Rugby, Cricket and Character

A journey through how the English education system used to build character from poetry through cricket and rugby.

As the Rugby union world cup started last weekend I’ve fielded a few questions from American friends about the sport and why people play it. Much like the other sport of the British empire, cricket, it’s a complex sport and quite an acquired taste, but developed for formative and educational purposes which it still works for.

Last year I was lucky enough to be able to go and see the opening matches of the Rugby League world cup, the Rugby Union world cup is in France, with tickets at least five times more expensive so there’s no danger I’ll be seeing any of those matches live. I do enjoy both codes, even if union’s constant kicking and rules tinkering can be rather irritating. What’s most important though, is that apart from the narrow corridor of rugby league heartland, all schoolboys play rugby union.

The game itself comes from the famous boarding school in the town of Rugby. It’s a fee paying school, which makes it a “public school” in the British sense and a private school in the logic of the rest of the world. The story is that William Webb Ellis, a pupil there in the 19th century, one day picked the ball up and ran with it so the game of rugby was born. Of course, medieval football was essentially a carrying, running and fighting game more than a kicking and passing game so it’s far more likely that Web Ellis was simply copying something he’d once seen a Dickensian street urchin doing.

A number of games like this still exist around Britain, and the slow moving scrum with the ball occasionally shooting out at random seems to be a feature of the game.

The associations of rugby with the type of schools that turned out good, solid, Victorian Englishmen to build and run empires was no accident. It overlapped with the muscular Christianity movement which essentially saw physical fitness and sport as having a positive moral impact upon people too. The game spread throughout the empire, and even France. It’s part of almost every boy’s time at school and even very boring state school’s like the one I went to dedicated almost as much effort to rugby as to football.

Rugby’s particular genius, especially at the amateur or school level, was always that it was a game for all shapes and sizes of player. The mouthy eight stone kid will play in the halfbacks, the short belligerent kid is cut out to play hooker. The fast boy who’s scared of contact ends up on the wings with the fat boys playing prop and the beanpoles playing second row. Before the professional era the idea of fast, muscular battering ram shaped players all over the park was fantasy.

I can remember playing for a few teams, mostly on the losing end of various fixtures. Perhaps the best team I played for was built around a very small scrum half. Traditionally more of a feature of French teams, where a five foot tall man with a Napoleon complex is the natural team leader, it must have been quite a sight watching this tiny man bossing around the whole team and commanding the forward pack, many of who weighed more than twice what he did. He’d have stood out even more if not for the fact that the team’s hooker was a five foot tall Frenchman who combined a strong southern French accent with a lisp - suffice to say we rarely understood any of the moves he called.

Rugby is great at teaching players to rely upon each other. In the scrum, everyone must do their jobs and rely on the other seven players bound onto them to do likewise. The nimble (and clean) winger can only go off on his run because he knows that if, or when, he gets tackled that a quarter ton of supporting players will appear to drive the opposition away.

The games I played were certainly all refereed, but were to some extent self policing. Bending the rules is considered part of the game, and studded boots were considered the best way of deterring the over side from cheating too much. I don’t think I ever played in a match where punches weren’t thrown, but in amateur, school or university games red and yellow cards weren’t used to control discipline. I can remember one clubhouse having a poster about player suspensions - the only two causes for suspension were punching a player who was defenceless or not joining in during a fifteen-a-side brawl.

The elements of physical risk, reliance on others, immediate consequences and everyone having their own place and role mean that the game offers some great opportunities to develop character.

The other great English game is cricket. It’s another sport we took around the empire, only to find that everyone we taught it to immediately managed to beat us. Cricket’s unique fit within the restrictions of caste and religion in the Indian subcontinent has meant that it’s now the world’s second biggest sport - I’ve even seen games played in parks in Italy.

We briefly saw some cricket played at this ground right next to Bamburgh castle this summer. The BBC rated it as one of the world’s most attractive cricket grounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/35213969

Cricket is a very difficult game to sell to anyone who hasn’t grown up watching it and with the jargon. Any sport where matches are planned to last five days and which frequently ends in a (one-sided) draw is something of an acquired taste. There are obviously physical aspects to the game - nobody can watch pace bowling or batters slogging sixes without understanding that. The key to the game though is concentration, as the story of the game so often ends with only two batsmen left in, desperately holding on for a draw. Inevitably, one of the pair is a good batsmen and the other a specialist bowler. The worst batter on the team, often mockingly referred to as a “rabbit” due to their rabbit-in-the-headlights expression when facing head height bouncing balls, is the man left trying to protect his wicket in fading light.

Story book endings seem to follow the England cricket team around. Leach, the last batsman, has the goal of staying in and letting the other, better, batter score the actual runs. His single run in 17 balls is just as key as Stokes’ scoring - you can’t score runs if there’s nobody left to bat with.

This dogged determination, concentration, and the demands to go beyond your abilities were seen as good qualities to instill in young men.

Henry Newbolt was a poet in much the same “English Imperial” style as Kipling, although certainly not as prolific. His best known work Vitae Lampada (the torch of life) follows a young boy learning the benefits of selfless commitment to duty on the cricket pitch and how this ability enables him to rally his men from near disaster in the Madhist war in Sudan. This poem neatly captures the goals of this form of sporting education and its desired effects on young men.

There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night –
Ten to make and the match to win –
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,
But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote –
'Play up! play up! and play the game!'

The sand of the desert is sodden red,–
Red with the wreck of a square that broke;–
The Gatling's jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
'Play up! play up! and play the game!'

This is the word that year by year,
While in her place the School is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind –
'Play up! play up! and play the game!'

Check out Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson’s satirical modern reworking of the poem here;

Vitaï Lampeda 2030