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• Interview

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• More titles by Julian Norridge

Synopsis

Americans may like to think they invented baseball (even if Jane Austen wrote about it decades earlier). And the French might be proud of founding the modern Olympics (when, in fact, a Shropshire doctor beat them to it by forty years).

But it was the British that gave sport to the world.

From the beginnings of 'the beautiful game' - raucous matches of folk football with hundreds of players on each side - to the original bowls - a thin excuse for drunkenness and gambling - games grew into sports here in Great Britain. And in Can We Have Our Balls Back, Please? Julian Norridge tells their stories with wit and good humour.

Including all the many sports we Brits have to be proud of - boxing, horse racing, cricket, football, rugby, hockey, lawn tennis (nearly called 'sphairistike') and more - and even those few that got away, this is everything you need to know about the very British love of sports and all the great games it's produced.

Because, even if we rarely win them, it's good to know we invented them.

Reviews

Interview

Can We Have Our Balls Please? is an intriguing title – what is your book about and what’s new about it?
The book tells the remarkable story of how the British invented almost all of the world’s leading sports and then, for more than a century, almost forgot how to play them. Things have been looking up a little lately, but as every British sporting fan knows that may well not last. What’s different about the book is its scope. There are lots of histories of individual sports, but none which takes this broad a look. What it reveals is that Britain invented the concept of modern sport, something which could be played on equal terms by anyone anywhere in the world. The book looks at how that happened.

Why did you decide to write about the origins of sport?
I’ve always loved sport and always been fascinated by history. For a long time I had toyed with the idea of doing something, a television series or a book, on the history of sport. But I could never quite work out how to do it – it was such a big subject. I then started thinking of doing just the obvious British sports – cricket, soccer, golf and so on. But when I started doing some research, I realised that we had invented almost all the major sports. That seemed a really interesting story to tell.

Why do you think so many sports originated in Britain?
The short answer is that Britain invented much of the modern world, so it’s hardly surprising that we invented modern sport as well. But there’s more to it than that. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Britain was obsessed with gambling, and if you were risking a lot of money you wanted to know what the rules were. That led to the development of the first wave of sports like boxing, horse racing, bowls, cricket and golf. The second wave grew out of the Victorian and very British idea, prevalent in the public schools, that sport was good for you and should be continued in later life: that’s why old boys from the schools laid down universal rules for sports like football, rugby, rowing and athletics.

What or who is your favourite story or character in the book?
This is really difficult because there are so many good stories and so many great characters. I love the story of how Albert Spalding, the baseball equipment magnate, formed a ‘special commission’ to prove that baseball was a purely American game. They came up with the idea that the game had been invented by the young Abner Doubleday, later a civil war hero, in Cooperstown in New York State in 1839. In the centenary year of this great event, as the Baseball Hall of Fame was about to be opened in Cooperstown, an official of the New York Public Library proved that the story was a complete fabrication. Baseball is in fact based on an old British children’s game called… baseball.

Some of my favourite characters came from the eighteenth century. George Osbaldestone MP, always known as The Squire, was a first class cricketer, a fine horseman and a frequent prize fight referee. He was a colourful rogue, but no one ever dared challenge him because he was also the finest swordsman and the best shot of his generation. Pierce Egan was a pioneering popular journalist with a style all his own: he came up with the name ‘The Fancy’ for the unruly collection of aristocrats and ne’er-do-wells who followed boxing. The Duke of Queensberry – ‘Old Q’ – was an outrageous rake who would wager on absolutely anything. But he was smart. He bet some fellow aristocrats that he could send a letter 50 miles in an hour. Not possible, they said. He put the letter inside a cricket ball, hired twenty professional cricketers to stand in a wide circle and throw it between them - and won the bet with a couple of minutes to spare.

During the process of researching, what surprises did you discover?
There were so many surprises. The first, right at the beginning, was to discover just how many sports the British did invent. I also hadn’t realised that, in the early days, both cricket and bowls were huge gambling sports. Nor that professional rowing was hugely popular in Victorian times and did a great deal to develop the modern sport; or that professional athletics, known as pedestrianism, used to attract crowds of thousands. And I didn’t know that Baron de Coubertin got the idea for the modern Olympics from a country doctor from Shropshire. There were lots of other delights along the way, like discovering where the expression ‘on your tod’ comes from and who the original Colonel Bogey was. It’s all in the book.

How did you tackle such an enormous subject? Do you have a set routine in the way you work?
After the initial research revealed just how many sports the British did invent, I decided to tackle the subject sport by sport. I tracked down every source I could on the history of each sport, read through them and wrote that particular chapter. Then I started on the next one. That made it manageable. I don’t really have a set routine. I wrote the book quite quickly, which required ten to twelve hour days for at least six days a week. I lived and breathed the subject for seven months. It was hard work but I loved it.

Do you play any sports?
At school and university I played cricket and rugby with great enthusiasm and a consummate lack of skill. I also dabbled at fencing and tennis. In my adult life I have continued to play cricket, but it has taken a great deal of cunning. At London Weekend Television I had to found a team to ensure I could play regular games. It was a very distinguished outfit – Greg Dyke and the author Nicholas Evans were regulars and our ringer was the art critic of the Spectator – but we never won much. My great regret is that I have never, ever played football.

Who is your favourite sportsperson – dead or alive?
It would have to be a cricketer, because that is my great love. Few can rival W.G. for skill, cunning and pure bloody-mindedness. But for sheer bravura I’d have to go for Denis Compton. An old Middlesex player once told me how Compton arrived in the dressing room for an important game still wearing the dinner jacket from the night before, had a quick shower and went out and scored a century. Gary Sobers, a close second, is renowned for doing much the same sort of thing. Both were supreme sportsmen who lived life to the full. My favourite sportswoman must be the feisty Miss Lottie Dod, who won the first of her five Wimbledon titles when she was just 15, then went on to become a national golf champion, a hockey international and an Olympic medal-winning archer.

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