C is for Clubosity

C in Oxford sport could stand for Colleges, Cuppers, College Cuppers, collegiality, Chris Chataway, the Chavasses, clerics, cardinals, captaincy, coaching, character, cricket or many other concepts. I am drawn, however, to the term coined by A L Smith and reported by one of his daughters: ‘clubosity’, as recalled under H is for Heads of House. As far as I am aware, clubosity has not been adopted as common usage by anyone since.

If it is good enough for the Master of Balliol, however, it is good enough for me, especially a Master of Balliol who was rowing for the college as an undergraduate when it went Head of the River in Eights Week 1873. A L Smith became a don and was Master from 1916 to his death in 1924. The biography of him by his wife, with contributions from his daughters, was published in 1928. He valued sport, you will recall, ‘as an index to character’ and a daughter’s reporting concluded our introduction to Heads of House: ‘I shall always remember my Father insisting on the importance of an attribute he called “clubosity”.’

She went on to say that A L Smith himself had ‘clubosity’ in abundance: ‘If by this virtue he meant love of one’s fellow-creatures and an intense interest in all their doings, he certainly possessed it to the fullest degree’.

A L Smith and his wife Mary had seven daughters and two sons. This daughter’s recollections are signed ‘M A B-W’. That must be Mary Alice, known as ‘Molly’, who married in 1908 (the year of the first London Olympics) Fred Barrington-Ward, a barrister and later a King’s Counsel, Recorder of Chichester. In the narrative of Smith’s wife and Molly’s mother, the groom is described as having been ‘elected to All Souls at the same time as Lionel, and who was also the eldest of nine children, so that we made a goodly company trooping across the Master’s Field, our special friend of old days, Canon Scott Holland, taking the service. He was Molly’s godfather and gave us a wonderful address, a deluge of words and beautiful, intangible thoughts.’

Well, of course he did because the preacher, Henry Scott Holland, was that sportsman, another Balliol rower, who gave us a couple of years later that sermon of beautiful thoughts about death which, on the one hand, might be ‘nothing at all’ but which, on the other, might be just about everything.

The same might be said about sport, about Oxford and about Oxford sport. It could be everything or nothing. If it is worthy of note, my instinct is that it will have something to do with what it tells us about character, the character of a university and of its members.

Collegiality, playing your part in building up a sense of community, is central to clubosity. Even what seems to be a solo sporting pursuit will have elements of this engagement with, and concern for, others, especially at college and university levels. Even the most exalted of Olympians will make a contribution to, and benefit from, University sport. Oxford’s greatest Olympian, Sir Matthew Pinsent, puts this well in his autobiography, A Lifetime in a Race:

‘Rowing is not a solitary sport. The motivation may be personal, even selfish, but you can’t go it alone. The stresses of training are such that you will always need people around you to work against or with, someone on the towpath to give you an idea of the way your rowing looks from the outside, and, ideally, someone at home you can bitch to when it all gets a bit intense. Even single scullers, the most introverted and self-obsessed of the rowing fraternity, are in no way alone.’

And even the busiest Olympian rower will try to put something back into their university and their sport. In doing so, they will stand every chance also of drawing yet more joy from both. Indeed, Sir Matthew Pinsent goes on to say that ‘just after I left Oxford University, I was approached by the Women’s Boat Club to see if I knew anyone who would be interested in doing some coaching.’ He was not the right person himself but he recommended Ben Hunt-Davis. That was in 1994. In 1998, Pinsent ‘offered my services to Ben in the last two weeks before the Women’s Boat Race to help out... Ben offered me the role of Finishing Coach for the reserves, which I accepted happily ... He also brought me in to decide on the last selection decision.’ That involved a Rhodes Scholar from Harvard, Demetra Koutsoukos, now Lady Demetra Pinsent.

The Pinsents met through University level sport. Membership of a celebrated Oxford sports club, Vincent’s, is through invitation to sportsmen of particular achievements. Vincent’s is about to embark on its 150th anniversary year. They are marking their anniversary in part by raising funds to support Oxford sport at all levels and they have been keen to encourage the female equivalent, Atalanta’s, to generate its own support network for Oxford’s leading sportswomen. So in the Blue squads for each sport and in clubs like Vincent’s and Atalanta’s, clubosity is to the fore.

Yet it is often at a more modest level of performance that clubosity is best fostered. Here there is something special about the great collegiate universities of Oxford and Cambridge. It has shone through many a chapter of this Z to A. As we come to construct our own ABCs of Oxford Sport, in my case through the back-handed route of now C, soon B and then A, I will adopt the Smithian terminology after one last digression prompted by the 11-strong family of A L and Mary Smith, the Master and his wife, together with their nine children. That is a lot of Smiths but then there are a lot of Smiths about. A L Smith put this rather well on one occasion, as recalled by his obituary in the Oxford Magazine. He was replying to a toast to his health in Balliol, where Adam Smith, the great economist, had studied two hundred and fifty years ago. Adam Smith wrote a book called The Wealth of Nations so A L, perceiving three other gentlemen of that honoured {sur}name in the room, said: “I have often heard of a book called Smith’s Wealth of Nations, but I have only now realized the Nation’s Wealth of Smiths”.’

Much of the genius of Oxford is in its large family of colleges and halls. In the official celebration of Cambridge’s first 800 years, Professor Marilyn Strathern, the Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge, has written, as befits a professor of social anthropology, on ‘the genius of scale’ in the colleges of Cambridge, which applies to Oxford also:

‘A college is a company of people from all the subjects that the University encompasses, an exhilarating amalgam of interests and enthusiasms. Take any rowing eight or cricket side – or choir, drama society or dinner table – and any discipline could be there. What is so valuable about that form of collegiality is not just the lateral thinking it engenders but the knowledge it brings of others’ work practices, pressures or preoccupations, and of what other parts of the University are like... And alongside the quiet evolution of individual colleges whose identity endures, new identities are created in response to new needs. The pioneering women’s colleges led the way in the 19th century ... Cambridge has been able to grow while sustaining intimate working environments quite distinct from the laboratory or department. The genius of scale is replicated throughout the system... Finally, colleges simplify what could otherwise be inordinately complicated. And they do that by a kind of unseen education.’

Those first two examples, of a ‘rowing eight or cricket side’ use sport to illustrate the more general thesis. There is something character-building about the way in which meaningful competition at college level brings together people from different disciplines, and different stages of university life, in a common endeavour. Perhaps, then, clubosity is a sporting variation on the themes of character and collegiality.

While it is generated in abundance at college level, it is most visible when student sportsmen and, more recently, sportswomen, achieve fame in varsity or international sport. This brings us to that remarkable character, Chris Chataway. In 1954, when he helped Roger Bannister to his legendary sub-four-minute mile, Chataway went on to win an epic struggle over 5,000 metres against another great runner, the Russian Vladimir Kuts, televised under floodlights at the White City in a competition between London and Moscow, setting a world record, albeit one that Kuts swiftly beat. In 1952, he had been leading Emil Zatopek and others in the final lap of the Helsinki Olympic 5000 metres final but as Zatopek passed him on that last bend, Chataway tripped and lost all chance of a medal. More than fifty years later, he is still running fast times, for instance in the annual Great North Run, and is still competitive yet charming. 1954 was the first year in which the BBC sought a sports personality of the year. Bannister came second. Chataway was the winner. The public had taken the first four minute mile in its stride, so to speak, but took Chataway to their hearts.

Four decades earlier, the same was true of the Chavasse family, including the twins from Trinity, Noel and Christopher, their brother Bernard who had been at Balliol with Ronnie Poulton, and their father, then the Bishop of Liverpool. Noel and Christopher played lacrosse together for Oxford against Cambridge, played rugby for Trinity College together, won Blues in athletics, winning between them the 100 yards and quarter mile in the varsity match and in the Oxford University sports, before competing in different heats of the same discipline in the London 1908 Olympics, the 400 metres. Both were decorated for their heroism in the First World War, as was their younger brother, Bernard, who (like Noel) became a doctor. Christopher and Bernard received the Military Cross. Noel was the only person to receive the Victoria Cross twice (the formal expression is VC and Bar) for heroism during the First World War, the second time posthumously. Their younger brother Aidan also died in the war. Their father and Christopher went on to found a hall which swiftly became a college, St Peter’s. These were extraordinary characters, who touched the hearts and souls of the nation. They exemplified the spirit of ‘clubosity’. Christopher protested that Noel and he were not that good at sport but they attracted attention because they were twins.

Christopher also went on to become a bishop, in his case of Rochester. We have seen how the earliest varsity contests, the boat race and the cricket, were started by students who became clerics. Although this was in an era in which religious tests applied to Oxford entry, so that a predominance of Anglican clergy might be expected, there were also nonconformist and Catholic Christians in Oxford’s nineteenth century ranks.

Indeed, Oxford has had some sporting cardinals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - Cardinals Manning, Heard and Hume. The role of a cardinal might itself be intangible but it has come to be seen in this country as having elements of captaincy and of coaching, twin concepts of character-forming leadership which Oxford’s collegiate and student-led University sport tends to cultivate. In 1907, a Balliol rower called William Theodore Heard became a Blue, losing to Cambridge in the Boat Race. Over fifty years later, he became a cardinal and then the only Blue Cardinal, so far as I am aware, at the Second Vatican Council.

Basil Hume was a student at St Benet’s Hall from 1944 to 1947. He played rugby for the University 2nd XV, the Greyhounds, and was pressed into service as a touch judge when New Zealand tourists played the University at Iffley Road.

More than a century earlier, Henry Edward Manning, later Cardinal Manning) knew from school the creator of the Boat Race and varsity cricket, Charles Wordsworth (later Bishop Wordsworth), and has the distinction of being in various cricketing anthologies for his verses of thanks on being given a cricket bat by Charles Wordsworth. That could only be bettered if William Wordsworth had been involved, or it Manning’s poetry had been of William’s quality.

Manning had been President of the Oxford Union, just ahead of William Gladstone. He was an undergraduate at Balliol and a don at Merton. A tribute to Manning’s clubosity is that his funeral attracted the biggest crowds of any funeral procession in Victorian Britain. People appreciated the support of this leading clergyman for the less privileged in society.

While mentioning clerics and cardinals, another C (and indeed see), Canterbury, brings us back to the Church of England, the church of Henry Scott Holland and Oxford-educated Archbishops of Canterbury, such as William Temple, who captained Balliol at rugby. Cardinal Manning had first become a priest in the Church of England but became a Roman Catholic and eventually the Archbishop of Westminster.

Part of the genius of Oxford sport is the way in which it gives so many students so many opportunities to grow as leaders of clubs and to learn how to follow in other clubs – clubosity squared. There are over eighty sports recognised by the University. There are some forty colleges and halls. Up to two thousand students can be involved in one of those sports alone, through Torpids and Eights Week in A L Smith’s beloved rowing. The competition matters. It plays a significant part in building up the traditions, the identity, the sense of belonging and of legitimate pride in a college community – college cuppers can be a cauldron of collegiality, of clubosity.

Simon Lee, Balliol 1976-1979, Cricket Captain, Rugby Secretary, Sports Editor of Devorguila; Emeritus Professor of Jurisprudence, Queen’s University Belfast; Chairman, Level Partnerships Ltd; Chairman, John Paul II Foundation for Sport.