Sport and Colonialism in 19th Century Australasia - LA84 Foundation

that competitive sport had become a corrupting influence upon
many boys. If an over emphasis on athleticism had its obvious
dangers it was clear that several headmasters in the early 1930s
subscribed to the view that considerable educational benefits
were to be derived from the pursuits of the games fields. However,
Darling's direct condemnation of Adamson's singular stance
on public school sport calls for an examination of the nature
and characteristics of athleticism at Wesley College and the
extent to which its headmaster might be held responsible for
the spread and entrenchment of the controversial educational
ideology.
The views and actions that Adamson precipitated at Wesley
College need to be considered against his English background
and the conditioning he experienced as a boy and young man in
Queen Victoria's England. Born in the Isle of Man in 1860,
Adamson grew up in the privileged world of the English upper
class. In 1874, the year he went to Rugby School, Queen Victoria
had over a quarter of a century to rule her Empire, Disraeli
became Prime Minister, there was famine in Bengal, a Zulu revolt
in South Africa and Irish revolutionaries had brought
terrorism to London. 11
Browning, Tennyson, Carlyle and Ruskin
were the giants of English literature and British Imperialism
was secured at the domestic level by success, prosperity, moral
rigour and social certainty. Propriety, and its unwritten
codes, bound the middle and upper classes into their respective
social spheres, observed in the subtleties of dress, manners
and speech. It was a world that Adamson understood and was
familiar with through his education at home, Rugby and Oxford.
At Rugby, Adamson had only moderate success in playing cricket
and rugby football but he enjoyed his sport, found pleasure in
its social experiences and no doubt became aware of the central
role team games could play in creating and developing atmosphere
and tone in a great public school.
Team games, and their particular character of amateurism,
had been efficiently and effectively harnessed in the English
public school system for the purposes of character training and
as a means of indoctrination into a prescribed code of rules
and conventions held by the upper classes. The practical value
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