Swearing In Sports In The Nineteenth Century

I’m not sure that this, found here, isn’t a hoax, but it’s jolly good fun nonetheless, and probably NSFW, which is something of a first for MTMG. Click the image to see full size:

Mitchell and Kenyon “Edwardian Sports”

Our school library had Wisdens going back to the 1890s. The yellow volumes, thickening as the decades passed, occupied one side of a narrow bay; the Georgian poets were on the other. This was where I spent my time over the golden autumn of 1985, holding the ancient print close to my eyes so that I could see the typeface flaws, poring over adverts for nets, bats and gloves. The paper smelt of hot valves. It was all just print and scrappy photographs: the BFI’s new Mitchell and Kenyon DVD is the moving, living sport that gave rise to it all.

Mitchell and Kenyon were a partnership of pioneering film makers in the north of England at the start of the twentieth century. Most of their work was thought lost by that small band of film historians who knew about them at all. Then, a few years ago, a shop clearance yielded up a couple of metal drums containing c.800 short Edwardian films in superb condition - a large chunk of the whole M&K output, and by a stroke of luck these fell into the right hands. Restored, they make up a startling visual record of Edwardian industrial life, and have the potential to transform our ideas of the film history of the time.

When the films first emerged in 2004, interest was huge: I attended a sell-out screening of M&K material at the Clapham Picture House, and I’d had to buy the tickets months in advance. For many people in Britain, there’s a sense that the Edwardian era was our last good time before we began to go wrong as a country, which is what I once thought. And, sharing that view, I would have wondered if there wasn’t some kind of key, some kind of secret, encoded in these astonishing films, which, if used, could bring it all back again…

Seeds of its own destruction. The new DVD shows the crowd at a Rotherham derby match, their dirty faces fresh out of work and etched with fatigue and real hopelessness. Deep tiredness, ingrained boredom, dirt beyond hope of cleanliness: Mitchell and Kenyon were too much the showmen to want to dwell upon it, but you see it time and again, creeping past the laughter and waving hats. Platt’s Works, Oldham; Parkgate Ironworks, Rotherham (a frightening, depressing film with strong undertones of violence: the cameraman is called off before he gets hurt) remind one that this was an England half-way between Henry Mayhew and George Orwell more than it was one halfway between Sherlock Holmes and Rupert Bear. (Platt’s and Parkgate are on earlier DVD releases, not this one).

Much of it never really went away, in any case. The AAA Championships at Huddersfield, featured on the new DVD, are dominated by American athletes. They wear dressing gowns between events - we wear blazers. And the big First Division games 100 years ago are still the big ones now: Everton, Newcastle, Liverpool, Aston Villa, Blackburn and Sunderland all feature.

There’s been plenty of football in earlier M&K releases, but it’s clear that they’ve saved up the best for this one. The games have cleaner images, better action, and a real sense of story about them.

Most of all, there’s skill, and lots of it - excellent Everton wingplay, short one-touch passing from Newcastle, mazy dribbles from a Bradford City player lighting up the first game at his team’s new ground. On Fremantle’s superb multi-DVD History of Football, elderly Italians explain their admiration for the old English game - “passionate, physical, but not violent” - and so it is here: injured players attract the sympathetic attentions of their opponents, and the tackling is hard but not malicious.

It’s tremendous to watch. You find yourself forgetting how old the film is, leaning forward in your chair as if it’s live. And you find yourself thinking that all the old theories were wrong: football didn’t succeed because it filled a hole in people’s schedules once they had Saturday afternoon off. It succeeded because it was fantastic.

The excellent accompanying booklet cites J.B. Priestley:

..football turned you into a member of a new community, all brothers together for an hour and a half.. you had escaped with most of your mates and your neighbours, with half the town, and there you were, cheering together, thumping one another on the shoulders.

It’s what drives the modern “Safe Standing” campaign. The fun of football isn’t just about the play. It’s about the camaraderie, being part of a crowd and a cause, something worth shouting and singing about in a place where it’s alright to shout and sing. Much of the M&K footage here is of the fans, and - with the exception of the exhausted Rotherham ironworkers - they are having it. Unlike previous Edwardian football films, there are proper goals here, and crowd and players celebrate in a way that is instantly familiar and comfortable.

I was at Craven Cottage to catch Fulham v Portsmouth in 2006, and couldn’t help wanting to join the Portsmouth fans, who were making all the noise and - vividly - having all the fun. They turned a seated stand into a terrace, somehow, and caught some of that atmosphere that is gone from grounds now. And it is gone: I fought against the idea for a long time, but there is so much Youtube footage now of ’70s and early ’80s matches, and the sound is quite different, exhilarating and uplifting.

It was what the scriptwriters of Life On Mars finally settled upon as their theme: you need to feel to know that you’re alive. The world can become too safe and unchallenging. And too cold. 23rd March 1901 was a cold day, and the Rugby League match between Halifax and Salford took place with snow piled pitchside in great drifts. But the atmosphere is pure carnival, the action fast and thrilling. Small boys take snow off the fence and ball it to throw at the cameraman. Watching, I want to feel that snow between my fingers, but I’m in suburbia, in August, 106 years later, and can’t.

At Long Last: The Return of Mitchell and Kenyon

We interrupt your normal programming to bring the following announcement:

Following on from the hugely successful BBC TV series The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon and the BFI’s first DVD volume Electric Edwardians, come two DVDs containing a new selection of films - Mitchell & Kenyon Edwardian sports and Mitchell & Kenyon in Ireland.

Mitchell & Kenyon Edwardian sports offers an unparalleled opportunity to see and learn about sporting action at the turn of the century. A remarkable selection of sporting highlights from the Mitchell & Kenyon Collection, it brings together some of the earliest surviving films (1901-7) featuring the titans of professional football, cricket and rugby whilst also rediscovering the Corinthian spirit of amateur sport and leisure in Edwardian life. Liverpool, Hull, Kingston Rovers, Everton, and Blackburn Rovers football teams are all featured, alongside a swimming gala in North Shields, the AAA championships of 1901 and the Mold cricket controversy - an early ‘chucking’ storm with an Australian umpire at its centre.

The DVD is programmed by Dr Vanessa Toulmin of the National Fairground Archive at the University of Sheffield Library, author of the BFI book Electric Edwardians: The Films of Mitchell & Kenyon (2006) and editor of The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film (BFI, 2004).

Although the commentary has been written by Toulmin, it’s actually being read by Adrian Chiles, which leaves you to wonder how close we came to getting Chris Waddle or Les Ferdinand. Nevertheless, Chiles is a proper broadcaster, so whatever the BFI had in mind with him will result in a good job being done.

The DVDs are released tomorrow, and I for one am going to swing by the South Bank before my evening clinic tomorrow.

An Emergent Phenomenon 2

Football as an emergent phenomenon of urban industrial society again.. but really just an excuse to link to another of Geoff Plumb’s spectacular pictures of that almost vanished world.

And another.

Into the Time Machine

An old chestnut popped into my mind as I rode the wrong train home from the meet-up last night. I’d triumphantly chosen the only pub in London not showing the football as our venue, and, having missed that match (I can’t say that I did miss it all that much) began thinking around time travel and catching up with all of the missed, lost games of the 130 years of recognizable football.

It’s hardly an original question. If you had a time machine…

I’d start with 1910, probably at one of Newcastle United’s Crystal Palace FA Cup Finals. I’d watch the greatest team of their era - the one that Herbert Chapman spent his postwar career trying to emulate - then travel back into Central London, taking in a couple of Edwardian pubs along the way to taste the beer, then ride the young London Underground to Paddington and take the pre-grouping Great Western down to the West Country. I’d buy autochrome film and walk through the East End. I’d walk white untarmacadamed roads and jump out of the way of the occasional passing car.

And then on to 1925. I’d watch and film Dixie Dean. Catch silent movies in young, unblemished prints, spend a day at Lickey Incline, cross the Atlantic in steerage and watch the ship enter New York in its golden age. Drink the night away with Armstrong and Ellington.

Then Portugal 0 England 10 in 1947; Arsenal v Manchester United February 1958; buy my 1965-6 Old Trafford season ticket.

And then back to 1910, park the time machine in a shed, cover it with a tarpaulin, turn my back on it, and walk away…

The Story Beneath A Title-Winning Season

Not the story behind a title-winning season - I do mean beneath. In 1974-5 Rangers were beginning to crack Celtic’s long dominance of the Scottish scene.

Here’s what was going on underneath Ibrox at the time:

Underneath Glasgow/Ibrox

More underneath Glasgow/Ibrox

The new Life On Mars series will be set in London. I can’t help thinking that’s something of a waste.

Interim: Wings of 1933

“In a year, or two or three, maybe we will be too old.” He was right about that. It’s been 74 years, and Toby Wing died 6 years ago aged 85.

Wing:

Another famous Wing of 1933:

Interim: Coney Island 1927

Away for a few days.

Fake sports in a ’20s New York theme park. The amusements of the 1920s were far more dangerous than the majority of serious sports nowadays.

No ride to represent chess, however. This is puzzling. Why a horseracing ride, and not a chess one?

A Prague Street Scene in the 1930s

Given that it is the 1930s, and that we are in a faraway country containing people of whom we know nothing, it would be easy to jump to conclusions about this photo:

And are those mounted policemen, or troops?

Still, at least the crowd is putting a brave face on whatever’s going on:

Indeed, there are those who look positively cheerful about it all. You’ve got to laugh, or…

But the mood these people are in is catching, even seventy (?) years on:

I don’t think it’s them anymore, do you? So who is this all about? Ah, here comes somebody:

And behind them…

The bashful, self-conscious face of a footballer out of his comfort zone changes little over the ages..

That’s better. And no need for a double-decker for these sophisticated Central Europeans:

You’ve guessed it before me - it’s the Czechoslovakian national team, returning in triumph after their narrow 2-1 extra-time defeat to Italy in the 1934 World Cup. The photographer is Josef Jindrich Sechtl, the photojournalism pioneer.

There’s something of the J.H. Lartigues about this sequence, which you can see and admire in full here. But some of his work has a different and more poignant air, as in this lovely autochrome of the ill-fated and luckless President of Czechoslovakia, Eduard Benes, seen with his wife:

1934 was one of the dodgy finals… the referee has earned his own Wikipedia entry, which you can find here. Nevertheless, the Czechs led until the last ten minutes.

UPDATE: FTv in the comments has spotted that our “smiling man” in two of these pictures is in fact Ferenc Furista, one of the most famous comedians of his day.

India 8 Germany 1: Berlin Olympics 1936

A truly beautiful tribute to Indian hockey - and an opportunity to build on any schadenfreude that the previous film of Jesse Owens might have given you.

If only pre-War football had been filmed so well.