Publisher's Synopsis
Modern sports and games are widely regarded as Britain's gift to the world. In the late 19th century British expatriate businessmen, railway builders and construction workers spread football through continental Europe and the Americas, and British Army garrisons introduced cricket and football wherever the map was pink. In this book, Tony Money shows how the roots of this export of team games lie both in the stable political and economic circumstances that prevailed in Britain in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and, more particularly, in the enthusiasms of boys at English public boarding schools.;By the end of the 18th century political revolution, religious zeal, and economic and social changes had all but extinguished football and many other games in Western Europe. Britain, however, escaped political upheaval, and upper-class field sports and cricket flourished. At the same time improved road travel persuaded the upper classes to send their sons as fee-paying boarders to a handful of old grammar schools. In their ample leisure time these public schoolboys organized and played cricket, football and fives and rowed. They also petitioned their headmasters, at first unsuccessfully, for school matches. They were soon joined by a great new wave of early Victorian public schoolboys who inherited and spread the tradition of games and school matches. Later at university and in the wider world they spread the cult of games, and when the Factory Acts gave the working class Saturday leisure, football, which had fallen victim to demographic changes, once again became the working-class game.
