I’ve always loved using newspapers for primary research. It’s true that some sports historians over-rely on them, and ignore other types of evidence. It’s also true that we sometimes don’t make as much effort to find out about a historical paper’s affiliations – political and economic – as we do with contemporary papers. This is particularly true of the local press, where we are often just so glad to have some evidence that we sometimes forget to ask some basic contextual questions. However, there’s no denying the allure of fading newsprint and their stories of old sport.

My research has been taking me into old papers a lot recently. I’m working on a history of the Olympic Games in Britain, and of the various events that were called ‘Olympic’ – or variants such as Olympian and Olympick – that took place before the International Olympic Committee established itself in 1894. Newspapers are crucial here, especially local newspapers for the various places that hosted these events, such as Liverpool, Much Wenlock, and Morpeth. While some papers are now available online in full texts pdfs back to the late eighteenth century, many remain accessible only in hard copy or microfilm in local libraries or at Colindale in the British Library’s Newspaper Library.

I spent quite a bit of time at Colindale when I was doing my PhD in the late 1980s, and going back there recently was a real pleasure. The place has hardly changed: institutional art deco architecture, airless and lightless microfilm rooms that leave me feeling like a nocturnal creature, and 1930s reading desks with their frames for holding the bound volumes. The real joy is in handling the newspapers in hard copy, not on microfilm, and turning the pages much as the original audiences would have done. The local slants on sporting events are always good value: the Hampshire newspaper that reported on the 1948 Olympic torch relay with a focus on a runner from Eastleigh, for example, or the Northumberland newspaper of the same year that compares – favourably, it must be said – the attendance at the wrestling at the Morpeth Olympic Games with the crowds in London for same sport in the Olympic Games. The heartbreaking way in which the pages flake in every reader’s hands as they are turned convinces us all that digitisation is the answer, but something will be lost when the switch happens and Colindale closes.

I’ve been using newspapers in teaching this week, too, and it’s been good to see students getting used to the conventions of the press from the last two centuries. They were particularly struck by the way in which more attention was paid in late eighteenth century cricket reports to gambling than to who the players were, and by the huge sums of money involved – like the 1000 guineas in a 1799 match between Surrey and eleven of England. They were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of detail in late Victorian local newspapers, with their news of athletics and swimming clubs’ annual events running into columns of close-set broadsheet pages. And they were drawn – as so many sports historians are – to looking at the football scores and league tables to laugh at how the mighty have fallen or how the minnows have arisen. A 1989 newspaper, for example, which showed Chelsea in the Second Division, and Norwich and Millwall in the top five of the League, seemed almost as unbelievable as the eighteenth century cricketers with more money than sense. Elvis Costello may have claimed that ‘yesterday’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper’: but it was a great feeling to pass on a critical respect for the press as a primary source to the next generation.

Comments

[Madelaine Smith]

The detail in old reports reflects the fact that there is no televison footage of what is being reported. Today we have every minute of a game filmed from every possible angle and if we need to know what happened, or how a move was made, it can be watched again. (and again and again!) Newspaper reporting was for a long time the only report and is therefore so transient (is that the right word) and also subjective as it represents one persons position (though as you point out maybe with an unknown political or other prejudice).