THE SCHOLAR-ATHLETE.

Auckland Star, Volume LVIII, Issue 78, 2 April 1927, Page 21

THE SCHOLAR-ATHLETE.

AN ENGLISH IDEAL. VALUE OF SPORTSMANSHIP. , FJoiors JounxALisrs COXTICTIONS.* By CYKAXO-1 "When the historian conic- to value the British Empire centuries hence, iust as ■we to-day try to explain what was best in Eoine, he will have to devote much attention to games, and his task of placing games and sport properly in the scheme of English life and philosophy be difficult. He will find in the records of the time lyrical and philosophical praise of sport, and sum fulminations against it. He will , have to try to picture the conditions of the time and the mentality of the Englishman: which realisation of the past is the first duty of the historian. A book that will help him—if book~ last so long—is Sir Theodore Cook"* "Character and Sir Theodore Cook is a scholar and an atiilete: he Las bern editor of the' ••Field"—the loading ].aj>er of its kind in the world—for many years, and he hahad a wide acquaintanceship with statesmen, writers, athletes, and sportsmen.! The scholar-athlete is Sir Theodore"? ideal, or rather, the scholar-athlete-sportsman, the ruan who loves learning and beauty, who keej-s his body fit. and : who J'lays games n:ore for the sake ofi play than fur the sake of victory. Such I a tyj>e was -Tulian Grenfell. who fell in I the war. a young aristocrat who loved i the zest and danger of iport. and wrote! a poem of battle that will live as I a- the language. So. t>>o. was George Wyndbam. that darling of fortune, whose heart the }«.»litk-s <>f Ireland broke. Sir Theodore of him that his .-peech at the dinner wjii.-h first welmnied the great. French srulptur K...diji tu London, was" "as full oi delicate apprwiation of artistic philosophy as his letters from eheshire were redolent of the true spirit of fox-hunting." Then there is Lord (irev of Fallodon. who, besides rising to Foreign Secretary, was an amateur tennis (not lawn tennis) champion, is one oi England's leading exponents of fly-fishing, and has written with ] loving appreciation of English country '' life and of Wordsworth. There are many : replies to the charge of Machiavellianism brought against Lord Grey, but none is more telling than his love of Wordsworth. "John PeeL" A more typically English book was ' never written. The tang of English sport, the smells of the eountrvside. are wafted across the world. Why. it opens . with a long consideration of '"John ' Peel." which is as English as eggs and bacon. The air of "John Peel" is one ; of the saddest and most haunting of old j songs. I have heard it sung in New ; Zealand at Christmas camps, in drawingrooms, and in mid-ocean, and I can never listen to it entirely dry-eyed. To this old air John Waldeck Graves, living in Coldbeek. Cumberland, wrote words one evening by the fireside in 1828-29, not i thinking at the time that they would ' be heard further. Years later, when '■ Graves was in Australia, the song became famous. The Border Regiment I adopted it for their '•'ilarch Past. 3 and tbe .music was played when Sir Herbert Plnmer xeviewed--ius-ri«torio«is army on j the Hohenzollern Bridge at Cologne. Peel was a real man, a yeoman farmer, a pack. He wore the ""hodden ! grey" of his class and never a red coat, i There is also much in this book about ; hunting squires, a class that displayed ! all teo plainly English weakness, as well I us English strength. There was George 1 Osbaldeston for example, famous as the Master of OsbaMeston. j for a wager, rode 200 miles in less than ten hours-, he was one of the six best I cricketers in England: he was a great tennis player, and a dead shot: refereed j in prize fights: j.layed billiards with the best: was the best man of his day in I cross-country races: and lost £200.000 j on tbe turf. But though he lived in j the days of Xapoleon. nothing outside j England seems to have interested him at ! all. Waterloo i≤ not mentioned in hi? i autobiography. Sir Theodore Cook is I ajive to the weakness in such men: ! if England had not produced others, lie i says, she would not be what she is to- ! day. at home or abroad. I wonder if he fully the shortcoming I of that magnificent • creature. Henry ■ Chaplin, on whom he has a most enter- | taining chapter. Chaplin wa- the last of i the fox-hunting squires who wielded j great political influence. He won the , Derby with Hermit in IS67 —after Her- ! rnjt had broken a blood-vessel—and was still in the House of Commons when the j Great War came. Chaplin was wonder- ! ful in his patriarchal style, his bound- j less hospitality, his passion for hunting ' ] he rode sixteen stone or =o. and had j two of the best hands in England—and i bis old-fashioned courtesy and rotundity j of political speech. His family acres he dissipated with a royal lav'ishnes*. -"When our Harry i> broke, which i~ i only a question of time." said the Duke j of Westminster, whose niece Chaplin | had just married, the crowned j heads of Europe otisht to give him i £100.000 a year in order that he may sho\s> them how to sr«end their money." ' Harry "went broke." accepted an ex- j Ministers pension of £1200 a year, and j voted against old-age pension* for the ' poor. The irony of the thins never ! struck him. His was a privileged class, i and to him no other arrangement of society was intelligible. Sportsmanship. But I am neglecting the main theme i of the book, which is the value of ! sportsmanship—the rame above the prize, the cause above renown. To j some colonials, and more foreigners. nans of this book may be irritating. 1 Tbe retort may be provoked that so much insistence on the game rather j than the prize does not come well from ' a nation that has of late years lost ' so many prizes. Sir Theodore i≤ aware I of this feeling. When the Olympic Games were i founded England* drew up the first code ! of rules for more than twenty forms of i sport. "We had been losing most of our world's championships before they besan. We have lost almost the last of them since," That, however, is not the reason why the British public i≤ not enthusiastic about these games. The reason is that ii they need a greater specialisation and invorre a higher cost in time and money than any sport professing to be! an educational -ecreation has ever de-1 manded of our English athletes." With the French idea of a Ministry of Sport he has no sympathy. Sport should organise itself. Yet this eminent authority is most generous in his praise of foreign athletes. He is outspoken about bygone American standards—as when an Englishman was deliberately pushed off the track when level witji American comjjetitnrs. and was told afterwards by an official that tH? -was

quit* fair—but ?ays that "such mi-taken notions of sport are now a< alien to the American? as to ours»>lve.O In tht? appearance of German athletes at J- tainford Bridge last year he <aw "fonnal acknowledgment that the English nation was ready to forgive her (< Germany t for the Great War." And what an appearance it wa=: Of the first five championships Germany won two. and e-lal>lisb<M a world's record. \Vhiie Dr. Peltzer v.ji? running: the half-mile in Im -31 ,"'-.">-.■ (;<-r----many was joining the League of Xaiion.-. Sir Theodore Cook i- convinced that if English education at public school an>i university had not lieen so "inextricably commingled with the be?t of Briti-h sport." the naiion would not have lasted through the war. and he sees further proof of its value in last year's gvneral strike, but be welcomes this foreign participation. ""What better solvent of the baser passions can possibly "be. imagined." he asks, than sucli meeting's a≤ that at Stamford Bridge in 1920' An Old Man Holds His Own. I wish I had space to quote more from this fascinating blend of scholarship ami sport. i The author, by the way. i=. steepwl in the classics, and remarks ruordactiy that "the outcry against the classics has always been Jed by the "practical man of business/ that most influential but mo>t disastrous counsellor in public affairs." Classics and sport give a man his ''abiding standard of and fit him to face any emergency. I must, however, pass on this story. An old Oxford athlete named ilitdiell, at the age of 70, was set upon in a railway carriage by three men. who tried to take his watch. He looked very mild, but fifty years before he had been an amateur boxing champion, besides a fine runner. He knocked out the first thief with "a pretty uppercut," collared the second round the knees, swung him over, and knocked out the third with his human projectile. He quietly •withdrew at the next station, and the guard found two unconscious men in the compartment, and a third unable to explain the situation. Evidence of a well-spent yc:;t_h indeed. •"Character and by Sir ThttxJore Cook (Williams icJ. Sorgate.t.