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To play or to pray?
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To play or to pray? The YMCA question in the United Kingdom and the United States, 1850-1900, William J Baker, International Journal of the the History of Sport, No 1, 1994, pp 42-62
Baker describes the origins of the YMCA. Draper, George Williams, began meeting regularly with colleagues for Bible study and founded the Drapers' Evangelical Association. For three years they functioned without formal organisation but in early June 1884 became the YMCA.
In the words of the minutes of the meeting their purpose was to encourage Christian men "to a sense of their obligation and responsibility as Christians in diffusing religious knowledge to those around them either through the medium of prayer meetings or any other meetings they think proper"
"In 1845 the first annual report of the London YMCA beckoned young men 'to the library of useful knowledge, rather than to cards and billiards, the cigar divan and the concert room, the theatre and this seducing and polluting retreat'". (Page 43)
WE Skipton, confronted with the possibility of chess room at the Leamington YMCA, commented in 1862, "I do not think it is part of the association's work to provide any man with amusements". (Page 44) Baker comments: "This negative attitude, common among the English founders of the YMCA, derived in part from a native Puritan tradition". (Page 44)
As the YMCA developed in the USA, a different view of sport emerged. In 1860 leaders of more than 200 North American YMCAs unanimously agreed on the "importance and necessity of a place of rational and innocent amusement and recreation for young men especially in large cities and towns". (Page 46). By 1865 no YMCA in US had a gym. By 1890 there were 400.
Robert McBurney maneuvered change in the constitution of the New York YMCA making it the first association in the world to specify "physical" as one of the fundamental goals of self-improvement. The gym was regularly filled to overflowing and by 1876 gym attendance averaged 300 men daily. (Page 47)
However, even in USA, some YMCA leaders "feared that the gymnasium was secularizing the association rather than the association Christianising the gym". Robert Roberts presented himself as "a Christian who directed physical activities, not a physical director who happen to be a Christian (or worse still a non-Christian)". (Page 50)
However the gyms were clearly seen as having only extrinsic value: "Before young men could be won to Christianity, however, they had to be enticed into the YMCA itself and for some YMCA men that was reason enough to build, equip and supervise gymnasiums". (Page 50).
"In 1880 most YMCA men agreed with Luther Gullick, who reminded them that the gymnasium should always be a means to the end 'of leading men to Christ', but then everything was a means to that end for evangelicals." (Page 51)
"The official historian of the YMCA exaggerated in his suggestion that Gullick 'found the YMCA doing calisthenics and left it on the basketball court and playing field' but not by much". (Page 53)
"For quite different reasons, the British YMCA also took half-heartedly to sport. Not one of the founders of the YMCA went to a British 'public school', where sports were becoming the rage in the middle years of the nineteenth century. George Williams, George Hitchcock, W.E. Shipton and their friends were all pious businessmen, not athletes. As youths, they had no opportunity to play organized games; as serious, money-making, God-fearing adults, they had no inclination to watch the many rowing, cricket, rugby and soccer matches that their less earnest contemporaries enjoyed". (Page 57)
In 1871 Dover YMCA was informed that they should stick to the basics of prayer meetings, Bible study and evangelistic activities. Physical exercise programmes "should not be looked for in connection with the arrangements for the YMCA". (Page 57 Source Binfield G Williams Page 289)
As one might expect, the great English popularizer of Muscular Christianity, Thomas Hughes, abhorred the YMCA's 'narrow groove' of spiritual, religious emphases that failed to touch the English working class'. Hughes pined for 'a revival of the muscular Christianity of twenty-five years ago', which probably meant more Christianity and less muscularity. Athleticism was still a good thing if kept in its place, he concluded in 1880, 'but it has come to be very much over-praised and overvalued amongst us'". (Page 57, source Thomas Hughes Memoir of a brother, Page 18 and The Manliness of Christ, 20-21)
"In populous Manchester, a new YMCA building opened in 1876 with a well-equipped gymnasium that attracted 600 new members in the first year. The Manchester Y sponsored cricket, swimming and walking clubs for 'vigorous, recreative exercises' to complement religious activities." (Page 58)
Liverpool YMCA renovated a gym in 1882, hired an athletic director and sponsored numerous indoor and outdoor athletic events. (Page 58 Source The Watchman 1 April 1878 and 7 May 1891. See Binfield 291, 305-6, 297, 379)
American YMCA leaders, by now having come to terms with athleticism, were simply appalled. They believed, as one put it in a report to a physical education journal, 'that a portion of the (London] Committee do not and never have looked with favor upon the physical department, and tolerated it only as a necessary evil, or as a kind of sop to public opinion in general and young men in particular". (Page 58 Source Binfield P305)
"The Reading Y operated by strict evangelical principles: all religious piety, no fun and games." (Page 58)
The Reading Y closed Its doors in I903, partly because of its unwillingness to offer the kind of recreational and physical activities that appealed to youths.'' (Page 58 Source Stephen Yeo, Religion and voluntary organizations in crisis Crook Helm, London 1976, 204-5)
The gods of sport took revenge on George Williams, it seems. When Williams died in I905 , several commemorative speeches and gospel hymns rattled off the walls of a YMCA gymnasium at Weston-super-Mare; on the next Saturday, the Preston YMCA soccer team wore black armbands in his honour. (Page 59 Source Binfield 297, 379)
"William Creese wrote to a friend in 1909 that he was utterly saddened by the developments in the YMCA. Billiards, bagatelles, card-games and ping-pong tables, not to mention cricket, football and cycling clubs what wa the world coming to? 'It was born of the spirit', lamented Creese, 'and now it appears to be yielding to the flesh'". (Page 59 Source Binfield 299)