Sportswear: A Reflection

It cannot have escaped your notice that professional sportsmen of various stamps are once again showing up to games wearing suits and ties, and leaving afterwards similarly attired. The England football team went to the last World Cup in grey three-piece affairs, and that was the best thing about their performance. This is all to the good, but something odd has happened.

England's 'footballers' 

I was reflecting the other day on the origins of certain forms of sporting dress, namely that worn for cricket, tennis and snooker. Cricket whites, or creams, were originally cream slacks, white shirt, and wool sweater (sleeves optional), worn with sporting blazer and cap. The blazer and cap were removed prior to play, and made for the accidental uniform of the sport. This is still the case, as seen in the fine-looking captains of England and Australia, below. But when all this was taking shape, men of all stamps who went to look on also wore jackets and ties, and hats.

Ponting and Strauss, this week 

Eton v. Harrow, Lord's 1906 

The tennis story is remarkably similar, as anyone who has seen old footage of Fred Perry playing will testify. The uniform of the sport was simply the uniform of the gentleman, but slightly unbuttoned. And the crowd spectated in collar, tie, and headgear.

Fred Perry

Snooker, which is now sinking into a mire of sad populism, owes its uniform to gentlemen’s evening wear, the dinner jacket being removed to leave simply a waistcoat, dress-shirt with bowtie, and dress trousers and shoes. Things devolved into the lounge suit, but basically remained attached to gentlemen’s formal attire. And those who watched the game would have looked much the same. Until the 1980s, the front rows of the audience at the World Championship wore black tie.

Joe Davis 

More generally, the sporting audience of yesteryear went into the public gaze in appropriate clothing regardless of the sport. Baseball audiences of the 1950s, and even football (soccer) audiences up until the 1960s were suited, booted and crowned (and I’m talking of working-class audiences in the main). So why, when so many sportsmen are returning to the suit, do the watchers of sport now attend the fixtures of their favoured sports wearing the clothes in which modern athletes perform? What logic is there in wearing basketball gear to a basketball game? Or a football strip to a football match? So many sporting uniforms owe their existence to a distant relationship with gentlemanly (or at least respectable) sartorial standards, it now seems odd that sporting attire – with all its utilitarian considerations of comfort, the wicking away of sweat, and optimal performance for elite professionals – is informing what Mr. Public wears in the street, around the house, and to sit and watch.

Baseball crowd, Cleveland 1957 

The explanation is perhaps wrought through an understanding of who reflects what. The amateur gentleman sportsman of old reflected the values of his society when he took to the field of play. Professionalism was a dirty word, and had nothing to do with the spirit of play. Now, professionalism is everywhere, and its crass tendrils infect us all. Celebrity, wealth, branding: these have become aspirations, and as such society attempts to reflect what it sees on the field of play. This inversion has little to redeem it, so let us hope that sportsmen’s return to decent clothing off the pitch ultimately has some influence on those of us who watch them on it.

School Uniform; or, The Beginnings of Self-Respect

My paternal grandmother was a fierce woman. I don’t think that anyone who knew her would disagree. Until she was 80 she would go on long marches with a stick, and I was never convinced that the stick served any purpose but for beating stubborn livestock that crossed her path. No doubt her early experience with a bull that had blocked her way home across a field had taught her a lesson. On that occasion she had been forced to spend the night under the stars, staring down the animal with contempt.

The 5th Earl of Carnarvon, or my grandma's largely absentee squire

Always take a stick. This lesson applied to life in general, and she wouldn’t suffer any nonsense. Nevertheless, my grandmother knew her place. She was working class, and defiantly proud of it. I’m sure she used to curtsey for the Earl of Carnarvon when he was up there shooting, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she cuffed the lads who weren’t prompt enough in the tugging of forelocks. Being working class was about being respectable: work hard; never let anybody see that you’re hurting, or that you have feelings; toe the line, even when you hate it, but give ‘em what for if there’s a whiff of injustice. Knowing one’s place involved everyone also knowing their respective places. In its own way, it worked. Of course, it also damaged. All that swallowed anger and resentment, those bottled up emotions and un-talked about problems – it was a patchwork of scarring. Still, face was saved. Respectability was assured. Heads could always be held high.


C.J. Vaughan

I wonder if we can dispense with the scarring and somehow reinvigorate the self-respect. What drove people then was a sense of belonging to a group, the code of which ensured that social transgression was policed not by parliament but by community. The same held good for the elite. C.J. Vaughan, headmaster of Harrow in the 1850s, once gave a lecture at Repton (home town of the aforementioned grandmother), claiming that authority and respect was maintained in the elite public schools by the prefects and praeposters, keeping bullying and oppression in check through their own activity of mind, industry and good conduct. Self-respect among leaders set the example for followers.


Local (to me) working-class school uniforms, c. 1970.

This week I read in the news that Education Secretary Michael Gove wants to encourage schools to re-introduce blazer and tie uniforms, and traditional prefect and house systems. There’s not much that’s come out of the mouth of this man in the last few months that I would care to endorse, but I think this is a worthy idea. I was looking through some archival photographs of kids from my childhood locale and noting that it really wasn’t so long ago that even the lowliest of comprehensive schools chose to sport collar, blazer and tie. Kids used to look smart, and schools had an identity because of their colours. Children felt like they belonged, and took ownership of their identity. Sure, they chaffed at the system at times, but surely they looked (and behaved) better than the track-suited and denim tribes one sees these days. I also remember with fondness the house system, with its house points, as late as the 1980s. I was in Nightingale house, and there was a genuine sense of wanting to do well for it. Good conduct, not to mention good work, benefitted the group as well as the individual. Bad behaviour penalised the group, and the group therefore policed itself. I really don’t know why we scrapped such things. To be house Captain surely was no bad thing. Why would we not want that for our children? All of it taught them self-respect, and all of it helped to ensure that the community sorted out its own transgressors.

My senior school scrapped the blazer and tie just before I joined it at 11. I’m sure my grandmother was appalled. Given the chance she would, no doubt, have cuffed the headmaster. Bring it back, I say, and let’s re-begin with self-respect.

Giving Thanks for Americans

Regular readers will know that I have an equivocal relationship with America and Americans, but it should be noted that while I have disliked It and some of Them with a fervency quite unmatched, I have also loved It and others of Them to degrees otherwise unknown. And this is not unbefitting for a country that has had a tendency of late to divide opinions, even among its natives (and historically, among its Natives). However much this leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, one can nonetheless state with complete certainty that American life is currently fully fuelled with passion, debate, and activity. While we may find fault with some of the chosen outlets for the burning of this fuel, we should be thankful that people are exercising their right to have a damn good barney.

Tomorrow is a special day for them, and it is scarcely creditable to me that this time last year I was there, cooking roast beef as a sort of Old World protest. I marked the day with mental relief at the removal of Hallowe’en decorations, and thought it was a jolly good thing to have a day of family and recreational time, filled to the gills with good food, only a month before Christmas: sort of a dry run for the real deal.

So, from my distant vantage, I raise a glass to the manly Americans out there, and salute your spirit. Long may you continue free.

A Sunny Disposish



The street where I live: grey, wet, and typical

I have a feeling that things may seem to have taken a turn for the bleak and miserable of late, so I write to reassure that the sunny disposition of yours truly is still alive and well. I wish I could say the same of Berlin’s climate, which does its best to shroud the city’s peculiar beauty in a damp mantle of slate grey. I had not realised how much one might miss the sun, and certainly I don’t recall November being so dark, even through all the worst that English winters had to offer. Wearing grey flannel and crowning oneself with a black umbrella, one runs the risk of merging into the monochromatic cityscape, like a Lowry figure of no distinction. Today, as a matter of defiance to the weather (which is set to get worse, by the way), I donned socks to amuse the Teutonic passengers on the U-Bahn. Germans don’t have any compunction about staring at strangers, but today I saw one or two smiling to themselves in the process. I count that as a significant victory.

My silver lining

Missing Pieces, Part II

The nature of the response to the first post under this title was such that I think there is real value in it. Examples drawn from life apparently say more and go further than any form of prescription or wit on the part of yours truly. If we all think about it, I’m sure we can come up with many examples of the tragically flawed in our lives, and upon reflecting on those flaws we perhaps better understand ourselves as we are, or as we would like to be.

Between the ages of about 5 and 13 my neighbour was a man I shall call Thomas. He lived with his wife and his Old English sheep dog, apparently in quiet suburban boredom, just like everyone else. He washed his car; he went to work; he mowed his lawn; he entertained – or endured – his wife’s parents, and her brother, every weekend; he walked the dog; he grew a beard; he washed his car… Once he had a knee operation to fix a cartilage problem. For six weeks in a cast he struggled with bucket and sponge, lawn mower and hound. But then all went back to normal.

After a few years a baby was born, just as you’d expect. His wife’s parents, and her brother, now visited more often, and he struggled to establish any paternal or familial status for himself. Things deteriorated. His wife suffered from post-natal depression, which neither of them understood, and about which neither of them knew how to ask for help. Thomas began to doubt his own worth: what was the meaning of this life, with its dark loveless procession of in-laws, works and days? He started to drink. My brother saw him at lunchtime one day, parked in his car in a layby drinking Tennant’s Super. The pain was to be numbed, one way or another. I watched with childlike fascination as this well-meaning but ultimately lost man fell apart. He came home from work one day and hid a plastic bag full of beer cans within our compost heap. His escape from the problem had now become the problem, the identification of which covered over the real issues – depression, family, fatherhood, boredom. Alcoholism tends to be treated as an evil in its own right, but often, as in this case, it is merely a symptom. To treat it without treating the underlying cause is futile.

Another evening: this time he arrived home already three sheets to the wind, and found himself locked out. He banged on front door and back, urinated against the side of the house, and then banged on the doors some more. Eventually she let him in, but it was now clear that his alcoholism had made her afraid – afraid of the animal in the man, the brute that all of us carry and suppress. No longer coherent, and no longer strong enough to be human, with all the sensibilities and sensitivities that guide our relations, he succumbed through alcohol to the bare beast.

A few days later an ambulance arrived in the morning and took him away in a wheelchair. He was ashen, resigned, a wreck. He died of septicaemia within a day or two. He was 34. His wife, when asked how she was, said it was ‘a relief’. Her son was raised by her and her brother, who moved in and took over the washing of the car and the mowing of the lawn. Thomas’ life insurance paid off the mortgage.