth cultivating among the young of all classes in an imperial nation conscious of its need to keep ahead in a competitive world. The second half of the nineteenth century saw the promotion of the cult of manliness through sport and the revival of chivalry. Schoolmasters, clergymen and social reformers led the way, and, with some moral amendment and a strong injection of notion of knightly self-sacrifice and duty, the values of the sporting aristocracy became models for the nation’s youth. Living examples littered schoolboy literature: there were resourceful subalterns thrusting forward imperial frontiers and daring gentlemen sportsmen stalked big game in Asia and Africa.
Aristocrats: Power, Grace, and Decadence: Britain's Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present Page 27
