Tom Brown and sports ministry

If you watched ITV’s dramatization of Tom Brown’s schooldays early this year, I wonder if you were aware of the influence of the book on the development of sports ministry.  On first thought, it may be hard to see how a novel about bullying, fagging, and corporal punishment in a public school in Victorian England has any relevance to Christians in Sport in 2005.  You may be surprised!

In 1857, Thomas Hughes, (1822-1896) who had attended Rugby School when Thomas Arnold was headmaster, published the novel entitled, Tom Brown’s School Days.  The book sold 11,000 copies in the first year – an astonishing number of copies in that era.  At Rugby, Hughes had been an enthusiastic cricketer.  At Oxford he had represented the university both in the boat race and the Varsity match in cricket.  He was a man who believed passionately in the moral and physical value of playing games.

Tom Brown is generally thought to have been to a significant degree a self-portrait,   Hughes, for example, had played in an exciting cricket match against a visiting MCC side in his last year at school.  This experience is replayed in the novel, as Tom Brown’s last match.

Thomas Hughes is also associated with the term "Muscular Christianity".  The phrase is thought to have been first used in a review of Charles Kingsley's novel Two years ago in 1857 and was used by Hughes in the sequel to Tom Brown's School days called Tom Brown at Oxford (1860). While the term is hard to define, a muscular Christian might be said to be someone who was “pure in spirit, fair in relationships and who actively pursued Christ's kingdom”[1].   The concept of a healthy mind in a healthy body is, of course, not a modern one.  The saying can be traced back to the Roman writer, Juvenal (55-127 AD)[2].

Tom Brown’s schooldays begin with the “football” match and end with the cricket match – both included in the TV version.  However, seeing sport as an instrument of moral reform or the view that "in the playing fields boys acquire virtues that no books can give them"[3] reflects Thomas Hughes’s opinions more than they are accurate reflections of Rugby School under Arnold.  The historian, Richard Holt, states that, “the great Thomas Arnold of Rugby, who was mistakenly idolized by subsequent advocates of public school sports, had no time for games himself”[4]. 

Thomas Arnold (1795-1842) believed in a highly ascetic brand of Christianity.  “Doing one’s duty” was high on his list of virtues.  He saw Rugby School as an institution for training Christian gentlemen.  If sport had a value it was in channelling and dispersing those boyish energies (particularly sexual energies) in more wholesome ways or simply that it kept the boys out of mischief. 

However, it is hard to overestimate the influence of Tom Brown’s School Days – which Theodore Roosevelt viewed as one of two books every boy should read.  It has been said to have “revealed a view of the moral value of sport which was increasingly adopted in the second half of the nineteenth century”[5] and to have made the modern public school what it is.

The value, which Hughes found in team games, comes out in the following passage from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, in which a master and Tom talk at the cricket match:

“The discipline and reliance on one another which it teaches is so valuable.  I think’, went on the Master ‘it ought to be such an unselfish game.  It merges the individual in the eleven; he doesn't play that he may win, but that his side may’

“That’s very true said Tom, ‘and that's why football and cricket, now one comes to think of it, are such much better games than fives or hare and hounds, or any others where the object is to come in first or to win for oneself, and not that one’s side may win’”[6]

In Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the reader is given a clear insight into the purpose of the school experience. Rugby was “a noble institution for the training of Christian Englishmen”[7] where the games, adventures and good fellowship were arguably more important than the academic work.  As Squire Brown thinks of his parting words to Tom as he sets off for school, he considers telling him to work hard but then dismisses the idea because he realized Tom wasn’t being sent to school for that.  In the end the Squire decides that his hope is rather that Tom will turn into “a brave helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Christian”.[8] 

When asked what he wants to achieve at Rugby, Tom says that he wants to be A 1 at cricket and football, make the Sixth Form, please the headmaster, behave honourably and almost as an after-thought learn just enough Latin and Greek as it takes to get into Oxford.[9]

Courage and manliness are two important characteristics of the Christian gentleman which are developed in school life, where “fighting with fists is a natural and English way for English boys to settle their quarrels”.[10]  This was all part of an emphasis on sorting out one’s own problems.  For example, there was a rule that a boy could not report any problem to a master until it had been reported to the Sixth Form.  However the Sixth former were usually unwilling to intervene, believing that it was for the boys’ own good to learn “to stand it and to take your own parts and fight it through”. [11] Thus Tom is advised that the only way to deal with the bully, Flashman, is to fight him and beat him – which he does in the book, if not in the TV programme!

There is clear link between physical and moral courage as the following quote equating physical and spiritual warfare shows, “From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood is the business, the real highest, honestest business of every son of man.  Everyone who is worth his salt has his enemies, who must be beaten, be they evil thoughts and habits in himself or spiritual wickedness in high places, or Russians, or border-ruffians, or Bill. Tom, or Harry, who will not let him live his life in quiet till he has thrashed them”.[12]

A boy is never to avoid a fight “because you fear a licking, and say or think it’s because you fear God, for that’s neither Christian not honest”.  Moreover he is assured that “It’s a proof of the highest courage, if done from true Christian motives”.[13]  Two boys, Snoops and Green, are wonderfully dismissed as people who “had never faced a good scrummage at football”.[14]

The model of Muscular Christianity propagated by Tom Brown’s School Days may see to have little to do with the relationship between evangelical Christianity and sport as we know it and to have much more to do with character development and attitudes and values which seem strange and outdated to us yet its influence of English Public Schools is beyond question.

As well as the public schools, the influence of  “Muscular Christianity” can be seen in the development of sport in the YMCA, a shift from the negative attitude to sport in the church to a more positive one in the late nineteenth century, the formation of football clubs by churches and in the prominence of CT Studd and his brothers in cricket and evangelism.

What cannot be denied is that however it started and whatever the “pure” version of Muscular Christianity may have been, its influence of the unfolding of the relationship between Christianity and sport during the next 150 years would prove to immense. The argument for the moral value of sport, which was increasingly accepted in the second half of the 19^th century and beyond has its origin in the thinking and writing of the early Muscular Christianity movement.

Stuart Weir

< back to issues list

Top of the page