Mud, Sweat and Beers: A Cultural History of Sport and Alcohol (Global Sport Cultures)

159 Pages·2002·10.84 MB·english

by  Tony Collins

Mud, Sweat and Beers
Global Sport Cultures
Eds Gary Armstrong, University of Reading, Richard Giulianotti, University of Aberdeen,
and David Andrews, The University of Memphis
From the Olympics and the World Cup to extreme sports and kabaddi, the social
significance of sport at both global and local levels has become increasingly clear in
recent years. The contested nature of identity is widely addressed in the social sciences,
but sport as a particularly revealing site of such contestation, in both industrialising
and post-industrial nations, has been less fruitfully explored. Further, sport and
sporting corporations are increasingly powerful players in the world economy. Sport
is now central to the social and technological development of mass media, notably in
telecommunications and digital television. It is also a crucial medium through which
specific populations and political elites communicate and interact with each other on
a global stage.
Berg publishers are pleased to announce a new book series that will examine and
evaluate the role of sport in the contemporary world. Truly global in scope, the series
seeks to adopt a grounded, constructively critical stance towards prior work within
sport studies and to answer such questions as:
• How are sports experienced and practised at the everyday level within local settings?
(cid:127) How do specific cultures construct and negotiate forms of social stratification (such
as gender, class, ethnicity) within sporting contexts?
(cid:127) What is the impact of mediation and corporate globalisation upon local sports
cultures?
Determinedly interdisciplinary, the series will nevertheless privilege anthropological,
historical and sociological approaches, but will consider submissions from cultural
studies, economics, geography, human kinetics, international relations, law, philosophy
and political science. The series is particularly committed to research that draws upon
primary source materials or ethnographic fieldwork.
Previously published title in the Series:
Gary Armstrong and Richard Giulianotti (eds), Fear and Loathing in World Football
GLOBAL SPORT CULTURES
Mud, Sweat and Beers
A Cultural History of Sport and Alcohol
Tony Collins and Wray Vamplew
Oxford(cid:127)New York
First published in 2002 by
Berg
Editorial offices:
150 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JJ, UK
838 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10003-4812, USA
© Tony Collins and Wray Vamplew 2002
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form
or by any means without the written permission of Berg.
Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Collins, Tony.
Mud, sweat, and beers : a cultural history of sport and alcohol / Tony Collins
and Wray Vamplew.
p. cm.--(Global sport cultures, ISSN1472-2909)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-85973-553-3
1. Athletes--Alcohol use. 2. Drinking of alcoholic beverages--Social aspects.
3. Alcoholic beverage industry. I. Vamplew, Wray. II. Title. III. Series.
RC1245.C652002
362.292’088’796--dc21
2001008221
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 1859735533(Cloth)
ISBN 1859735584(Paper)
Typeset by JS Typesetting, Wellingborough, Northants.
Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn.
Contents
Introduction 1
1 This Sporting House: The Pub and Sport 5
2 A Thirsty Business: The Drinks Industry and Sport 39
3 Cheers! Alcohol and the Sporting Crowd 69
4 A Little of What Does You Good? Alcohol, the
Athlete and Sporting Performance 91
Conclusion: More than Beer and Skittles? 119
Bibliography 127
Index 139
v

Introduction
‘Football is a fascination of the devil and a twin sister of the drink system,’
declared an Anglican vicar in 1893.1 Although the leisure interests of Satan
lie beyond the scope of this work, it is undoubtedly true that football and all
other sports have enjoyed a close and familial relationship with alcohol
throughout the ages.
Today, hardly a month goes by without the tabloids exposing the drinking
habits of a sports star. And barely a day passes without the sight of alcohol
sponsorship or advertising at a major sporting event. But while those who
believe in a mythical Golden Age of sport may point to such examples as yet
more evidence of declining morality or rampant commercialism, in reality they
are just the latest stage in the long and symbiotic link between sport and the
‘demon drink’. Those who hanker for an alcohol-free golden age of sport
should perhaps consider that most sporting trophies are cups, the original idea
of which was to facilitate the imbibitions of the winning team or athlete.
This book aims to explore the multi-faceted relationship between alcohol
in all its aspects and sport at all levels. Our starting point for this has been to
integrate the history of the drinks industry in Britain since the mid-nineteenth
century with the history of sport in the same period and trace the story from
there.
For both sport and alcohol, the late-Victorian period was one of tremendous
and rapid change. The drinks industry underwent a process of consolidation
which saw the number of pubs and breweries decline rapidly while alcohol
consumption also fell quickly. Mass spectator sports such as football and rugby
rose to great prominence in the 1880s and the following decade saw the growth
of middle-class sports such as golf and tennis.
We trace the subsequent relationship by looking at four key aspects:
(cid:127) the role of the pub and its decline as a social centre and conversion into a
retail outlet;
(cid:127) the development of modern marketing techniques by the breweries and the
changing ways in which sport was used to sell alcohol;
(cid:127) the importance of alcohol to the sporting crowd and its relationship to
crowd behaviour;
1
Mud, Sweat and Beers
(cid:127) the changing attitudes to drink as both an aid to and an inhibitor of
athletes’ sporting performance, together with its role in the life of both elite
and recreational sports men and women and its relationship to the lifestyle
of the professional athlete.
Additionally, we look at the attitude of the temperance movement towards
sport and consider the impact of government legislation on the use of alcohol
by sports spectators and participants.
In choosing this structure, we have sought to present a rounded and
comprehensive history of the subject. However, this is not to imply that the
work is exhaustive; indeed, we hope to have shed light on enough areas to
encourage others to illuminate them in far greater detail.
The history of the drinks trade and associated alcohol industries is one which
has been well served by historians, such as Peter Mathias, Ian Donnachie, Terry
Gourvish and Richard Wilson, yet an examination of the social and cultural
role played by alcohol is still underdeveloped. Brian Harrison’s ground-
breaking 1971 study of the nineteenth-century temperance movement, Drink
and the Victorians, remains the benchmark for subsequent studies. Paradox-
ically, and perhaps inspired by Harrison’s work, it is the temperance movement
and attempts to restrict the consumption of alcohol which have attracted most
attention from scholars.2
One of the more notable exceptions to this is Paul Jennings’s work on the
social and economic history of pubs in Bradford, which demonstrates both the
painstaking research needed to develop a convincing portrait of the subject and
the insights which such studies can throw on the social development of the
wider community.3 More recently attention has focused on the history of
consumption and the social meanings attached to it. John Burnett’s Liquid
Pleasures and Andrew Barr’s Drink: A Social History have both sought to place
alcohol consumption in a broader social context and relate it to the changing
work, leisure and cultural patterns of society.4 It is also important to note that
there is a flourishing community of non-academic historians of pubs and
breweries, many of whose members have produced important studies on the
subject.
There is also of course a significant literature on football hooliganism and
drink, which tends to portray the relationship between sport and alcohol as
being a question of public order, and an even larger body of work which
examines alcohol from the perspective of sports medicine and performance
enhancement – some of it eerily reminiscent of the temperance campaign
literature of the early twentieth century in its condemnation of its subject.
However, with the single exception of John Weir’s 1992 work on drink and
early Scottish football, there have been no studies which seek to examine the
2
Introduction
cultural and social history of the relationship between sport and alcohol in
Britain.5 There are perhaps a number of reasons for this. The relationship
appears to be self-evident, a view which could imply that further research is
unnecessary. It is also the case that the social history of sport is still in its
adolescence and has yet to enjoy the status of other fields of historical research.
There is also a tendency to ’compartmentalise’ research into discrete areas
which rarely impinge on other fields.
In contrast, we hope that this work may help to suggest a shift in the focus
of studies of sport and leisure away from such compartmentalised investig-
ations of individual aspects of leisure towards broader, holistic explorations of
leisure and recreational histories. The fact that sport and alcohol cross-pollinate
with each other in so many ways helps to throw fresh light on both of their
histories.
For example, the importance of brewers to commercial sport – financing
professional football clubs and their grounds, underwriting golf, cricket and
other sports’ clubs, and, more recently, providing extensive funds through
sponsorship – has been hinted at by scholars but the extent of this relationship
has not hitherto been explored.
On a cultural level, the deep and long connections between drinking and
sporting enjoyment, whether as a participant or spectator, have been previously
acknowledged but, outside of the context of football hooliganism, remain
largely uninvestigated. We hope that by highlighting the links between drink-
ing and sport and issues such as masculinity, class and regional identity, we
have suggested avenues for future investigations in related fields.
As with all scholarly work, this book could not have been written without the
help and advice of many other people. First and foremost we owe a debt of
gratitude to the Leverhulme Trust whose support made this research for this
work possible. We are also especially grateful to Richard Cox for initially
suggesting the topic, Joyce Kay for brain-storming on the grant application,
Neil Tranter, Peter Radford, Duncan Stewart, Patrick Chaplin, John Harding,
Gordon Taylor of the Professional Footballers’ Association, Ken Thomas at the
Courage Archives, Alma Topen of the Scottish Brewing Archive, Liz Press of
the Bass Museum, Jan Booth of the Brewers and Licensed Retailers Assoc-
iation, Dorothy Sheridan of the Mass-Observation Archive at the University
of Sussex, Jed Smith of the Museum of Rugby Union at Twickenham, the staffs
of numerous libraries and local archives, the many participants at conferences
of sports history organisations in Britain and Europe for ideas raised in
response to papers, and particularly our colleagues at the International Centre
for Sports History and Culture: Mike Cronin, Richard Holt, Pierre Lanfranchi,
3
Mud, Sweat and Beers
Tony Mason and Matt Taylor. Quotations from the Mass-Observation Archive
are reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on
behalf of the Trustees of the Archive and are copyright of the Trustees of the
Mass-Observation Archive. Finally, our deepest thanks must go to our respect-
ive partners, Cathy France and Janice Vamplew, who have both contributed
much work and support in the research and writing of this book.
Notes
1. Yorkshire Post, 22 March 1893.
2. Ian Donnachie, A History of the Brewing Industry in Scotland, Edinburgh, 1979;
T.R. Gourvish and R.G. Wilson, The British Brewing Industry, Cambridge, 1994;
D.W. Gutzke, Protecting the Pub: Brewers and Publicans against Temperance,
Woodbridge, 1989; Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, 2nd Edition, Keele,
1994; Peter Mathias, The Brewing Industry in England, 1770–1830, Cambridge,
1959.
3. Paul Jennings, The Public House in Bradford, 1770–1970, Keele, 1995.
4. Andrew Barr, Drink: A Social History, London, 1998; John Burnett, Liquid
Pleasures: A Social History of Drinks in Modern Britain, London, 1999.
5. John Weir, Drink, Religion and Scottish Football 1873–1900
4