A guide to the history of physical education

While the Turnverein, or popular gymnastic society, was spreading over Germany, and systems of school gymnastics were being developed in that country and in Sweden, a variety of sports and organized games had become an established feature of life in the English public schools and universities.⁠[156] As might be expected, these different types or phases of physical training have later begun to react upon each other, and each has been copied in more or less modified form in other countries. Most European states now have societies modelled after the German Turnverein, and the gymnastics of Spiess won friends among educational authorities far beyond the bounds of Switzerland and Hesse. We have found the playground movement making headway in Germany and Denmark, but shall also see the Swedish system of school gymnastics gain a foothold in England, as it had already done in Denmark.

In the first chapter of his “Athletics and Football” (The Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes) Montague Shearman has reviewed the history of athletic sports in England. He attempts to show “that competitions in running, jumping, and hurling of heavy weights are not only indigenous to the land, but have been one of the chief characteristics of both town and country life in England as far back as chronicles will reach; and that athletic sports, though they have had their days of waxing and waning, have always been a feature of life in ‘Merrie England.’” Young Londoners in the reign of Henry II (1154-1189) practised “leaping, wrestling, casting of the stone, and playing with the ball,” together with other exercises, in open spaces set apart for their use near the city. We have seen (p. 55) that Sir Thomas Elyot, in The Boke published in 1531, refers to lifting or throwing the heavy stone or bar, wrestling, running, swimming, handling the sword and the battle-axe, riding, vaulting, and shooting in a long bow. Some idea of the universal prevalence of vigorous forms of recreation in the early part of the seventeenth century we gain from a passage in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Writing of exercise as a cure (Partition 2, section 2, member 4), he first considers hunting and fishing, and then goes on to say that “many other sports and recreations there be, much in use, as ringing, bowling, shooting (archery), which Ascham recommends in a just volume (Toxophilus, 1545) ...; keelpins, tronks, quoits, pitching bars, hurling, wrestling, leaping, running, fencing, mustering, swimming, wasters (fencing with wooden swords), foils, football, balloon, quintain, etc., and many such, which are the common recreations of the country folks; riding of great horses, running at rings, tilts and tournaments, horse-races, wild-goose chases, which are the disports of greater men....” The ordinary occasions for the pastimes of the common people were Sundays and church festivals, and the numerous country fairs. Joseph Strutt’s volume on “The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England,” published in 1801, gives an entertaining description of town and country recreations practised “from the earliest period to the present time,” and it also reflects the general interest in such matters at the opening of the nineteenth century.

When we come to the particular forms of active sport or pastime which have been popular in Great Britain at one time or another we are amazed at their number and variety. Activities once practised as a necessary part of daily life survive in the sports of hunting, shooting, falconry or hawking, fishing with rod and line, and archery, and the same is true of walking, mountaineering, rowing and sailing, swimming, skating, and the like. The primeval joy of combat has been furnished by wrestling, boxing, fencing with foil and sabre, single-stick and quarter-staff. Man has matched himself against man in foot-races, broad and high jumping, weight-throwing and putting the stone or shot, the hammer-throwing and caber-tossing of the Scottish highlands, and the pole-vaulting which probably had its origin in contests between messengers whose calling required them to cross ditches and hedges with the help of jumping-poles. The game of bowls has been traced back to the thirteenth century or farther, and curling has been popular in Scotland for three centuries or more. Skittles, quoits, and hockey or shinny (shinty) have been played time out of mind. Golf was a formidable rival of archery in Scotland as far back as the middle of the fifteenth century; but English interest in the sport is comparatively recent. Polo was not introduced from the East until about fifty years ago. Tennis and fives, racquets and squash racquets have long had their devotees, and lawn tennis is now added to the list. Cricket, while it existed in England as long ago as 1600, did not become widely popular until towards the middle of the next century; but football “is undoubtedly the oldest of all English national sports. For at least six centuries the people have loved the rush and struggle of the rude and manly game” (Shearman).

Certain ones of these sports are common to several or many countries, and no nation has a monopoly of games; but Great Britain has been preëminently the home of such pastimes, and nowhere else have they won such an enthusiastic following among all classes of society or affected so large a part of the population. In variety of sports cultivated, elaborate attention to details, and the perfection of play attained in games like cricket and football she was long without a rival. Price Collier, in the chapter on sports in his “England and the English from an American Point of View” (New York, 1909), quotes some figures which “an accepted authority upon all matters of sport in England has compiled as to the investment and expenditures upon sport by the forty odd millions of inhabitants of Great Britain. His estimates, when they have been criticized, have been criticized mainly because they were too low.” From these figures Collier concludes “that some $233,066,250 are invested permanently, and $223,887,725 spent annually for sport.” He goes on to say: “Travel by train or motor anywhere in England and you see games being played—particularly if it be a Saturday—from one end of the country to the other. The open spaces of England seem to be given over to men and some women batting, kicking, or hitting a ball. The attendance at games on a Saturday is very large.... Even at the beginning of the football season the gate receipts show an attendance of more than 200,000 people. When the big and final games take place, I have calculated that out of the male adult population of England and Wales on a great football Saturday one in every twenty-seven is in attendance at a game of some sort, and this leans to the error of being too few rather than too many.”

Foreigners visiting England, and particularly men interested in education and brought into contact with the athletic life of the great public schools and Oxford and Cambridge Universities, could not fail to be impressed by such facts as we have mentioned, and to report them in the books which were the outcome of their travels. The influence of English practices on Koch, Hermann, and Hartwich, pioneers of the playground movement in Germany, and Raydt’s journey of 1886 and the volume embodying the result of his observations (1889) have been already cited (Chapter XIV). Professor Törngren, from the Central Institute of Gymnastics in Stockholm, visited England in 1877 and published a volume on school games shortly after (p. 162). The results of a later visit (1889) are reported in the Tidskrift i Gymnastik for 1890 (3: 145-195). English customs, also, seem to have been partly responsible for starting the playground movement in Denmark (p. 194). Paschal Grousset, the French journalist, recorded his impressions in “La vie de collège en Angleterre” (Paris, J. Hetzel, 1880), writing under the nom de plume “André Laurie.” Pierre de Coubertin, who began his visits to England in 1884, has done the same in his “L’éducation en Angleterre: collèges et universités” (Paris, Hachette, 1888). Chapters II-IV in the volume on Physical Education of the Young by Professor Angelo Mosso, the Turin physiologist (German translation, 1894; French translation, 1895) reveal his indebtedness to English experiences. In the United States we have had Caspar Whitney’s “A Sporting Pilgrimage” (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1894), and John Corbin’s “School Boy Life in England” (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1898) and “An American at Oxford” (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1902).

To an outsider, attempting to review the earlier history of physical education in England, it seems that apart from her outdoor sports, in the form they have assumed at the public schools and universities, her greatest contribution has been made through the teaching and writings of Archibald Maclaren, for many years proprietor of a gymnasium at Oxford. He was born in 1819 or 1820⁠[157] at Alloa, a seaport on the north bank of the Forth, in Scotland. His daughter writes that she believes his father was the minister of a neighboring kirk, and the boy was brought up a Presbyterian. At the age of sixteen or a little older he went to Paris, and for some years was a student of fencing and gymnastics there. He also studied medicine; but was most interested in physical training, and determined to reform gymnastics, make a real science of it, and put it on a plane where it belonged as a part of education. He therefore settled in Oxford, and opened a fencing school in Oriel Lane, afterwards converting it into a gymnasium. In 1858 he erected a building of his own, the University Gymnasium, on Alfred Street at the corner of Bear Lane.⁠[158]

An interesting sidelight on Maclaren’s qualities of mind and heart is afforded by certain events which belong to this period. William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, poet- and painter-to-be, entered Exeter College, at Oxford, in January of 1853, and both young men soon began to frequent the fencing rooms on Oriel Lane. J. W. Mackail⁠[159] recalls how “between them and Maclaren himself, a man in the prime of life, cultivated and full of enthusiasm, a mutual intimacy and liking sprang up, and grew into a warm friendship. Three or four times in the term they would go and dine with him in Summertown....” And Lady Burne-Jones⁠[160] speaks of Maclaren as a “man of the highest character and with warmth and tenderness underlying reserve of manner. His home at Summertown, then a small village separated by a stretch of country road from Oxford, was a sanctuary seldom opened to the outer world.”⁠[161] She calls him one of the truest friends her husband ever had, and one whose eyes discerned his pupil’s genius from the first.⁠[162]

About 1860 Maclaren was asked to work out a system of physical education for the British army. The result was “A Military System of Gymnastic Exercises for the Use of Instructors” (London, H. M. Stationery Office, 1862), “approved by the General Commanding in Chief and to be adopted at all stations where the means of carrying it out may be provided,” according to a general order issued in February, 1862. Already, in 1861, a gymnasium built on the plan of the Oxford one had been erected at Aldershot, and Maclaren himself has described⁠[163] the next step in carrying out the plan of the military authorities. “Two detachments of non-commissioned officers, under the command of the officer (Major Hammersley) selected by the authorities to direct its introduction (i.e., the Maclaren system) and conduct its future extension—an officer specially selected for his high qualifications for the difficult work of introducing into the Army a new and hitherto entirely untried institution—were sent to Oxford to be qualified as instructors, and thence removed to Aldershot to form a normal school for the preparation of other teachers, and form the center of the military gymnastic system.

“The first detachment of non-commissioned officers, twelve in number, sent to me to qualify as Instructors for the Army were selected from all branches of the service. They ranged between nineteen and twenty-nine years of age, between five feet five inches and six feet in height, between nine stone two pounds and twelve stone six pounds in weight, and had seen from two to twelve years’ service. I confess I felt greatly discomfited at the appearance of this detachment, so different in every physical attribute; I perceived the difficulty, the very great difficulty, of working them in the same squad at the same exercises; and the unfitness of some of them for a duty so special as the instruction of beginners in a new system of bodily exercise.... But I also saw that the detachment presented perhaps as fair a sample of the army as it was possible to obtain in the same number of men, and that if I closely observed the results of the system upon these men, the weak and the strong, the short and the tall, the robust and the delicate, I should be furnished with a fair idea of what would be the results of the system upon the Army at large. I therefore received the detachment just as it stood, and following my method of periodic measurements, I carefully ascertained and registered the developments of each at the commencement of his course of instruction, and at certain intervals throughout its progress.”⁠[164]

To this period belong Maclaren’s article on “National Systems of Bodily Exercise,” published in Macmillan’s Magazine for February, 1863 (VII: 277-286), and another on “Military Gymnasia” which appeared in Volume VIII of the Journal of the Royal United Service Institution (Oxford, 1864). He also compiled “A System of Fencing, for the Use of Instructors in the Army” (London, H. M. Stationery Office, 1864). A general order of July 31, 1864, states that this system, “having been approved by the Field Marshal Commanding in Chief, is to be adopted in the Military Gymnasia, and at other stations where the means of carrying it out may be provided.”⁠[165] The next volume, “Training in Theory and Practice,”⁠[166] reveals Maclaren at his best. He centers his remarks about a single exercise, rowing, and “in a great measure the mode in which that exercise is practised at our Universities and Public Schools.” This selection is made because he believes rowing to be “the exercise most susceptible of being influenced by a judicious system of bodily preparation, being at once an art of considerable intricacy, demanding long and assiduous practice, and an exercise of considerable difficulty, involving the possession—although not in an equal degree—of both muscular and respiratory power, to promote which is the object of all training.” Exercise (pp. 2-59), diet (60-119), and sleep, air, bathing, clothing (120-158) are discussed in turn in a clear, sane, and masterly fashion, with frequent sharp and skilful thrusts at time-honored customs and beliefs. Fourteen appendices contain diagrams and tables relating to boats, diet, training systems, etc. It remains today one of the most valuable books of its class. A second edition, in 1874,⁠[167] is enlarged by the addition of a practical course of training for the several kinds of boat-races practised at the university (pp. 119-160), a review of J. E. Morgan’s “University Oars” (161-192), reprinted from Nature,⁠[168] and an appendix on the subject of the sliding seat.

Outside of England, at least, Maclaren is best known through his latest volume, “A System of Physical Education, Theoretical and Practical,” published in 1869.⁠[169] The book is arranged in three parts: (1) Growth and Development (pp. 3-101), (2) Practical System of Gymnastic Exercises (105-472), and (3) Appendices A-K (475-518). While the second part, which makes up nearly three-quarters of the volume, is not without interest as a manual of gymnastics embodying the author’s ideas and the results of his long and varied experience,⁠[170] it is the first hundred pages and certain of the appendices which have raised it to the rank of a classic in its field. After pointing out that “exercise alone of all the agents of growth and development can be regarded in an educational light—alone is capable of being permanently systematized and administered as a means of progressive bodily culture,” he proceeds to discuss its nature and effects in terms of the physiological science of his day, much of it now outgrown. Health, rather than strength, should be the aim, he says. “Scholarships Junior and Senior, Examinations, open Fellowships, speculations, promotions, excitements, stimulations, long hours of work, late hours of rest, jaded frames, weary brains, jarring nerves—all intensified and intensifying—seek in modern times for the antidote to be found alone in physical action.” School-games, sports and pastimes he finds, “from their very nature, are inadequate to produce the uniform and harmonious development of the entire frame, because the employment which they give is essentially partial.... Recreative exercise in sufficient amount is usually in itself sufficient to maintain health and strength after growth and development are completed, but it does not meet the many wants of the rapidly-changing and plastic frames of youths spending a large portion of their time in the constrained positions of study.”

He dwells at length upon conditions in the army, the attempt which he had made to meet them with his military system, and the results secured (pp. 64-94). “Now if all this arrangement and method were considered necessary in the organization of the bodily exercise of full-grown men—men of mature frame and hardy habit, and at the period of life when all the physical energies are at their highest point of power, at least as much precaution and forethought and method, it would be expected, would be adopted on its administration with boys and lads at school, whose frames are all incomplete and impressionable in the highest degree; capable of being affected for good or evil by every surrounding agency. But what are the facts? Except the two Military Colleges of Woolwich and Sandhurst, and Radley College, not one of our large educational establishments is provided with a regularly organized Gymnasium with properly qualified teachers.... In our day if gymnastics mean anything,—that is, anything worth the serious thought of parent, teacher, or pupil,—they mean a gradual, progressive system of physical exercise, so conceived, so arranged, and so administered, that it will naturally and uniformly call forth and cultivate the latent powers and capacities of the body, even as the mental faculties are developed and strengthened by mental culture and mental exercise.”

In the appendix Maclaren illustrates certain forms of growth and development, regular and irregular, at different ages (A. Figs. 1-14); gives tables showing the state of growth and development between the ages of ten and eighteen years (B), and of men on arriving at the University (C); one which shows the influence of systematized exercise, extending over periods of several years, on boys of different conditions of growth and development, and on men of different degrees of physical power (D); and others containing measurements of non-commissioned officers before and after their course of training under him (E), and corresponding figures for youths at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich (F), and for two pupils of his own (G); explains his system of measurements (H), goes into some detail regarding the construction and requirements of gymnasia (I), and closes with tables of best performances at certain athletic meetings (K). It is this practical demonstration of what regular exercise will accomplish, as well as his impressive setting forth of the need for it, that has caused his book to be so often quoted and makes it one of permanent value.

The first trace of the Ling system of medical gymnastics in England we find in 1838, when Lieutenant Govert Indebetou (the name is also written In de Betou), after completing the course at the Central Institute of Gymnastics in Stockholm, moved over to England and began the practice of that art in London. His work was continued for a time by an English physician, John W. F. Blundell. Another Swede, Lieutenant C. Ehrenhoff, settled in London for the same purpose in the early forties. Much more significant was the arrival of Carl August Georgii from Stockholm, where he had been a teacher at the Central Institute since 1829 and head teacher after 1840. He opened a private institute in London in 1850, and continued in active practice and teaching there until 1877. One of his pupils was the English physician M. J. Chapman, and another was Dr. Mathias Roth.⁠[171] All of these men published pamphlets or more elaborate treatises on the subject. Of the Swedish system of school gymnastics, originated by P. H. Ling, but given its present form by his son Hjalmar in the years 1864-1882, we hear first in 1878. Dr. Roth had interested Mrs. Alice Westlake, a member of the London School Board, in this form of physical education, and in that year she persuaded the Board to engage Miss Concordia Löfving, a graduate of the Central Institute in Stockholm in 1870, to give a course in the theory and practice of Swedish gymnastics to women teachers under the Board, leading to a special certificate.

In 1881, at the end of the summer term, Miss Löfving withdrew from the service of the Board, and Miss Martina Bergman (later Mme. Bergman Österberg)⁠[172] was appointed superintendent of physical exercise in girls’ and infants’ schools. Within the next six years, under her direction, the system was introduced into 300 schools, and 1000 teachers were trained. September 23, 1885, Miss Bergman opened a Training College for (women) Teachers of Physical Education at Reremonde, Broadhurst Gardens, Hampstead, N. W. (a borough of London), removing it ten years later to Kingsfield, Dartford Heath, Kent, and in her thirty years at the head of this school she built it up into an institution of more than national influence and importance. In 1893 she was present at the eighth annual convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education and the Congress of Physical Education in Chicago, and in 1900 she attended the International Congress of Physical Education in Paris and gave a demonstration there with her pupils.⁠[173] Captain J. D. Haasum, graduated at the Stockholm Central Institute in 1872 and teacher there since 1873, spent six months in London in 1884 and gave the first training course in Swedish gymnastics to a number of men teachers under the School Board, with the help of a gymnasium fitted up at the Crampton Street schools, Walworth. This work was continued by Allan Broman (Stockholm Central Institute of Gymnastics 1883), who at a later period (October, 1911) opened in London a “Central Institute for Swedish Gymnastics, for Men Students of Physical Training.”

How the Swedish system was introduced into the British Navy and substituted, in large part, for the Maclaren gymnastics in the Army, may be told in a few words. Commander N. C. Palmer of the Navy spent some weeks in Stockholm in the autumn of 1902, in order to study the organization and management of instruction in gymnastics there, and upon his return set in motion plans for the training of instructors from among officers and non-commissioned officers. In the summer of 1903 Allan Broman was put in charge of the first course at Portsmouth, given to sixty officers in the British Navy. That same year a Handbook of Physical Training, published by authority of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, was issued.⁠[174] Part I (pp. 4-73) is evidently based upon the Swedish Army and Navy Manual of 1902 (see p. 163), in both text and illustrations. A new Handbook, much enlarged and altogether Swedish, was published in 1910, the work of Lieutenant Lockhart Leith, who during a winter in Stockholm had taken part in the exercises at the Central Institute of Gymnastics. In 1906 the Army authorities decided to introduce the same system, but instead of going to Sweden they applied to the Danish government for a man capable of teaching it at the Aldershot training school for instructors. H. P. Langkilde (p. 192) was selected for the task. He began a course with the sixteen teachers at the school in August, and the next month a regular four-months’ course with non-commissioned officers. By the first of the next year (1907) the transition to the new system was complete. A Manual of Physical Training, worked out by Major Moore in collaboration with Langkilde on the basis of the Danish Haandbog of 1899, the Army and Navy Manual (Danish) of 1905, and the books of Knudsen was published in 1908.⁠[175]

March 31, 1902, King Edward VII appointed a commission of nine “to enquire into the opportunities for physical training now available in the State-aided schools and other educational institutions of Scotland; and to suggest means by which such training may be made to conduce to the welfare of the pupils; and further, how such opportunities may be increased by continuation classes and otherwise, so as to develop, in their practical application to the requirements of life, the faculties of those who have left the day schools, and thus to contribute towards the sources of national strength.” This commission reported under date of March 14, 1903,⁠[176] and perusal of the second volume shows the Swedish system still in use in elementary schools for girls under the London School Board, and in two Merchant Company’s higher schools for girls in Edinburgh, the Edinburgh Ladies’ College and George Watson’s Ladies’ College. Having regard to the findings of this Royal Commission an “Interdepartmental (i.e., English and Scotch) Committee on the Model Course of Physical Exercises,” under date of March 10, 1904, presented to both Houses of Parliament a report directed to “the Right Honorable the Lord President of the (English) Board of Education and the Right Honorable the Vice-President of the Committee of the Privy Council on Education in Scotland.”⁠[177] On pp. 10-49 is the proposed Syllabus of Physical Exercises, based in general on the Swedish system. In consequence of this report the English Board of Education published its first official “Syllabus of Physical Exercises for Use in Public Elementary Schools” in 1904.⁠[178] The next year it was reprinted, with slight alterations; but the third edition,⁠[179] four years later, contains “further amendments and extensive revisions, which are based upon experience.... Speaking generally the new Syllabus, like its predecessor, is based on the Swedish system of educational gymnastics which has been adopted in several European countries, and is now the basis of physical training in the Army and Navy in this country” (p. vi).

The part played by Denmark in this transplantation of an alien system to British soil has been already indicated (p. 192). Even in the endowed Public Schools, the very strongholds of athletic sports, we find it introduced as a general requirement, to supplement the effects of outdoor recreation. Lieutenant F. H. Grenfell, who had taken work at the Stockholm Central Institute of Gymnastics, brought it to Eton College in 1907, and Captain E. C. Brierly, of the Army, undertook a similar task at Rugby in September of 1911. Harrow and Winchester, at least, among the other public schools, also possess gymnasia in addition to their extensive playgrounds.

To this fragmentary review of certain phases of physical education in Great Britain a paragraph on the Dunfermline College of Hygiene and Physical Training should be added. The Carnegie Dunfermline Trust was formed in August of 1903, and in the hands of its Trustees Andrew Carnegie placed a princely fund to be used for the benefit of the town of his birth. A gymnasium was opened October 21, 1904, and the New Baths March 31, 1905. Physical training was introduced into the schools soon after the Trustees came into office, and medical inspection of school children was begun in 1906. October 4, 1905, a College of Hygiene and Physical Training (for women) was opened, offering a two-year course and housed at first in the Gymnasium and Swimming Pool, on Pilmur Street. Three years later a men’s department was added, and the two departments were united in 1911. By the next fall 75 students had received diplomas for the full course. Meanwhile, in July of 1909, the Trustees learned that the College had been recognized by the Scotch Education Department as a Central Institution for the purpose of the Education (Scotland) Act of 1908, i.e., for the training of teachers for the schools of that country; and by an arrangement approved in 1912 the services of certain teachers on the college staff are available for the work of inspecting the teaching of physical exercises in schools throughout Scotland. Venturefair Park, seven acres in extent, was leased for the games of the College students and opened July 27, 1909, and in September of 1914 a new building, the foundation stone of which had been laid by Mr. Carnegie two years before, was occupied by the College and the School Clinics. Early in 1911 the original gift to the Trust had been increased by one half, raising the fund to $3,750,000.