Recording Leisure Lives: Sports, Games and Pastimes in 20Th Century Britain

RECORDING LEISURE LIVES: SPORTS, GAMES AND PASTIMES IN 20TH CENTURY BRITAIN

BoltonMuseum, 7th April 2009

Bob Snape, Helen Pussard and Louise Window

The second ‘Recording Leisure Lives’ conference took place in Bolton on 7th April, presented by the University of Bolton and Bolton Museum and Archive Service in partnership with the Leisure Studies Association.The conference attracted over one hundred delegates, a number of whom also attended last year’s conference. Once again the themes of the conference were inspired by the photographs taken by Humphrey Spender during Mass Observation’s ‘Worktown’ project in Bolton in the late nineteen thirties, and delegates were able to view the special exhibition on sports and games, mounted to coincide with the conference, in the Museum’s Worktown Gallery. The links between the conference and Mass Observation were further in evidence in its aim of drawing attention to the everyday aspects of sports, games and pastimes in people’s leisure lives in twentieth century Britain.

‘Recording Leisure Lives’ conferences are concerned only with the history of leisure but also with the ways in which leisure is recorded, archivedand, from amuseum curator’s position, collected. We were thus pleased to devote two full parallel sessions to the recording and archiving of leisure which brought together leisure historians, photographers, archivists and curators and produced some highly informative papers and discussions. There was a considerable degree of interest in the conference amongst the general public and it was pleasing that several members of Bolton’s public were present. In keeping with the spirit of the recording of everyday leisure lives there was an on-going presentation throughout the day of images of street games and sports in China taken by students of the University of Bolton’s MA Photography course. In addition to providing an insight to leisure lives in another country, these images formed the basis of the workshop on documentary photography at the end of the day, of which more later.

As last year, the conference was held at BoltonMuseum, mainly in the nineteen thirties lecture theatre. One of the features of a theatre of this age is the lack of modern heating control and although it was once again rather warm, delegates appeared to appreciate the authenticity of the un-reconstituted ambience of the room. Indeed it was very easy to imagine that Tom Harrisson or Humphrey Spender might once have occupied one’s seat! Following the initial welcoming addresses the conference was officially opened by Dr. Peter Marsh, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bolton, Stephanie Crossley, Bolton Council’s Director of Leisure and Culture and Dr. Karl Spracklen, Secretary of the Leisure Studies Association who was deputising for the unavoidably absent Chair of the Association,Professor Scott Fleming. The conference then commenced with a keynote paper on ‘Exhibition and inhibitions: working-class boys and leisure in the 1920s and 1930s’ by Melanie Tebbutt, Director of the Manchester Centre for Regional History at Manchester Metropolitan University and author of Working-class Masculinities in the Interwar Years: Youth, Leisure and Identity, (forthcoming 2010). Melanie contested familiar representations of young men as a largely insensitive subject by showing how duringthe interwar years they negotiated new models of performance and behaviour as glamourised expectations of appearance and style, and how exposure to more relaxed social and emotional codes through the popular press and commercial entertainmentsubtly influenced their sense of self. These youthful identities were constructed through the changing use of social and recreational space, for example the cinema and dance floor and outdoor space where working-class boys learnt the most familiar lessons of adolescent masculinity.

Following Melanie’s paper there were three parallel sessions whichincluded a wide range of papers dealing with local and regional identities in leisure, gendered leisure histories and archiving and representing leisure. Three papers made direct use of the Mass Observation Archive.Carolyn Downs’ (University of Salford) paper was based on the 1947 Mass Observation file report on gambling behaviour which showed that despite decades of attempted government prohibition of working class gambling, it nevertheless thrived as an everyday leisure activity. Matthew Taylor, (De Montfort University) also used the MO archive as the starting point of his paper ‘Mass-Observation, Sport and the Second World War’ which reflected upon the role of Mass-Observation in the construction of our understanding of the history of British sport in the late 1930s and 1940s.Ivor Timmis’ (Leeds Metropolitan University) paper ‘Sport, dialect and identity in Bolton 1937-1940’ used comments recorded at rounders pitches and bowling greens in Bolton (Worktown) to investigate the importance of sport and dialect in the construction of identity. Continuing the theme of identity, Susan Barton (De Montfort University) discussed in her paper ‘Creating resort identities and loyalties among British communities in Switzerland 1870-1914’ the ways in which British sportsmen in Switzerland developed loyalties to particular resorts and created a pseudo-colonial identity in English speaking communities there. The theme of archiving and representing leisure was continued in a presentation by Gill Wright (Manchester Victoria Baths Trust) on ‘The Victoria Baths History Archive - Manchester's swimming history encapsulated’. The Baths was the winner of the BBC 2 Restoration series and Gill’s paper provided interesting insights to the nature of the donations received, several of which were personal memories of leisure experiences at the Baths.

Unusually for a Leisure Studies Association conference, knitting loomed large, its first appearance of the day being in Alison Slater’s (Manchester Metropolitan University) paper on’ Make-do-and-Mend: ‘leisure’ or ‘work’ in the lives of working class women in Bolton and Oldham, Lancashire 1939-1945’ which questioned how working-class women in these towns responded to the Board of Trade 1942 ‘Make-do-and-Mend’ programme and the part that home sewing, knitting and mending played in their wartime lives, ultimately addressing if such activities were considered ‘work’ or ‘leisure’. The theme of gender was explored by Laura Ugolini (University of Wolverhampton) in her paper ‘Men, leisure and shopping c. 1900-1939’ in which she argued that shopping was not inconsistent with a ‘manly’ identity but was, on the contrary, part of the leisure experiences of most men, serving to reinforce their identities as adult, independent and ‘manly’ men. Paul Jennings (University of Bradford) also addressed gender in ‘The local: ideal and reality in the English pub’, showing how the ideal of the local came to be articulated during the inter-war years, and the Second World War and how this was contested by women. Finally, two papers dealt with the cinema, Rosalind Leveridge (University of Exeter) identifying the regional exhibition contexts for early film and its audiences in the South West in her paper ‘In these days of the wonderful”: early cinema experience in South West Resorts’ and Jacqueline Dagnall (Independent Scholar) examining in ‘Saturday Night at the Movies - Bolton Style’ the various constructs of picture houses situated both in the town and the wider surrounding areas and the significance of location in relation to the choice of a weekend venue.

Heeding feedback on last year’s Recording Leisure Lives conference concerning the crowded arrangements for lunch, we were this year able to use the bar of the Octagon Theatre which offered much more spacious accommodation and was also large enough to house some display tables. The four post-lunch parallel sessions focused on leisure identities, invented traditions, narratives and testimonies and archiving and representing. Peter Davies (University of Huddersfield) and Duncan Stone (University of Huddersfield) each presented papers on cricket, respectively ‘The Cricketing Heritage of Calderdale and Kirklees’ and ‘Regional Cricket Identities: the construction of class narratives and their relationship with contemporary supporters’. Peter’s paper was based around the experience of a project at the University of Huddersfield: ‘The Cricketing Heritage of Calderdale and Kirklees’ and highlighted the social role of cricket clubs in that area while Duncancontrasted the differinginvention of the narratives of cricket in Yorkshire and Surrey. The theme of an invented Yorkshire and an imagined northern tradition in sport was further investigated by Stan Timmins, Karl Spracklen and Jonathan Long in their paper ‘The glory of their times: black rugby league players, imagined communities and the invention of tradition’. This argued that although black players have been involved in rugby league’s history, this has mainly been through negotiation of the symbolic boundaries of rugby league’s imaginary community and that the mythology of inclusion, constructed and maintained by invented traditions about the game’s open nature, has provided a convenient excuse for more recent failures to expand the game beyond its white, working-class, northern constituency.Simon Vaukins (University of Lancaster) in ‘Manx national identity and the Isle of Man TT motor-cycle races’ investigated how and why the TT races became so deeply ingrained in the island’s national identity during the period between 1904 and the 1960s and examined the development of two rival place-myths (traditional versus modern) on the island and the extent to which the different ingredients, which together made up a ‘Manx identity’, existed harmoniously. The relationships between leisure, youth cultures and identity are well established and Michelle Liptrot (University of Bolton) in her paper ‘Leisure and resistance in Thatcher’s Britain: the second wave of punk’ drew on testimonial and photographic evidence of punk culture in Bolton to analyse the resistant aspects of social identities that were, and continue to be, built around this subcultural leisure form. The leisure dimensions of music also formed the basis of a paper by Dan Laughey(Leeds Metropolitan University) which argued that Mass Observation’s investigations of jazz and popular music in the late 1930s and early 1940s show the Observers engaged in ‘grounded ethnographic’ observation and interviewing. Rather than being detached and aloof, Mass-Observers were actively reflexive in their attempts to gain insider knowledge and experience of jazz and pop music culture, both produced and consumed.

Three further papers dealt with sport. David Day (ManchesterMetropolitanUniversity) narrated the biography of Walter Brickett, a coach to many of the leading amateur swimmers of the early twentieth century, highlighting the tensions within the amateur sports community concerning the need for coaching. Neil Wigglesworth (University of Lancaster) related specific aspects of the development of football in the second half of the twentieth century andsuggested that the predominance of spectatorism had led to an 'industrialisation' of sport. The under-researched sport of darts was the subject of Patrick Chaplin’s (Anglia Ruskin University) paper which used Mass Observation publications, contemporary newspaper reports and hitherto unpublished archival material to explore the organisation and development of darts in Bolton (and elsewhere) during a period that witnessed ‘a growing rage for darts’.

The final parallel session was devoted to documentary photography and the recording of leisure. The inter-disciplinarity of leisure history was exemplified in Stephen Clarke’s (Blackpool and the FyldeCollege) account of an on-going artist project to represent holidays in North Wales, in particular the seaside resorts of Rhyl and Llandudno, making links with museum practices and social history.Adam Murray (University of Central Lancashire) in ‘Preston is my Paris’ also discussed how leisure sites, in this case cafes and pubs, remain an important subject of focus for image makers working in social documentary. Glynis Shaw (Castell Photography) spoke about the photographic documentation of the new promenade landscapes of Rhyl and Cleveleys and their reflection of local and regional identities and the final paper by Steven Speed (University of Central Lancashire) was concerned with the ethics and politics of photography and was based on his photographs of young Salfordians at an exhibition of paintings by L.S. Lowry at the Lowry Arts Centre in Salford. These photographs not only documented their experience, but also raised issues about ‘Art’ and regeneration, identity, class and gentrification.

Following a break for afternoon tea Martin Polley presented his keynote paper ‘Sportsmen and their Sweaters: knitting patterns as historical sources’. In a highly entertaining paper, exceptionally well supported by illustrative materials gleaned from books and pamphlets of knitting patterns, Martin showed how sources such as these, normally viewed as ephemeral and disposable, can nevertheless reveal historical changes in class, identity and gender in sport. The final keynote paper was presented by Dorothy Sheridan, Development Director of the Mass Observation Archive. Before taking this post Dorothy was Director of the Mass Observation Archive for a long period and was thus able to give a fascinating talk on the relationships between leisure and Mass Observation, liberally interspersed with anecdotes and memories of its development, including some relating to Tom Harrisson, a founder of the Mass Observation project.

The conference concluded with a discussion forum on the challenges facing documentary photographers in contemporary Britain. This was led by Ian Beesley, a professional documentaryphotographer and leader of the University of Bolton’s MA Photography. The approach adopted by Humphrey Spender to recording ‘Worktown’ in the late nineteen thirties contrasts starkly with the restrictions currently placed on photography in public places. It transpired that some authorities are claiming the right to impose restrictions in situations where there is no legal remit to do so and this clearly has implications for the recording of leisure and for its future historians.

As conference organisers we would like to thank everyone who attended, and in particular our keynote speakers and paper presenters for a totally interesting inter-disciplinary array of presentations. The next Recording Leisure Lives conference will be on 30th March 2010, again in Bolton, on the theme of Holidays and Tourism in 20th century Britain. Please see the LSA website for further details and updates.

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