Gentility’s mark

Introduction

Victorian Bournemouth (198) examines the social profiles of men acting in an official capacity for one or more of the local sporting clubs. Most if not all bore ‘the mark of gentility’, a profile suiting the more exclusive residents. Indeed, the cricket club appeared to practice a form of sporting apartheid, desiring only to play with gentlemen. Some of those helping the sporting clubs, however, despite gentry, played important roles in the wider community.

Victorian Bournemouth (198): background

Survey

During 1883, the Bournemouth Guardian published a community directory. Amongst these listings appeared several clubs, both sporting and social. The sports clubs covered the following activities: cricket, football, bicycling, rowing. Two social clubs – Bournemouth, Yelverton – appeared in the list as did a chess club. Analysis of those named as club officers suggests two patterns: duplication of individuals, social homogeneity. Several individuals devoted considerable attention to Bournemouth’s club-world. Sir H. D Wolff, Horace Davey, and Charles Baring Young, participated in two or more clubs, serving as president or vice-president. William Stevenson presided over the Yelverton Club and the Football Club, serving as vice-president for rowing and bicycling. The same name appears as a captain in the 1st Hants Artillery Volunteer Corps. Genealogical analysis on identified individuals indicates that all belonged to the upper levels of society. They included knights, clergymen, ‘esquires’, and a handful of described as ‘Mr’.

Motivations

In part, the men will have participated because of the contemporary, Victorian interest in muscular activity, induced for many through public school attendance. A humorous column hinted at the boisterous male atmosphere pervading the clubs. It referred to recent marriages undergone by two captains as going over to the enemy. In addition to physical activity and male companionship, including periodic club dinners, the clubs offered wider opportunities. Horace Davey sat as the member for Christchurch, while Wolff had preceded him and Baring Young would follow. Thus, the sporting clubs offered ways for political men to mingle with opinion formers and voters. J. G. Shepherd, the cricket club’s treasurer in 1883, managed the local branch of the Wilts and Dorset Bank. The sports clubs contained men of good reputation and credit: good potential customers. Clergymen perhaps relished the chance to remind their fellow members about participation through worship and donations.

Victorian Bournemouth (198): snapshots

Robert Brackenbury Badeley

Badeley (1851-1938) acted as secretary for the Cricket Club in 1883. His genealogy and connections illustrate a social type found often in Bournemouth. A physician’s son, one of several siblings, born in Chelmsford, he seems always to have had the benefit of a private income. His widowed mother left an estate of almost £3,000 in 1878. He married into an Anglo-Indian imperial family, his father-in-law would become a general, his mother-in-law, like his wife, born in the sub-continent. Badeley lived in the Bournemouth area for many decades, his estate worth £5,000. 

J. G. Shepherd

Shepherd (1824-1899), manager of the local Wilts and Dorset bank branch, acted as treasurer for both the cricket and rowing clubs during 1883. Son of a Scottish bank accountant, Shepherd worked for the Bank of British North America, four of his children born on that continent. After coming to Bournemouth he orchestrated the development of a local network for the Wilts & Dorset. His obituary portrayed him as a strong member of Bournemouth’s community: ‘a man of unchallenged probity and integrity’. An old sporting colleague and fellow Scot attended him, during his last illness, Dr John Roberts Thomson.

J. R. Thomson

Thomson (1845-1917), physician, had lived in Bournemouth since the late 1860s. In 1883 he appears as a vice-president for both the rowing and the bicycle clubs in the resort. Son of a Presbyterian minister, he married his first wife in Bournemouth and appears never to have left. The size of his household, including a butler, suggests professional success. The extent of his estate confirmed that. A fulsome obituary praised him as a leading member of the community who had taken an interest in local education. He had an ‘unparalleled’ career in his chosen area of public service.

Victorian Bournemouth (198): sporting apartheid

Gentlemen only

These pen-portraits illustrate perhaps the typical social backgrounds of men who participated in running Bournemouth sporting clubs during the 1880s. They also show the extent to which their community activities and lives interlaced. The cricket club, however, based at this time in Dean Park, appears to have practised a form of sporting apartheid. Badeley had a row with Ringwood CC, refusing a fixture with them because of their ‘discourteous and ungentlemanly behaviour’. Described by the press as for ‘the Upper Ten’, the club imposed a £25 match fee on working men wishing to play on Dean Park. Their high fees, however, discouraged many, not least the younger men who wanted to play. Badeley stopped serving in 1887, after which the club fell into organisational chaos: no membership rolls, no turn-style system used for gate revenue. By 1890, it had created a deficit, salved somewhat by Bank-Holiday games against the MCC.

Grass roots cricket

As early as 1884, critical views of the cricket club’s exclusivity appeared in the press. The club attracted ‘… only people who bear the mark of gentility – which frequently is only another name for idleness’. At an Improvement Commission meeting, Captain Hartley expressed the need for a ground where tradesmen’s or visitors’ clubs could play, if not at Dean Park. Notwithstanding this, a more active development appears to have occurred at the grass roots’ level. During this decade, the press referred to cricket clubs at Winton, Pokesdown, Westbourne, and Bournemouth East. A railway team, perhaps associated with the latter, if not independent, also appeared. This development, therefore, echoed the early social configuration at Bournemouth, whereby two societies occupied the space in parallel. One consisted of those having the mark of gentility, the other included respectable middling people and artisans together with those who laboured for income.

Takeaway

Victorian Bournemouth (198) has found that a gentle oligarchy pervaded the organisational structure of the resort’s main sporting clubs during the 1880s. This reflected a contemporary rear-guard movement conducted by reactionary, conservative residents who sought to prevent the attainment of incorporation from broadening the social pyramid. Despite the cricket club’s extreme social protectionism, some of the officials played supportive roles in the wider community thereafter.

References

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