ANÁLISIS DE RESULTADOS

To what extent was alcohol associated with sport at Rugby school? There is evidence for schoolboy drinking in all three of the major sports – cricket, football and athletics.180 There were no reports of drunkenness on the cricket field at Rugby found in the archival research. This does not mean drunkenness on the field did not occur. For example, there is evidence that drinking occurred on the field in cricket, as in the recollections of a fag at Eton. Fags were required to procure bottles of beer for the cricketers.181 Boys were exposed to the drinking and feasting rituals around cricket. The Rugby schoolboys played against older men and after the match the boys regularly dined at local hotels and were handed down the templates of drinking and feasting.182

In the 1850s a war of words was conducted in The Times. The heart of the argument centred on whether the annual schoolboy cricket games played in London at the start of each summer fostered vice and alcohol abuse amongst the boys by exposing them to the adult evils of London. The schools primarily involved were Winchester, Eton and Harrow.183 Australian and English newspapers were replete with ominous

180

Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, p. 319 notes that ‘… Though Lord Salisbury might argue as late as 1886 that beer had done him no harm after a day’s rowing at Eton, few public schools at that time still favoured beer as a beverage; for the athletic exercise increasingly popular in late Victorian public schools was not compatible with drinking’.

181

Eric Parker, Floreat An Eton Anthology (London: Nisbet & Co. 1923), p.280. A. C. Ainger recalled being sent to fetch bottled beer by a member of the Eton Eleven and his fear of meeting a Master and hearing the clinking of beer bottles under his gown. Tellingly he said they had no choice in the matter. This old Etonian was one of a number who were bullied and prevailed upon to procure quarts of bottled beer for distinguished members of the Eleven. There were also suggestions that in the 1880s that beer was taken by football players. ‘I was not the only one who was sent, by a distinguished member of the Eleven, to fetch him bottled beer from the “Christopher”. Apart from the doom impending, if I met a master, going or still more returning, the pocket of a Colleger’s gown was not a convenient receptacle for quart bottles knocking against each other. But we had no choice’. Brooke’s comments in Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, pp. 99-100, also suggest that drinking alcohol on the sports field at Rugby was known.

182

For example, Bell’s Life in London, 29 May 1853 p. 3, ‘The Rugby Club v Rugby School’, ‘The School dined each day with the Club, a most excellent dinner having been supplied by Mr Williams of the Horse Shoes Hotel’.

183

Rugby was not included in this discussion. See articles in The Times, from 20 July 1857 through until 11 August 1857. Parents feared that their sons would be exposed to the nasty underbelly of London. The rallying counterpoint to this argument was that such independence was the making of the boys and the cradle from which sprung fearless English men who would retain Britannia’s grip upon the world. Fred Gale, a prominent nineteenth century writer on English cricket, recalled that in 1841, a member of the Winchester cricket XI was incapacitated by champagne and taken to a police station. Edmund H. Fellowes, A History of Winchester Cricket Fellowes (Winchester, 1930), pp. 95-7, claimed it was ‘beyond dispute’ that lack of parental restraint led to exposure to vice and drunkenness of the schoolboys during their week in London for the schools cricket match.

warnings of the need to be on an everpresent footing for war and the role of sport and temperance in such preparedness:

The nation which aims at greatness cannot afford to neglect the example of Greece. The races which have done most for the world have always been those which have attended to their bodily culture. The Goths conquered Rome because they were physically better men – the Turks, the Arabs, for the same reason … It has been said, with great truth, that to our public school system were we indebted for the reconquest of India under difficulties … Of all our games, the one which has succeeded in creating the largest national interest is cricket; and it is, in many respects, the model of what a game ought to be … No game makes so great a demand upon all the higher physical qualities; nor is it enough that the cricketer a quick of eye, strong of arm, and agile of foot. He must be temperate, patient, and self- contained. He must know when to strike and when to forbear. He is trained, indeed, to a mimic war, which (as the game now is) involves just so much of the personal risk as to make the cricket ground no bad practice for the battle field …184

Young Brooke’s farewell speech in Tom Brown’s Schooldays warned potential sportsmen to avoid the dangers of alcohol. But the message was ambiguous. It was considered that certain types of alcohol rather than alcohol per se was dangerous. Similar catch cries can be found transplanted decades later in the Victorian colony when sportsmen and drink were commented upon. Brooke pleaded with the boys at Rugby school to avoid public houses and drinking of bad spirits and punch:

… such rot-gut stuff. That wont make good dropkicks or chargers of you … You get plenty of good beer here, and that’s enough for you; and drinking isn’t manly, whatever some of you may think of it.185

There is a telling reference to drinking while playing football in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. It hints at dark behaviour looked upon dimly by Tom Hughes. During the half time break fruit vendors distributed oranges as they wended their way through the players. The seniors who ‘are past oranges and apples’ placed the innocence of

184

Argus, 6 February 1860, pp. 4-5. See for further comment, James Bradley, ‘Inventing Australians and Constructing Englishness: Cricket and the Creation of a National Consciousness, 1860- 1914, Sporting Traditions, vol. 11, no. 2 (May 1995), pp. 53-4; M. Connellan, ‘From Manliness to Masculinities’, Sporting Traditions, vol. 17, no. 2 (May 2001), pp. 49-63, J. A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School (London: Frank Cass, 2000), pp. xxii-xiii, 14-7 and K. A. P. Sandiford, Cricket and the Victorians (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994), pp. 34-52.

185

Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, p. 89, ‘Brooke … he’s cock of the School, and head of the School – house side, and the best kick and charger in Rugby’.

gingerbeer bottles to their lips but to the knowing something stronger was being swallowed. Hughes made no bones about alcohol’s drain on a sportsman’s prowess – ‘one short made rush, and then a stitch in the side, and no more honest play; that’s what comes of those bottles’.186

Drinking beer after ‘Hare and Hounds’ was openly mentioned in the boys’ writings. The more successful the athlete, the more he was exposed to the life of the inn. Alcohol was a reward for the swiftest of runners. Though this was common knowledge, the literature of the time does not hint at any concern from teachers. There was also no suggestion amongst the boys of this practice being dangerous to an athlete.

The boys openly commemorated, in verse, the ritual drinking of alcohol during sporting occasions. Beer was drunk joyously and deliriously at times of moment; none more so than after a stirring football performance:

Oh! fir a drink of beer,

Oh swipes! for pardon I pray, Full oft have I cursed, you I know, But I love and adore you to-day.187

Such revelry and boisterous singing, though under some guidance from house staff, was open and seemingly plentiful.188

6 The Rugby Template comes Home to the Colonies: Mr T. W. Wills of English