Last updated by kprzemek on 2016-05-06. Originally submitted by tomash on 2016-05-02.
Paul Newsham
'British til I die': Expressing British Identities in sporting song.
My PhD thesis concerns the history of British sporting song and analyses both the content of the songs and the practice of collective singing in sporting contexts, with the aim of showing that this is an important cultural phenomenon which can teach us much about our social and cultural history. The ways in which collective identities, whether they be based on nation, region, class or ethnicity, have been expressed in sporting song is an important element of this research and will be the focus of my talk.
The historian Benedict Anderson (1982) was among the first to appreciate the particular role of sport in the construction and reinforcement of (national) identity, and his ideas have been the basis for important work on the role of identity in British sporting history ( Holt 1989; Smith & Porter 2004; Taylor 2008). Dave Russell argued a similar role for popular music (1987) and has more recently written about the many crossovers between sport and popular music, and how identities were expressed in such contexts in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods (2013).
In my talk I will explain that such forms of expression have roots in the collective singing of broadside ballads and music hall songs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that the expression of collective identity through song in and around sporting stadia was a natural progression for people who were used to singing in public contexts. Further, I will show that this was a well-established and widespread practice by the time of the outbreak of the First World War.
Finally, I will stress the similarities between the ways in which identities were expressed in the past and how they are expressed now. The reworking of popular songs to show loyalty to club or country is often cited as an invention of 1960's football fans, but if anything this decade merely saw a revival of practices which were much older.
Anderson, Benedict. 1982. Imagined communities : reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.
Holt, Richard. 1989. Sport and the British: a modern history. Cambridge: Clarendon Press.
Russell, Dave. 1987. Popular music in England 1840-1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Russell, Dave. 2013. "See the conquering hero comes! Sound the trumpets, beat the drums: music and sport in England: 1880-1939", Sport in Society 17/3: 303-319.
Smith, Adrian and Dilwyn Porter (eds.). 2004. Sport and national identity in the post-war world. London: Routledge.
Taylor, Matthew. 2008. The association game: a history of British football. Harlow: Longman Pearson.
