Child Work or Child Labour? The Caddie Question in Edwardian Golf

Introduction: Child labour in sport is often regarded as a relatively modern phenomenon, usually with exploitative implications, involving third-world workers producing sporting goods, the abused bodies of communist bloc girl gymnasts, and teenage African footballers discarded when they failed to make the grade in Europe. Although historical examples are Idrottsforumabsent from the academic literature, there are late nineteenth and early twentieth-century instances in Britain in the use of boy jockeys in horseracing and, the subject of this chapter, the child caddie in golf. For the purposes of this chapter children are considered to be young persons under the age of sixteen, the line generally taken by golf clubs. Hence the discussion of child caddies is not confined to those still at school but also includes school leavers, many of whom could be as young as twelve

The Rough and the Fairway: Processes and Problems in Ryder Cup Team Selection 1927-2006

Introduction Competed for by European and American golfers, the Ryder Cup is unusual in professional sport as the participants play without financial reward using a team format in a game normally associated at the their level with individual rivalry. This paper will outline the history of the competition, examine implications of the selection policies and procedures and discuss the issue of identity, particularly when the non-American opposition switched from being British to European. It will also add to the relatively sparse coverage of golf in academic literature. What has been written has focused on the gender divide, the economics of the sport and, more recently, the environment. The Ryder Cup itself, whilst the subject of several popular works, has had only one academic article devoted to it on this side of the Atlantic

Ragworth: The emergence and development of a disadvantaged estate: A study in the residualisation of public sector housing in a de-industrialising conurbation

The primary objective of this thesis is to explain how a particular council estate in Stockton-on-Tees became run-down and disadvantaged. However, the pursuit of such an explanation demands a historical, social, political and economic perspective embracing the conurbation within which the estate is located. In fact, it is necessary to go beyond the confines of Teesside and take account of national and international processes and forces. With regard to national influences, these have played a crucial role in the urban growth of Stockton and in the progressive diminution of its public housing sector to create an increasingly residualised welfare tenure. Moreover, central mechanisms and decisions taken by international capital have de-industrialised the Teesside conurbation and led to high and long-term unemployment. So disadvantage has increased for this and other reasons, and the minority of the population suffering it are largely housed in council accommodation. Local characteristics and factors also play a crucial part in the way that central forces impact on a locality, mediating and modifying their consequences depending on the particular configuration of industrial, social, etc., features that impart to local areas their unique traditions and identities. Yet, significant as this interaction is between central forces and local factors in creating a poorer stock of council housing and the disadvantaged families who live in it, to explain how and why particular run-down areas arise can also demand a closer focus on individual estates to explore specific causes. A further theme of this study concerns the possibilities and mechanisms of change on disadvantaged estates. One such period of change on Ragworth is examined in the light of before-and-after survey research, as is a new regime of decentralised management which followed. Finally, the effects of current policy initiatives are measured against the immense problems posed by the shifts in the social class structure represented by the growth of disadvantage and the emergence of what has been described as an underclass

Empiricist versus sociological history: some comments on the ‘civilizing process’

This paper makes a further contribution to the debate in this journal between Tony Collins and disciples of the theory of the ‘civilizing process’, but this time with reference solely to cricket, a sport ignored by Graham Curry, Eric Dunning and Kenneth Sheard in their reply to Collins.[2] Moreover, whereas Collins focuses his criticisms on the historical method and the associated problems of hindsight, progress and perspective, this paper will concentrate on the use of historical evidence

Adaptive Response Function Neurons

Biological neurons that show a locally tuned response to input may arise from the network topology of interneurons in the system. By considering such a subnetwork, a learning algorithm is developed for the online learning of the centre, width and shape of locally tuned response functions. The response function for each input is trained independently, resulting in a very good fit for the presented data. Two example networks utilising these neurons were considered. The first was a completely supervised network while the second utilised a Kohonen-like training scheme for the hidden layer. The adaptive response function neurons (ARFNs) were able to achieve excellent class separation while maintaining good generalisation with relatively few neurons