WORKER'S PLAYTIME
The leisure activities of the British people in the present decade offer a revealing guide to the changes that have overtaken their society. One can learn a great deal by comparing a rugby crowd at Twickenham and a soccer crowd at Wembley. The rise in popularity of some forms of entertainment, notably television, testifies to the new prosperity of the working class. The slow decline of interest in some sports and the shift from playing to watching illustrate other changes in the make-up of Britain.
Television is the greatest new influence on the British masses since the education acts of the last century produced a proletariat capable of reading the popular press, a situation capitalized by Lord Northcliffe and others. And the mass attention to "what's on television," like every other change in Britain, has social connotations. Among many in the middle class and the upper middle class it is close to class treason to admit regular watching of television. "We have one for Nanny and the children," a London hostess said, "but we never watch it. Fearfully tedious, most of it."
Significantly, the middle class, when defending its right to send its sons to public schools, emphasizes that the working class could send its sons to the same schools if it were willing to abandon its payments for television. This may reveal one reason for the middle-class dislike for this form of entertainment. Television sets are expensive, and possibly the cost cannot be squeezed into a budget built around the necessity of sending the boy to school.
The spread of television-viewing in Britain has had far-reaching economic and social effects. A sharp blow has been dealt the corner pub, by tradition the workingman's club. Since the rise of modern Britain, it is to the pub that the worker has taken his sorrows, his ambitions, and his occasional joys. There over a pint of bitters he could think dark thoughts about his boss, voice his opinions on statesmen from Peel to Churchill, and argue about racing with his friends. "These days," a barmaid told me, "they come in right after supper, buy some bottled ale—nasty gassy stuff it is, too—and rush home to the telly. In the old days they came in around seven, regular as clockwork it was, and didn't leave until I said 'Time, gentlemen, please.'"
Television also has affected attendance at movies and at sports events. The British have never been a nation of night people, and nowadays they seem to be turning within themselves, a nation whose physical surroundings are bounded by the hearth, the television screen, and quick trips to the kitchen to open another bottle of beer. My friends on the BBC tell me this is not so; television, they say, has opened new horizons for millions and is the great national educator of the future. It is easy to forgive their enthusiasm. But how can a people learn the realities of life if what it really wants on television is sugary romances or the second-hand jokes and antics of comedians rather than the admirable news and news-interpretation programs produced by both the BBC and the Independent Television Authority? The new working class seems to be irritated by attempts to bring it face to face with the great problems of their country and of the world. Having attained what it wants—steady employment, high wages, decent housing—it hopes to hide before its television screens while this terrible, strident century hammers on.
The view that the British have become a nation of spectators has been put forward with confidence by many observers, British as well as foreign. It is valid, I believe, only if one takes the view that the millions who watch soccer (which the British call football), rugby football, field hockey, and other sports on a Saturday afternoon in autumn are the only ones who count. But there are hundreds of thousands who play these sports. Some few hundred are professionals playing before thousands, but many thousands more are amateurs. Stand in a London railroad station any Saturday at noon and count the hundreds of young men and young women hurrying to trains that will take them to some suburban field where they will use the hockey sticks, football shoes, or cricket bats they are carrying.
Neither soccer nor rugby football is so physically punishing as American football, although both demand great stamina. So the British play these games long after the American college tackle has hung up his cleats and is boring his friends at the country club with the story of how he blocked the kick against Dartmouth or Slippery Rock. An ex-officer of my acquaintance played cricket, and pretty good cricket, too, until he was well into his forties. On village cricket grounds (the British call them "pitches") on a Sunday afternoon one can see sedate vicars and husky butchers well past fifty flailing away at the ball.
If one adds to these the thousands who take a gun and shoot or a rod and fish, and the tens of thousands more who cycle into the countryside spring, summer, and fall, the picture reveals a nation which does not rely solely on watching sports for its pleasure but which still gets enormous fun out of playing them.
Sports of all sorts, either spectator or participant, occupy an important, even a venerated, place in British society. Kipling's warning against the damage that "the flanneled fool at the wicket and the muddied oaf at the goal" might do to the nation's martial capacity was never taken very seriously. After all, Britons have been told interminably and mistakenly that Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton. The Duke of Wellington, who commanded the British forces in that notable victory, could recall no athletic triumphs of his own at Eton save that he had once jumped a rather wide ditch as a boy. The Duke's pastimes were riding to hounds and women, neither of which was in the Eton curriculum at the time he matriculated. Nevertheless, the tradition remains.