Miscellany — Summer 2010 (July/August)

Sports in the summer of 2010 . . .

This summer Miscellany appears amidst pervasive reminders of the extraordinary social, cultural and economic scale and significance of sports in the modern world. I thought it would be interesting to look at sport in Electronic Enlightenment and get a comparative sense of sport then and sport now. June and July alone have seen well represented a series of sports with 18th-century precedents, including:

• cricket
  • Australia v Pakistan, Lord's, London (1st Test starts 13 July) — played in England for security reasons
  • Sri Lanka v India, Galle, Sri Lanka (1st Test starts 18 July) — the final Test for the remarkable bowler Muttiah Muralitharan, starting the series on 792 wickets for 132 Tests
  • England v Pakistan, Nottingham (1st Test starts 29 July)
• football
  • the FIFA World Cup, South Africa (11 June–11 July) — a rainbow of nations playing in the Rainbow Nation, in a fitting tribute to the spirit of Nelson Mandela and the people of South Africa
• golf
  • the 115th US Open, Pebble Beach, California (14–20 June)
  • the 150th Open Championship, Old Course, St Andrews (15–18 July)
• tennis
  • French Open tennis championship, Paris (finished 6 June)
  • Wimbledon tennis championship, London (21 June–4 July)

One of the remarkable changes in sport over the last 250 years is its globalization, in terms of international, professional competitions, and in the participation in sports by non-professionals.

One striking comparison is to consider the value of the UK economy at the end of the 18th century against simply the prize money awarded by the events listed above — a total in excess of £360 million (roughly US$540 million).

To generate some numbers for the comparison, I've made use of the calculators available at MeasuringWorth, an academic, economic history site referenced by the Economic History Association among others, though this is not an official economic analysis. Additionally, each of the MW's calculators has a terminus ad quem of 2003 or 2008 depending on the data-set available for the calculation type. However, the available information is informative:

• £360 million would have been equivalent to approximately £6.7 million, in monetary terms, in 1800 (the UK nominal GDP was £257 million for the period 1800–1801);
• with a UK population in 1800 of 10,686,000, sharing the prize money across the would provide each person with £0 12s 8d.

To get a sense of what £0 12s 8d might have meant in late-18th-century London, we can compare Liza Picard's work on 18th-century prices in London (Liza Picard. Dr Johnson's London: life in London 1740–1770. London: Orion Books, 2000):

• 2s — weekly rent for a tradesman's furnished room;
• 2s 6d — a whole pig, a tooth extraction, dinner sent in from a tavern, a ticket for the rehearsal of the royal fireworks music at Vauxhall;
• 2s 10d — 1lb of candles;
• 5s — a pound of Fry's drinking chocolate, a bottle of claret at Vauxhall, a box at Drury Lane Theatre ;
• 8s — a bottle of champagne at Vauxhall;
• 9s — unskilled labourer's weekly wage;
• 10s — volume price for Dr Johnson's Dictionary;
• 10s 6d — a ticket to hear Handel's Messiah at the Foundling Hospital (with Handel on the organ).

Sports in the 18th century . . .

What would our EE authors have made of this? Could they have imagined the social and commercial significance, let alone the scale and international reach of sport? It seems unlikely. In truth, sport is not one of common topics in the correspondences, and then it is most often associated with children and childhood. But the references there are provide an entertaining and revealing glimpse into the personal lives of our correspondents.

Once we were young and dirty lads . . . 

On the 7 June 1742, Thomas Gray writes to his friend Richard West. Gray is on the verge of "going into the country for a few weeks" to enjoy the Spring weather, and he recounts some of what he will do and who he will see. A reminder of schoolmates playing cricket helps mark the contrast between the things of childhood and those of maturity:

Gray was in fact travelling to visit relatives in Stoke Poges, the site of his famous "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (composed sometime between 1745 and 1750). The lords in question, and one time "dirty boys", are John Montagu (1718–1792), fourth Earl of Sandwich; and George Montagu Dunk (1716–1771), second Earl of Halifax — both of whom were at Eton in Gray's time.

A cricketeer ther was, and that a worthy man . . . 

In a kind of reverse journey of Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrimage, Jeremy Bentham records the travels of himself and a companion, G. Wilson, from Maresfield to London in December of 1777:

The route of Bentham and Wilson journey follows the route of the present-day A22 from Eastbourne to London. Pursuing this route with little effort or deviation (from Maresfield, East Sussex to East Grinstead, West Sussex, then on into London via Croydon, Brixton and Lambeth) would bring you to Southwark Cathedral, from whence Chaucer's own assorted band set off. The lords in mentioned in this letter were Charles Bennet, 4th Earl of Tankerville (1716–1791), a member of the committee which revised the laws of cricket in 1774; and John Frederick Sackville, 3rd Duke of Dorset (1745–1825), member of the Hambledon Club and of the committee which drew up the original laws of the M.C.C.

Glory days . . . 

Another Spring letter and the rising sap brings thoughts of exercise, (though not too strenuous) and memories of the sporting triumphs of youth:

A Jabulani ball it wasn't!

A much earlier spring letter this time, by a perhaps slightly less sporty poet, still brings to mind a sporting story . . . of sorts:

And so, why does the ball bounce?

The science of sport, or sport in science, seems to have started earlier than most would suspect. Here Descartes explains the bounce in a tennis ball to his longstanding correspondent Marin Mersenne (French physicist & theologian, 1588–1648):

This letter is not only remarkable for Descartes' references to the elements of tennis — real tennis that is, jeu de paume, not lawn tennis. It is interesting to note too his assertion, as if an established law, "the fact that [once] a thing has begun to move it follows that it continues to move for as long as it can; and if it cannot continue to move in a straight line, rather than coming to rest, it rebounds in the opposite direction." Why is this remarkable? If nothing else, it serves as a reminder of the complex density and fluidity of historical fact — something well demonstrated by a project like Electronic Enlightenment. When Descartes wrote this letter to Mersenne, the future Sir Isaac Newton was just 12 years old. It's generally assumed that the laws of motion were first outlined in his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published 57 years after this letter, on 5 July 1687.

Be active & be healthy . . .

Tennis is not only an arena for the demonstration of science, as Descartes also shows, it can serve as a model for the physical health that is equally important to our spiritual well-being. In a letter to the princess of Bohemia, Descartes sounds a bit like a 17th-century version of the "good-health advisor" at my local gym:

Ladies & gentlemen, in the red corner, David "the hammer" Hume . . .

In a Pythonesque moment, we have the philosopher and historian David Hume in a metaphorical boxing ring with fellow Scot and historian William Robertson (Scottish historian, principal of Edinburgh University, 1721–1793):

Finally Bentham, paddling in seas & legal associations . . .

For his summer "hols", Bentham and company were spending late August in Battle, Sussex — which Google Maps agrees is 6 miles from the sea.

Writing to his father, who we must understand from the letter was rather good in the water, the 29 year old Jeremy cannot help but create legal metaphors even when recounting an English summer holiday near the seaside:

 

— Robert V. McNamee
Director, Electronic Enlightenment Project
© 2010 University of Oxford

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