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Robert Colls
This Sporting Life: Sport and Liberty in
England, 1760-1960.
Oxford University Press, 416 pages, $32.95
On the first page of his absorbing, original, and entertaining account of the place of sport in England between 1760 and i960, This Sporting Life, Professor Robert Colls writes that one of the aims of his book is to dwell upon what another English academic, Ross McKibbin, meant when he called sport "one of the most powerful of England's civil cultures." McKibbin was right, not least because sport cuts across England's noted-or, to some, notorious - class system in a way that other civil cultures (which find themselves deemed either excessively proletarian or elitist) do not.
That does not mean, as Colls points out, that there are not sports, or aspects of sport, that find themselves rooted in class. For example, it was the landowning, or old upper, class who controlled (and insofar as a version of it still exists, continues to control) foxhunting; the middle class tagged along and often did not pay their subscriptions or other fees; and the working men of a foxhunting district (Colls concentrates on the center of the English sport, Leicestershire, in which happily his university also exists) came too, as foot followers. This is sport as an example of social unification; it is outside the timescale of Colls's book to dwell on why this particular sport, foxhunting, was banned-up to a point-by the Blair administration in 2003. It had nothing to do with one class's resentment of another-all those braying toffs on their fine horses, sailing over hedgerows in the English midlands while pursuing "Charlie" and, in some cases, seeing him ripped to shreds by a pack of hounds. It was that urban dwellers, who now form the great majority of the English population and have less idea of the ecology of the countryside than most people do about brain surgery, allowed themselves to be manipulated by a tiny group of fanatics -mostly hard leftists-into believing that the instantaneous killing of vermin was some sort of affront to civilization.
Colls's other aim, which he achieves as completely as he does the first, is "to try and say something about England's sporting life as it was lived and played." This takes us...