Most of my teaching is on sport studies and sports management degree courses. The courses are multidisciplinary, encompassing physiology, psychology, business, management, and pedagogy, as well as my historical and social contributions. All of our students have to go through a rigorous ethics procedure with their dissertation proposals. We need to see that they have thought through such issues as health and safety risks, the protection of vulnerable populations, and the data protection of their information. This is always pretty straightforward in many cases, particularly in sport science: if a student is planning to take blood or urine samples from a subject, or wants to observe PE lessons in a primary school and talk to the children about it, then the ethics issues, and the need for safeguards, are obvious. What is sometimes less obvious is how this all applies to historical research, and it sometimes feels as if history is perceived as a non-contentious subject where research carries no risks or controversy.

To a certain extent, this is true. No sports history student is going to try and take blood samples from athletes who lived a century ago, and as most archival sources that students are likely to use are in the public domain, then there are no data protection issues to worry about. However, to ignore the historians’ ethical obligations is foolish. First off, we have an obligation to be faithful to our sources. I know that such a claim is inviting post-modernist snipers to shoot me down, and I know full well that every historian approaches the sources with a mindset and an ideology, but there is still an ethical duty to deal with what’s there, and not make things up. Second, any oral history (which I’ve written about previously) carries just the same concerns as projects based on contemporary interviews – possibly more, as the oral historian is likely to touch on themes that are sensitive, emotional, and controversial to the interviewee. Historians feel uncomfortable with destroying the evidence, a norm in some sciences, and we also often name our interviewees, which adds to our duty towards them. Finally, some projects require students to get access to private collections of archives through the goodwill of sports bodies and clubs, and this can create ethical tensions between the researcher’s need to be independent and his or her fear of offending the club with any critical discussion of their history.

Two incidents in February also reminded me of how contentious history is – maybe not in the scientific ethics process way, but in ways that touch on people’s hearts and minds. The first came when the newspapers broke a story that all members of the British Olympic team for this summer’s Beijing Olympics were having to sign a contract that forbade them from saying anything critical about the political situation in China. The story was later challenged, but the point was made. Where history came in was how at least one national newspaper carried the Beijing story next to a photograph of the 1938 Germany v England football match in Berlin, with the England team giving the Nazi salute. England’s 6-3 victory in that game (without the need for a penalty shoot-out) was irrelevant; so was the nuanced context of the appeasement period – The Mail on Sunday isn’t too strong on nuance. This was about past examples of British/English sportsmen indulging in shameful political exercises on the instruction of their governing body. The second example also came from football. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the Munich air crash, in which a number of players, officials, and journalists connected to Manchester United were killed and injured. The ways in which this deeply emotional anniversary – particularly for the victims’ families, and for survivors such as Bobby Charlton – was marked were marked by contention. There was a widespread fear – fortunately unfounded – that opposing fans would not mark the two minutes’ silence at the start of the Manchester derby match near the anniversary. The two teams’ shirt sponsors removed their logos for the game, presumably seeing a mismatch between a dignified memorial of a tragic history and the contemporary expectation that footballers should be moving billboards. Here was a raw history, still full of meaning despite the media’s best efforts, and one that was open to different interpretations, from respect to hostility.

History may never have the same immediate need to ethical management as the sciences: but this doesn’t mean that we don’t have to be careful with it, or that we can approach it thinking it won’t be contentious.