Dave Day

• PhD
• Emeritus Professor of Sport History at None

During the Edwardian period, women’s physical education colleges were graduating significant numbers of gymnastics and games teachers, the demand for whom had increased rapidly following an expansion in the playing of team sports in girls’ schools. Much of the subsequent development of women’s physical activity in the 1920s can be credited to the p...

Historical sources prove that swimming is a universal cultural asset, a cultural technique that has been practised by people all over the world at all times. Nevertheless, the subject is still a stepchild of research. This volume brings together contributions on the history of bathing and swimming. It focuses in particular on tourism, recreation an...

Throughout the Victorian era, the availability of facilities and prevailing social attitudes were important influences on the swimming landscape. Middle-class concerns about the working classes led to the creation of municipal swimming baths following Acts of Parliament in 1846 and 1878 and these became hubs for the development of local swimming co...

The nineteenth-century development of swimming for women was stimulated by the public appearances of professional female natationists who performed in endurance events, exhibited and raced in swimming baths, and displayed ornamental swimming skills in music hall tanks, aquaria and circuses. These aquatic promotions were significant features in the...

From gladiatorial combat to knightly tournaments and from hunting to games and gambling, sport has been central to human culture. A Cultural History of Sport presents the first extensive history from classical antiquity to today, covering all forms and aspects of sport. Chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice...

From gladiatorial combat to knightly tournaments and from hunting to games and gambling, sport has been central to human culture. A Cultural History of Sport presents the first extensive history from classical antiquity to today, covering all forms and aspects of sport. Chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice...

THE LEGACY OF A CULTURAL ELITE: THE BRITISH OLYMPIC ASSOCIATION Changes in the State’s attitudes towards intervention in elite sport, particularly its willingness to invest through the National Lottery after 1996, resulted in Britain rising from thirty-sixth in the Olympic table in 1996 to second place in 2016. Government involvement marked a turni...

This article tracks some of the international activities of Foden Ladies Football during the 1920/70s

During the nineteenth century, swimming became socially acceptable for women because it had utilitarian value as a lifesaving activity, it took place in an environment that masked physical effort, and it provided mild, beneficial exercise in segregated surroundings. Widening female participation was facilitated by an increase in baths provision fol...

Emerging out of the shadows cast over women’s football following its marginalisation by the Football Association in the inter-war years, Fodens Ladies, formed at a lorry manufacturing plant in Sandbach, Cheshire, contributed to a new vibrancy in the game between 1960 and 1980. Emulating many similar works-based predecessors, the team established it...

During the interwar years, the female body was a central focus of modernity and the topic of debate in a period that witnessed an expansion in women's sports participation. 1 Feminine identity was not only changing but fracturing into multiple constructions 2 with women's participation in exercise and sport often 'determined more by age, employment...

Modern sports forms emerged in Britain during the ‘long-Victorian’ period, the years from the 1789 French revolution to the outbreak of World War One in 1914, when the number of instructional manuals expanded as coaches increasingly recorded their advice in print. While the majority of early texts dealt with pugilism, by the first decade of the twe...

The introduction of new swimming facilities in the nineteenth century led to an increase in employment opportunities in roles ranging from superintendents and matrons to attendants and swimming teachers. This chapter utilizes different biographical methods to explore some of these positions and to uncover, in particular, the class origins and invol...

While early efforts to organize swimming had been initiated by swimming professors with a view to increasing their teaching opportunities, towards the end of the nineteenth century an amateur swimming community emerged that first created swimming clubs and then concentrated on developing a centralized organization. This eventually evolved into the...

While there were many different professional swimming communities operating during the nineteenth century, the Beckwith family were the most prominent. Headed by Professor Fred Beckwith, who involved virtually every member of his immediate and extended family in swimming-related activities, his community generated interest in all aspects of swimmin...

The evolution of swimming as a global sport was initiated by professionals in the mid-nineteenth century well before the Amateur Swimming Association became seriously involved in the twentieth century. Swimming professors and their families took their skills abroad and this chapter demonstrates how some remained there as swimming teachers while oth...

This chapter focuses on the nineteenth-century swimming professors whose entrepreneurial activities replicated the working lives of the artisans that were typical of the social class from which they had originated. These craftsmen utilized their expertise and shared experiences to develop swimming skills and then to employ this emerging knowledge i...

This chapter discusses three key nineteenth-century swimming communities, the most important being the community surrounding swimming professors, whose craft expertise and entrepreneurial skills developed a public appetite for swimming. The authors suggest that these communities operated as a type of industrial district in the sense that professors...

One of the characteristics of late nineteenth-century swimming was the rapid expansion in swimming among women who made the transition from merely bathing to adopting the activity as a serious physical exercise. The social acceptance of female swimming was helped by the creation of segregated spaces in the new baths, and by a degree of medical supp...

While it was mainly limited to bathing in the natural environment in the early nineteenth century, swimming subsequently developed into a competitive activity, stimulated by the expansion of facilities created by the 1846 and 1878 Baths and Washhouses Acts. In the absence of national structures, progress in all aspects of aquatics relied upon the i...

The long Victorian period has often been interpreted through the lens of ‘separate spheres’, a notion that compartmentalizes markers such as gender and class into discrete areas. However, the margins surrounding class and gender were full of fissures and scholars have argued for more nuanced research involving specific case studies at a micro-level...

This book explores how different constituencies influenced the development of nineteenth-century swimming in England, and highlights the central role played by swimming professors. These professionals were influential in inspiring participation in swimming, particularly among women, well before the amateur community created the Amateur Swimming Ass...

In Inter-War Britain, several individuals exploited their athletic skills by pursuing careers as coaches, invariably drawing on, and reflecting on, their practical experiences, in a method theorised by John Dewey. These coaches were the masters of a body of specialist craft knowledge, the tacit nature of which was transmitted through apprentices wa...

The British Olympic Association was formed by men whose class attitudes were reflected in their adherence to traditional notions of amateurism. An emphasis on elegance and a suspicion of professional coaches were central to their ethos and resulted in the middle-class amateur focusing on events that accommodated the symmetrical body while avoiding...

Interest in swimming for women during the second half of the nineteenth century was stimulated by the public appearances of professional female natationists who performed in endurance events, exhibited and raced in swimming baths, and displayed ornamental swimming skills in music hall tanks, aquaria and circuses. These aquatic promotions were const...

During the latter stages of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the trajectory of organized sports followed significantly different paths in North America, Europe and Great Britain. Nowhere was this more evident that in the field of professional coaching where the American model of full-Time coaches in the Universities and Athletics...

Increased industrial activity during the Victorian period led to the creation of industrial townships such as Crewe, whose growth was stimulated and sustained by the involvement of the London and North Western Railway Company. As in other townships, the paternalism of employers was reflected in company involvement in all aspects of the social, poli...

During the latter stages of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the trajectory of organized sports followed significantly different paths in North America and Great Britain. Nowhere was this more evident than in the field of professional coaching where the American model of full-time coaches in universities and athletics clubs contr...

In 1873, The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine extolled the values of swimming for women and gave advice on the best form of bathing dress, one which preserved modesty and met the demands of contemporary fashion. This essentially impractical type of bathing outfit has been the subject of much of the historiography surrounding female swimming costume...

Contemporary Manchester is recognized internationally as a footballing city, with both Manchester United and Manchester City acknowledged as prominent clubs. However, the city has not always been a force in the game, nor has the game always been important across Manchester’s social spectrum. This paper examines how Manchester first became establish...

The development of English swimming throughout the nineteenth century relied heavily on the activities of swimming professors and their families who promoted the sport through challenges and competitions and established classes for the teaching of swimming and lifesaving. Like many of their contemporaries, the leading swimming family of the period,...

By 1837, the sporting landscape of England was populated by a number of professional pedestrians who competed in a range of events that were extensively covered in the sporting press. These men distinguished themselves from their competitors through their use of ‘colours’ and a range of different athletic clothing. In the later stages of the ninete...

Association football had become a prominent part of Manchester's sporting landscape by 1884, when the Manchester FA was formed, and this paper considers both how the game became significant in the city and how this development can be used to further the wider debate on the origins of the game. Using a range of archival sources, the paper provides a...

Drawing primarily on their own experiences and the mores of oral tradition, nineteenth century coaches accumulated a range of techniques and sport-specific practices related to both skill development and physical preparation. Coaches also experimented in applying emerging knowledge. In doing so, they intuitively accepted or rejected appropriate mat...

In 1895, athletes representing London Athletic Club were whitewashed by those of the New York Athletic Club. British reactions focused on the American commitment to coaching and the provision of funds to subsidize athletes, epitomized by the use of the ‘training table’ in clubs and colleges whereby selected men were provided with quality food in se...

In 1913, some interested Frenchmen, aided by a Belgian launched the International Boxing Union (IBU), the only body whose primary purpose was to govern the sport at a world level. In the immediate post-war years, this initiative, continuously driven by Frantz Reichel and Paul Rousseau, foundered despite the brief participation of the English, throu...

The eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of a plethora of sporting professionals, many of whom were involved in developing training and coaching practices. Teaching the skills, the ‘science’, of boxing became an important source of income for professional fighters while some practitioners also developed careers as trainers, normally operating...

Interest in swimming for women during the second half of the nineteenth century was stimulated by the public appearances of professional female natationists who performed in endurance events, exhibited and raced in swimming baths, and displayed ornamental swimming skills in music hall tanks, as well as teaching swimming in female-only classes. This...

When the Olympic Games were staged in London in 1908, the British organizing committee ensured that the definitions of amateur formulated by individual national governing bodies were enshrined into the regulations for the event. Contemporary newspaper reports comparing British and American attitudes to sport suggest that the amateur ethos, which su...

Victorian and Edwardian coaches and athletes often referred to their training regimes as ‘scientific.’ However, the impact of experimental science on coaching programmes was minimal, and coaching was considered an art as much as a science. Coaching operated as a trade or a craft with the typical coach relying on traditional practices, experience, i...

Although an increase in the quality and availability of sports coaching is one of the ‘soft’ legacy targets for the organisers of London 2012, little is actually known about the ongoing relationships between the Olympic Games and Britain’s coaching traditions, social practices which form an important part of the nation’s intangible cultural heritag...

Nineteenth-century professional sports coaching had much in common with conventional craft processes, with the coach as the master of a body of traditional specialist knowledge passed on through kinship groups and coach-athlete relationships. Knowledge transfer was embedded within informal communities of practice such as that centred on swimming pr...

When Victorian and Edwardian coaches used the term ‘science’ they were generally referring to technique or to systematic training regimes, and traditional coaching practices, derived from experience, observations and intuition, maintained credibility long after physiologists began investigating sport. Scientists testing athletes at the 1928 Olympic...

This metadata relates to an electronic version of an article published in Sport in History, 2010, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 32-54. Sport in History is available online at informaworldTM at http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a919909021 As sporting opportunities expanded during the eighteenth century, a number of individuals made a liv...

Paper presented at the British Society of Sports History Annual Conference, Friday 10 – Saturday 11 September 2010 at Wellcome Collection, London. The need to improve British Sport in terms of success, efficiency and organisation can be traced back to the British failures at the Stockholm Games in 1912. Despite gradually diminishing international p...

Paper presented at the British Society of Sports History Annual Conference, Friday 10 – Saturday 11 September 2010 at Wellcome Collection, London. Late eighteenth century boxing manuals argued that the appropriate methods of training ‘wind’, ‘bottom’, and ‘science’, were at last fully understood, and it was this body of experiential knowledge which...

Paper presented at MMU Research Institute for Health & Social Change, Annual Conference, Thursday 1 July 2010. Gradually diminishing international performances by the British teams can be traced back to the Stockholm Games in 1912. Since then the need to improve British Sport in terms of success and efficiency have been publicly stated, yet the Bri...

Paper presented to the MMU Research Institute for Health & Social Change, Annual Conference, Thursday 1 July 2010. Sport and the public house have been linked since its emergence in the sixteenth century, with many a sporting event being twinned with excessive drinking and gambling. During the nineteenth century, as the countryside became developed...

Paper presented to the Recording Leisure Lives Conference, Leisure Studies Association, Bolton Museum, Bolton, 7 April 2009. The social constraints that surrounded coaching lives altered during the late nineteenth century as emerging amateur sporting organisations used their increasing influence to implement an ideology that rejected professional c...

Paper presented at the Sports Coaching and the Sociological Imagination Conference, Manchester Metropolitan University, 19 March 2008. Bourdieu regarded biographies as illusions, arguing that the straightforward, one- dimensional life story could not exist and that lived lives are chaos. For C. Wright Mills, however, observers need to fully underst...

Paper presented at Women and Leisure 1890-1939, Women’s History Network Conference - Midlands Region, 8th November 2008.

Paper presented at the Manchester Metropolitan University, Research Institute for Health & Social Change, Annual Conference, 1-2 July 2008. The proliferation of boxing manuals in the last quarter of the eighteenth century reflected both a revival of interest in a long standing sporting entertainment and a desire of some participants and observers t...

Paper presented to the SSHM Annual Conference 2006, Practices and Representations of Health: Historical Perspectives, held 28-30 June 2006 at University of Warwick Victorian sportsmen referred to their sports as “scientific” but scientifically determined training regimes are comparatively modern and coaching was considered an art, just as much as a...

Paper presented to the Manchester Metropolitan University, Research Institute for Health & Social Change,Manchester Metropolitan University Research Institute for Health & Social Change 2008 Annual Conference 1-2 July, 2008 This paper arises from ideas gathered from personal experiences as a coach and coach educator as well as my research on coachi...

Paper presented at the MMU Research Institute for Health & Social Change, 2010 Annual Conference, Thursday 1 July 2010 When Victorian and Edwardian coaches used the term ‘science’ they were generally referring to either technique or to systematic training regimes, and the longevity of traditional training practices, derived from experience, observa...

Paper presented to the British Society of Sports History Annual Conference, Friday 10 – Saturday 11 September 2010 at Wellcome Collection, London. Historically, sport and the public house have been closely linked and from its emergence in the sixteenth century to the pub culture of today, the association of sporting events with this environment has...

Paper presented to the Memories, Narratives and Histories Postgraduate Conference, Tuesday 2 June 2009 at Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research, University of Brighton. Public houses in England throughout the nineteenth century provided many men with an alternative environment to the workplace. In particular, as the countryside and fiel...

Paper presented to the MMU Research Institute for Health & Social Change, Annual Conference, Friday 1 July 2010 at Manchester Metropolitan University. Public houses in England throughout the nineteenth century provided many men with an alternative environment to the workplace. In particular, as the countryside and fields became developed, ‘foot-rac...