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.
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’. Yet both Wilson and Sandbrook are oblivious. Like that great chronicler of English architecture Nikolaus Pevsner, who tramped the length and breadth of the land to compile his massive The Buildings of England, but whose perambulations in, for instance, Liverpool’s Stanley Park had him listing every church, period house and public building in the area, but ignoring the two gigantic Victorian structures which utterly dominate either end: Liverpool’s Anfield and Everton’s Goodison Park.
Old Nik was just as blind in every town he logged. In the huge work he gives just one irritated blink of a mention to Wembley stadium ruining north London’s skyline. Similarly in Wilson’s Victorians, celebrity feast-founder of all sports W.G. Grace warrants not even a passing mention, and over the whole 700-pager there is but one desultory paragraph about the birth of Britain’s football obsession — at the time of Victoria’s death, in the First Division alone, more than six million were watching matches every Saturday.
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