Ninth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

Through extensive press coverage, as well as a spate of memoirs and novels, the British public was fed an on-going diet of war stories and reportage in which athletic endeavour and organised games featured prominently. This contemporary literary material sheds light on the role sport was perceived to have played in the lives and work of the military personnel deployed in South Africa. It also, however, reveals a growing unease over the importance attached to the cult of athleticism in late Victorian and early Edwardian society. Early reverses against the Boers gave cause for both military professionals and the wider public to reassess the validity of the games culture that underpinned the amateur-military tradition and lay at the heart of the British perception of itself as a “sporting” nation.