‘No fee’ was to be charged for their services: Amateur athletics advisors in 1935: Part 2. Henry Rottenburg, Athletics Innovator.

In December 1935, the Manchester Guardian produced a list of men willing to give talks, lectures and demonstrations to clubs and schools. No fee was to be charged for their services, although it was expected that out-of-pocket expenses would be met. Whilst never professing to be a coach, one of the most interesting men on the Guardian list was Henry (Harry) Rottenburg, M.A., M.I.E.E., who was prepared to give talks of the ‘Correlation of science and athletics’. This article touches briefly on his activities

Class, Gender and Employment in England’s Victorian Public Baths.

Although both sexes engaged in bathing in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century, often under the supervision of seaside 'bathers', swimming for exercise remained a primarily male activity. However, mainly because of its utilitarian value in saving life and its potential for enabling 'feminine-appropriate' activity, formal swimming gradually became more acceptable for women, especially after Municipal facilities increased significantly following the Baths and Washhouses Act of 1878. As the number of swimming baths expanded, some women took on formal teaching positions, designating themselves as 'swimming teachers' or 'mistresses', and some assumed managerial duties as 'matrons', while others were employed in a range of roles from 'bath attendant' to ‘ticket clerk’. This paper investigates the expansion in opportunities for female employment in the Baths during the ‘long-Victorian’ period by taking a prosopographical approach to analyse relevant census data collected in England between 1841 and 1911. The author concludes that a moral imperative, which increasingly required women to be attended to only by women, combined with the creation of segregated indoor swimming spaces, meant that the Public Baths provided a number of potential career routes for women from both the lower-middle and skilled working-classes. In particular, both the swimming mistress and the matron, many of whom had family connections to a facility or to the sport, became more visible as participation increased among all social classes. In that respect, swimming, and the social spaces and structures that were developed to accommodate it, stimulated a limited degree of gender equality in the work place

Swimming Natationists, Mistresses and Matrons: Patriarchal Influences on Female Careers in Victorian Britain.

The Victorian period has been studied from several perspectives, including through the lens of 'separate spheres', a notion that suggests a compartmentalization of markers like gender and class into discrete areas exemplifying typical relationship patterns. As Poovey (1995) argued, however, the margins surrounding class and gender were full of fissures, leading scholars to argue for a more nuanced approach involving specific case studies to explore how gender and class intersected at a micro level (Vickery, 1993). Because sport was a means of reinforcing social inequalities it provides a useful vehicle for micro study and this paper uses biographical methods to try to understand the degree of self-determinism that women had in selecting swimming-related careers. Serious swimming had utilitarian value and provided feminine-appropriate activity in segregated surroundings, making it increasingly acceptable for women of all social classes, especially after facilities expanded following the Baths and Washhouses Acts of 1846 and 1878. A moral imperative, which required women to be attended to only by women, meant that gender-specific career routes emerged as the activity became more widespread. For some working-class women, swimming, packaged as entertainment, provided an attractive working environment and by the end of the century, professional female natationists were appearing in front of all classes of society on the stage, in the baths and at the seaside. Their activities stimulated interest at all levels of the social hierarchy and generated a demand for female swimming teachers, whose numbers increased significantly. Other women were employed in supervisory capacities with married couples normally being employed as superintendent and matron. They generally lived above the baths and other female family members were often employed as swimming teachers or baths employees. This paper initially adopts a prosopographical approach to the census data collected at ten-yearly intervals in England and Wales between 1841 and 1911 to explore the class origins, familial connections, and marital status of these women and to trace their career trajectories. Collective biographies are then outlined and the life courses of some key individuals are described to place them within the contemporary social context. While more work needs to be done to uncover what Bale (2011) calls the 'layers of truth' surrounding these biographies there are indications that these could tell us something interesting about females, sport and ‘separate spheres’. For example, the data highlights the ongoing patriarchal influences on the shaping of women’s lives. Female natationists were almost always introduced to the activity through fathers and brothers, swimming mistresses entered their careers through male connections, and matrons were almost exclusively engaged as an adjunct to their husband’s appointment. In these respects, even though their lives might apparently challenge any rigid notion of ‘separate spheres’ it seems that few women really exercised any significant degree of self-determinism in their career choices. The paper concludes with reflections on the usefulness of different biographical approaches. Higgs (1996) argued that census data cannot be used uncritically to study divisions in Victorian society and it is essential that prosopography is combined with more traditional approaches to biographical research to produce what Jockers (2013) calls, a 'blended approach'. Keywords: References Bale, J. (2011). 'Ernst Jokl and Layers of Truth', in Sporting Lives, ed. Dave Day Manchester: MMU IPR Publication, 1-15. Higgs, E. (1996). A Clearer Sense of the Census. London: HMSO. Jockers, M.L. (2013). Macroanalysis: Digitial Methods and Literary Theory. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Poovey, M. (1995). Making A Social Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vickery, A. (1993). Golden age to separate spheres? A review of the categories and chronology of English women's history. The Historical Journal, 36(2), 383-414

‘No fee’ was to be charged for their services: Amateur athletics advisors in 1935: Part 1. Coaches and Administrators.

Resistance to the use of professional coaches in British athletics during the first half of the twentieth century has been well documented and an ongoing preference for amateur coaching from one’s peers was clearly evident in the year before the Berlin Olympics. A list of amateur coaches appeared in an article in the Manchester Guardian, 13 December 1935, 3, and this article explores some of these individuals

‘We have every reason for failure but not a single excuse’: British Field Athletics in the early Twentieth Century

The aristocratic and educated middle-class men involved in the formation of the British Olympic Association (BOA) in 1905 typified the class of man administering British sport in this period. They were wedded to the concept of amateurism and their class attitudes were reflected in the way in which the athletic body was presented. The amateur's emphasis on elegance and style, and a suspicion of training methods that produced muscular, specialized sporting bodies, rather than all-rounders, were important principles of an ethos that drew some of its rationale from the classical world. Amateurism normalized and standardized a bodily performance as the middle-class amateur athlete selectively used classical precedents, science and clothing to reinforce the distinctions between their own bodies and those of the professionals. Although historians have discussed the English amateur body, there has been little consideration of the impact of this aesthetic on athletic preferences and this paper links amateur views of the athletic body to ongoing weaknesses in British field events. As Table 1 shows, this has been a feature of British Olympic performances since 1896 despite occasional efforts to resolve the problem. Using press reports, family records and organisational archives, the paper uncovers some of these initiatives immediately prior to and following the First World War

Harry Koskie and Geoff Dyson: Sports Coaching in Britain after WWII.

Britain’s athletes and swimmers prepared for the 1948 and 1952 Olympic Games in a landscape of ongoing defeats across all sports by foreign competitors from America, Europe and the Empire. This was not a new phenomenon and merely represented a continuation of the sporting disasters of the pre-War period, the result of a combination of factors including lack of government support, the arrogance of amateur sporting officials, and, in particular, half a century of resistance to the employment of professional coaches. During those fifty years there had been a number of intermittent attempts to establish a British coaching culture and, although these had failed to embed the position of coach into the elite sporting environment, there were signs in the late 1930s that National Governing Bodies (NGBs) of sport were becoming more receptive. This openness extended into the post-WWII period and had led to the appointment of national level coaches by 1948. The Amateur Swimming Association (ASA) appointed amateur Harry Koskie to lead them into the London and Helsinki Olympics while the Amateur Athletic Association (AAA) appointed professional coach Geoff Dyson. This paper explores the coaching lives of these men through archival material, newspapers, family records and census data and utilises minutes from NGBs and other organisations to put their coaching practices into the cultural context of the period. The author compares and contrasts the experiences of these two coaches as they tried to make Britain’s representatives more competitive with their European and American rivals, and concludes that the structural constraints imposed on them made their tasks almost impossible

'Exercise for the multitude, rather than competition for the specialist': British Sports Coaching Initiatives (1937-1947)

The pervasive influence of the amateur ethos, with its emphasis on volunteerism, permeated all aspects of British sport in the mid-twentieth century, including attitudes towards professional coaches and specialized training. While British international sporting performances continued to decline, for many middle-class sports administrators, who consistently focused on encouraging participation, other issues were more important, especially the poor fitness levels witnessed among the general population. The 1937 Physical Training and Recreation Act, introduced to improve the physical state of the nation, resulted in the establishment of a National Fitness Council (NFC) to provide financial assistance for sporting organizations to educate their teachers. Paradoxically, this inadvertently stimulated employment prospects for professional coaches, although the NFC declared from the start that it was not interested in supporting the training of Olympic prospects. This paper explores how British administrators in athletics and swimming responded to the opportunities afforded them by the creation of the NFC and, in the post-War period, by the Ministry of Education, which assumed control of the pre-war NFC Grants Committee and had a remit to finance national coaching schemes. While both sports developed coaching programmes, these continued to focus on the production of honorary coaches to expand participation. In adhering to their amateur values and traditions, rather than supporting specialized elite training, both associations struggled with the tensions between their philosophical objectives and the pressures of international sport, as reflected in ongoing debates about the values of ‘voluntarism’ as opposed to the benefits of ‘professionalism’. The paper also takes the opportunity to juxtapose the life courses and class attitudes of those who organized and administered British sport with the very different experiences and perspectives of the men and women they employed as coaches