A month in the life of a sports historian

When I meet new people and they ask what I do for a living, the reply ‘I’m a sports historian’ usually elicits one of two responses, even when I qualify the title by explaining that I’m a university lecturer. Some people look askance, wondering how on earth what sounds like a trivial subject gets taught at universities. Others are envious, and say that it sounds like the best job in the world, and then expect me to reel off all the winners of the Grand National in sequence, or ask me to recite the batting averages of post-war British test cricketers. The truth – as every liberal historian will tell you – is somewhere between the two. Yes, it’s interesting; yes, sports history does deserve to get taught; and no, I’m afraid I’d have to look that stuff up. However, I thought I’d devote for this month’s entry to the ‘log’ element of weblog, and provide an overview of what I’ve been up to.

My teaching and marking finished in June, and July started with a PhD examination. I was external examiner on a PhD thesis on the history of sports coaching. The project was outstanding, and the viva – the oral exam by which the student convinces the examiners that the work is original and that he’s got more to offer – was a pleasure. The sign of a good PhD is when the examiners learn something new from it, when the student has gone beyond any published literature and offered up something that makes us want to ask loads of new questions. In this case, the project touched on such diverse areas as local and community history, occupational cultures, scientific and medical knowledge, and the professional/amateur debate; and the student even demonstrated the trudgeon, a now disused swimming stroke. Here was cutting edge sports history, where the established academics – the supervisors, the other examiners, and me – were able to bring on new talent and help in its development.

I’ve had two conferences in July. First up was the Centre for Contemporary British History’s annual conference in London, which this year was dedicated to the Olympic Games. Using this year’s centenary of London’s first Olympic Games as the peg, the conference looked at 1908, 1948, and plans for 2012 from many different angles. I gave a paper on the 1908 Olympic Marathon route from Windsor Castle to White City, part of my work in progress on British Olympic history. I looked at the notion of ‘associative significance’, and how contextual historical research can help us to understand the extraordinary things that have happened in ordinary places. The conference brought together academic and non-academic historians, professional authors, planners, journalists, and politicians, and proved a great focus for thinking about how history can inform our understanding of the present and thus our decisions about the future. History and Policy’s sponsorship of the round table session underlined these links. My second conference couldn’t have been more different. In The Loop: knitting past, present and future at the University of Southampton’s Winchester School of Art (WSA) was held to launch the WSA Library’s Knitting Reference Collection. It brought together academics from many different fields, along with knitters, collectors, librarians, and archivists. I gave a paper on knitting patterns as historical documents, using the Reference Collection’s numerous patterns for sports clothing as my sample. Sweaters for cricket, tennis, and golf; swimming costumes; scarves and hats in club colours: these sources provide a wonderful snapshot of everyday life from the past. I’ll write about them in more detail later this year. Although the conference had a different focus from the Olympic one, with sport as a tiny theme, it brought up some similar themes about how the past and its artefacts need to be collected and conserved for historical research.

My third big commitment brought everything home. My family and I went to Much Wenlock in Shropshire to watch the Olympian Games. Never mind Beijing: here was a historical event that, through revival and a degree of reinvention, continues to fulfil its founder’s aim of giving a wide-ranging sporting experience to the people of the region. We watched athletics, archery, five-a-side football, and tennis. There was nothing phoney or faux about it: here was a community sports event that attracted people from across the Midlands (clubs represented in the athletics, for example, included Birchfield Harriers and Coventry Godiva) exactly as the original, pre-Coubertin series of Olympian Games had from the 1850s. The veteran bicycle event was the only thing that was overtly historical. Here was living history, a sports event that maintained a link with the past without attempting to weigh it down with the baggage of too much heritage.

These are the highlights. I did a range of other things involving sports history during the month, including some writing, and some discussions about future projects. I also went to my students’ graduation, and saw the fruits of the teaching coming to bear. Sports history, like any kind of history, is about this constant interplay between what happened then, what’s happening now, and what might happen next; and what I did in July showed this relationship up in all sorts of ways.

Comments

[chelsea football club]

sports historians are cool