JJ Sefton
Live, Laugh, Love
No one knows where football began. There is evidence of a ball game, similar to football in the basics, being played by the ancient Chinese and Egyptians, some say it started as a form of military training, others as a fertility right. Others believe that it originated as a victory celebration with the game being played with the severed heads of vanquished foes and both Romans and the Celts are said to have practised this in Britain. Just after 1100 the English game was first written about, described as a free for all where gangs tried to move a ball through the streets. There were few rules to speak of and Edward III was forced to pass laws to curb the violence which often accompanied the games. He failed and the game continued. One such game, played in Sheffield in 1793, was described by the novelist Bernard Bird:
“There were selected six young men of Norton, dressed in green; and six young men of Sheffield, dressed in red. The play continued for three consecutive days. At the arch which was erected at each end of the place selected, there was a hole in the goal, and those on the Sheffield side would prevent the ball from passing through the hole. Then those on the Norton side (not being so numerous as those of Sheffield) sent messages to the Peak and other places in the county of Derby; in consequence thereof, a great number of men appeared on the ground from Derbyshire.
Then those of Sheffield sent fife and drum through the streets of the town, to collect recruits and sufficient force against Derbyshire men. The fashion then was for all responsible gentlemen, tradesmen and artisans of Sheffield to wear long tails. Hence, at the conclusion of the third day, a general row or struggle took place between the contending parties, insomuch that the men of Derbyshire cut and pulled nearly all the tails from the heads of the gentlemen of Sheffield.
I understand there were many slightly wounded, but none were killed; thus ended the celebrated football match which aroused the bad passions and humanity for many years afterwards, insomuch so that the inhabitants of Norton felt a dread in coming to Sheffield, even about their necessary business”.
The game continued to be popular among both the rural and urban poor, but it was the public schools of Victorian Britain which created the modern game. Shunning the mass brawls in the slums the budding gentlemen of Oxford, Cambridge, Rugby, Eton and Harrow wished to bring some order to the fixtures they played against each other, and so a set of rules, or understandings, gradually grew up. It still had some way to go before it became what we would recognise as football however; handling was allowed as was kicking an opponent and scrums were an accepted part of the game.
1863 was the turning point in the history of the game. In October of a group of players from the top public schools met in The Freemasons Tavern in London. Their first task was to draw up a definitive set of rules which would bring some uniformity between the schools. The size of the pitch was set out as were rules for offside, kicking off and returning the ball to play. Handling of the ball was strictly limited but the big decision was to outlaw ‘hacking’ and a band of disaffected ‘hackers’ broke away to form the Rugby Football Union. These became known as The Football Association Rules after the second task accomplished at the meeting; the founding of the Football Association.
Through the 1860’s this group would go on, among other things, to introduce goal kicks and establish the size of teams at 11 a side. However, it was dominated by teams drawn from the public schools and Home Counties and footballs strength was growing elsewhere, in the northern industrial towns such as Manchester, Blackburn and Preston, where two factors were coming together to ally the rules of the public schools with the popular game. These were political radicalism and self improvement.
Sheffield was another of the booming industrial centres of the Victorian era. It had long been famous for its steel manufacture, Geoffrey Chaucer mentioned a “Sheffield thwitel (knife)” in ‘The Canterbury Tales’, and, surrounded by hills full of coal and iron ore and perched next to several rivers, Sheffield was ideally positioned for the new water mills which powered the industrial revolution of the 18th century. The development in the city of the Bessemer process in the 1850s and Stainless Steel in 1903 cemented its position on the cutting edge of modern British industry. By the end of the 19th century Sheffield accounted for 97% of British steel production and demand for labour in the new industries saw Sheffield’s population explode. In 1841 it stood at 68,000 but by 1881 this had grown to 284,500 residents most of them concentrated in the city's four central parishes. By 1911 the population was 455,000.
Life in industrialized Sheffield was gloomily described by George Orwell in ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’.
“Sheffield, I suppose, could justly claim to be called the ugliest town in the Old World: its inhabitants, who want it to be pre-eminent in everything, very likely do make that claim for it. It has a population of half a million and it contains fewer decent buildings than the average East Anglian village of five hundred. And the stench! If at rare moments you stop smelling sulphur it is because you have begun smelling gas. Even the shallow river that runs through the town is usually bright yellow with some chemical or other. Once I halted in the street and counted the factory chimneys I could see; there were thirty-three of them, but there would have been far more if the air had not been obscured by smoke. One scene especially lingers in my mind. A frightful patch of waste ground (somehow, up there, a patch of waste ground attains a squalor that would be impossible even in London) trampled bare of grass and littered with newspapers and old saucepans. To the right an isolated row of gaunt four-roomed houses, dark red, blackened by smoke. To the left an interminable vista of factory chimneys, chimney beyond chimney, fading away into a dim blackish haze. Behind me a railway embankment made of the slag from furnaces. In front, across the patch of waste ground, a cubical building of red and yellow brick, with the sign ‘Thomas Grocock, Haulage Contractor’.
At night, when you cannot see the hideous shapes of the houses and the blackness of everything, a town like Sheffield assumes a kind of sinister magnificence. Sometimes the drifts of smoke are rosy with sulphur, and serrated flames, like circular saws, squeeze themselves out from beneath the cowls of the foundry chimneys. Through the open doors of foundries you see fiery serpents of iron being hauled to and fro by redlit boys, and you hear the whizz and thump of steam hammers and the scream of the iron under the blow.”
Working conditions in the factories were rotten. In 1844 a local doctor described to Freidrich Engels the Grinders Asthma which affected the steelworkers.
"They usually begin their work in the fourteenth year, and if they have good constitutions, rarely notice any symptoms before the twentieth year. Then the symptoms of their peculiar disease appear. They suffer from shortness of breath at the slightest effort in going up hill or up stairs, they habitually raise the shoulders to relieve the permanent and increasing want of breath; they bend forward, and seem, in general, to feel most comfortable in the crouching position in which they work. Their complexion becomes dirty yellow, their features express anxiety, they complain of pressure on the chest. Their voices become rough and hoarse, they cough loudly, and the sound is as if air were driven through a wooden tube".
Following on from the city’s long tradition of religious non conformity, such conditions soon saw an active trade union movement appear in Sheffield. Between the 1860’s and 1880’s violence between union and non union workers, known as the ‘Sheffield Outrages’, earned the city a reputation for militancy. A meeting in the city in 1866 organised by the Sheffield Trades Council formed the United Kingdon Alliance of Organised Trades, the forerunner of the Trade Union Congress. In 1886 the Sheffield Socialist Society was founded with the specific aim of the violent overthrow of capitalism and was soon playing host to talks by figures such as the famous Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin at its premises on Scotland Street.
Government legislation, notably the Factory Acts passed at intervals throughout the nineteenth century, sought to improve these working conditions. One of the major aspects of the Acts was to limit working hours but many social activists and employers worried that the extra leisure hours would be devoted to drunken excess or political activism. Engels wrote that
"Immorality among young people seems more prevalent in Sheffield than anywhere else. The younger generation spend the whole of Sunday lying in the street tossing coins or fighting dogs, go regularly to the gin palace, where they sit with their sweethearts until late at night, when they take walks in solitary couples. In an ale-house which the commissioner visited, there sat forty to fifty young people of both sexes, nearly all under seventeen years of age, and each lad beside his lass. Here and there cards were played, at other places dancing was going on, and everywhere drinking. Among the company were openly avowed professional prostitutes. No wonder, then, that, as all the witnesses testify, early, unbridled sexual intercourse, youthful prostitution, beginning with persons of fourteen to fifteen years, is extraordinarily frequent in Sheffield. Crimes of a savage and desperate sort are of common occurrence; one year before the commissioner's visit, a band, consisting chiefly of young persons, was arrested when about to set fire to the town, being fully equipped with lances and inflammable substances. We shall see later that the labour movement in Sheffield has this same savage character"
Pre empting Orwell’s observation that football was “war minus the shooting”, leading figures in Sheffield quickly came to see sport as a safety valve for a restless workforce.
This outlook found an ally in the Victorian ethic of self improvement. Samuel Smiles wrote a book called ‘Self Help’ in 1859 which became a sensation, going on to sell a quarter of a million copies, in which he recommended “abundant physical exercise”. In 1901 Ernest Needham highlighted this concern
“It is a recognised fact that the majority of bread-winners follow occupations in surroundings not at all healthy; therefore it is not to be wondered at that this recreation is largely patronized by them for health seeking purposes. Take away “sport” altogether, and what would be the result? I venture to predict a bigger death roll than we have now. Again, how would the “masses” spend their spare time?..I fear, although I don’t wish to brand the working man as a drinker, that the public-house would be resorted to more if the game were abolished”
“There were selected six young men of Norton, dressed in green; and six young men of Sheffield, dressed in red. The play continued for three consecutive days. At the arch which was erected at each end of the place selected, there was a hole in the goal, and those on the Sheffield side would prevent the ball from passing through the hole. Then those on the Norton side (not being so numerous as those of Sheffield) sent messages to the Peak and other places in the county of Derby; in consequence thereof, a great number of men appeared on the ground from Derbyshire.
Then those of Sheffield sent fife and drum through the streets of the town, to collect recruits and sufficient force against Derbyshire men. The fashion then was for all responsible gentlemen, tradesmen and artisans of Sheffield to wear long tails. Hence, at the conclusion of the third day, a general row or struggle took place between the contending parties, insomuch that the men of Derbyshire cut and pulled nearly all the tails from the heads of the gentlemen of Sheffield.
I understand there were many slightly wounded, but none were killed; thus ended the celebrated football match which aroused the bad passions and humanity for many years afterwards, insomuch so that the inhabitants of Norton felt a dread in coming to Sheffield, even about their necessary business”.
The game continued to be popular among both the rural and urban poor, but it was the public schools of Victorian Britain which created the modern game. Shunning the mass brawls in the slums the budding gentlemen of Oxford, Cambridge, Rugby, Eton and Harrow wished to bring some order to the fixtures they played against each other, and so a set of rules, or understandings, gradually grew up. It still had some way to go before it became what we would recognise as football however; handling was allowed as was kicking an opponent and scrums were an accepted part of the game.
1863 was the turning point in the history of the game. In October of a group of players from the top public schools met in The Freemasons Tavern in London. Their first task was to draw up a definitive set of rules which would bring some uniformity between the schools. The size of the pitch was set out as were rules for offside, kicking off and returning the ball to play. Handling of the ball was strictly limited but the big decision was to outlaw ‘hacking’ and a band of disaffected ‘hackers’ broke away to form the Rugby Football Union. These became known as The Football Association Rules after the second task accomplished at the meeting; the founding of the Football Association.
Through the 1860’s this group would go on, among other things, to introduce goal kicks and establish the size of teams at 11 a side. However, it was dominated by teams drawn from the public schools and Home Counties and footballs strength was growing elsewhere, in the northern industrial towns such as Manchester, Blackburn and Preston, where two factors were coming together to ally the rules of the public schools with the popular game. These were political radicalism and self improvement.
Sheffield was another of the booming industrial centres of the Victorian era. It had long been famous for its steel manufacture, Geoffrey Chaucer mentioned a “Sheffield thwitel (knife)” in ‘The Canterbury Tales’, and, surrounded by hills full of coal and iron ore and perched next to several rivers, Sheffield was ideally positioned for the new water mills which powered the industrial revolution of the 18th century. The development in the city of the Bessemer process in the 1850s and Stainless Steel in 1903 cemented its position on the cutting edge of modern British industry. By the end of the 19th century Sheffield accounted for 97% of British steel production and demand for labour in the new industries saw Sheffield’s population explode. In 1841 it stood at 68,000 but by 1881 this had grown to 284,500 residents most of them concentrated in the city's four central parishes. By 1911 the population was 455,000.
Life in industrialized Sheffield was gloomily described by George Orwell in ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’.
“Sheffield, I suppose, could justly claim to be called the ugliest town in the Old World: its inhabitants, who want it to be pre-eminent in everything, very likely do make that claim for it. It has a population of half a million and it contains fewer decent buildings than the average East Anglian village of five hundred. And the stench! If at rare moments you stop smelling sulphur it is because you have begun smelling gas. Even the shallow river that runs through the town is usually bright yellow with some chemical or other. Once I halted in the street and counted the factory chimneys I could see; there were thirty-three of them, but there would have been far more if the air had not been obscured by smoke. One scene especially lingers in my mind. A frightful patch of waste ground (somehow, up there, a patch of waste ground attains a squalor that would be impossible even in London) trampled bare of grass and littered with newspapers and old saucepans. To the right an isolated row of gaunt four-roomed houses, dark red, blackened by smoke. To the left an interminable vista of factory chimneys, chimney beyond chimney, fading away into a dim blackish haze. Behind me a railway embankment made of the slag from furnaces. In front, across the patch of waste ground, a cubical building of red and yellow brick, with the sign ‘Thomas Grocock, Haulage Contractor’.
At night, when you cannot see the hideous shapes of the houses and the blackness of everything, a town like Sheffield assumes a kind of sinister magnificence. Sometimes the drifts of smoke are rosy with sulphur, and serrated flames, like circular saws, squeeze themselves out from beneath the cowls of the foundry chimneys. Through the open doors of foundries you see fiery serpents of iron being hauled to and fro by redlit boys, and you hear the whizz and thump of steam hammers and the scream of the iron under the blow.”
Working conditions in the factories were rotten. In 1844 a local doctor described to Freidrich Engels the Grinders Asthma which affected the steelworkers.
"They usually begin their work in the fourteenth year, and if they have good constitutions, rarely notice any symptoms before the twentieth year. Then the symptoms of their peculiar disease appear. They suffer from shortness of breath at the slightest effort in going up hill or up stairs, they habitually raise the shoulders to relieve the permanent and increasing want of breath; they bend forward, and seem, in general, to feel most comfortable in the crouching position in which they work. Their complexion becomes dirty yellow, their features express anxiety, they complain of pressure on the chest. Their voices become rough and hoarse, they cough loudly, and the sound is as if air were driven through a wooden tube".
Following on from the city’s long tradition of religious non conformity, such conditions soon saw an active trade union movement appear in Sheffield. Between the 1860’s and 1880’s violence between union and non union workers, known as the ‘Sheffield Outrages’, earned the city a reputation for militancy. A meeting in the city in 1866 organised by the Sheffield Trades Council formed the United Kingdon Alliance of Organised Trades, the forerunner of the Trade Union Congress. In 1886 the Sheffield Socialist Society was founded with the specific aim of the violent overthrow of capitalism and was soon playing host to talks by figures such as the famous Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin at its premises on Scotland Street.
Government legislation, notably the Factory Acts passed at intervals throughout the nineteenth century, sought to improve these working conditions. One of the major aspects of the Acts was to limit working hours but many social activists and employers worried that the extra leisure hours would be devoted to drunken excess or political activism. Engels wrote that
"Immorality among young people seems more prevalent in Sheffield than anywhere else. The younger generation spend the whole of Sunday lying in the street tossing coins or fighting dogs, go regularly to the gin palace, where they sit with their sweethearts until late at night, when they take walks in solitary couples. In an ale-house which the commissioner visited, there sat forty to fifty young people of both sexes, nearly all under seventeen years of age, and each lad beside his lass. Here and there cards were played, at other places dancing was going on, and everywhere drinking. Among the company were openly avowed professional prostitutes. No wonder, then, that, as all the witnesses testify, early, unbridled sexual intercourse, youthful prostitution, beginning with persons of fourteen to fifteen years, is extraordinarily frequent in Sheffield. Crimes of a savage and desperate sort are of common occurrence; one year before the commissioner's visit, a band, consisting chiefly of young persons, was arrested when about to set fire to the town, being fully equipped with lances and inflammable substances. We shall see later that the labour movement in Sheffield has this same savage character"
Pre empting Orwell’s observation that football was “war minus the shooting”, leading figures in Sheffield quickly came to see sport as a safety valve for a restless workforce.
This outlook found an ally in the Victorian ethic of self improvement. Samuel Smiles wrote a book called ‘Self Help’ in 1859 which became a sensation, going on to sell a quarter of a million copies, in which he recommended “abundant physical exercise”. In 1901 Ernest Needham highlighted this concern
“It is a recognised fact that the majority of bread-winners follow occupations in surroundings not at all healthy; therefore it is not to be wondered at that this recreation is largely patronized by them for health seeking purposes. Take away “sport” altogether, and what would be the result? I venture to predict a bigger death roll than we have now. Again, how would the “masses” spend their spare time?..I fear, although I don’t wish to brand the working man as a drinker, that the public-house would be resorted to more if the game were abolished”
