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Leisure and entertainment
Making use of ‘spare time’
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Introduction
Dates are in red.
Hyperlinks to other pages are in dark blue.
Headlines are in brown.
References and citations are in turquoise.
Contextual history is in purple.
Victorian Leisure
By the 1830s East End artisans went on
trips to Gravesend and Margate, and by the 1840s, Lancashire cotton workers
went on trips to Blackpool.
Employers grudgingly but increasingly
agreed to seasonal holidays or wakes.
Official Bank holidays were introduced
in 1871 for bank workers and soon were practised more widely.
Working hours fell to the
internationally envied English five and a half day working week.
New forms of amusement developed. It was
relatively orderly under the disapproving eye of the respectable and the
commercial interests of the providers – drunkenness, vice and violence were
discouraged at football clubs, fairgrounds and music
halls.
There was an element of cross class
interest for instance in horse racing and the boat race. Boxing had a
disreputable air, but even it was bound by the
Queensberry Rules in 1867.
William Frith’s Derby Day
Cricket and rowing gave both elite and
popular enjoyment. Eventually the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race and the Henley
Regatta sidelined professional rowers.
Fox hunting expanded during the
nineteenth century and increasingly brought the landed elite and the middle
classes together.
(Robert
Tombs, The English and their History, 2023, 484 to 485).
Sport
In the early nineteenth century there
was disapproval of sport. He Master of Balliol tried
to interfere with the first Boat Race in 1829.
This changed within a generation,
spurred by urbanisation, shorter working hours, higher income
and better transport. The Victorian age moralised sport as a manly Christian
value. Disraeli called it ‘muscular Christianity’. In 1851 it was noted that
crime was light where cricket was played.
Football, rugby, tennis, croquet, and
badminton developed between 1850 to 1870.
·
The
Football Association founded in 1863 by old boys’ clubs adopted Cambridge
University rules and forbade hacking (kicking an opponent).
·
The
Rugby Football Union founded in 1871 adopted Rugby school rules
International
matches and tours began in the 1860s.
In
the 1883 Cup Final, the professional working class team,
Blackburn Olympics beat the Old Etonians. However
there was a growing rift between gentleman amateurs and semi
professional working class teams.
·
In
1895 the Northern Union, which later became Rugby League was founded.
·
Cricket
tended to bring different classes together often on the village green. It was
quintessentially English and brought aspirations such as playing a straight
bat.
·
Gentlemanly
amateurs disliked commercialisation, or rowdy crowd behaviour and two cultures
emerged.
·
The
working class focus on professionalism looed to physical aggression and winning
at all costs.
·
There
was often hypocrisy. Dr W G Grace (1848 to 1915) made £120,000 as an ‘amateur’.
(Robert Tombs, The English and
their History, 2023, 513 to 517).
Leisure Time
Lark Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter IV, At the ‘Wagon and Horses’:
Fordlow might boast of its church, its school,
its annual concert, and its quarterly penny reading, but the hamlet did not
envy it these amenities, for it had its own social centre, warmer, more
human, and altogether preferable in the taproom of the 'Wagon and Horses'.
There the adult male population gathered every evening, to sip its
half-pints, drop by drop, to make them last, and to discuss local events,
wrangle over politics or farming methods, or to sing a few songs 'to oblige'.
It was an innocent gathering. None of them got drunk; they had not money
enough, even with beer, and good beer, at twopence a pint.
Lark Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter XV, Harvest Home:
Harvest time
was a natural holiday.
Against the billowing gold of the fields the hedges stood dark, solid and
dew-sleeked; dewdrops beaded the gossamer webs, and the children's feet left long, dark trails on the dewy turf. There were night
scents of wheat-straw and flowers and moist earth on the air and the sky was
fleeced with pink clouds. For a few days or a week or a fortnight, the fields
stood 'ripe unto harvest'. It was the one perfect period in the hamlet year.
Entertainment
Lark
Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter XV, Harvest Home: There were still bands of mummers in some of
the larger villages, and village choirs went carol-singing about the country-side; but none of these came to the hamlet, for they
knew the collection to be expected there would not make it worth their while.
Samuel Farndale
(FAR00475)
was the son of a publican who sang comic songs in the 1880s.
George William
Farndale (FAR00614)
was a comedian, pianist and member of the Yorkshire
Mummers.
Humour
Traditional English humour was irreverent,
cruel and often obscene. The Victorians sought a more
restrained and polite form of humour and saw cruelty as bad taste. They enjoyed
the genial cartoons of Sir John
Tenniel (1820 to 1914), the nonsense
poems of Edward
Lear (1846) and the bizarre tales of Lewis Carroll
(Alice in Wonderland, 1865). Oscar Wilde entertained
the upper classes in the 1880s and 1890s.
Music Hall songs entertained the masses
with a humour of fatalism, political scepticism, parody, irony
and absurdity, often impenetrable to outsiders.
(Robert
Tombs, The English and their History, 2023, 521 to 522).
Stories and Tales
Lark Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter IV, At the ‘Wagon and Horses’:
The newspapers
furnished other tales of dread. Jack the Ripper was stalking the
streets of East London by night, and one poor wretched woman after another was
found murdered and butchered. These crimes were discussed for hours together
in the hamlet and everybody had some theory as to the
identity and motive of the elusive murderer. To the children the name was
indeed one of dread and the cause of much anguished sleeplessness. Father might
be hammering away in the shed and Mother quietly busy with her sewing
downstairs; but the Ripper! the Ripper! he might be nearer still, for he might
have crept in during the day and be hiding in the cupboard on the landing!
Joseph Farndale
(FAR00350B)
was involved in the investigation of a Jack the Ripper hoax claim in
Birmingham.
The cradle of the
Farndale family shares many stories, including that of the Farndale Hob.
Queen Victoria and the Jubilee
Lark
Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter XV, Harvest Home:
Up to the
middle of the 'eighties the hamlet had taken little interest in the Royal
House. The Queen and the Prince and Princess of Wales were sometimes mentioned,
but with little respect and no affection. 'The old Queen', as she was called,
was supposed to have shut herself up in Balmoral Castle with a favourite
servant named John Brown and to have refused to open Parliament when Mr.
Gladstone begged her to. The Prince was said to be
leading a gay life, and the dear, beautiful Princess, afterwards Queen
Alexandra, was celebrated only for her supposed make-up.
The Queen,
it appeared, had reigned fifty years.
As the time
drew nearer, the Queen and her jubilee became the chief topic of
conversation.
Then there
were rumours of a subscription fund. The women of England were going to give
the Queen a jubilee present, and, wonder of wonders, the amount given was
not to exceed one penny.
'Oh, please,
Miss Ellison, you haven't been to Mrs. Parker's, and she's got her penny all
ready and she wants the Queen to have it so much.'