Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- A guide to prices, 1870–1914
- Part I An overview
- Part II The development of professional gate-money sport
- 3 Popular recreation before the Industrial Revolution
- 4 Sporting activities and economic change, 1750-1830
- 5 The precursors of commercialised sport, 1830–75
- 6 The rise of professional gate-money sport, 1875–1914
- 7 From sports spectator to sports consumer
- Part III Sport in the market place: the economics of professional sport
- Part IV Playing for pay: professional sport as an occupation
- Part V Unsporting behaviour
- Part VI A second overview
- Appendices
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - The precursors of commercialised sport, 1830–75
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- A guide to prices, 1870–1914
- Part I An overview
- Part II The development of professional gate-money sport
- 3 Popular recreation before the Industrial Revolution
- 4 Sporting activities and economic change, 1750-1830
- 5 The precursors of commercialised sport, 1830–75
- 6 The rise of professional gate-money sport, 1875–1914
- 7 From sports spectator to sports consumer
- Part III Sport in the market place: the economics of professional sport
- Part IV Playing for pay: professional sport as an occupation
- Part V Unsporting behaviour
- Part VI A second overview
- Appendices
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the quarter century from 1830 the sports scenario began to change significantly. On the one hand, a shift in the locus of political power led to the national outlawing of brutal animal sports and a clampdown by many local authorities on football, pugilism and other traditional and violent sports. On the other hand, the spread of the railways and a rise in working-class spending power pointed the way to future developments.
The increased political strength of the middle-class reformers enabled them to influence legislation against traditional recreations. The Highways Act of 1835 illegalised street football; a series of Acts outlawing brutal sports culminated in the abolition of public cock-fighting in 1849; and four years later betting shops were also placed beyond the legal pale. At a narrower geographical level, municipal authorities increasingly legislated to control those popular recreations which were deemed unsuitable to a modern urban environment, its property and its commerce. Over time the threshold of what would be tolerated was progressively raised, and what was accepted was more closely supervised and regulated.
Nevertheless making laws was one thing; enforcing them quite another. Neither parliamentarians nor aldermen bore the brunt of implementation. That task lay with local control agents - the police - who in many areas were a relatively new institution. Their intervention into working-class leisure was clearly resented by men and women who felt humiliated by the ‘move-on’ system which hit at the traditional freedom of assembly in the streets.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Pay Up and Play the GameProfessional Sport in Britain, 1875–1914, pp. 44 - 50Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1988