Opium of the people

I stoked up some good log fires over the holiday, and with a box or two of Thornton’s Continental Selection was snug at the hearth with two British histories on the go, thoroughly enjoying them both: The Victorians by A.N. Wilson and Dominic Sandbrook’s Never Had It So Good (1956–1963). Scholarship and readability in flawless harmony, each relishingly, relishably bringing vividly alive their seminal eras to a semi-dunce who is at long last better versed on such as the Chartists, Irish Home Rule, Gladstone, Marie Lloyd, Gilbert and Sullivan, and CND, Supermac, Angry Young Men, Mods, Rockers and the life and works of Cliff Richard and good ol’ Gamal Abd al-Nasser.

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Neither acclaimed social history, however, offers a sniff to that opium of the people: Sport. Each author’s chosen era was fundamental for sport — the Victorians invented the whole malarkey for the world, and with the end of football’s minimum wage and cricket’s feudal gents-and-players divisions, the cusp of the 1960s dramatically repackaged ‘the product’.