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Tragic Symbiosis: Distinctive ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Visions and Voices

2011; Routledge; Volume: 28; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09523367.2011.546156

1743-9035

J.A. Mangan,

Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes

Abstract On the sacred late-Victorian and Edwardian public school playing field – the sanctus sanctorum – courage, determination and endurance were honed for the battlefield. There was a tragic symbiosis between playing field and battlefield – a distinctly ‘Anglo-Saxon' manifestation. However it is important to recognise that complexity was a feature of the public school embrace of the Games Cult as military preparation. There were disparate constellations, patterns and complexities in the schools and in society, best revealed by examination of hitherto insignificant visions and voices of the time. Consideration of a far wider range of visions and voices is require if the full chorus of the Great War ‘chanteurs and chantrices' is to be heard. Historians have an obligation to consider both the ‘significant' and ‘insignificant' if a more complete record of late-Victorian and Edwardian attitudes to war is to be made. Keywords: militarism; ‘real' manhood; ‘Anglo-Saxon' manliness; hardening; sacrifical subalterns; Darwinian directives; martial spirit; sanctus sanctorum; significant and insignificant Notes 1. Thomson, David Lloyd George. 2. Speech by David Lloyd George in 1914 quoted in Thomson, David Lloyd George. 3. Blanning, The Romantic Revolution. 4. Bowen, The Death of the Heart. 5. Blanning, The Romantic Revolution, 1. 6. Best, ‘Militarism in the Victorian Public School’, 13, 142. Imperial expansion was a major cause of the idiosyncratic militarism in the schools and while there were, of course, a number of reasons for the Great War imperial confrontation was certainly one of them. 7. Ibid. 8. Mangan, Prologue, Militarism, Sport, Europe, 2. 9. Mangan, Prologue, Making European Masculinities, 2. 10. Gilmore, Manhood in the Making. 11. Ibid., Epilogue, 185. 12. Ibid., 185–6. 13. Ibid. 14. The term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is used here as a generic term and refers to England and its imperial expansion which, of course, in its early stages embraced Ireland, Scotland and Wales and in all its stages came to embrace dominion, colony and other territories. 15. See Mangan, ‘Manufactured Masculinity’, passim. 16. See the ‘Series editors' foreword’ to the volumes of ‘Sport in the Global Society’ for details. 17. Mangan, Introduction, A Sport-Loving Society. To say this is not to overlook the impact of other Western modern ‘empires’, especially the United States; see Dyreson et al., ‘Mapping an Empire of American Sport’. In passing it should be noted that this ‘empire’ influence was mostly in Latin America and the Far East. It both complemented the British Empire, and at times confronted it, in its use of sport as a form of cultural imperialism. For the use of sport as a means of British cultural imperialism, see, among other sources, Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism and Mangan, The Cultural Bond, and for the American ‘empire's’ use of sport in this way, see Elias, The Empire Strikes Out. 18. For an overview of the evolution of the system, see Honey, Tom Brown's Universe. 19. Mangan, Militarism, Sport, Europe, 6–7. 20. Mason, The English Gentleman, 170. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Smith, ‘Courage’, in Members One to Another, 85. 24. Charterhouse School Magazine XI, no. 373 (18 Feb. 1921), 172–3. 25. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School, 138. 26. Quoted in Mangan, ‘Social Darwinism’, 72. 27. Ibid. 28. Mangan, ‘Duty unto Death’, 139. 29. Mangan, ‘Muscular, Militaristic and Manly’, 163. 30. Tim Blanning in his The Romantic Revolution, has written informatively of the Continental sacralisation of art in the wake of the French Revolution period, with museums replacing churches as places of awed worship. In the late Victorian and Edwardian periods in the Anglo-Saxon world a strong case could be made for public-school playing fields as places of upper middle class worship with their own sacred places and heretic elements. 31. Quoted in Mangan, ‘Social Darwinism’, 146. 32. Ibid., 147. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Eby, The Road to Armageddon, 99. 36. Newbolt, Poems New and Old, 156. 37. Stephen, The Price of Pity, 232. 38. The author has read closely only a tiny fraction of the available public school magazines (about ten) covering the period 1875 to 1918 and there is clear evidence from them of a mass of verse by masters, boys and old boys. There were some 300 public schools by the end of the Great War. Then there is the verse in the boys’ annuals and similar publications. 39. See Eby, The Road to Armageddon, 98–108. 40. Ibid., 99. 41. Mangan, ‘Duty unto Death’, 131. 42. Stephen, The Price of Pity, 78. 43. Eby, The Road to Armageddon, 102. 44. Ibid., 108. 45. Newbolt, ‘He Fell Among Thieves’, verses 5 and 6, in Poems New and Old, 70. 46. Blanning, The Romantic Revolution, 6. 47. Newbolt, Poems New and Old, 136. 48. Ibid., 213. 49. Newbolt, ‘The Moonrise’, in Poems New and Old, 141. 50. Ibid., 101. 51. Stephen, The Price of Pity, 24. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 24–5. 54. Ibid., 23. 55. Ibid. There is more in like vein. See 23–5. 56. Richards, ‘With Henty to Africa’, 80. 57. Best, quoted in Mangan, ‘Duty Unto Death’, 139. 58. Mangan, ‘Duty Unto Death’, 27–8. 59. Richards, ‘With Henty to Africa’, 80. 60. Quoted in Mangan, ‘Duty Unto Death’, 27–8. 61. Richards, ‘With Henty to Africa’, 83. 62. Richards, Happiest Days, 13. 63. Best, ‘Militarism in the Victorian Public School’, 146. 64. Ibid. 65. Studd, Quaint Rhymes for the Battlefield, 83. 66. Letts, The Spires of Oxford and Other Poems, 16. 67. Letts, Hallow-een and Poems of the War, 20. 68. A. Podmore, ‘Rugger At the Front: Davidson of the Gunner’, The Marlburian 50, no. 747 (March, 1915), 40. The ‘Wiltshire school’ is Marlborough College; ‘the Shop’ is Woolwich Military Academy. 69. Hall, ‘The Cricketers of Flanders’, 286–7. 70. Cameron, ‘Sportsmen in Paradise’, 393. 71. Tynan, ‘Speeding’, in The Holy War, 39. 72. J.H. Hastings, ‘The Schoolboy at War’, The Marlburian 52, no. 776 (July 1917), 108. 73. Stuart, ‘Forgotten Dead I Salute You’, 105. 74. G.A. Studdert-Kennedy, ‘My Peace I Leave You’, quoted in Stephen, The Price of Pity, 145. 75. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School. 76. See Mangan, ‘Imitating their Betters’, 228–61; also Mangan and Hickey, Soccer's Missing Men; Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism and Mangan, ‘Noble Specimens of Manhood’, 173–94. 77. Best, ‘Militarism and the Victorian Public School’, 130. 78. A contemporary illustration of this is the emergence of ‘annex public schools’ modelled on English examples and run by their staff to be found in the increasingly prosperous nations of south-east Asia. 79. Mangan, A Sport-Loving Society, 5. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid., 3. 83. Ibid., 8. 84. Ibid. 85. Corelli Barnett, ‘A Military Historian's View of the Great War’ in Essays by Divers Hands – copy in the Marlborough College Archives, 7. 86. Ibid., 8. 87. Ibid. 88. Mangan, ‘Social Darwinism’, 142. 89. John Honey, quoted in Ibid. 90. I owe this anecdote to the excellent archivist at Marlborough, Dr T. Rogers. 91. Quoted in Mangan, ‘Social Darwinism', 443. 92. Barnett, ‘A Military Historian's View’, 17. 93. Stephen, The Price of Pity, 147. 94. Richards, Imperialism and Juvenile Literature, 81. 95. Stephen, The Price of Pity, 121. 96. Ibid., 184. 97. Mary Wedderburn Cannan, ‘The Echo 1923’, in Fyfe, The Tears of War, 5. 98. The claim for ‘Pierrot Goes to War’ is made by Stephen, The Price of Pity, 184. 99. As stated in the text, studies of the emotional impact of the Great War are rare. A recent thorough inquiry is Roper, The Secret Battle. 100. The ‘Golden Boys’ mourned by Winifred M. Letts: The Spires of Oxford, 16. 101. Stephen, The Price of Pity, 184.