“Knowing Christ is the best thing that has ever happened to me, although winning the US Open was a pretty good second.”
Cricket and the Victorians
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Keith Sandiford, Routledge, 1994
The book consists of nine chapters, one of which is called the Impact of muscular Christianity, pages 34 to 53. This review is of that chapter, not the entire book.
In the second-half of the 19th century working hours reduced and a more positive attitude towards exercise developed, with the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle being seen to be dangerous to health. Queen Victoria is said to have liked cricket. Sandiford writes that the clergy resigned themselves to this sporting mania and tried to put it to constructive use. Victorian churches came to accept play alongside work – Sandiford adds “even non-conformists”.
Sport became popular in schools both as an instrument of discipline of the rebellious and also for building adolescent character with the result that “godliness and manliness, spiritual perfection and physical power became inextricably interwoven”.
Reference is made to Thomas Waugh’s “the cricket field of a Christian life” as an example of how cricket, morality and religion had become intermixed. Sandiford notes with bemusement the Waugh chose to write about cricket rather than soccer and that the Christians were the batsmen not bowlers!
The article notes the number of clergy who were involved in cricket as players or administrators and how clergy, serving as headmasters give impetus to cricket in schools to the extent that “Victorian public schools made cricket something of a cult”. The author suggests that it is difficult to exaggerate the importance of cricket in the development of Victorian public schools. One explanation of this was the belief that cricket encouraged the development of spiritual qualities.
The article states: “soccer was very much the product of muscular Christianity in the public schools after 1850.. Yet, paradoxically, the muscular Christians adopted cricket as their special game and bestowed upon it as sanctity that no other sport can come close to matching”.
There's a reference to a sermon by the Rev G J Chester preached in 1859 which saw cricket promoting purity of life as well as a healthy body. The Bishop of Hereford in 1915 referred to cricket as the “English game least spoiled by any form of vice”.