Faith in state planning was central to Harold Wilson’s pledge to modernise Britain. It was his rhetorical vision of a country guided by strategic foresight and ‘forged in the white heat of technology’ that helped him win the 1964 election. But Wilson also displayed the same attachment to planning in his personal life. Back in 1934 he joined the Port Sunlight tennis club, not because he was interested in the sport but because he felt it would provide the right environment to approach one of its young female members, a shorthand-typist called Gladys Baldwin. Unlike his ‘white heat’ agenda, the policy worked. After a lengthy courtship, during which Gladys dropped her first name in favour of her second, Mary, they married.

Rugby served as a catalyst for the revival of Welsh nationhood after a victory against the All Blacks in 1905

Wilson’s pursuit of Miss Baldwin is just one of the gems in David Horspool’s highly original history of British sport. Some traditionalists might sniff at the idea of attaching too much importance to this subject, but such a dismissive attitude ignores the reality that sport has long been a phenomenal cultural and commercial force across the world. It would be impossible, for instance, to write a history of Nazism before the second world war without a reference to the 1936 Olympics. In the context of Britain’s heritage, a stance of aloof superiority is particularly inappropriate, given that most leading sports were invented here. It was John Major who wrote that ‘19th-century Britain was the cradle of a leisure revolution every bit as significant as the industrial and agricultural revolutions we launched in the century before’.

Horspool shares that view. ‘Sport has infiltrated every part of British life,’ he claims, adding that ‘different sports seem to reflect particular aspects of our historical experience’. More Than a Game has a thematic structure, as the narrative gallops along, covering everything from horse racing to cycling. In one sense it is a very modern book, since each sport is seen through a separate angle of fashionable identity politics. Boxing is dealt with in the context of ethnicity, tennis through female emancipation, cricket through class and golf through property rights.  

This approach could have produced a dull volume, given how dreary the orthodoxy of political correctness can be. But Horspool’s outlook is too lively, his content too rich and his style too readable to fall into that trap. His thesis that sport helped to shape our national destiny and character is supported by a wealth of evidence, such as the role the Commonwealth Games played in easing the flight from empire or the part that early football fan journals had in the advent of tabloid journalism.

The chapter on rugby is typical of the book’s capacity to provide fresh insights. Horspool shows how the sport, first devised at an elite English public school, served as a catalyst for the revival of Welsh nationhood, especially after a pulsating victory against the formidable New Zealand All Blacks in 1905. Yet in Ireland, rugby was viewed by nationalists as an alien, colonialist pastime. In their quest to ‘remove with one sweep everything foreign’, the Gaelic football authorities dished out lifetime bans to any of their own players who flirted with the other code. But rugby survived, partly because its roots were so strong and partly because its shrewd administrators ignored partition by creating an all-Ireland team.

Just as interesting is the chapter on horse racing, which emphasises the sport’s links to royalty and the aristocracy, though there is also a harrowing passage about the physical ordeals that jockeys endured in the 19th century, including extreme diets and purgatives. As a result, many of them suffered from mental illness and depression, revealed in their high suicide rate. Even the greatest jockey of the Victorian age, Fred Archer, died by his own hand.  

The range of Horspool’s knowledge is impressive. He writes with equal command about the design of football stadiums, changing fashions in tennis (as skirts got shorter, women’s underwear started to be discussed openly) and the bond at the end of the 19th century between the popular boom in cycling and party political organisations, led by the Primrose League for Conservatives and the Clarion Club for the Labour movement. He is just as fascinating on each sport’s mythology about its own creation: was football really started by a group of English ex-public schoolboys in 1863, as conventional wisdom has it, or did its origins stretch back much further, to medieval Italy or perhaps even China in the 4th century BC? The beginnings of tennis, however, seem more clear. In 1874 Major Walter Wingfield, a retired cavalry officer, took out a patent on a game he had designed called sphairistike, which he publicised widely. It was soon taken up as a country house game – Oscar Wilde was an early enthusiast – but thankfully its awkward name (from ancient Greek for ‘skill in playing at ball’) was dropped in favour of ‘lawn tennis’.

Horspool maintains that ‘the history of sport in Britian is a history of popular heroism’, and his book is filled with striking characters such as Harry Shapland Colt, the pioneering designer of golf courses, and the two black American boxers, Tom Moyneaux and Bill Richmond, both of them freed slaves, who became popular fighters In Britain in the early 19th century. No figure is greater in this story than W.G. Grace, the man who turned cricket into our national summer sport with his towering achievements in the Victorian age. His legacy was a complex one, for he was not only capable of extreme gamesmanship in defiance of cricket’s ethics but also made a mockery of his supposed amateur status by earning a fortune from the game. As Horspool writes in his chapter on cricket, which is perhaps the best in the book, such ‘shamateurism’ was to bedevil the English game right up to the early 1960s, serving as a vehicle for the kind of class-ridden obsession with hierarchies that Wilson promised to remove.