The Kirkwall Ba’ game is a form of mass folk football, which is played annually on Christmas Day and New Year's Day in Kirkwall, the capital of the Orkney Islands. The two teams are known as Uppies and Doonies, and membership is historically determined by the participants’ places of birth in the town. John Robertson's nicely produced and well-illustrated history of the game is a substantially updated and expanded version of his 1967 work Uppies and Doonies. The original book was probably the best account of a “traditional” form of football, and the new edition builds on that work. Despite not being the work of a academic historian, the book provides a wealth of information on the game and its traditions, together with a summary of the history of folk football in general and in Scotland in particular.
For the historian of leisure and recreation, the book helps to shed considerable light on many of the issues and debates that surround the history of football in Britain. There is a tendency among nonacademic historians (and even some academics) to believe the claims of late nineteenth-century antiquarians who often stated that a particular regional variant of folk football was of great age. Usually this was a product of wishful thinking, innocent extrapolation, or simple invention. Neal Garnham in his work on football in Alnwick in Northumberland (English Historical Review 117, no. 474 [2002]: 1228–48) has pointed out that the Alnwick game, traditionally presented as a form of folk football that stretches back into time immemorial, seems to have emerged only in the 1780s, undergoing several reinventions over the subsequent century and a half. One of the strengths of Robertson's book is that he has done a significant amount of referenced research and presents a much more accurate account of the game than many other similar histories of traditional sports and games. Broadly in line with Garnham's findings, the evidence in the book is that the Kirkwall Ba’ only appears to have emerged as a street game in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Before that, football was usually played on fields, often specially set aside for the purpose.
Despite the fact the game is played by hundreds of men on each side and that the chief means of propelling the ball to each goal is through the formation of a huge suffocating scrum, in which each side seeks to push its opponents backward, it seems to be remarkably free of violence or serious injury. Indeed, other than a handful of broken limbs, Robertson can find little evidence of serious physical injury to players over the past century and a half. Nor is there much evidence of violent behavior among players, despite intense rivalry between the two sides and an almost complete lack of laws governing the game. This would appear to suggest that the generally held idea that folk football was a highly dangerous or violent sport (most notably expressed in Eric Dunning and Ken Sheard's Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players [New York, 1979) is somewhat mistaken, at least in this case.
Perhaps even more so than in today's football, folk football has historically been seen as an almost exclusively male domain. However, Robertson's research has thrown up a number of examples of women taking part in the game in the 1860s and 1880s. In the early 1920s young women became enthusiastic participants in the Kirkwall Ba’ boys’ game, held for youths of fourteen years of age and younger. In 1925 it was being reported that even married women were taking part, and by 1929 it appears that young women outnumbered young men in the boys’ game. They remained prominent in the game throughout the 1930s, and separate women's games were staged on Christmas Day 1945 and New Year's Day 1946. One of the most useful features of the book is that Robertson reprints numerous reports, letters, poems, and other ephemera of the game, and the reprinted, albeit disapproving, newspaper report of the women's Ba, demonstrates that these matches were serious games, rather than male-sponsored comedic events. However, despite a substantial number of women participating, the condemnation of the town council was enough to ensure that these were the first and last women's games. It also appears to be the case that women no longer took part in the boys’ game either, indicating a significant backlash against women's involvement.
The rise of women's participation in the game after World War I coincides with the rise of women's soccer in Britain, suggesting that women's expectations of social and recreational equality were widespread and that the popularity of women's soccer was a symptom of wider social attitudes. It is also indicative of the fact that folk football and modern football existed side by side and were subject to the same social forces and trends. For example, Robertson shows that the Kirkwall Ba’ became hugely popular in the 1880s, precisely the time at which the boom in mass spectator sport, and especially in modern soccer, took place. The idea that modern forms of football simply superseded the old forms in a strict linear fashion is clearly mistaken. In many cases, as in Kirkwall, the two existed side by side.
Folk football has yet to find its historian. This is perhaps because the sheer number of different types of football and their geographical spread makes primary research a somewhat daunting task. Nevertheless, as the story of the Kirkwall Ba’ illustrates, the history of folk football presents an important window through which we can study the transition to modernity, and the survival of older traditions, in a recreational context. For the historian keen to pick up this challenge, Robertson's book will be an invaluable source.
