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Missionaries to the Scottish Middle Classes

In any assessment of the importance of sport and the games ethic in Scottish culture, it is necessary to take a wide geographical, cultural and political view embracing the Victorian and Edwardian ideologies, largely middle-class, regarding Britain and the Empire. Here I consider the assimilation of the games ethic into various Scottish private and state schools, largely through inspirational headmasters and the motives that inspired them. Both pragmatism and idealism were the sources of an eventual revolution in manners and morals in Scottish middle-class education, which resulted in the loss of an exclusive Scottish identity but which ensured a compensatory British identity at the height of empire and brought social acceptance and occupational opportunities. By the middle of the eighteenth century, as Linda Colley makes clear, ‘Scotland was coming to be seen by those in power as useful, loyal and British’. [2] This loyalty was to be paid for ‘by giving its titled and talented males increased access to London and its plums’ [3] in a process which is still in place today. She goes on to describe the enthusiasm with which Scots made full use of opportunities of Empire, as a result of which she notes that ‘whatever some Scottish nationalists choose to maintain today, it was not simply a case of Scottish ability being creamed away from its proper home for the benefit of an English empire’. [4] However, loss of identity has been a longstanding concern. Sir Walter Scott, who died in 1832, believed that ‘everything distinctively Scots was about to die’. However, he was equally certain ‘as to the virtues of empire in enhancing Scotland’s prosperity’ and, according to one contemporary commentator, ‘subscription to the virtues of union and empire and anxiety about the loss of a distinctive Scottish culture, have been mirrored in all subsequent writing about Scotland and the Empire’. [5] All this is relevant to the nineteenth century and a Scottish educational revolution that took place in the second 50 years. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Scotland, like England and Wales, was without an efficient state system of secondary education. What was provided was a ramshackle, amorphous private system of varying degrees of competence, organization and order. At the upper end of the system – in the few schools for the wealthy and the well-placed – the situation institutionally, educationally and morally was far from satisfactory. [6] Not to put too fine a point on it, these schools, mostly in England, were mostly a shambles. In the wake of Evangelical revivalism, public criticism and shocking revelations, reform of these private schools began. It is customary to point to the Clarendon The International Journal of the History of Sport Vol. 27, Nos. 1–2, January–February 2010, 262–278