The supply of leisure

Leisure activities were made available in four main ways and as a result provided employment in leisure. First, the state, whether at local or national level, both created a legal framework and acted as a direct supplier. Secondly, there was much self-made leisure, whether this is thought of as communal or associational on the one hand or personal and family based on the other. Thirdly, voluntary bodies and philanthropists were key agents in the supply of leisure for others. Finally, leisure was supplied on a commercial basis. These neat categories are, however, susceptible to fragmentation. Sheet music, for example, supplied on a commercial basis, provided a necessary resource for much individual and communal self-made leisure.

The state

The state had always been concerned with the supply of leisure. In the early part of this period its main concern was to control supply, chiefly by licensing, but later its role was more positive and it became a direct supplier of such facilities as parks, libraries and playing fields. This interpretation has some validity but it provides little to help unravel the motives for its intervention in the supply of leisure other than dividing its activities into two separate spheres, negative control and positive supply.

One such motive was prestige. At the national level this entailed support for both the production of high culture in the present and the preservation of the high culture of the past. By the 1830s it was recognised that state aid was necessary to maintain or at least subsidise museums throughout the country and from the 1860s governments drew back from subsidising high culture. Public funding required more justification than had the royal patronage that dominated support for culture in the first half of the nineteenth century. The public could not be denied right of access. In 1810 admission to the British Museum was made free and unlimited with dramatic impact on the number of visitors: in 1824-5 this stood at 128,000 rising to 230,000 in 1835 and 826,000 by 1846. These figures lead into the second motive that governed state supply of leisure, a concern for public order and social harmony.

It is, however, easy to exaggerate the amount of state supply. The typical pattern was not for the government of the day to take an initiative, but for a pressure group within Parliament to be appeased by the appointment of a select committee. The outcome tended to be permissive legislation, which a local authority could implement if it wished. Central government provided a legal framework within which museums or libraries could be built and run out of the rates; but it was as much concerned to protect the ratepayer as to encourage the provision of a facility. Not surprisingly, buildings were often slow to appear on the ground. Up to 1914 libraries stemmed much more from philanthropy than from rates and even at that date were within reach of only 60 per cent of the population. The same was true of museums and parks. Local authorities played an increasingly important role and shared the same motives as central government: a concern for prestige, in this case in relation to other local authorities; and a worry about social order. But they added to them a more compelling motive, a desire for prosperity. The seaside resorts led the way after 1875, investing in sea defences, promenades, piers, golf courses and concert halls in an attempt to improve their attractiveness to potential visitors.

A major element in the state’s supply of leisure was its concern to control and monitor the use of space. The home, as a private space, was beyond its physical reach. The pub was much less safe and hardly at all to be recommended. Licensing of retail outlets for the sale of alcohol was the state’s major intervention in the leisure market and was intended to preserve public order and provide some means of monitoring the leisure of the poorer sections of society. Public parks, museums and libraries were supported precisely because they were public, open to scrutiny and controlled by bye-laws. The space provided by theatre, music hall and cinema was potentially more dangerous, but the power or threat of licensing of both building and activity made them relatively acceptable. The censorship of both plays and films ensured that public entertainment adhered to acceptable moral and political values. Fire regulations, for example those imposed on music halls in 1878, not only reduced the dangers of fire, but drove many of the smaller, less salubrious halls out of business. In the cinema the industry formally established its own form of censorship in 1912 with the British Board of Film Censors. In horse-racing, by contrast, the government stepped in to ban off-course betting in the Street Betting Act of 1906. It was, however, leisure that took place outside these spaces that posed the threat; streets, rivers, canals and privately owned rural areas were spaces where there was almost constant feuding between the state and the people.

Self-made leisure

In self-made leisure the separation between supply and demand becomes artificial. The more self-made it was, the more local or domestic it was likely to be, and therefore the harder it is to find information about it. In its communal or associational forms it was a major means of supply of leisure for the middle-class urban culture, typically in the form of subscription concerts and libraries and of clubs, for example, for chess. In Bradford in 1900, for example, there were 30 choral societies, 20 brass bans, an amateur orchestra, six concertina bands and a team of hand-bell ringers. In Rochdale, and doubtless elsewhere, the churches and chapels were crucial suppliers of leisure up to 1914 with their young men’s and ladies’ classes, their debating societies and numerous other activities. At the family and individual level reliable information is even harder to come by. Much leisure within the family relied on commercial sources of supply, of games, pianos, books and a huge array of hobbies. In music and hobbies in particular there came to be considerable degree of activity in working-class homes: by 1910 there was one piano for every fifteen people, far more than the middle-classes could absorb.

Voluntary bodies and philanthropy

Voluntary bodies and philanthropists were less single-minded than the state, but as with the latter it is both tempting and misleading to divide their activities in the supply of leisure into two groups, a negative controlling one and a positive supply one. Into the first group would fall such organisations as the Vice Society (1802), the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (1824), the Lord’s Day Observance Society (1831), numerous temperance and teetotal societies and the National Council for Public Morals (1911). The second group might include philanthropists and employers who funded parks, libraries, brass bands and football clubs, the Mechanics’ Institutes, the Pleasant Sunday Afternoon Association, the Girls’ Friendly Society (1874) and the Boys’ Brigade (1883). Such a division obscures the factor uniting the two: a concern to direct and mould other people’s leisure by control of some sort over its supply.

The hope of weaning people away from bad habits by the provision of counter-attractions came to the fore in the 1830s. ‘Rational recreation’ offered the solution and quiet and elevating pursuits, modelled on the best contemporary middle-class practice, were recommended and offered. As a result, not only would the bad habits themselves disappear or at least diminish, but in the process people (largely men) of good will from different classes would meet fraternally and come to understand each other’s point of view. The amount of leisure provided under these auspices was enormous. Parks, libraries and similar institutions were frequently the outcome of philanthropy. In Glasgow, for example, were ratepayers on three occasions in the second half of the century refused to fund a public library, Stephen Mitchell, a tobacco magnate, left £70,000 for a library that opened in 1877. In Manchester T.C. Horsfall raised the funds for an Art Museum opened in 1884. Bristol acquired a municipally owned museum, library and art gallery between 1895 and 1905, all through private benefactions. Much church and chapel activity should probably come under this head, rather than in the self-made category, for it was organised from above for people deemed to be in need. Of these, the most important were the young. The real problem arose when they left Sunday Schools. It was partly to keep a hold on these children that William Smith established the Boys’ Brigade in Glasgow in 1883. Thereafter uniformed youth movements, particularly for boys, were to attract a high proportion of the youth population. The Boys’ Brigade had its denominational rivals and from 1908 faced serious competition from the Boy Scouts. By 1914, between a quarter and a third of the available youth population was enrolled in a youth movement.

The provision of leisure probably served females less well than males, doubtless in part because the former were thought to pose less of a problem. The Girls’ Friendly Society, formed in 1874, was predominantly rural and Anglican in outlook and many of its members were young domestic servants. Two further organisations came into being to meet their needs as they grew older: the Mothers’ Union founded in 1885 expanded to 7,000 branches by 1911 and the Women’s Institutes begun in 1915.

Commercial supply of leisure

Commercialised entertainment played a larger and larger role in the supply of leisure between 1830 and 1914. In 1830 it was provided largely for the middle-classes but diffused itself into the working-classes by the 1870s and to the masses by 1914. There was a shift in the nineteenth century from the patron-client relationship that characterised the employment of professionals in cricket and music in 1800 to an employment relationship more akin to that of the industrial world. This was in part because of the seasonal nature of much of such employment, but also because of the lack of control over entry to leisure jobs. The numbers employed were growing, certainly after 1870. Between 1871 and 1911 the population of England and Wales rose on average by 0.8 per cent per year and the number employed in the arts and entertainment by 4.7 per cent per year. The number of actors and actresses peaked in 1911 at over 19,000, having quadrupled in the previous thirty years.

In nearly every section of the leisure industries there were attempts to raise the status of entertainers. The outcome was the achievement of stardom for the select few while the rank and file had to be content with wages at roughly semi-skilled level. The best actors and actresses were already getting £150 per week in the 1830s. In 1890 at least ten jockeys were earning £5,000 per season and the better professional cricketers were earning £275 per year. Between 1906 and 1914 the wages of performing musicians doubled reaching £200 per year. The best professional footballers could not earn high wages: the Football Association set the maximum wages at £208 per year and only a minority got that amount. On the whole, however, complaints about wages and conditions of service within the entertainment and sports world were muted. The lure of acceptance as a profession, the hope of stardom for the individual and the sense that to be in entertainment was unlike any other job, for the most part curtailed any open conflict.

Conclusions

The importance of leisure in giving people a sense of national and social identity is matched by a greater significance placed on leisure in people’s individual life-choices and priorities. Leisure preference is normally assumed to have been a feature of pre-industrial society and could not survive the greater emphasis on consumerism of an industrialised society. Between 1830 and 1914 as hours of leisure grew longer so leisure activities took on a more central role in people’s lives. It is not surprising that ‘rational recreationalists’ wanted to ‘control’ what people, and especially the working-classes, did in their spare time. They were successful, to a degree, in mitigating the worst excesses of pre-industrial leisure with its potential violence and cruelty. Yet the persistence of large-scale spectating, especially of football and horse-racing showed the limits of that success. Alcohol and gambling remained key working-class leisure activities and, despite increased controls by the state, continued to play a major part in defining working-class consciousness throughout this period. Leisure remained in 1914, as it was in 1830, largely male-dominated and escapist.

Urban popular culture

Urban popular culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can best be understood by distinguishing three approaches to the analysis and composition of such a culture. The first approach emphasises activities for which people had to pay and in which their essential role was that of spectator, audience or reader. Included would be theatres, circuses and fairs in the first half of the century and later, music halls, professional football, horse acing, the popular press, seaside excursions and cinemas. In this approach the focus is on the scale of commercialisation, the size of crowds, the distancing of stars and professionals and the role of technology. From this point of view of supply, urban popular culture can be seen as mass culture.

The second approach focuses on people as the prime agents in generating leisure activities. There might be some commercial or voluntary input towards the provision of facilities but the activity was of and for the people. The most significant institution was the pub, the location for much more than the consumption of alcohol. The activities included brass bands, mass choirs, flower shows and the allotments that provided the basis for them, fishing and pigeon fancying. In this approach activities are generated within the community or neighbourhood; though they might take the participants outside in the competitiveness that was one of the hallmarks of this type of urban popular culture: pub against pub, club against club; stars and professionals were absent; there was little formal separation of performers and spectators; and, the participants were mainly adult males.

In the third approach women move centre stage and attention is drawn to the much hazier boundary between work and leisure for most women. The focus is not on activities, but on space and, in particular, the space of the home and of the street; women’s leisure was not an activity demarcated as leisure but something that was done as an accompaniment to work; in its more social aspect, in the street, its most typical form was chatting, and here too work, discussing prices for example, was in no way distinguished from other forms of talk; and, consequently it was a culture heavily based on a sense of neighbourhood.

Each of these approaches emphasises a different aspect of what can legitimately be described as urban popular culture.

Spectating

Other forms of literature besides drama were becoming popular and more pervasive. The period after 1830 was the first literate rather than oral popular culture. Events were advertised in print and news was conveyed in print. The expanding newspaper press of the eighteenth century reached a largely middle-class audience largely because of cost, but the chapbooks and broadsides, some of which sold a million copies, were bought by the new literate popular culture. It is difficult to establish an accurate profile of the readership of this expanding quantity of print by age, gender and class. Men, until after 1870, had a higher rate of literacy than women and they may have had easier access to literature. They were probably the main readers of the popular Sunday newspapers that by 1850 were read by one adult in twenty; for Sunday was much more a day of leisure for men than women. Sporting literature was a genre of popular literature, and with its emphasis on ‘manly’ sports, may be assumed to have reached a dominantly male audience. Similarly, participation in and spectating of commercialised sports was largely, though not exclusively, male. Horseracing was immensely popular despite attempts to control its spread by force of law.

After 1850 figures for attendance become more reliable and their general trend is upwards. Music hall was the first new form of entertainment to make its mark. Charles Morton’s opening of the Canterbury Hall in Lambeth in 1851 was to gain him immediate and retrospective attention, but there were important precedents in the saloon theatres that had flourished since the 1830s and in the ‘music halls’ that already existed in the larger provincial towns. What is striking about the 1850s and 1860s was the multiplicity of forms in which people could experience what was eventually to become standardised as ‘music hall’. The analysis of the songs has distracted attention from the range of entertainment on offer in the halls; dance, acrobatics, mime drama and clowning as well as the occasional associated facility a museum, art gallery or zoo, were part of the ‘variety’ of the halls from the beginning. The emergence of music halls that were architecturally similar to theatres came relatively late during the second great wave of music hall building in the late 1880s and 1890s when chains of ownership were becoming common. It was in the 1890s, too, that there was a partially successful attempt to win middle-class audiences. Cinema can be seen as superseding music hall as the most popular form of mass entertainment, but there was a long period of overlap. Music hall was indeed the commercial cinema’s first home. From 1906 onwards, however, cinemas acquired their own homes, some 4,000 of them by 1914. Until 1934 we can only guess at the number of admissions but an average of 7 or 8 million a week seems plausible in the years immediately before 1914 or 400 million admissions a year.

The seaside holiday is, on one argument, a dubious contender for inclusion in urban popular culture for it represented in some ways an escape from the city. But the manner of that escape suggests that urban popular culture was being transposed to the seaside. The history of the seaside holiday was not something initiated by the middle-classes and imitated by the working-classes. Escape to the sea by workers preceded the coming of the railway. The major increase in demand, however, came only in the later nineteenth century and it was only then that the seaside holiday became a recognisable part of urban popular culture. Even then there were regional variations. The week at the seaside that many working-class Lancastrians had come to enjoy by the 1880s was unique; elsewhere the day trip was the norm. The expansion of demand can be seen in the increasing number of visitors to Blackpool in season: it rose from 1 million in 1883 to two million ten years later and to 4 million in 1914.

Spectating at professional sport was already common by 1850 and to some extent what happened after was a switch from one sport to another. Rowing ceased to be a major spectator sport and amateur athletics could never claim the crowds of the professional pedestrianism that it replaced. Football, on the other hand, attracted numbers that rose from the late nineteenth century to 1914 and beyond. The average football cup tie attendance rose from 6,000 in 1888-9 to 12,000 in 1895-6 to over 20,000 in the first round in 1903. In 1908-1909, English First Division 6 million people watched matches, with an average crowd size of 16,000. It was, of course, dominantly a male pastime and it was regionally concentrated in the Lowlands of Scotland, northern and Midland England and to a lesser extent London.

The available statistics may, however, be more significant for the light they shed on leisure as an industry than as an indicator of how urban people spent their leisure time. In particular, they did not point to any great change towards a spectator society, for spectating was already a common activity in 1850. When considered not as tens or hundreds of thousands, but as a proportion of the available population their significance in the social life of the people can be placed in a fairer perspective.

Active involvement

The pub had close ties to this commercialised aspect of urban popular culture. It was itself a commercial undertaking, increasingly under the control of the major brewers. It was the main location of what was by far the largest single item of leisure expenditure, alcohol. Despite this, the pub also managed to be the main organising centre for the self-generating culture. Publicans were often sponsors of activities that they viewed simply with an eye to profit and some of the activities were on a large scale. In addition the pub offered a space for socialising; clubs of all kinds met in pubs. The community generated by the pub expressed itself in the annual outing. Above all, within the pub men could take part in a range of competitive activities: darts, draughts, bowls, card playing and gambling of all kinds. This participant competitiveness was indeed a key feature of urban popular culture and its significance is grossly underplayed in those accounts that focus exclusively on music hall, cinema and spectating generally. As communications improved many of these competitions became regional and national. Brass bands, for example, were competitive from their beginnings on a significant scale in the 1840s.

Culture in home and street: a culture of gender

The urban popular culture focused on the home and the street offered different kinds of satisfaction to a different part of the population. The dominant masculinity of the world of participant competition had its parallel in an equally dominantly female world. Most working-class women were confined, for their leisure as for their work, to the home and the street and there is increasing evidence from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that they created their own separate female culture there. It remains to be established when such a culture can first be identified and when it began to wither away, but there is enough to suggest that it existed as a key component of the ‘traditional working-class culture’ associated with the period from 1870 to 1950. Whether it can be called leisure culture is dubious: it was essentially a female network of support based on the separation of male and female world after marriage. The distinction between the three approaches to urban popular leisure culture has value to the extent that it identifies different and mutually exclusive worlds of leisure. Popular urban leisure was to a considerable degree fractured along lines of gender.