Honourable mentions
MATTHEW TAYLOR enjoys a thorough study of the evolution of a concept considered a national characteristic
When awarded penalties during a number of South African tour matches in 1907, members of the Corinthians football club, composed of English gentleman amateurs, purposely kicked the ball behind the goal. This act was an exaggerated public expression of a code of honourable and fair play for which the team had become widely known. However, it didn’t please the South African football authorities, who considered it a lack of respect for local referees. Neither was it a practice the Corinthians repeated in important matches back in England, where winning rather than fair play was their main concern.
It is this relationship between the discourse of fair play and its practical manifestations that lies at the heart of Jonathan Duke-Evans’ meticulous and thoroughly entertaining new book. Using examples sourced from as far back as classical literature, he explores the origins and development of the idea of fair play, and maps how the term was used across time and space. He also examines – as the title suggests – the extent to which fair play might be unique to English or British people, and how far it has become a defining feature of the national character.
This is an ambitious undertaking that Duke-Evans tackles with verve and skill. He begins by charting the rise of the phrase through the classical world and the Middle Ages in western Europe. He then focuses specifically on a British strand that became widespread through the 16th and 17th centuries. He is especially strong on pre-industrial Britain, and the importance of fair play as understood in the common law. Duke-Evans makes good use of the example of John Lilburne’s 1649 trial defence, in which the Leveller intertwined notions of fair play and justice. And he argues persuasively that, by the 18th century, fair play “was fully entrenched in the national consciousness”.
Fair play had its detractors. Duke-Evans shows that, though many observers treated fair play as an essential characteristic of Englishness, this idea was increasingly challenged. One writer in The Speaker magazine denounced Britain’s “shocking” conduct in the Boer War as making “all England’s protests about justice, fair play and freedom so much nauseous hypocrisy”.
Any book that covers such extensive chronological ground is bound to miss out some things and get others wrong. Hence Duke-Evans is a little shaky on certain aspects of sporting history. He suggests, for instance, that concerns over limiting the domination of richer clubs in football are recent, and neglects to explore the English Football League’s 20th-century mechanisms for ensuring equality of competition. These methods, including the retain-and-transfer system and the enforcement of a maximum wage, would have offered interesting case studies of the contrasting claims of fair play from supporters, players and clubs. More seriously, perhaps, the relatively thin section on empire might have explored more fully the use of the rhetoric of fair play in arguments both supporting and challenging imperial ideologies and actions.
Nonetheless, if the language of fair play seems increasingly unfashionable today, Duke-Evans makes an excellent case for taking it seriously as a core component of the values that the British claimed – and still claim – for themselves.
Matthew Taylor is professor of history at De Montfort University