Baron de Coubertin
CHARLES KINGSLEY (1819–75)
Charles Kingsley is best remembered for his novel The Water Babies, a moral tale, but he was strongly associated with the promotion of sport and in 1788 formed the ‘Committee for the Propagation of Physical Exercise in Education’ with himself as its secretary. He had some very strange views on improvements in sanitation and other public health measures which, he feared, would preserve unworthy specimens and lead to the degeneration of the race. He believed that vigorous exercise would ‘check the process of degradation which I believe to be going on’.
In 1875, aged 12, de Coubertin read in a children’s magazine, Journal de la Jeunesse, a story called ‘Aventures de Tom Brown à Rugby’, extracted from Thomas Hughes’s book Tom Brown’s Schooldays. In 1883, now aged 20, de Coubertin made the first of a series of annual visits to England and by 1888 had visited ten public schools, Oxford and Cambridge universities, Henley Royal Regatta and Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel. He was impressed by the central role assigned to sports such as football, rugby, cricket and rowing. In that year he wrote of English education: ‘The architecture of their Public Schools is Gothic. Their teaching is somewhat Gothic too but their education is not so at all.’ He added, ‘Two things dominate in the English system: freedom and sport... hand to hand fighting and punches, especially punches, are not without a certain usefulness in high schools. The English call boxing gloves “the keepers of the peace”.’ He referred to ‘la poussiere Olympique’ (Olympic dust) in English education. This flattering view of English education was to bear fruit in the Modern Olympics, but first de Coubertin had to meet Dr William Penny Brookes.
TOYNBEE HALL
Toynbee Hall, in Whitechapel, was established in 1884 by the Rev. Samuel Barnett and his wife, Henrietta, both from prosperous backgrounds, to improve the lives of residents of one of London’s most impoverished areas, where Jack the Ripper would shortly find his victims. Evening classes, games and food were supplied to those who attended, the early staff including volunteers such as Clement Attlee, the future Prime Minister, whose pragmatic socialism was strongly influenced by his experiences at Toynbee Hall.
The Baron and the Doctor
‘The vast Gothic chapel’
Pierre de Coubertin visited many English public schools but, influenced no doubt by his early reading of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, he was most impressed by Rugby School. Following his visit he wrote a book called L’Education en Angleterre in which he wrote that ‘organised sport can create moral and social strength’. The hero of the book is Dr Thomas Arnold of Rugby. De Coubertin believed that Arnold, headmaster of Rugby from 1828 to 1842, had promoted the cult of sport within English public schools which underpinned the creation of the British Empire. He visited Rugby on several occasions and wrote that Arnold ‘would not have been an Englishman had he not loved sport’ and that he had given ‘the precise formula for the role of athletics in education. The cause was swiftly won. Playing fields sprang up all over England.’ Thanks to Arnold, de Coubertin believed, sport had shaped England’s ascendancy. He recorded his experience at Arnold’s tomb in Rugby School chapel, writing: ‘How often, at dusk, in the vast Gothic chapel at Rugby, with my eyes fixed on the funeral slab inscribed simply with the name of Thomas Arnold, have I thought to myself that here was the cornerstone of the British Empire?’ In contrast, he wrote, in France ‘physical inertia was until recently considered an indispensable assistant to the perfecting of intellectual powers.’
Dr Thomas Arnold
But de Coubertin was mistaken about Dr Thomas Arnold’s attitude towards sports. Tom Brown’s Schooldays which had influenced him so much gives an account of life at Rugby during the last years of Arnold’s headship when Hughes was a pupil at the school. It contains a fine account of sporting activities, notably a cricket match, and does give the impression that sport was a major feature of the school’s life at the time. Thomas Arnold, however, had little interest in sport. He stated that he wanted to create pupils who were Christians, gentlemen and scholars, especially classical scholars, in that order of importance.
A CLASSICAL EDUCATION
The values of classical civilization were deeply ingrained in English society in the 19th century, not just in the public schools and universities. The Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace included pictures of ‘Victor entering the temple of Zeus’ and ‘Start of the Running Race’. The Spectator wrote of the exhibition as ‘This Olympic Games of Industry’ and early football leagues were given Greek names like the Athenian, Corinthian and Isthmian leagues. The Corinthian Casuals football team was so devoted to the supposed Greek virtue of the gentleman amateur that their players refused to take penalties.
Dr Arnold didn’t mention sport in his writings. A historian of the school later wrote that Arnold’s interest in sport was confined to the fact that ‘he sometimes stood on the touchline and looked pleased.’ Despite his misconceptions about Thomas Arnold and the contributions of others to the Olympic movement, Pierre de Coubertin is rightly regarded as the moving spirit behind the revival of the games. He died in September 1937 while walking across a Lausanne park close to his home, rather hard up and resentful at what he regarded as the lack of recognition he had received in his native France. Following his death his heart was buried at Olympia on 26 March 1938 in the presence of Crown Prince Paul of Greece. He is commemorated by many statues including one at the headquarters of the IOC in Lausanne, Switzerland, and in 1976 he had a distant planet named after him by a Russian astronomer.
WILLIAM WEBB ELLIS
A plaque at Rugby School commemorates ‘the exploit of William Webb Ellis who, with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran with it, thus originating the distinctive feature of the Rugby game, AD 1823’. De Coubertin would certainly have known of this claim (rugby was played in France from the 1870s having been introduced to the country by British railway engineers) but there are some serious doubts about whether Webb Ellis ever did any such thing.
The Chelsea Olympics
The ‘Baron’