Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rsih20

Download by: [Université de Neuchâtel] Date: 14 August 2016, At: 23:59

Sport in History

ISSN: 1746-0263 (Print) 1746-0271 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsih20

Book Reviews

Lincoln Allison , Neil Carter , Dion Georgiou , Kevin Tallec Marston , FearghalMcGarry , Roger Munting , Wray Vamplew & Jean Williams

To cite this article: Lincoln Allison , Neil Carter , Dion Georgiou , Kevin Tallec Marston , FearghalMcGarry , Roger Munting , Wray Vamplew & Jean Williams (2011) Book Reviews, Sport inHistory, 31:1, 110-133, DOI: 10.1080/17460263.2011.556709

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17460263.2011.556709

Published online: 09 Mar 2011.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 112

View related articles

Book Reviews

Robin Daniels, Cardus, Celebrant of Beauty, A Memoir (Lancaster:

Palatine, 2009). Pp. 452. £25.00 (hb). ISBN 978-1-874181-58-3

It would be difficult to imagine a book with forewords by Daniel

Barenboim and Andrew Flintoff if it were not for the career of Sir Neville

Cardus, 1888 (perhaps) to 1975, music critic and cricket correspondent

for the Manchester Guardian. The paradox of Cardus was that he was

unique but influential, inspiring attempts at imitation but no fully

successful imitators. The historic opportunity, the high period of news-

papers, has gone; not only have they declined in significance, but even the

most cerebral of them are not interested in much ‘reflexion’ or in writers

who set their own agendas.The ‘perhaps’ after Cardus’s date of birth is

doubly significant. Daniels gives the year of his birth as 1888, though

previous biographers and Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians give it

as 1889. This all has to do with Ada, Cardus’s mother, being a prostitute

who later married, and was clearly more to spare her blushes than her

son’s; his autobiography cheerfully recalls her coming back to the house in

Rusholme after setting off to the centre of Manchester because she has

forgotten her ‘French letters’. The implication, of course, is that Cardus

himself is the product of a forgotten French letter. He appears in the 1891

census as ‘Frederick Newsham’, aged three. Newsham was the surname of

his stepfather, Cardus of his maternal grandfather.

So the first and most challenging significance of the anomaly is that it

signifies the degree of social mobility involved in Cardus’s career. He was

brought up in a context which fell under the anachronistic heading of

‘underclass’ and had the bare minimum of education. His breakthrough

came when he was appointed cricket coach at Shrewsbury School and

established such good relations with the headmaster, Cyril Alington, that

he was also given the job as Alington’s secretary. Their conversations were

clearly the beginning of his real education. The second encouraging

patron was the Guardian’s ‘legendary’ editor, C.P. Scott, who gave a very

minor and junior contributor increasing scope to write about the things

he loved. The challenging question concerns the chances of a lad (or lass)

Sport in History

Vol. 31, No. 1, March 2011, pp. 110�133

ISSN 1746-0263 print; ISSN 1746-0271 online/11/010110-24

DOI: 10.1080/17460263.2011.556709

from the Manchester slums becoming a world authority on music and

cricket in the twenty-first century. It is important to note that Cardus was

far from unique in this respect: the two other principal music critics of the

day were his boss/predecessor Samuel Langford and his rival Ernest

Newman. Langford was a market gardener first published in his forties

and Newman a Liverpudlian tailor’s son who started his working life as a

bank clerk.

The second significance starts with the question of what we are

supposed to make of a journalist who obfuscates even his year of birth.

Unlike previous sports reporters, Cardus did not see factual accuracy as

his strength. What he did so well was imagery, whether portraying himself

or those he admired. Who else would perpetuate the myth (or fact?) that

he left his seat at Old Trafford, got married and returned to find that

Lancashire’s score had advanced by only 17? Or say that ‘Cricket was

Emmott Robinson’s mission, Yorkshire his religion’. Or claim that ‘Patsy’

Hendren’s joy in the game was such that he was in danger of being given

out ‘smile before wicket’. Cricket for Cardus was much less about facts

than it was about images and beauty and near-mythological characters.

Which made him a revolutionary and profoundly influential sportswriter,

though one must add that the imitation has often been regrettable. In this

respect he is comparable to other stylistic revolutionaries such as the chef

Michel Guerard.

That Cardus was also a music critic was mainly a strength in his

sportswriting; it gave him gravitas and credibility. The reverse was not

necessarily true: Sir Hamilton Harty complained that the use of the

stopwatch might be acceptable in assessing innings, but it had no place in

describing musical performance (Harty as conductor being responsible

for some of the slowest known performances of major symphonies). But

Cardus was entitled to reply that both facts and imagination were relevant

to both cricket and music, sometimes independently and sometimes

interdependently. One does not have to conflate art and sport to accept

that both can be the subject of imaginative and creative writing; it is not

surprising that Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist was a work that Cardus

admired.Cardus, Celebrant of Beauty is absolutely no substitute for

reading the man himself, particularly the Autobiography (1947) and

Second Innings (1950). Nor does Daniels challenge these works in any way;

he quotes them at great length, but as a friend and admirer rather than as

a biographer, the author previously of Conversations with Cardus (1975).

Autobiographies are never the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the

truth and the literary merits of these should not blind us to the

Sport in History 111

probability that Cardus was worse than average in this respect. It is also a

frustrating book, consisting essentially of 93 essays on Cardus and his

context, divided into nine sections. Given the very high proportion of

quotation involved, the overall effect is far from fluent. The minimum

claim for the book, however, is that it is a very useful source on the

context and period of Cardus’s career and its major characters, including

essays on A.C. MacLaren, Sir Thomas Beecham, Ernest Newman and

Kathleen Ferrier.

The larger claim is that there does emerge � not particularly clearly or

explicitly, but emerging nevertheless � a kind of teasing-out of a

philosophical position behind Cardus’s criticism. It is a form of

aestheticism with ascetic qualifiers, a love of beauty compatible with a

distaste for the physical world. Cardus did not like even to shake hands

and described his wife as more of a sister than a wife. There are elements

of all this variously in common with Ruskin, Shaw, Wilde and Pater and it

is clearly a form or derivative of that vaguest of phenomena, Romanti-

cism. Daniels is (among many interesting things, including the official

historian of Blackpool Football Club) a Jungian analyst; a Freudian would

have made a very different meal of the evidence. Cardus’s greatest

achievement is surely that he applied an aesthetic philosophy to cricket �a practice which Ruskin, Shaw et al. would have considered to be entirely

trivial.

LINCOLN ALLISON # 2011

University of Warwick

lincoln.allison@warwick.ac.uk

Patrick Chaplin, Darts in England, 1900�39: A Social History (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 2009). Pp. xiv � 258. £55.00 (hb). ISBN

978-07190-78030-3.

For someone who grew up watching the likes of Eric ‘The Crafty Cockney’

Bristow, John ‘Stoneface’ Lowe and Jocky ‘On the Oche’ Wilson, darts

seemed to have been a well-established part of the British sporting scene,

while the link between the dartboard and the pub was taken for granted.

However, as Patrick Chaplin demonstrates in this scholarly yet highly

accessible book, the sport of darts, as we know it, is very much a recent

invention, and in this sense, shares similarities with John Walton’s work

on the history of fish and chips, which debunks myths and challenges

widely held assumptions.

112 Book Reviews

Darts in England is a welcome addition to the historiography of sport

and fills a gap in our understanding of popular cultural practices more

generally, hence its inclusion in Manchester University Press’s impressive

series on this theme. Chaplin argues that the history of darts is a ‘complex

form of cultural interaction’ (p. 6) but to fully understand its develop-

ment the sport’s ‘material base’ needs to be examined. As a result, popular

culture is skilfully blended into the sport’s business and economic history.

As a history of popular culture, Chaplin is fully aware of the challenges

that this brings to historians working in this area, in which oral traditions

are much stronger than written material. Nevertheless, he has employed a

wide variety of sources to present a fuller picture as possible. His primary

sources have been heavily dependent on the archives of brewers, which is

unsurprising given their important role in forging modern darts; diaries,

memoirs, interviews and personal correspondence have been used as well

as Parliamentary papers. A substantial number of newspapers and

periodicals have been scoured to track down the scant references to darts

in the period in question. After a lengthy introduction, the following

chapter examines the sport’s sketchy origins. For those who like to believe

that Darts is quintessentially British, it may come as a blow to know that

France, in the shape of the game ‘Fletchettes’, played a pivotal role in its

development, along with the English game of ‘puff-and-dart’. In addition,

Chaplin investigates other theories that link darts with toxophily, hunting

and children’s recreations.

Chapters 3 and 4 look at darts from 1900 to 1939, which until this

point was ‘little more than an occasionally played child’s game, fairground

attraction and pub game’ (p. 46). However, it is here that the social and

economic context is set for the game’s formative period. Unsurprisingly, it

is darts’ association with the public house that is crucial. With an

expanding leisure market, brewers were becoming increasingly concerned

about the diversion of working class consumer spending on alternative

leisure pursuits such as football and increasingly the cinema.

After the First World War, the brewers began to place more emphasis

on the provisions inside their public houses. This had been a response not

only to the competition of an expanding leisure market but also growing

criticism over drinking levels, especially by the temperance movement. As

a consequence, a movement for public-house improvement emerged,

which aimed to make the pub more respectable; and the increasing

inclusion of recreations such as darts was part of this process. Darts

leagues, organized by the breweries, began to emerge in the 1920s, and by

1939, it was rare to find a major brewery without its own darts league. In

Sport in History 113

addition, the design of new pubs now took into account a space for darts,

mainly in the vault.

There was not a uniform development across the country. Initially,

London had been (and remains) the centre. The game then spread to

other parts of the South East and by the end of the 1930s, through the

brewers’ leagues, was found in most major British towns and cities.

Interestingly darts was actually banned in Huddersfield, Glasgow and

Liverpool where it was thought to increase drinking levels and was thus

deemed a societal nuisance.

Nevertheless, as a mark of the sport’s modernization, the National

Darts Association was formed in 1925. It was the first organization to

standardize the various local rules that continued to be played around the

country. In chapter 5 Chaplin charts how this process evolved. The NDA

chose the ‘clock’ dartboard � the one still used today � to be the standard

one rather than the ‘Kent’ board or the ‘five’s board, which had different

scoring options. However, the ‘clock’ board was not universally taken up.

While it was quickly accepted in London and the South East, there was no

smooth transition. Indeed, even today there is still resistance in Burton-

upon-Trent, Manchester and parts of Yorkshire, which continue to play by

their own rules and board.

It was in the 1930s that darts’ place in popular culture became more

firmly established. In the concluding chapter, it is shown how an

increasing number of women played the sport, despite the persistence

of male opposition in some parts of the country. Darts also gained greater

media attention. Some matches were broadcast on radio and, bizarrely, a

game of darts is played in the 1939 film, Son of Frankenstein (p. 189). At

the centre of this growth in popularity though was the popular press and

particularly the News of the World, which played a pivotal role in the

development of the game. In 1927, the newspaper had instituted the first

recognizable darts competition. The ‘News of the World’ later became a

national tournament and helped to popularize the game further. In 1937,

a woman, Mrs Morgan, the wife of a publican, even reached the final

stages of the competition, an achievement never bettered.

However, Chaplin perhaps over-exaggerates the extent of darts’ wider

popularity. He claims that by the mid-1930s, the game had become ‘a

dominant part of the popular culture of the English middle and upper

classes’ (p. 205). While this is unlikely he seems to contradict this

statement by later claiming that ‘darts had been ephemeral, a short-lived,

transitory distraction’ for them up to 1939. This justification for darts

anyway is unnecessary. As Patrick Chaplin has shown in this entertaining

study, darts was an established part of working-class culture in much of

114 Book Reviews

the country by 1939 and for this reason alone makes Darts in England a

valuable addition not only to the history of sport but also social history

more widely.

NEIL CARTER # 2011

De Montfort University

necarter@dmu.ac.uk

Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edition

(Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). Pp. 472. £25.00 (pb). ISBN 978-0-754-

66507-6

First published in 1978, the latest edition of Peter Burke’s seminal Popular

Culture in Early Modern Europe boasts a new introduction, while its main

text and bibliography have also been partly updated to reflect the

significant volume of research conducted into this subject over the past

three decades. In the book’s initial prologue, reprinted in this latest

edition, Burke defined culture as ‘a system of shared, meanings and

values, and the symbolic forms (performances and artefacts) in which

they are expressed and embodied’, and popular culture as the unofficial

culture of ‘more or less definite social groups’, particularly peasants and

craftsmen (p. xiii). Burke’s new introduction considers the criticisms that

have since been levelled against his original approach, and concedes that

his definition of what is ‘popular’ may have been too rigid, failing to

sufficiently convey popular culture’s pluralism and the extent of its

interaction with elite culture. Yet Burke also problematizes alternative

interpretations of popular culture and its relationship to ‘official’ culture,

criticizing what he deems the indiscriminate usage of Gramsci’s concept

of ‘cultural hegemony’, as well as flaws within the ‘centre versus

peripheries’ and ‘history of things’ approaches. Similarly, while recogniz-

ing that his initial definition of the range of practices that comprise

‘culture’ may be restricted by today’s standards, he argues that the dearth

of socio-cultural histories in existence during the 1970s meant the time

was not ripe for a wider synthesis, and that his narrower approach allowed

for more detailed comparisons. Nonetheless, Burke’s new conclusions,

that popular and elite culture should be viewed as different ends of a

spectrum, and that someone should be defined as a cultural historian not

because of the field they work on but because they show a concern for

values and symbols wherever they are found, demonstrate significant

shifts in his thinking since 1978.

Sport in History 115

By contrast, while the main text of Popular Culture in Early Modern

Europe does include some new passages covering more recent work on

previously under-scrutinized areas of early modern European history,

these tend to supplement rather than challenge Burke’s initial conclusions.

The book nonetheless remains impressive in its scope and ambition. It is

divided into three parts, the first laying out how popular culture might be

classified and studied. Burke argues that between 1500 and 1800, Europe

possessed two cultures: a popular one and an elite one, with elites also

participating in popular culture but ordinary people lacking the where-

withal to participate in elite culture. He categorizes popular culture as

composed of numerous ‘subcultures’: the several strands of rural and

urban popular culture, as well as occupational, religious, ethnic and

gender variations. Burke acknowledges the importance of regional

differences in popular culture but argues that they mask important

continuities across the continent, and that they too should be understood

in terms of ‘subcultures’; the culture of an individual community might

be partly determined by the region it belongs to, but also by its dominant

religion, occupation, language etc.

Part II explores the structures of popular culture during the period.

Burke lists a broad range of ‘bearers’ of this culture, including professional

artists, an assortment of travelling entertainers, upper-class amateurs and

semi-professional entertainers. He then delineates the culture they

participated in, claiming that popular formats such as songs, folktales,

sermons, plays, dances and art were centred on recurring formulae and

motifs, but that in the context of an oral culture, where nothing is written

down, artists inevitably produced variations upon these basic compo-

nents. Burke also argues that the narratives prominent in this culture

tended to comprise a range of stock figures such as rulers, clergymen,

peasants and outsiders, who fell into the broad categories of heroes,

villains and fools, with narratives crystallizing around certain figures

because they corresponded to these existing types. In these stories,

whatever was outside the experience of ordinary people was explained

through the supernatural, while complex social and economic phenom-

ena were personified. Yet Burke states that these narratives and their

characters must be understood in the context of the rituals they were

attached to, focusing on the feast of Carnival, as well as other feasts that

took on elements of the carnivalesque. He names food, sex and aggression

as the Carnival’s main themes, along with the overt contrast of Carnival

with both Lent (a time of abstinence) and everyday life. Burke claims the

ruling authorities may have used festivals to channel potentially

116 Book Reviews

dangerous sentiments into relatively harmless rituals, but notes that they

also offered an opportunity for ordinary people to vent their anger at

existing scheme of things.

The final part of the book considers changes that occurred in popular

culture during the early modern period, and the reasons for these

transformations. Burke states that there was a concerted effort between

1500 and 1650 by Protestant, Catholic and even Orthodox reformers to

improve popular culture, which they criticized on both religious and

moral grounds. Reformers succeeded in abolishing many practices in

much of urbanized and Protestant Europe by 1650, but in Catholic and

outlying areas and in eastern Europe this did not occur until afterwards;

this second wave of reform was marked by the greater involvement of the

laity and the increasing use of secular rather than religious arguments for

reform. Yet Burke also attributes many of the changes in popular culture

during the early modern period to wider changes such as population

growth and accompanying urbanization, commercial expansion and

improvements in communications. Cultural production was standar-

dized; new forms of entertainment emerged, while existing forms were

integrated into larger, more formally organized formats; increasing

literacy levels enabled the spread of print culture, which showed some

continuities from oral culture but also introduced new character and

narrative types, and was also more secular and politicized; popular

culture as a whole also became more politicized, due to intermittent

transformative events such as war and the growing impingement of the

state on everyday life. Burke also avers that, at different times in different

regions, the ruling classes withdrew from the popular culture they once

shared with ordinary people. Burke’s highly readable book remains an

excellent introduction to early modern European history. For the sports

historian, although it only contains some references to precursors of

contemporary sports, it nonetheless demonstrates the cultural contexts in

which such pastimes were rooted � their linkage to certain occasions, for

example, such as Carnival-time races, or Shrove Tuesday football

matches. To understand modern sport and leisure practices � indeed,

to understand what is specifically ‘modern’ about them � familiarity with

this ancestry is vital. Moreover, while the book’s definition of ‘popular

culture’ may be partly in need of updating � as Burke himself does,

impressively, in his introduction � Popular Culture in Early Modern

Europe is nonetheless a testament to the insights comparative analysis can

offer into broader historical processes. Burke’s argument that regional

differences in culture be viewed in the same way as other potential

Sport in History 117

variations like gender or religion is an important one for all modern

social and cultural historians, because it is all the more potent given the

impact of globalizing trends such as migration, advancements in

communication and capitalism.

DION GEORGIOU # 2011

Queen Mary, University of London

sportshistory@hotmail.co.uk

Chris Green, Every Boy’s Dream. England’s Football Future on the Line

(London: A & C Black, 2009). Pp. 207. £9.99 (pb). ISBN 978-1-4081-

1216-8.

Children’s play has become an adult preoccupation, it has become

professionalized, it is no longer a world separate from the world of

adults.1

Originally writing in 1982, Neil Postman, quoted above, foretold of the

loss of childhood and diagnosed sport as one ailing area. In a stirring read

and thorough overview of the current and recent past of youth football in

England, Chris Green raises some of the taboo questions that occupy the

minds of many concerned public officials, members of the media and,

without any doubt, parents. It is all the more interesting in that the area of

youth football has received little in the way of proper historical enquiry in

England. Having gone under the sociological microscope examining

themes such as masculinity and other more public-policy-oriented

research focusing on educational provision or child protection, Green

offers a wide-ranging approach based on his twenty-some years

experience covering the sport. Through a journalistic and informal style

Green converses with his audience while providing insight, astute

conclusions and sagely avoiding the claim of having uncovered a

panacea. There are few weaknesses in the book save for some

methodological questions and some missed opportunities for a more

engaged discourse.

The author begins from an overall question concerning the approxi-

mately 10,000 boys ‘who play in England’s football factories each season �the 99 percent who don’t make it as well as the estimated 1 percent who

do furnish domestic football club first teams and senior international

teams, having started their club careers at the age of nine’. The research is

primarily based on many years of interviews with an extensive host of

actors in the football industry (administrators, youth coaches, parents,

118 Book Reviews

club academy staff). While readers wishing to deepen their own knowl-

edge will bemoan the lack of a bibliography, Green mentions numerous

sources including the Charter for Quality, the ‘Lewis review’, along with

various documents and statistics from the FA and the Football League. It

should be noted, however, that an unsatisfying number of these are said to

be confidential and not or no longer publicly available. While it is clear

that he has interviewed tens of parents and children, providing the reader

with a more explicit methodology would strengthen the book’s arguments

and further justify its conclusions.

The work begins with a mythology of sorts describing the heyday of

football, when all the lads were local boys and they understood what the

club shirt really meant. Green deliberately keeps the description of the

‘golden days’ as he calls them, concise, which does give rise to an

oversimplification of certain aspects through this so-called glorious age.

He largely debunks the myth of locality and youth in football and quickly

proceeds to the starting-block of the book, which centres around what

was intended to be the Copernican revolution of youth development,

Howard Wilkinson’s 1997 Charter for Quality. Based on his visits to

numerous academies and centres of excellence he paints the luxurious

portrait of lavish facilities of Premier League clubs’ ‘football factories’.

There is one question that would benefit from further examination,

however. Green argues that the Charter for Quality changed the face of

youth football in 1997 by lowering the age at which club coaching could

start from 14 to 9. Not mentioned in his analysis are the regulations of the

Football League which, when surveyed, provide contradictory informa-

tion. While the regulations do not necessarily describe the reality of the

interaction between clubs and players from the 1960s to the 1990s, as a

basic premise of the book, this is a crucial point which should be clarified.

A second issue in the opening two chapters is Green’s claim that the

English domination of international football is a myth and in fact never

happened because ‘there was never a comprehensive, fully funded

national programme supported by the clubs designed to do this . . .stretching way back to the game’s professional origins, there has never

been a big idea on how to develop home-grown talent’. While he is not

entirely wrong, his presentation on the one hand of the clubs as

progressive and for coaching and development, and on the other hand

the FA essentially as backward-thinking amateurs, could be more

nuanced, especially considering Sir Stanley Rous’s active role in develop-

ing coaching curricula and courses in the inter-war period.

As Green continues, he reveals a plethora of major issues tarnishing the

youth game. He begins with the lack of opportunity and discusses the

Sport in History 119

paradox that despite having created over the last decade, according to an

interview with Premier League head of youth development, Huw Jennings,

the highest general skill level among England’s young footballers, these boys

have a continuingly declining chance of making it to the top level due to the

influx of foreign players. Green also evokes the weighty dun of being signed

up by a club and its the effects on parents, kids and family life; the countless

hours of driving boys to and fro across the country are a high price when

only to be told at some point that the boy has been released, crushing his

dream. With a handful of interview-based cases, he then unveils an

ensconced transfer market of young talent. The prior issues culminate in a

thorough consideration of the leadership of the game supported by telling

questions and arguments such as the notion that youth football is

dominated by a power struggle of the ‘traditional governors of the game

(FA) and the new ‘‘guv’nors’’ (Premier League) with the Football League

sandwiched in between’. All of which causes him to ask ‘how about fighting

for the well-being of kids first and foremost?’ and leads to the final issue at

hand, that of educational provision under the various apprenticeship

schemes. After outlining and explaining these areas largely to the reader’s

satisfaction, he attempts to contextualize with the wider world of sport and

draws a number of parallels from domestic rugby, cricket and continental

football, and even an American comparison. It is this section which is

probably the weakest as it relies on a much shallower analysis and suffers

from generalizations from specific cases (e.g. the Dutch example and the

oversimplified American system). The last section of the book is perhaps

the most interesting as Green covers a number of isolated examples of

contemporary best-practice. A handful of limitations do not deter from the

overall appreciation of Green’s work as his major focus is the English

situation which he exposes rather well.

One recurring theme throughout the book is the shift from schools to

clubs as the loci of youth football. While this is central to the book, the

reader can almost regret not having developed this more. In describing the

environment of club academies and centres of excellence, Green does

lament the difficulties placed on parents due to the lack of ‘information

that is widely available in other areas of education’. Through his reading of

the 2007 ‘Lewis review’, he astutely underlines the absence of any

interviews with youth players or parents and concludes that the report

was for the benefit for the governing bodies and not ‘the boys or the

parents doing the thrice-weekly academy run, or schoolteachers spotting

kids creeping into school yawning, nor to protect the significant sums of

120 Book Reviews

public money pouring into the youth programmes or education budgets’.

In response Green calls for independent standards like those which are

‘laid out in education by law’. Indeed, what he describes is the paradox of

sport and education. After a long relationship which began and

blossomed in Victorian schools, but suffered a separation in the 1980s,

one awaits a headline proclaiming the end of the romance. While he does

not go that far, through his interview material he does fully describe the

effect of this divorce on the children of football.

The other major current of the work lies in the accepted credo that

youth development is an inherently good thing and always has been.

Green questions this to an extent and also poses the disturbing hypothesis

wondering if anyone is truly bothered to ethically consider whether the

ends justify the means. He brings to light the stories of youth who never

made the ‘little time’ let alone the ‘big time’. For all the efforts of the

football system to produce a Gerrard or Rooney, Green asks about the

side-effects of the same system which digests and spits out young players

like Ricky Clarke who admits that ‘It was a mistake to choose football over

other things. Looking back, I should have carried on with my education

and just tried a lot harder at school and seen how my football went.’ Such

stories are a refreshing, honest and critical reality that rarely gets more

attention than an occasional news story. The book is well summed up by

the author’s declaration that ‘It seems too many people in the football

industry are blinkered by the belief that the only possible raison d’etre for

children to slip on boots or pull a football shirt over their head is so they

can become a professional player’.

It is the revealing of such a priori which can be seen as the success of the

book but also its limitation in leaving them largely unchallenged. What is

certain however, is that Green has offered a comprehensive analysis of the

last twenty years of competitive English youth football and sketched a

map for further questions and debate.

KEVIN TALLEC MARSTON # 2011

De Montfort University and Centre International d’Etude du Sport

kmarston@dmu.ac.uk

Note

1. Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (New York: Vintage, 1994),

130.

Sport in History 121

Mike Cronin, William Murphy and Paul Rouse (eds), The Gaelic Athletic

Association 1884�2009 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009). Pp. 300.

£25.00 (hb). ISBN 978-0-716-53028-2

Despite its importance in Irish social and political life, academic

historians in Ireland have been slow to embrace sport as a subject worthy

of serious research. The principal exception concerns the relationship

between sport, national identity and politics, which has attracted more

scholarly attention, much of it critical of the way that sport has

functioned as a signifier of ethnic-communal identity or a means of

political radicalization, whether during the cultural revival and revolu-

tionary eras during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries or

the more recent Northern Irish ‘Troubles’. Founded in 1884 to promote

Gaelic games (notably hurling and Gaelic football) as part of a broader

cultural revival dedicated to the strengthening of national identity, the

countering of ‘anglicization’ within Irish society and, ultimately, the

achievement of political independence, the Gaelic Athletic Association

(GAA) has long been at the heart of these debates. As several contributors

to this impressive collection of essays � published to commemorate the

125th anniversary of the founding of the organization � note, the GAA

was always more than a sporting body.

While political themes feature strongly, the collection considers Gaelic

games and their impact on Irish society more broadly. Indeed, it could be

criticized for ranging too widely, given that the opening two essays

consider Irish sport long before the establishment of the GAA. A.B.

Gleason makes use of a comparatively vast corpus of early written sources

to shine an interesting � if necessarily tentative � light on the provenance

and significance of ‘stick and ball’ games in medieval Ireland. Inevitably,

many of the essays revise traditional nationalist assumptions about Gaelic

games: Gleason concludes that there is no evidence to confirm the much-

vaunted ancient provenance of hurling, and no reason to suppose that

medieval references to field games refer to hurling or its antecedents. Eoin

Kinsella’s essay on sport in the early modern era illustrates how many of

the concerns expressed by clerical and political authorities after the

formation of the GAA � including its identification with disorderly or

seditious conduct, the undermining of sabbatarianism, and the expression

of sectarian or political grievance � were present during a much earlier

period.

Assessing the GAA in the context of the international origins of modern

sport, Richard Holt brings a useful comparative dimension to bear.

Although ostensibly backward-looking in its revivalist aspirations, the

122 Book Reviews

organization was a product of the same mid- to late-nineteenth-century

phenomena � associationalism, codification, the involvement of mass

spectators, the exploitation of literacy, the popular press and other

technological advances � that created modern sports elsewhere. Holt

emphasizes the contingent aspect of all this: the Irish could, like other

inhabitants of the British Empire, have chosen to beat England at her own

games, adopted American sports or, like the Czech nationalists, embraced

mass gymnastics as a means of pursuing physical fitness and national

pride. This essay, like several others, suggests that the GAA must be

understood both as an unexceptional manifestation of the broader

emergence of modern sport, as well as something more distinctively

rooted in Irish concerns and circumstances. The GAA, for example,

adopted the amateur ethos that characterized other late-nineteenth-

century British sporting organizations, while rejecting their elitism;

similarly, it embraced spectator sports but less so the model of sport as

commercially-driven entertainment.

The theme of contingency features also in Paul Rouse’s revealing

portrait of Michael Cusack, the remarkable � and remarkably volatile �founder of the GAA. Shortly before establishing the movement that would

do more than any other to root out English sports in Ireland, Cusack had

advocated the setting up of cricket clubs in every parish in the country,

eulogizing the sport � ‘the boy who can play cricket will not, in after

years, lose his head and get flurried in the face of danger’ � in much the

same way as later nationalist would Gaelic games. Rouse places Cusack’s

momentous conversion within the political context of the rise of

Parnellite nationalism as a powerful political force during the 1880s.

That Gaelic sports reflected � more than they shaped � broader

political developments is also demonstrated in William Murphy’s

perceptive essay which outlines the role of the GAA during the Irish

Revolution, and provides a useful historiographical overview of how this

role was subsequently depicted after the attainment of independence. The

relationship between the GAA and republican mobilization throughout

revolutionary Ireland � while certainly significant � was more patchy and

indirect than was later asserted by early GAA historians keen to write the

organization into the creation myth of the new state. The GAA, Murphy

concludes, was more playground than player in the revolution. Rather less

revisionist in approach is David Hassan’s essay on the GAA in Ulster.

Hassan endorses the GAA’s belief that the British authorities and RIC

sought to eradicate GAA games. The reality was more complex: those

GAA activists who deliberately sought to politicize the organization by

identifying it with militant separatism and involving it in conflict with the

Sport in History 123

authorities were resented by many Gaels, and the primary purpose of

much of the inveighing against ‘garrison games’ and the British

authorities was the marginalization of less militant nationalists. For

example, Patrick Whelan, an Ulster GAA official quoted in Hassan’s essay,

was forced out of the organization not by the British but by militant Gaels

who decided that those civil servants who had sworn an oath to the

authorities had forfeited the right to remain within it.

Mark Duncan’s essay evaluates photography as a significant but

underused source, but might itself have been better-illustrated. Duncan

attributes the absence of photos of Gaelic games from the well-known

collections of early photography to class and commercial factors but notes

how coverage improved with the growth of the popular and sporting press

and technological advances on the eve of the Great War. Sean Crosson’s

essay assesses depictions of Gaelic games in Irish and international film

but is also limited by a dearth of source material. Brian O Conchubhair

addresses the thorny issue of the GAA’s efforts to promote the Gaelic

language: denounced by some as hypocritical lip-service but others as

evidence of ethnic chauvinism, the GAA has often found itself on a sticky

wicket on this issue.

Donal McAnallen provides a stimulating account of the importance of

amateurism within the GAA. As with Kinsella’s essay, an element of plus

ca change is evident: as early as 1908, inter-county players complained

about inadequate expenses and a lack of representation, issues that

recently led to the controversial formation of the Gaelic Players

Association. Demonstrating how each period provided distinctive

challenges to the GAA’s amateur ethos, McAnallen attributes its

endurance to a combination of financial pragmatism and the games’

distinctive place as a symbol of national identity; the GAA’s democratic

ethos and plebeian origins also ensured that amateurism was not seen as a

relic of the English Victorian revolution. Precisely how plebeian these

origins were is questioned in Tom Hunt’s analysis of the organization’s

late-nineteenth-century social structure. Although small, his sample of

GAA members indicates that the farming and commercial lower middle

classes predominated, while the rural poor were largely excluded.

Paul Darby demonstrates how the fortunes of Gaelic games in the United

States ebbed and flowed in line with Irish emigration patterns and the

organization’s ability to satisfy the socio-economic, cultural and psycho-

logical needs of the Irish in America. He suggests that the GAA’s

identification with a ‘narrow, ethnic version of Irishness’ has hindered its

efforts to establish roots among the increasingly prosperous and assimilated

Irish-American community. Mike Cronin’s essay surveys the GAA’s other

124 Book Reviews

activities, echoing earlier observations about the organization’s distinctive

place in Irish society. The final article by Gearoid O Tuathaigh provides a

balance sheet of the GAA’s achievements (notably its immense popularity

and social impact) and shortcomings (its alienation of unionists and

working- and middle-class supporters of rival codes); he concludes that the

organization’s ability to embrace change � not least by moving away from

the ethnic chauvinism and strident nationalism noted by Darby � places it

in a strong position to meet the challenges of the future.

FEARGHAL McGARRY # 2011

Queen’s University Belfast

f.mcgarry@qub.ac.uk

Emma Griffin, England’s Revelry: A History of Popular Sports and Pastimes,

1660�1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, for the British Academy,

2005). Pp. xiii � 294, £55.00 (hb). ISBN 0-19-726321-6.

Emma Griffin’s reputation with readers of this journal is high; she has

twice been awarded the coveted Lord Aberdare Prize. The reputation is

well-deserved, for this is a masterly piece of scholarship, based on

assiduous and detailed research, yet written in an accessible style. Those

expecting a detailed consideration of early football, cricket and other such

games will, however, be disappointed, for these are dealt with rather

briefly, though are very far from being ignored. There are interesting

pages on these games and others such as knur and spell (mostly in

Yorkshire) and camping (East Anglia) for instance. She does more or less

ignore horse racing and pugilism. In fact the one sport (or should that be

‘sport’?) that is considered in detail is bull baiting, of which more anon.

Griffin questions the idea that industrialization and urbanization

destroyed a pre-industrial popular culture, including recreation. The

story was much more complicated. In the period examined, the

Restoration to the eve of the Victorian period (the ‘long’ eighteenth

century, as she puts it), industrialization barely touched many parts of the

country. Economic change was important but the effects varied from

place to place. One might observe, however, that she has chosen her

examples carefully. Horse racing and prize fighting, which she does not

consider, and indeed cricket which she does, depended heavily on

commerce, professionalism and gambling. Yet she pays little attention

to these influences. Griffin also eschews the usual emphasis on social class

as an explanatory factor in sporting history. Many sports had support

across social barriers: pugilism, cricket, cock fighting and the various

Sport in History 125

forms of animal baiting. Griffin pays most attention to the use of space:

village greens, heaths and commons in a rural setting, market squares or

simply the street in urban environments. Space is her analytical frame-

work, so she is more concerned with where games were played than how

they were played. In turn she considers recreation in villages, market

towns and industrial towns.

The use of this social space, she argues, for play was customary and

popular in the sense of being plebeian, but was very often sanctioned by

the ruling elites. Thus the market squares, in whole or part, were set aside

for popular pastimes. And one of these was bull baiting, for which

designated bull rings were maintained. This was a routine practice, at least

in urban settings. Dogs were set upon a tethered bull in turn and tested

for their strength; the ‘sport’ was a contest between the dogs that might

suffer injury or even death from the tormented bull. The supposed

purpose was to improve the meat from the animal that was later

slaughtered. Indeed it was a requirement that this be done; butchers were

subject to fines for selling meat from an animal that had not been baited.

However, this law fell into disuse early in the eighteenth century; the sport

did not.

By the end of the century, though, it had faded in popular interest

almost everywhere but the West Midlands, especially the Black Country.

Local newspapers began to write about it in a critical manner. But in the

Midlands various attempts to suppress the sport failed. Working people

had established their own traditions and were determined to keep them.

Legislation to put a stop to baiting in the 1830s was really, Griffin

suggests, a national measure to deal with a local problem. Quite why the

people of the West Midlands should retain this interest is unclear. Griffin

suggests (I am bound to say not altogether convincingly) that it was to do

with the mode of work. In the West Midlands work most industrial

working men were individual craftsmen. In West Yorkshire, by contrast,

the textile factories were machine-based and the workers were attracted to

more athletic contests.

There were certainly local and regional variations and Griffin is

reluctant to come to any great or single conclusion because of that.

There were some things in common. Annual holidays � ‘wakes’ or

‘feasts’ � and celebrations, most famously Shrove Tuesday or Guy Fawkes

Day, were times for play. But what was played varied. Why some games

prospered and some declined is not easy to explain. Camping in East

Anglia disappeared at the turn of the nineteenth century but it is unclear

why. Land enclosure had a profound effect on rural space and often

destroyed commons including village greens or ‘camping closes’ for play

126 Book Reviews

but cricket, requiring much larger space, prospered. And elsewhere

football carried on in urban areas with agreed local rules, but no national

rules. This lends weight, it seems to me, to the views of Goulstone and

Harvey on the continuity of working-class football in the early nineteenth

century.1 Restrictions were tightened in the eighteenth century, not

because of the game itself but because it was played in the street, and

damage and unruly behaviour resulted. Likewise bonfires on Guy Fawkes

Day came to be discouraged because of associated lawlessness. But Griffin

shows that such customs persisted or were adapted in the face of official

restriction. Far from reducing popular sports urban areas provided a

fruitful environment for traditional games and recreation.

There is little known about popular football or stool ball because they

were played by the unlettered. Cricket was much more likely to have been

played by the social elites and be better recorded. Griffin has gone to great

pains to examine local sources to try to overcome these difficulties.

Official reports, examining conditions in industrial towns, probably

overstated the restrictions on space to play. People found the space, the

constraint was time. There were huge local variations but some customs

remained strong, adapting to the tide of industrial change.

ROGER MUNTING # 2011

University of East Anglia

roger@munting.demon.co.uk

Note

1. John Goulstone, Football’s Secret History (Upminister: 3�2 Books, 2001); Adrian

Harvey, Football: The First Hundred Years (London: Routledge, 2005).

Donna Landry, Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English

Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Pp. 240.

£27.00 (hb). ISBN 0-8018-9028-4.

In the century from 1650 over 200 horses were imported into Britain from

the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary States of North Africa. Donna

Landry, professor of English at the University of Kent, argues that these

eastern imports, conventionally referred to as Arabian, radically changed

Britain’s equestrian culture. Her writing is erudite, scholarly almost to the

point of antiquarianism, fluent but sometimes complex. The book was

not designed for readers of this journal, though three strands of her basic

Sport in History 127

argument relevant to sports historians can be discerned: eastern horses

affected breeding concepts, training methods and riding styles which, in

turn, influenced the development of equestrian leisure pursuits such as

racing and hunting.

British breeders took the foreign animal with its pace, appropriated it as

English and used it to develop the thoroughbred. In this they were

following the tenets of agricultural improvement but also pursuing

miscegenation, something less tolerated in society than in the stud, where

race mixing occurred for the sake of English bloodstock.

Allegedly the Arabian horse also brought intelligence with its speed.

This was seen in its interaction with its riders and grooms, but it may have

been less inherent and more due to training and treatment. When dealing

with this aspect Landry delves into the philosophy of the nature of

enquiry about animals, querying whether humans really know what is

best for them and asking whether the relationship between horse and man

is essentially one of inequality in which the latter dominates and exploits

the former. Historically her study contrasts the early harsh English

training methods with the gentler ones of the Turks. She then shows how

the English took on eastern attitudes, generally treated the horse with less

brutality, and developed the ‘silken thread’ means of control. The

increased speed that the Arab horse brought to the English thoroughbred

led to a style of riding suitable for taking obstacles at pace in the hunting

field, which became part of Britain’s equestrian cultural baggage. Rising in

the trot and lifting and working the horse along in the gallop with the

reins became synonymous with English horsemanship.

Although Landry makes great play with the racial aspect of foreign

horses interbreeding with British ones, there was also a gender side

concerning both horse and rider. It has been the Arab stallion that has

taken the credit in thoroughbred development: this, of course, is no

different from the anonymity of the mare in any studbook analysis before

the emergence of genetic theory. The Arab horse was smaller than the

thoroughbred which it helped develop and was unable to carry heavy

riders any distance at more than moderate pace. Hence it was generally

more suited to the female jockey and over time, as riding for women

became socially acceptable, this became its major role.

Where Landry excels is in conveying to her readers the significance of the

horse in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century society. It was economically

central as the basis of locomotion and the source of agricultural power; as

property it reflected status and conspicuous consumption; and socially it

provided a link between classes in which the low-born groom could be

128 Book Reviews

admired for his skill by the aristocratic owner. Yet, as she points out,

equestrian culture exceeded the requirements of economic necessity.

Horses infiltrated art and literature. Indeed Landry draws on contemporary

paintings, prose and poetry for much of her historical evidence.

The sports historian may accept Landry’s views and arguments, though

they may be less impressed � or perhaps not understand � her research

methodology: not by the range of archives consulted (which was wide)

but by her use of the coded messages of art history and the political

allegory of Jonathan Swift’s writings. Personally I found difficulty in

appreciating why she felt a need to discuss whether the artist George

Stubbs really loved horses when he was prepared to have their throats cut

and bleed them to death while injecting a preservative fluid so that he

might dissect and study them.

WRAY VAMPLEW # 2011

University of Stirling

wray.vamplew@stir.ac.uk

Paul Dimeo, A History of Drug Use in Sport 1876�1976: Beyond Good and

Evil (London: Routledge, 2007). Pp. 153. £27.99 (pb). ISBN 978-0-415-

35772-2.

The blurb on the book-jacket of A History of Drug Use in Sport 1876�1976:

Beyond Good and Evil suggests that it ‘offers a new history of drug use in

sport’ over a hundred-year period. The British Society for Sports History

nominated this work as co-winner of the Aberdare prize in 2008, and so

this review is somewhat overdue in Sport in History. As the subtitle

suggests, the thesis concerning the current moral panic over the ‘evil’ that

has become termed ‘doping’ in sport has been constructed differently over

time and that the nineteenth century saw a period of experimentation and

innovation in pursuit of enhanced athletic performance. Early twentieth-

century examples of open doping, such as Thomas Hicks and Dorando

Pietri, make the point that taking substances of various kinds was not seen

as a sporting crime. Inter-war technological change established exercise

physiologists in new laboratories but an essentially unchanged ethical

attitude linked drugs, science and sport in relatively uncomplicated ways.

Dimeo cites the Second World War as the impetus for greater drug use

and a more widespread moralizing surveillance in response. The book

chapters are split into two parts to emphasize this point, with 1945

marking the conclusion of the first section and the beginning of the

Sport in History 129

second. The argument closes in 1976 with the Montreal Olympics seeing

the introduction of scientific tests for steroids and the attendant effects of

prohibition as the ‘foundations for four decades of anti doping’.

Presumably the author intends to follow up the book under review

with another on this later period.

The Prologue sets the scene, and the argument is wholly convincing.

Dimeo calls for ‘reasonably good historiography’, a critical analysis of

primary sources, interrogation of secondary accounts and the need for

context. In a subject that often generates much heat, the light that the

book seeks to shine on the moralizing agenda of the anti-doping lobby is

valuable. The clarity of expression in what could have become a

succession of acronyms is particularly helpful. What seems clearest is

that sport as somehow good and pure in motive, tainted by the ‘evil’ of

drugs, is a dichotomizing discourse. It depends, of course, on accepting a

prelapsarian history for sport before the temptations of money, fame and

medals meant that the deluded took whatever substance would help them

to win. Here, suggests Dimeo, we have heroes and villains but very human

ones who can be cast and recast over time as tastes and morality change. If

testing in sport has become an ‘unstoppable machine’ so too has the trade

in opinion about what is, and should be acceptable, to enhance

performance ever since John Hoberman’s Mortal Engines: The Science of

Performance and the Dehumanization of Sport (New York: The Free Press,

1992) and Testosterone Dreams (California: University of California Press,

2005). The most recent area of academic concern, as the section on anti-

doping and sport in the first chapter of A History of Drug Use briefly

discusses, are twenty-first-century debates on genetic modification.

Notably, Andy Miah has taken these debates firmly into the twenty-first

century with Genetically Modified Athletes: Biomedical Ethics, Gene Doping

and Sport (London: Routledge, 2004).

Two recent articles on this issue show different approaches to the

ethical dilemmas that genetics might entail. Andy Miah in ‘Towards the

transhuman athletes: Therapy, non therapy and enhancement’ in Bo

Carlsson and Kutte Jonsson’s Directions in Contemporary and Future Sport,

a special edition of Sport in Society (13, no. 2 [March 2010]: 221�33),

argues that in 2002 the Education and Ethics Committee of the World

Anti Doping Agency (WADA) code set out to distinguish between

methods of doping that enhance performance and those that are banned

for moral, social or legal reasons. The committee ruled that only the

former should concern WADA. The ethical distinction between enhance-

ment and non-enhancement continues to challenge academics in this

130 Book Reviews

area, with the widely used ‘therapeutic use exemption’ (TUE) invoked by

athletes. Miah suggests that genetic modification has renewed debate

about what constitutes therapy and non-therapy in sport. Miah takes the

view in this article that genetic modification should be legalized but drug

use should continue to be prohibited. Relating genetic modification to

children, Mike McNamee’s ‘Beyond Consent? Paternalism and Pediatric

Doping’ in the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport (36, no. 2 [2009]: 111�26), argues that the key issues are regarding the vulnerability and

exploitation of young people. His concern is that paediatric doping is

not mentioned by WADA or the International Federation of Sport

Medicine (FIMS). In McNamee’s view, genetic modification is supported

by a quasi-medical lobby that wants to advance technology and use sport

as part of this agenda. The debate certainly raises controversial questions

about the technology we use more generally and what it is to be human. It

does, however, incorporate a lot of ‘ifs’, ‘buts’ and ‘maybes’. While Dimeo

has recently collaborated with McNamee on public-health issues and

doping, it is possible to see why he felt that he wanted to base the work

under review on empirical source material to unpick existing conven-

tional orthodoxies.

That I found the book too short is therefore, for the most part,

intended as a compliment. My relatively slight reservations relate to the

time period and to the brevity of treatment of some issues, for example,

the complex amalgam of what Tommy Simpson has come to mean.

On the first point, the Victorian drug culture is less well documented here

than the twentieth century. Dimeo begins this section with a revision of

John Hoberman’s thesis that drugs, not enhanced sport performance, was

the concern of nineteenth-century scientific interest. With reference to

alcohol use, coca and kola tonic drinks, oxygen, cocaine and strychnine,

he shows that some athletes were willing to use stimulants for competitive

advantage, real or imagined. I learned a lot about these substances;

however, 42 years are condensed to 15 pages. Having read David Day’s

2008 PhD, ‘From Barclay to Brickett: Coaching Practices and Coaching

Lives in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century England’, and, in

particular, the wealth of contemporary material on which he has drawn,

I think Dimeo’s conclusion that there is no evidence of widespread drug

use in Victorian sport could be revised. Some of the coaching ‘professors’

wrote manuals in which they promoted purging, various dietetic aids and

substance-taking as part of their supposedly unique regime. An intriguing

question, as Dimeo points out, is how many people followed this advice,

and we know very little about the wider influences of these endorsed

Sport in History 131

practices. We do know, though, that there were at least some entrepre-

neurial individuals who set themselves up as experts and sporting role

models who were, by the advice of their own booklets, known to take

what they thought were aids to performance.

There are seven references to Tommy Simpson in the book, most

notably on page 61 where he is described as having ‘a reputation for drug

taking and for trying to find any sort of enhancement that would help

him achieve success’; his death ‘was obviously a tragic combination of

drugs and the extreme pressures of the Tour’ and that ‘many fans of the

sport regard him as a hero not as a dope villain or a cheat’. While later

references develop the complexities of the case, in particular the shock of

English riders who found drug-taking widespread when on the Tour and

the pressure Simpson felt under when he initially could not stay with the

leaders as a ‘clean’ athlete, the main source seems to be William

Fotheringham’s, Put me Back on my Bike: In sarch of Tom Simpson

(London: Yellow Jersey Press, 2003). Fotheringham’s is a thoughtful,

sensitive book and to some extent deals with memory. However, there are

also others, including Simpson’s autobiography Cycling is My Life

(first edition, Stanley Paul, 1966, reprinted, Yellow Jersey Press, 2009).

Regardless of a not insubstantial secondary academic literature, the death

also made front-page news in the British press. It is easy, of course, in

reviewing any monograph to say that more work should have been done

and I do not want to labour a point overmuch in reviewing a widely-

admired book; however, what Tommy Simpson meant to boyhood cycling

fans unaware of his drug-taking, quite why he has been the subject of

more than one biography and what he means now, compared with (say)

Marco Pantani, could have been an interesting part of Dimeo’s discussion.

Some drug-takers are heroes, some are villains, some are both. Perhaps

because so much has been written and recorded, this wider literature and

filmography is somewhat assumed.

A History of Drug Use is an important follow-up to Dimeo’s previous

edited collection Drugs, Alcohol and Sport (Routledge, 2006) and both

will become standard texts as attention on the many issues around forms

of abuse in sport, drugs being one of them, is likely to intensify in the

approach to London 2012. One of the strengths is the focus on IOC

policy more widely for scientists, the medical establishment, academics

and the public in establishing a pseudo-religious rhetoric around anti-

doping. The less well-known story of British influence in the persons of

Professor Arnold Beckett, John Williams, Arthur Gold and Arthur Porritt

is a particularly noteworthy strand in this regard. The view that the

history of sport is best understood in a linear way or that the values of

132 Book Reviews

sport are to be valued on their own terms are questioned by the brief

opportunity to legitimize amphetamines until the late 1950s and 1960s,

for example. The methodological questions around textuality, discourse

and representations are all the more pertinent because the controversial

nature of the topic makes finding hard evidence difficult and such

substantiation as exists is open to considerable interpretation. Where this

leaves us is raised by the concluding questions of the work: ‘Is it possible

to have a new set of ethics once we accept that sport has been changed by

science and the cult of victory?’

JEAN WILLIAMS # 2011

De Montfort University

jwilliam@dmu.ac.uk

Sport in History 133