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Regions in England have never been closely defined; and urban regions even less so. Cultural identities have been forged locally – in streets, villages, parishes, townships, counties – and also nationally or even, at times, imperially. Moreover, suspicious central governments have always refused to designate formal provincial capitals. That has been the case over many centuries. As a result, regional boundaries in England resist tidy mapping and English towns have never been constrained within distinctly designated regional networks. Yet there have also existed some broad historical affiliations that were greater than the shire counties and less than the nation. Thus were generated England's ‘regions of the mind’. In concept, these were permeable and mutable, their boundaries and significance varying over time. But, by virtue of their popular origins, they had a shadowy survivability. They drew not upon formal administrative structure but upon shared geography, experience and culture. In addition, the long-term persistence of urban networks often encouraged these ‘regions of the mind’, since communal identities were forged when people met together – and the towns provided the classic meeting places, where residents and travellers congregated for commerce, conviviality and conversation. East Anglia and Regionality East Anglia existed regionally in this way. Its boundaries were not rigid. It was not recognised by government as an administrative region and hence had no official provincial capital. Its ‘broad’ speech was fused from a variety of dialects. Moreover, its local economy was not homogeneous. And it certainly was not cut off from the wider world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Insouciant her life might appear to be, but it was anything but a bed of roses, as Théophile Gautier observed when enumerating all the demands made on the average actress every day as a matter of course. To stay on good terms with the director, the stage manager, the costumier, the prompter, the callboy, and apart from these, not counting her protector, with boyfriends past, present, and to come, with playwrights, choreographers, composers, critics and the claque! To exchange a few words with one, smile at another, be charming to everyone and never upset anyone, for that might result in a prolonged hiss coming from a darkened box or the black waves of a hostile cabal surging from a corner of the pit; and in addition to have to change ten or a dozen times in an evening, to recite her part faultlessly, to sing in tune, to make the right gestures, graceful or bored, to cause her bosom to heave at the appropriate moment and to sink to earth dishevelled at the end, taking care not to mark her dress … Gautier's reference to boyfriends and protectors needs clarification today. The stage provided, as much in the nineteenth as in the previous century, one of the very few careers open to single women in which they could compete with men on equal terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Everyone knows that British soccer fans are hooligans. Those in doubt need only consider an incident after a Scottish Cup Final played, almost inevitably, between the Glasgow duo of Rangers and Celtic. These clubs are soccer's representatives in the religious bigotry which permeates Scotland, Celtic being a Catholic-based side and Rangers a hard-line Protestant team who between 1914 and 1984 have selected only two Catholic players, one non-practising and the other by mistake. With both religious and local supremacy at stake the fans of these clubs have a large emotional attachment to their teams and any threat to their football can have serious consequences. At full time in the game the scores were level and the spectators eagerly anticipated extra time as had been falsely advertised in the press. When it became apparent that the match was not going to continue, angry fans began to invade the pitch. Eventually some six thousand of them were fighting each other, assaulting the police, pulling down barricades and goalposts, setting fire to the payboxes, and attacking the firemen who came to deal with the blaze. One hundred and eighteen people finished up in hospital and only by a miracle was no one killed. A typical day in the life of a modern football hooligan? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost any event in Victorian England which brought together a large gathering of people could result in crowd disorder. Violence frequently broke out at all sorts of mass meetings ‘from Salvation Army processions to demonstrations of the unemployed, industrial disputes, … eviction scenes, Orange celebrations, public hangings’. Sports crowds were no exception. Spectators frequently got out of hand at mid Victorian horse-racing. Trouble seems to have been commonplace at several London meetings in the late 1860s: at Bromley a pitched battle was fought between welshing bookmakers and angry punters; at Streatham a rioting mob tore up railings and flung them at a jockey accused of not trying; and at Enfield a similarly suspected rider was saved from lynching only by the intervention of armed racecourse officials. The disturbances at some metropolitan meetings became so bad that in 1879 parliamentary legislation was used to suppress them. Provincial meetings, too, had their disturbances, particularly when backers felt that they had not had a fair run for their money or when bookmakers welshed on winning bets. No wonder that J. H. Peart, right-hand man of the famous trainer, John Scott, unfavourably contrasted the English situation with that at Chantilly, where ‘the arrangements on the racecourse are far beyond what they have in England. The roughs are kept in their proper place, and there was no hustle or confusion, and no fear of being robbed of your wallet. ’ Soccer, too, had its crowd problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rewards to the successful in professional sport, and equally the failure to obtain them, can tempt participants to go beyond the violence and dispossession sanctioned by the rules. Thus many late nineteenth-century commentators feared that, unless it was strictly controlled, sports professionalism would inevitably lead to corruption and misconduct: It is not good that a game should be made a matter of money. Evil passions are excited; the temptation to unfairness is increased; rowdyism comes in. As soon as any sport has become so popular that money is to be made out of it, and men engage in it upon whom the loss of reputation has little effect, it may be prophesied with certainty that abuses will arise. Experience shows that whenever, in any sport, an entrance has been opened for making money without amateur supervision, the element of corruptibility is sure to step in, with disastrous effects. The history of prizefighting was testimony to what could happen to a sport if professionalism got out of hand. Increasingly from the 1820s on, fights became unpredictable - not, however, due to closeness of competition, which might have been acceptable, but because of corruption, which was not. Despite the pretensions of the Pugilistic Club, the sport had no real ruling body and no steps were taken to rectify the situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Power relationships in commercialised sport were skewed against the professionals. Admittedly some top-class jockeys found that they held the reins, partly because they were frequently proved right in their choice of race tactics, but also because ‘the supply of men between 7 stones and 8 stones possessed of the needful skill and experience [was] extremely limited, and [so] people think it diplomatic in consequence to put up with this, that and the other’. These men could always find employment with a rival owner and hence their peccadillos were often tolerated by employers who would not have accepted similar behaviour from others in their pay. Generally, however, the pendulum of sports power swung towards the employers, men whose notions of industrial relations were dominated by paternalism: employees would be looked after if they behaved themselves and they should be grateful for what they were given. Clubs could be ‘good’ to their players. The provision of leisure facilities at the ground, winter employment, excursions, and the payment of doctors' and hospital bills, often in excess of what a player obtained in wages, all testify to that. Individual examples of club generosity include Sheffield Wednesday sending the injured Robertson, accompanied by his wife, to the seaside to recuperate; Leicestershire doing the same for the consumptive Jayes and later paying for his sojourn in a Swiss sanitorium; and Lancashire financing the long-serving Richard Pilling's journey to Australia in an attempt to beat the respiratory affliction which eventually killed him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constant insecurity was the hallmark of a career in professional sport. Every day the professional sportsman faced the possibility that there would be no work tomorrow: losing in a tight finish, a poor afternoon in the field, being the victim of a nasty tackle could all lead to non-selection. Accentuating the anxiety was the annual trauma of contract renewal, for few employers in the sports industry were willing to ‘guarantee’ work for more than a year. In horse-racing a few outstanding riders managed to obtain retainers for a two- or three-year period, but most were for a single season. The majority of jockeys, however, did not hold retainers and had to join the demeaning, and often demoralising struggle for mounts on a day-to-day basis. In soccer the retain-and-transfer system operated on an annual basis - in 1891 the Football League Management Committee specifically forbade the signing of players for more than one season at a time - and, if not retained, the unwanted footballer had to hope that some other club would be willing to pay for what was a rejected product. Sheffield Wednesday did concede one of their players a two-year contract after he had been a first-team regular for a couple of seasons, but when this led to further demands a board decision was made not to sign any player for longer than twelve months. Cricketers, too, generally obtained only annual contracts, sometimes with a guaranteed number of matches, though in 1898 Willie Quaife, Warwickshire's star batsman, after several requests and a threat to go to league cricket, persuaded the county to grant him a five-year engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]