Introduction
When recalling his education at a “rough” Stockport school at the beginning of the twentieth century, Jim Hooley noted that the “best education you received was how to look after yourself,” most notably in learning “how to use your fists.”Footnote 1 Hooley saw his experiences as unremarkable, what might be expected if one were to grow up in an industrial town in northern England. Learning to fight was, in his opinion, an essential and normal feature of childhood for working-class boys. Hooley's experiences were representative of most of the boys who grew up in Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They saw fighting as an important part of the school experience; in their memories it often overshadows academic learning, and in their accounts of school life they frequently pay more attention to playground battles than to what occurred within the classroom. The attitudes of the era are captured in an observation by John Glenwright, who, recalling his experiences of a particular school in County Durham before the First World War, commented:
Although I stayed six years at that particular school, I cannot remember learning very much except to read badly and write with an untidy scrawl. I made more progress in the art of self-defence. I was a small, but willing young horse, and the bigger boys, just to amuse themselves, found me plenty of opponents, some older and bigger than myself. I received many a good hiding.Footnote 2
Such an experience might be taken as signifying educational failure, in which violence formed a substitute for intellectual learning. Because the ostensible purpose of schools is to provide the latter, it is unsurprising that playground fights are a wholly neglected aspect of educational history, despite their ubiquity. Yet when one reads descriptions of childhood from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one sees that many boys educated at the time believed that fighting was an important aspect of their school life. These accounts transcend the sentimental views of childhood, common from the nineteenth century onward, which saw children primarily as victims in relation to violent acts.Footnote 3 Finally, these stories show that fighting was not only incidental to schooling but also functioned as part of the learning experience and was an essential aspect of growing up for many boys. The playground fight is important, then, for what it reveals about childhood aggression and the violent influences upon children in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Schooling and the Economy of Violence
The way in which societies respond to violence is not a simple and transparent matter. Violence is an interpersonal process defined largely by social context. For instance, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a fistfight is generally seen as an undesirable form of violence. This has not, however, always been the case, and it would be a mistake to project our modern perceptions of violence onto past eras. The historical problem of how violence influences the way in which we judge past societies has been considered at some length by the historian John Carter Wood. In his book Violence and Crime in Nineteenth-Century England, Wood notes that “it is relatively easy to look at a society or era with more violence and assume that the result was a correspondingly diminished quality of life.”Footnote 4 However, he goes on to show that this is not always an accurate judgment; the assumption that violence necessarily plays a negative role in society “tends to blind one to the vibrancy and coherence of alternative modes of organizing violence as well as to the contradictions within ‘civilized’ mentalities of violence themselves.”Footnote 5 Wood argues that violent acts should be viewed within the context of an “economy of violence,” a nexus of customs, laws, and politics that determine acceptable responses to violent behavior.Footnote 6 It is this economy that enables us to make moral distinctions among a boxing match, a domestic assault, and the use of force by a police officer. The relative permissibility of violence is dependent upon this economy.
Economies of violence are necessarily based upon cultural context, a fact that often complicates the manner in which aggression is interpreted within a given society. Monica Flegel provides a useful example of this problem in her studies of the emergence of child cruelty narratives in nineteenth-century Britain. These were accounts, either in the press or circulated by charities, that described the cruel treatment of children. Flegel shows that the contrast between the forceful, aggressive adult and the meek, submissive child was a crucial aspect of the conceptualization of cruelty.Footnote 7 However, as Flegel points out, delinquent children held an ambiguous position in these narratives, and their existence provided an alternative, and occasionally competing, image of childhood.Footnote 8 These contrasting representations of children were the product of an economy of violence in which some acts of aggression against children were condemned, while the forceful physical punishment of the delinquent child was seen as both normal and reasonable.
The notion of the delinquent child should act as a reminder that much of the work done by historians on the subject of violence has focused on transgressive and often criminal behavior. In particular, the attention of historians has been drawn to the significant changes in attitudes toward violence in the criminal justice system during the last two hundred years. While there clearly has been a profound cultural and social shift in terms of how violence was regarded during this period, there has been considerable debate among historians as to the manner in which this reflected broader trends in contemporary society. Martin J. Wiener, for instance, has characterized these changes as part of a “civilizing offensive,” aimed at strengthening the social order while reducing interpersonal violence.Footnote 9 He has argued that the trends were part of a “growing intolerance of violence,” with its basis in an expanding criminal justice system that acted as a mechanism for expanding social control.Footnote 10 The end result, claims Wiener, was that traditional male behavior was increasingly stigmatized and proscribed.Footnote 11 Wiener's investigation into the mechanisms of control has been supplemented by the work of Clive Emsley, who has attacked teleological notions prevalent in the discussion of violence and crime. For instance, Emsley's examination of police documents shows that levels of violent activity in Victorian Britain may have been far higher than crime statistics suggest.Footnote 12 If Wiener suggests that the state increasingly took on powers to control and restrain violence from the nineteenth-century onward, then Emsley shows that such powers were applied selectively—and with restraint.
While the work of these historians provides a detailed overview of attitudes toward violence during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this scholarship is limited in that it is primarily concerned with violence as an aspect of criminality. This perspective has an effect upon how violent activities are framed and produces a tendency to focus on events with serious consequences because they are more likely to come to the attention of the criminal justice system. A useful example of why this is problematic is the examination of ritualized “fair fights” by John Carter Wood. In his exploration of interpersonal fighting, Wood finds that the visibility of the fair fight declined during the nineteenth century, leading him to conclude that “there was a weakening in the limits of what was acceptable when two men came to blows.”Footnote 13 However, Wood's conclusions are largely based upon court documents, many recording the manslaughter trials that occurred after a participant had died from injuries sustained in a fight. These were, obviously, anomalous events, and it is questionable as to whether they provide a sufficient basis for broad comments about social attitudes, not least because the work of other historians seems to indicate that the belief in fair fights was prevalent long after Wood proclaims its demise.Footnote 14 Similarly, the focus upon crime can begin to define violence for historians. For instance, in discussing Emsley's treatment of sport, Paul R. Deslandes notes that the introduction of the Queensberry rules failed to eliminate “rowdy and violent outbursts” at boxing matches.Footnote 15 Yet the entire point of boxing is that the participants are involved in violent acts that they direct at one another. The normal activities in the ring do not, however, seem to be included by Deslandes in the definition of violence, a term reserved for transgressions of established rules.
The dominance of crime narratives also has a distorting influence on the work of historians. Violence becomes defined by what is said within the courtroom and which activities contravene social norms. Wiener, for instance, focuses his work entirely on narratives of murder, concentrating his research on published accounts of killings and of material generated by the state in response to such crimes.Footnote 16 While the study of this form of violence can provide useful insights into state and society in a given historical period, it is important to recognize that murder is exceptional and that a large proportion of violent acts, particularly those that do not result in serious injury or death, are never addressed by the criminal justice system. This broader range of activity is best understood in terms of “everyday violence.” This, notes Shani D'Cruze, was made up of interactions arising from “people's ordinary routine and mundane social interaction.”Footnote 17 D'Cruze points out that this was violence taking place in environments such as the home or the workplace and that it “formed part of the broader and ongoing negotiations of respectability and social identity.”Footnote 18 The notion of everyday violence as deployed by D'Cruze is useful, because it extends far beyond violent crime and includes many forms of behavior that, while less publically visible, may have had a considerable impact on the lives of those living in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The moral economy in which everyday violence takes place is such that violent acts can become invisible merely through being an expected norm; Deslandes's comment on violence at sporting events is a useful example of this. However, a close examination of particular institutions and situations can often reveal previously unnoticed acts of violence. For instance, while a school is not normally seen as a violent environment, it might expose a child to a variety of violent experiences. At its most extreme, this violence could manifest in the form of the aggressive activities that were part of normal life within the elite boarding schools of Britain during the nineteenth century, where schoolboys spent their time hunting and killing animals, brawling with inhabitants of nearby towns, and occasionally plotting active rebellion against their teachers.Footnote 19 More common forms of violence, meanwhile, included those administered by teachers for disciplinary purposes; a misbehaving pupil might potentially face corporal punishment, an application of force that was considered by many educationalists to be a necessary tool for the maintenance of order.Footnote 20 This latter use of force was prevalent within schools and consequently provides a useful counterpoint to playground violence. First, we should note that, as a normal and sanctioned educational process, corporal punishment is a useful baseline against which other instances of violence within the school may be compared. It was expected that at least some corporal punishment would be used in the school, and as a result, it was one form of violence with which most children were familiar.Footnote 21 Second, it provides an example of how economies of violence were constructed, with the permissibility of particular activities being based upon an institutional context. While some uses of corporal punishment may seem irrational or excessive to the modern reader, they were justified by educational norms that framed its usage.
While the use of corporal punishment within the school is relatively well recorded, playground fights and other unsanctioned uses of violence are almost invisible in the historical record; consequently, there is relatively little academic knowledge as to the historical extent of violence within state schools.Footnote 22 This is largely the product of the documentation of educational practice, with official records concentrating more on the manner in which the school ideally functioned than on the actual school experience.Footnote 23 It is necessary, then, to turn away from documents generated by schools and to look instead at autobiographical accounts. There are, of course, particular considerations in relation to using such material. First, as many writers have pointed out, it is important to treat autobiographical material with caution. Because most accounts of school life were written decades after the events that they record, for example, writers have had an opportunity to consider their experiences and redefine them in relation to their subsequent lives.Footnote 24 A particular example of this is recorded by Jonathan Rose in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, in which he shows that the politics of individuals in later life bear a strong relationship with how they perceived the exercise of school discipline from their younger years.Footnote 25 Such issues have been developed by Brian Roberts, who, in examining the variety of ways in which memories are created, has shown that autobiography is a complicated narrative construction and not a mere recitation of facts about an individual life.Footnote 26 One should, therefore, be cautious in interpreting an autobiographical account as a strictly factual record of events.
There is, conversely, a considerable body of literature that has explored the value of autobiographical literature and has shown its value to the historian. While we need not explore this in detail, it is worth considering the comments of David Vincent when he notes that autobiography provides one with the “ability to comprehend fully the significance and coherence of past experience.”Footnote 27 This is a significant point; we know that fighting took place between children, but it is only through reading the stories of the participants themselves that we can gain the insights necessary for understanding the processes behind these conflicts. While official records might tell us that violence has occurred, an autobiographical account tells us what violence meant to an individual. This is particularly important when looking at a subject such as playground fights, where comparatively little information is recorded in contemporary source material. In order, then, to understand the economy of school violence, it is necessary to go beyond official records of school life and look at the experiences of pupils.
The Constitution of a Fight
The playground fight was, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a normal and everyday activity in which many British boys participated. As a common childhood diversion, it was, a number of writers recalled, what one expected to witness when visiting a school playground. For instance, Peter Donnelly, in an account of his schooling in the north of England in the 1920s, described how the boys in his school would fight among themselves, commenting that those passing by his school must frequently have been greeted “by the sight and sound of urchins in full fight or preparing to fight.”Footnote 28 A similar description was provided by Ken Ausden when he wrote about his education in the south of England during the 1930s. Ausden commented on how the boys in his school “did a great deal of fighting,” either individually or in groups; “entire classes punched their way, happily or angrily according to the seriousness of the dispute, through successive morning and afternoon breaks.”Footnote 29 As one writer explained, “[a]t school, fights were popular and frequent.”Footnote 30
These fights were not random outbreaks of unconstrained violence but structured events, framed by contemporary notions of what constituted appropriate behavior. They should thus be seen as operating within a particular economy of violence in which the actions of participants were guided, consciously and unconsciously, by custom. This meant that playground fights were often quite organized affairs; one writer remembered the events at his school being “conducted usually under the control of an elder, with due solemnity and order.”Footnote 31 This informal regulation of fighting distinguished it from a random outpouring of aggression. It was, moreover, a reflection of adult notions of the fair fight then prevalent within society.Footnote 32 The rules of a playground fight were not, however, always apparent in practice, and it would be possible to describe the average contest, as one observer did, as “a fight to the finish with bare knuckles, and uncontrolled by a referee.”Footnote 33 Such statements should not be read to imply a complete freedom of action for those who took part in fights, and expectation and custom could have a significant influence on governing the actions of participants. A typical example of this was described by Jimmy Wilde in his recollections of schooldays in late nineteenth-century Wales. Wilde observed that boys “would go to a lot of trouble with these fights. A rough ring would be formed, seconds were appointed with dignity, although no one seemed anxious for the task of refereeing.”Footnote 34 Wilde's statement combines observations on how such events could be governed by expectation and tradition while lacking a formal structure. In this context, it was left up to “the anger of the crowd” to ensure that foul play did not take place.Footnote 35
The expectations and assumptions of the children themselves were important in determining how a fight should be conducted, with customs and local norms determining what was permissible.Footnote 36 Interpretations of what constituted acceptable behavior were, however, fairly liberal, sometimes surprisingly so. In Yorkshire, the local “code of fighting did not forbid kicking,” and as one Yorkshire boy observed, “clogs were our chief weapons when we really got down to business and a kick on the shin from an iron-shod wooden clog is a bitter check to pugnacity.”Footnote 37 In contrast, the deliberate use of weapons seems to have been considered objectionable throughout Britain. One boy, recalling an occasion when he was struck with a bottle, called the attack “unpardonable” and complained that it was a breach of the boys' “rules of chivalry.”Footnote 38 While such rules were often fluid, actions considered as unsporting could produce strong reactions. Ken Ausden recalled witnessing one such act when a boy struck another in the groin during a fight at his school. The unanimous reaction of the pupils was to ostracize the perpetrator for acting in such an unsporting manner.Footnote 39 The relative importance of such codes of behavior can be observed in Guttersnipe, Sam Shaw's account of working-class life during the early twentieth century. After committing a petty crime while still a minor, Shaw found himself sent to the Feltham Industrial School, an institution for the rehabilitation of juvenile criminals. Although fights were common at Feltham, they were of a similar character to those in mainstream schools, constrained by rules that prevented participants from striking below the belt or hitting an opponent when he was down. While such rules may seem surprising in the context of an industrial school, Shaw considered such restraint perfectly reasonable, the product, he said, of the “inherent sense of fair play, planted in every true Englishman.”Footnote 40 Thus, even in the most adverse environments, one might find that the school fight was governed by a series of consensual rules.
Nevertheless, it is easy to get distracted by the details of the customs that governed fighting and miss the fact that it occurred for a reason. Fights could be provoked by reasons as petty as partisanship over the Oxford and Cambridge boat race, which could lead to “a rough and tumble playground battle.” Similarly, arguments over newsworthy events, such as the controversial verdict in the trial of Victorian murderess Florence Maybrick, might lead to conflict.Footnote 41 However, more often than not, fights between boys were used as a means of establishing and reinforcing a social hierarchy. The key figure within this structure was known as the “cock of the school,” the boy who “had proved he could beat any other boy in the school with his fists.”Footnote 42 As one individual observed of his schooling, every boy who came to a school had to recognize the cock as his “superior” or else he would be expected to fight.Footnote 43 The existence of the cock, therefore, shaped much of the fighting that occurred among schoolboys. As one individual noted, many boys were “consumed with ambition to be [their] school's prize fighter.”Footnote 44 The fights that were seen as most interesting were those in which a given boy showed particular and unexpected talent because, if a boy was “thought a match for the reigning cock,” the situation “would require another fight.”Footnote 45 Moreover, the apparent importance of having a well-defined social hierarchy meant that it was undesirable to have an uncertain outcome to any fight. If this occurred, it would be necessary to resume the fight at a suitable time, often on the following day. If the participants were evenly matched, it was possible that the resolution of such a conflict might require a series of short bouts occurring over a period of up to five days.Footnote 46 The prolonged violence, it seems, was worthwhile if it helped to eliminate uncertainty.
The presence of the cock, and the fights that occurred to establish a given boy in this position, meant that it was possible to create a general hierarchy within the school, with each boy ranked according to his martial prowess.Footnote 47 Robin Bryans provides what is perhaps the best summary of the effect this had on school life in his autobiography, No Surrender. Growing up in Northern Ireland during the interwar period, Bryans recalled a competitive world in which a boy's identity and status were determined by his ability to fight:
Certainly none of us could remember what place we held in class with regard to spelling or arithmetic, but we never forgot our position on the fighting championship ladder. He who stood on the top rung kept his position by his fists. Under this system everybody eventually fought everybody, the weak and fearful being more content to remain so, the strong consumed with ambition to be the school's prize fighter.Footnote 48
It is telling that Bryans's most vivid memories of school are the fights that he took part in and observed. What dominates his memories of school, decades after the events in question, is not the life of the classroom but the violence of the playground.
Fighting in Fantasy and Reality
The notion that fighting within the school was limited by certain constraints indicates how violence was seen not only as a means to an end but also as a particular class of behavior that was an end in itself. While the status accorded to the cock of the school may have motivated many boys to fight, many others simply felt a general pride in their participation in the act of fighting.Footnote 49 To take part, even to be beaten by another boy, seems to have had some intrinsic value, providing that the fight in question was conducted according to the law of the playground. This situation is best understood if the playground fight is seen as a heavily romanticized activity, a form of constrained violence by which a boy could measure himself against contemporary ideals of masculinity. This process is understandable when one considers how, from the late Victorian era onward, it was seen as particularly desirable to encourage qualities of manliness in growing boys. This encouragement was given in a variety of ways, such as through the Earl of Meath's “Duty and Discipline” campaign, which began at the end of the 1880s. This was a political movement that encouraged tradition, patriotism, and the robust upbringing of children; its supporters argued that “almost any harshness compatible with [children's] physical health and mental progress would be better than an ignoble and helpless inability to control their conduct.”Footnote 50 The example of the Duty and Discipline movement highlights the attitudes toward manliness that were increasingly being stressed in the latter years of the Victorian era. In this view of the world, pain and physical hardship would help boys assert their masculinity in what was frequently condemned as an “age of sentimentality.”Footnote 51
The most obvious and enduring way in which these debates on masculinity were communicated to boys was through the children's literature of the period. This issue has been explored in depth by the historian Kelly Boyd, whose work on masculinity in children's literature has shown how, from the 1890s onward, books aimed at school-age boys increasingly promoted a notion of physical assertive manliness; this encompassed within it an idea of fair play and the belief that fighting was a reasonable, manly, and courageous response to certain circumstances.Footnote 52 This literature was often a written expression of the cultural issues expressed through political movements such as the Earl of Meath's Duty and Discipline campaign. Moreover, notably from our point of view, these books frequently portrayed violence as a reasonable, if not commendable, means by which problems might be addressed, with physical courage and confrontation being part of a masculine approach to the problems of life.Footnote 53 While literary representations of manliness should not necessarily be seen as a cause of violence and aggression, they provided a behavioral template to participants, influencing their perceptions of fighting and informing their responses to conflict.
The influence of literature on fighting was commented on in a number of autobiographic accounts of life in the early twentieth century. In particular, many individuals claim to have been influenced by school fiction, an extraordinarily popular genre of children's fiction during the first half of the twentieth century.Footnote 54 Although most school stories appear relatively remote from working-class life, concentrating as they do on fictional public schools, the genre held a romantic allure for many children. Looking back on their childhood in later life, many boys would claim that they were influenced by the codes of conduct common in the fictional public schools of their childhood literature.Footnote 55 One example can be seen in the autobiography of Michael O'Donovan. Growing up in Cork immediately before the First World War, O'Donovan recalled that his own behavior was affected significantly by the school stories he found in periodicals such as The Gem and The Magnet. Admiring “the public-school code,” he resolved that his own actions, most notably the manner in which he fought other boys, should be based on these idealized notions of childhood.Footnote 56 In contrast, a less positive reception to such fiction was provided by Paul West, who grew up in a country village in Derbyshire. West explicitly rejected the ideals set down by school stories, complaining that it was rare for boys to “patch up a quarrel by shaking hands,” with that kind of behavior confined to “cissy school stories with boys called Antony and Jeremy.”Footnote 57 Yet in this rejection, West was responding to the school story just as readily as was O'Donovan, framing playground violence within a fictional context. What makes their claims particularly believable is the manner in which their experiences failed to live up to the image of reality promoted by tales of life at public school. O'Donovan, for instance, admitted that his school-story fantasies of personal combat failed to match the reality of fighting. He recalled that “before ever I got in the deadly straight left I had developed from shadow boxing before the mirror, I got a knee in the groin or a kick in the shin or had my glasses knocked off, and went home, weeping.”Footnote 58 The playground fight could be a hard lesson in the differences between fiction and reality.
The inculcation of masculine values was not transmitted solely through literature, and children could learn about manliness through many other aspects of culture at the time. For instance, sporting proficiency was a notable channel for aggression, with the physical prowess exhibited in sport being one way of displaying manliness.Footnote 59 Most significant, at least from the point of view of interpersonal violence, was the popularity during this period of boxing in working-class communities. Boxing not only provided boys with sporting heroes, whose actions might be emulated in the playground, but also was an activity endorsed by the educators of the period; according to one writer, it was a “manly and healthful exercise,” which would instill in boys the virtues of “tenacity, magnanimity, fortitude and courage.”Footnote 60 It was possible to see boxing solely in practical terms, as a source of skills, and it is in this form that the sport enters into the autobiographical accounts of people who grew up in Britain from the end of the Victorian period onward. Boxing was seen by some children as an arcane science, with skilled boxers being in possession of secret knowledge that would allow them to triumph over their opponents.Footnote 61
The prominence of images drawn from school stories and boxing matches can be contrasted with the comparative absence of adult violence from childhood memories. This is perhaps surprising, given that playground conflicts often resembled forms of adult fighting prevalent among the British working class during the nineteenth century. As historians have shown, the notion of the ritualized fair fight was common in the Victorian era; in the words of John Carter Wood, it was a form of violence defined by “a clearly delimited variety of fighting techniques,” not dissimilar from an informal version of boxing.Footnote 62 However, the striking lack of reference to fair fights among adults suggests that these did not directly influence playground conflicts. Instead, the fair fight was filtered through the medium of school stories and boxing, becoming a fantasy that infected both childhood practice and later recollection.
The fantasy of fighting did not always, or even often, match the reality experienced by children. It was, for instance, typical for a fight to begin with the combatants, “mindful of the boxers they saw in the Sunday papers,” assuming appropriate stances; however, with the first blow, “both would forget the niceties of boxing and fight each other in a whirl of arms, legs, clinches, clogs, and the swear words of which we were all proud.”Footnote 63 If any boys learned to apply practical boxing skills, such experiences were absent from their autobiographies; even individuals who became boxers in later life, such as Septimus O'Reilly, reported little of the refined skill of the boxing ring in their stories of childhood fights. In his autobiography, O'Reilly admitted that he would simply rush at his opponent and hit him repeatedly, which was reportedly an effective technique when a fight consisted of a “lot of squaring up and sparing about and threatening each other before ever a blow was struck.”Footnote 64 As another individual would observe of the notion of coming into a fight like a boxer, “winning by circular swings of mighty hairy fists spelled doom from the start.”Footnote 65 Nevertheless, although adopting the skills of the boxer appears to have been rare in practice, discussion of the sport is important, because it reminds us of the role played by the imagination in the lives of children. Indeed, for many boys, it seems that the fantasy roles that were assumed while fighting were as important as success within the fight. They fulfilled an unspoken purpose, allowing boys to act out fantasies of male aggression. Mere participation in a fight, even if one was beaten, was useful, because it showed that one possessed the valued masculine qualities of bravery and determination.Footnote 66 Conversely, although it was possible to avoid violence, this carried with it the “slur of cowardice,” seen as “the more unpleasant alternative” to the process of fighting.Footnote 67
The importance of imagination in the fighting process can be underlined with the gender distinctions made by many writers. Fighting was considered to be distinctly masculine, and girls were at least notionally excluded from such behavior because, according to the beliefs of the period, “it was wrong to hit a girl.”Footnote 68 This comment was representative of a masculine notion that girls could or should not fight. This was more the product of societal expectations than of empirical experience; when tested, it was not always found to be an accurate representation of reality. For instance, Albert Mansbridge, educated in a London school during the late nineteenth century, recalled picking a fight with a girl, under the impression “that boys were stronger”; beaten by his opponent, he received a practical demonstration that such prejudices were not always true.Footnote 69 The anecdote indicates that girls might engage in fights, a notion reinforced by the fact that some women did include stories of participating in playground fights in their autobiographies.Footnote 70 However, such accounts are not common, with women more prone to recount domestic tales from their childhood than any violence in which they might have participated in while they were girls. This portrayal of girls' participation in playground fights is suggestively inconsistent; while enough accounts exist to suggest that girls participated in and observed fighting, many writers excluded girls from their accounts of fighting or insisted that girls did not participate in this form of violence.Footnote 71 This should be a reminder of the limitations of autobiography, which reflects society as much as personal experience. The notion that violence was an intrinsically masculine pursuit meant that it was more readily discussed by men who admitted that, in childhood, their fantasy lives had been consumed by fighting, as they imagined themselves to be daring boxers or fictional heroes, who expressed mature masculinity by prowess in combat. In addition, while both fantasy and reality are reflected in autobiography, it is not always easy to distinguish between them; with such accounts prepared at a great distance in time from the events to which they refer, the two can easily blend together to form a semi-imagined account of childhood violence.
Aggression and Cultures of Schooling
Although playground fights were often spontaneous exhibitions of aggression, it is important to place them in the cultural context of Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As we have seen, late Victorian cultures of masculinity had made fighting seem a reasonable, and even commendable, behavior by the 1880s and 1890s. These cultures, moreover, were emphasized by a series of military conflicts that had a significant effect upon British culture. The imperial wars of the nineteenth century, the Boer War at the beginning of the twentieth, and the two world wars that followed were important events in British history. Their influence was unmistakably profound, and many of those who grew up at the time recalled the prominence of militarism in British culture at the time.Footnote 72
While children had little direct contact with military life, the indirect influence of warfare was pervasive and militarism often encouraged by schools. From the Edwardian period onward, children were encouraged to see warfare as central to British history and culture—to view themselves as the “kinsmen of men who charged with the Light Brigade, and sons of the heroes who routed the Zulus.”Footnote 73 In particular, prior to the First World War, some saw one purpose of schools as being to prepare children for military life; thus, physical drill was described “both as a matter of public health and as a preparation for the citizen army of the future,” and a number of commentators argued that rifle training should be a standard feature in the curriculum.Footnote 74 Although few schools took up the latter suggestion, the notion of the soldier as a heroic figure was promoted and, as one individual observed, it was not unusual for the boy who went on to join the armed forces to be portrayed as “the hero of the school.”Footnote 75 The militaristic strands within British education during this period helped to promote a nationalistic culture in childhood play, which might manifest itself in pastimes such as the popular Edwardian game of “Britons and Boers.” This was, in the words of one participant, “a primitive pastime which consisted of chasing the Boers and lamming them with belts when they were caught.”Footnote 76 The prevalence of such violent pursuits attracted alarm from some quarters; as one writer was to complain, if schoolchildren were playing Britons and Boers, “can we be surprised that the games of larger boys in towns should be more serious fights?”Footnote 77 However, more often than not these violent games were accepted as part of normal childhood play and even described as having redeeming qualities. As one educational manual of the period explained, aggression
may be due to an exuberance of energy and animal spirits, a consciousness of muscular strength, a love of power, a desire for fame or distinction. In such cases the violence of temper or action is not always an unmixed evil. In fact, it is a hopeful fault, because good qualities may underlie it.Footnote 78
Although the game of Britons and Boers was only popular for a short period at the beginning of the twentieth century, it had its equivalents throughout the period that we are examining. Edward Short, who was born in 1912, recalled that his childhood games were often influenced by the violent conflicts that formed a backdrop to his boyhood. He noted that, during the First World War, many games “involved fighting the Germans who lurked around every corner”; a few years later, he and his friends were “equally preoccupied fighting the Sinn Fein up hill and down dale.”Footnote 79 Such pursuits were tolerated, seemingly unaffected by the concerns over the brutalization of the British population that were under debate in the period.Footnote 80 The activities of the children included fighting, and as one individual remarked, the teachers of the period “seemed to look upon it as clean, healthy fun” and chose not to intervene in playground fights.Footnote 81 “Masters,” it was claimed, “never interfered and black eyes in class went unremarked,” provided that one did not fight other boys too often, “else the Head might take unfavourable notice.”Footnote 82 Moreover, acts of violence were not seen as serious offenses; contemporary records show that kicking other boys might be punished with four strokes of the cane, as opposed to the six strokes of the cane that could be awarded for impudence or insubordination.Footnote 83 While the latter punishment might seem disproportionately severe, it reflected the notion that disciplinary measures were designed for the purpose of maintaining order within the school. As long as fighting occurred during time set aside for play, it was not seen as disruptive. The relative importance of imposing order and controlling aggression is revealed in the recollections of Abel Jones, who was schooled in late nineteenth century Wales. Jones stated:
I spent my boyhood in the elementary school in the days of rigid discipline, when a headmaster's whistle would demand immediate silence and stop all movement. One playtime I, a small boy in Standard I, fell down and was kicked in the face. At this point the whistle went. A brother of mine, a couple of years older, seeing me on the floor, bleeding, ran to me at once in spite of the whistle. He was severely caned.Footnote 84
These events clearly show the economy of school violence in action. Although it may seem irrational for an act of compassion to provoke corporal punishment, while an unprovoked act of violence went unpunished, the events should be seen within the context of the values of the nineteenth-century school. Order and discipline were of paramount importance in this world, while violent acts were seen as of incidental importance. While fighting was at times punished, it was often in situations when this behavior had consequences for the maintenance of order. For instance, during 1935 and 1936, the punishment book of Salter's Hill School in London recorded only two occasions when children were punished for fighting. The first act of punishment related to boys fighting when “in line,” while the second resulted from boys “fighting in room.”Footnote 85 Here the reasons for punishment emphasize the fact that teachers were less concerned with the violent nature of such activity than with its disruptive effect on their own authority when it occurred in inappropriate times and places.
The other point at which teachers might intervene was when there was evidence that serious harm might result from fighting. An instance of this was observed by John Giscard, during his schooling in the 1930s. An intense period of fighting between the boys at his school was tolerated by his teachers until one boy used a knife on another. In this situation the punishment was relatively mild and the boy in question received a mere two strokes of the cane.Footnote 86 Nevertheless, it is clear that, even when teachers were forced to intervene, they did not consider playground violence to be a serious issue. In part, these attitudes were derived from the notion that the playground was a space where children should be allowed to freely develop. From the nineteenth century onward, it was commonly accepted that play and use of the playground were valuable parts of the educational process.Footnote 87 The playground was typically described as the “uncovered school-room,” where the “formation of character goes on even more decisively than in the school-room strictly so called.”Footnote 88 Despite the extensive disciplinary powers of teachers, it was believed that “the playground is often a better teacher of discipline than the class room, for it is in the play-ground that the boys have to learn to obey their chosen leaders.”Footnote 89 Moreover, in an era when corporal punishment was a normal and acceptable part of maintaining order within the classroom, the violence of the playground was not seen as in any way exceptional. Children, as one educational writer argued, saw “physical restraint and bodily pain as the natural order of things.”Footnote 90 This acceptance of pain was seen as a positive, masculine, quality by teachers, and it was thought that the “boy who cannot take a well-deserved thrashing without crying out about it is not worth calling a boy at all.”Footnote 91 The idea, then, that boys might spend much of their time fighting was perfectly acceptable to most teachers, because it merely reflected the attitudes of the classroom.
The Expectations of Masculinity
While the playgrounds of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may seem intolerably violent to the modern reader, they reflected the aggressive norms of contemporary society. “Physical violence was a part of everyday life,” explained journalist Brian Magee, recalling his childhood in the 1930s, “not only the standard sanction of anyone in authority but also the standard arbiter of differences and disputes amongst ourselves.”Footnote 92 Fighting, noted another writer, was more common, and was of a “more brutal character” in the period prior to the Second World War than in the postwar years.Footnote 93 While this latter assertion is wholly subjective, it is worth noting that it runs counter to the popular historical assumption of a peaceable past that has given way to a violent present.Footnote 94
Prior to the Second World War, the role of violence in society was heavily determined by contemporary cultures of masculinity. As historian Peter Stearns has observed, in the early twentieth century the Anglo-American ideal of manliness legitimated the use of controlled anger.Footnote 95 It was this culture that not only encouraged boys to fight while at school but also allowed their teachers to see such behavior as a normal part of childhood. Aggression was understood to be a valid way in which children might relate, or even communicate, with one another. More than one individual recognized that the fights of their childhood were used as a means of building relationships. As one writer noted, one way to make friends “was to pick a fight: if you won, the boy respected your skill and saw in you a useful ally; if you lost, he respected your cheek and flattered himself by offering to ‘stick up for you’ in the future.”Footnote 96 Fighting could thus provide a shared experience of tapping into the prevailing masculine culture and, through this, form the basis of friendship. However, while aggressive ideas of what constituted masculinity were dominant during this period, they were not universal. Although positive accounts of fighting frequently appear in autobiographical records, some individuals were willing to admit that they found no pleasure in the violent episodes of their school life. As one was to remark in later life, playground fights were “needless and silly ways of getting hurt.”Footnote 97
Since masculinity and aggression were coupled in the popular imagination, it was difficult for boys to completely withdraw altogether from the fighting culture of schools. While fighting was an almost universal aspect of boyhood, many authors were to admit in later life that they participated with reluctance. Coercion might be necessary to persuade some boys to fight, and they could be “goaded into punching each other” by what was, in the words of one observer, “a howling mob” of children.Footnote 98 Even those boys who were happy to fight might dislike what was often the coercive nature of playground aggression; as one boy noted, he was happy to fight another boy, but he “would not fight on a silly side pretext.”Footnote 99 In some instances, this reluctance to get involved was due entirely to a distaste for the painful consequences of violence; as V. W. Garratt was to comment, he “lacked the courage to give the first punch” and was thus “content to let other boys do the shedding of the blood.”Footnote 100 There was, however, something about the very nature of violence that some boys found frightening or disturbing. For instance, James Kirkup, educated at a “rough” school in South Shields during the 1920s, claimed that the “heated, almost hysterical violence of certain boys and girls” would fill him with anxiety.Footnote 101 Joseph Barlow Brooks, another unwilling fighter, recalled that some boys in his school, “like some dogs, had a taste for fighting.”Footnote 102 Examples such as these are useful, because they underline the fact that the Victorian culture of masculinity was not a universal and impersonal force to which all members of society were subject. Instead, it was the product of beliefs held in common by a sufficient number of people to have an effect on how society functioned. While fighting may have been a normal activity for boys during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is necessary to recognize that not all children subscribed to the cultures that promoted this form of behavior and that many found playground violence to be a negative experience.
Despite the aggressive nature of masculine culture during this period, little connection was made between violence and its consequences. Boys were, by fighting, playing out the roles of boxers or literary heroes, or were trying to assume some aspect of adult masculinity. As one schoolboy of the period recalled, he and his schoolfellows felt the idea “that someone should be killed was terrible.”Footnote 103 It seems that few boys understood what the potential effects of violence might be. There were, however, occasions when fighting did cause harm. One example of this, which helps to underline some of the complexities of male aggression, can be found in Robin Bryans's account of his childhood. Bryans grew up in Ulster during the 1930s and was, in the early years of his schooling, a keen fighter.Footnote 104 This situation changed with the death of his cousin Capstack from “fatal blows delivered on the playground.”Footnote 105 Bryans resolved to refrain from fighting, study hard, and gain a career in the shipyards of Ulster. This proved to be a difficult choice in the context of an aggressive school culture:
My abstinence was translated as cowardice pure and simple. I was called a “yella bugger.” Then I threw shipyard and apprenticeship and the vision of Capstack to the winds and in the rush of temper would follow the old, familiar thud of knuckle on muscle, and the din and roar of blood.Footnote 106
The problem faced by Bryans was not that he was forced to fight but that to not fight was problematic in that it implied he was a coward and lacked proper masculine virtues. His continued participation, goaded on by accusations of cowardice, is a reminder that boys were not compelled to fight but chose to, coerced by a culture that expected aggressive behavior. It might be undesirable to refuse a challenge, but it was possible to do so. As William Goldman was to recall, violence could only be avoided by a firm refusal:
An older boy would bear down on you during play-time, thrust his face into yours, and inquire, “Wan’ a fight?” The natural retort of “Why?” wasn't accepted as a legitimate one; it would land you in a fight whether you wanted one or not. If you said yes the same consequence followed. Only by a direct no could you escape with a few short and contemptuous blows, and the slur of cowardice. For many it was the more unpleasant alternative.Footnote 107
Nevertheless, the ability to refuse, along with the notion of the fair fight, meant that playground conflicts were a form of aggression over which children had some control. It is worth noting that many children educated during the period compared the school fight favorably to other forms of violence they might encounter. For instance, corporal punishment, commonly experienced by children in this period, could be seen as an unfair and disagreeable use of force, “always practiced on someone too small to retaliate.”Footnote 108 The playground fight at least allowed its participants the possibility of triumphing over their opponents and, if not, a chance to show a mature magnanimity in defeat.
Conclusion—An Era of Violence
While playground fights have always been an aspect of school life, what emerges in an analysis of autobiography is a cohesive culture of playground aggression that spanned the years between the later nineteenth century and the advent of the Second World War. This culture was encouraged by the expansion in school attendance in the latter years of the nineteenth century, which drew large numbers of children together in institutional environments. Meanwhile, the simultaneous growth of the Victorian cult of manliness supported the idea that violence was an appropriate part of masculine behavior. Both of these factors related to underlying societal shifts. The growing importance of education, for instance, was linked to the increasing economic importance of skilled labor and the professions; the cult of manliness, meanwhile, was very much a Victorian invention, dating from a time when changes in employment patterns meant that many middle-class men felt anxiety over the status of their passive clerical jobs.Footnote 109 Such issues were the product of a changing and urbanizing world. Demonstrative expressions of masculinity were coming into fashion at the point where children were being thrown together in a system of mass education that reinforced these images of manliness.
Once established, notions of violent masculinity might be reinforced in numerous ways. Children's fiction played a significant role, and as Kelly Boyd has noted, the growth of the working-class market for boys' stories grew at the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote 110 The activities of children were also influenced by contemporary militarism in society, particularly in relation to the wars in which Britain participated in this period. As Joanna Bourke has observed, “[D]uring the First World War, literature about the imperial wars entranced thousands; at the time of the Second World War, boys spent hours reading The Times History of the Great War.”Footnote 111 As she also points out, many soldiers during the wars drew their expectations of warfare from literature and particularly from childhood reading.Footnote 112 This literature could also influence activities in the playground, and both childhood fights and participation in wars could act as expressions of masculinity. This continuity can be seen in the recollections of Michael O'Donovan, who, as we saw above, adopted a public-school code of honor in relation to his conduct in his own school life. O'Donovan would grow up to be a young man in Ireland at the time of its struggles for independence; viewing “life through a veil of literature,” he was driven by his ideals to serve the republicans in the civil war that followed.Footnote 113 Thus, the same literary influences stretched across his early life, having an effect upon both his school experiences and the part he played in the Irish civil war.
The influences of masculine culture, militarism, and children's fiction were pervasive and relatively unchanging for a considerable period of time. Playground fights, existing within this context, were equally unchanging. Thus, the position of cock of the school was as recognizable to the school children of London in 1890 as it would have been to their equivalents in Yorkshire in 1940. In consequence, the stories told of playground fights in autobiographical accounts are, at times, virtually indistinguishable from one another, differentiated only by dialect and the context within which they are framed. These forms of fighting were a product of a particular set of converging influences; they came into existence in the early years of mass education and would dominate the shape of violent behavior at school until the middle of the twentieth century.
There are two notable points about the relatively static nature of playground violence. The first is that it fits poorly with the notion that violence declined gradually through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as part of a civilizing process.Footnote 114 Such claims have generally been made on the basis of trends in serious violence, particularly murder and certain forms of public disorder. Accounts of playground fights, however, suggest that at least certain forms of violence were exempt from this and that the civilizing process may not be as simple, or as linear, as it is sometimes represented. Second, the static nature of playground fighting serves to conceal the manner in which it occurred within an economy of violence. Militarism and the cult of manliness not only made school violence permissible but also were sufficiently pervasive so as to become established long-term norms. This continuity makes it easy to see why teachers during the 1930s accepted the prevalence of playground violence, given that it was little different from what they might have experienced twenty, thirty, or even forty years before.
By the middle of the twentieth century, the manner in which playground fights were framed began to shift considerably in response to changes in British culture. Most prominent among these shifts was the move away from the Victorian cult of manliness. While this survived into the twentieth century, it was on the wane; historians J. A. Mangan and James Walvin claim that, although this model of masculinity remained a significant influence in British society after 1900, it suffered a steady and gradual decline until its disappearance in the 1940s.Footnote 115 While this cultural shift was a complex phenomenon, it is worth noting that the idea of manly self-defense was increasingly at odds with the professional, industrial warfare of the mid-twentieth century. The idea that courage or skill at boxing would allow one to overcome one's enemies was appearing increasingly absurd.Footnote 116
With the decline of the cult of manliness, the economies of violence in Britain, both within the school and in society in general, were inevitably subject to change. Thus, although fighting remained a feature of school life after the Second World War, the language and ritualized behavior that surrounded it declined. When Iona and Peter Opie were researching cultures of childhood play in the 1950s, they found that, although fighting retained some rituals, many traditional aspects, such as the phrase “cock of the school,” had faded almost entirely from use.Footnote 117 Therefore, while it would be impossible to give any precise date by which the fight was no longer a central part of playground culture, it would seem reasonable to locate it around the middle of the twentieth century, along with the last remnants of the Victorian cultures of manliness. As these long-standing notions of masculinity declined, so too did the economies of violence that for half a century had sustained a stable and continuous set of playground behaviors. In the new economies of interpersonal violence that were emerging in the middle of the twentieth century, it was becoming harder to see childhood violence as anything other than a meaningless struggle, characterized by one participant as “a few harmless blows and possibly a badly-aimed kick or two.”Footnote 118 Violence was being reinterpreted, not as a meaningful exhibition of masculinity, but as a relatively inconsequential set of actions; the playground fight was becoming an outmoded form of aggression, no longer acceptable in the schools of Britain.
