Abstract
The term ‘sportsmanship’ was accepted as the dominant value system of sport. It is a term which had a moral power to regulate the athletes’ conduct in the early part of the twentieth century.
We have been able to identify only one example of the term ‘sportsmanship’ in the 17th and 18th Century British Library periodicals collection (Burney Collection). However, after the first nineteenth century use of the word in 1825, ‘sportsmanship’ starts to become a more common term and we can see the numbers gradually increase from 1840s onwards. Its usage increases dramatically after 1892 and is sustained throughout the 1890’s, while there are only a few examples which refer to ‘sportsmanship’ in a wide range of modern sports (excluding field sports) of the term between 1885 and 1892. The majority of references to ‘sportsmanship’ in general newspapers and magazines are about football, rugby, and cricket.
In most examples in this period the use of ‘sportsmanship’ was broadly synonymous with “fair play”. In some cases the term ‘sportsmanship’ was used in the context of criticising or commenting on a ‘lack of sportsmanship’. In the 1890s there was a huge increase in the frequency of use of the term ‘sportsmanship’ in the press because as sports expanded beyond the elite amateur confines, the meaning of the term was increasingly disputed. In this context not only professional players and officials but also Americans and Colonials were criticised for their ‘lack of sportsmanship’ because the English public school elite saw amateurism and sportsmanship as synonymous. The elite found out the ‘lack of sportsmanship’ outside of their ‘cherished circle’.
Until as late as the mid 1890s ‘sportsmanship’ could still represent not only the virtue and skill in sport but also the membership of ‘gentleman-amateur’ because ‘sportsmanship’ and ‘statesmanship’ being a politician were wished to be both sides of being an ideal ‘gentleman’. However, in the democratisation of society after the Reform Act of 1885 ‘sportsmanship’ began to be required to the working classes as well. It seems to be the making of a widely shared belief in the value of sportsmanship as a part of the common national vocabulary of sport. But it also means ‘sportsmanship’ and ‘statesmanship’ were going to be separated.
