A history of summer games and sport in our collections

It is impossible to say exactly when the history of sport began. Sports and physical games have been embedded in cultures around the world for thousands of years and have continued to play vital roles in societies.

In its earliest days, sports were closely connected with warfare. Sporting competitions demonstrated individual strength and physical prowess. Wrestling is considered to be the oldest sport in the world. Wrestlers are depicted in the famous cave paintings estimated at over 15,300 years old in Lascaux, France.

The Ancient Greeks are credited with the introduction of organised sports, holding the first Olympic Games in 776 BCE. These Games included sports like running and hockey, and grew quickly to include boxing, javelin and discus.

A book of 1674, called The Compleat Gamester described billiards as ‘a most gentile, cleanly and ingenious game’ and that ‘it is much approved of and played by most nations of Europe, especially in England, there being few towns of note therein which hath not a public billiard table…’.  We don’t know very much about the people that made them but it was a very specialised craft, with a huge amount of skill involved in getting the bed as flat as possible so that balls would run smoothly. 

Lawn sports became hugely popular in England from about the reign of Charles II in the 17th century. Croquet is thought to have been imported from France around this time, derived from the French game ‘paille-maille’ that used wooden mallets to hit balls.

The National Trust has a special role in the story of croquet. The rules were codified at Chastleton House and Gardens, Oxfordshire, by the rather unlikely Walter Whitmore Jones in 1866. Jones was born and lived at Chastleton, and turned to croquet as part of a lifelong passion for inventing games.

The 15th and 16th centuries saw a rise in popularity of ball games and equestrian sports in particular, seen in England in the establishment of Shrovetide football and Ascot Racecourse. However, it was the Victorian era that saw a boom in the evolution of sports, driven by industrialisation, mass production and the Victorian obsession with leisure.

Racehorses were the sports cars of their day and proud owners commissioned artists to paint their horses. Among the 11,000 paintings that we care for, there are many that feature racehorses.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, sea-bathing was promoted for its health benefits. King George III visited Weymouth in 1789 for his health, popularising sea ‘dipping’. Bathing machines on wheels became a common sight on Britain’s beaches. They could be pulled out to sea so those inside could change and then take their dip whilst maintaining their modesty.

Early bathing costumes were often made of wool flannel for warmth, constructed with skirts for modesty. Swimming demanded a lighter form of dress. By the 1920s, swimsuits were sleeker, briefer, tighter fitting and more stylish, with an emphasis on the practical.

The use of swimming pools stretches back to the third millennium BCE, when the earliest known manmade bathing space, the Great Bath of Mohenjo-daro, was erected. In Britain, taking a dip in a nearby river was a common pastime for all. However, swimming pools only really began to come into favour in the mid-19th century and burgeoned after 1896, when swimming was incorporated into the modern Olympic Games.

Modern lawn tennis evolved later in the 19th century, although had deep roots in the medieval version ‘real tennis’, which was favoured by many royals, especially the Tudors. Allegedly, Henry VIII was playing real tennis on his personal court at Hampton Court when his second wife Anne Boleyn was arrested.

From the 1900s onwards male and female tennis players began wearing the distinctive all white clothing we are so familiar with today. For women, chic, short, full skirts aided movement, and pleats allowed movement as the player leaped and ran about the court. 

Fast forward to the 1960s and 70s which saw new developments in the design of tennis clothes and the introduction of logos on clothing. Fred Perry (1909–95) was a British tennis player and three times Wimbledon champion in the mid 1930s. The Fred Perry company (founded in 1952) built on their brand identity with a distinctive laurel wreath logo, based on the original symbol for Wimbledon.

Clothing designed specifically for sport became an industry in the Victorian period, when the widespread popularisation of sport created a market economy for activewear. In the 1870s, John Redfern was one of the first couturiers to make garments especially for sports. Sporting fashions evolved rapidly from the 1920s, became increasingly practical and comfortable, overlapping with daywear as women’s fashions became less formal.

With the Trust’s fundamental connection to nature and the outdoors, many of our places remain synonymous with sport. As home to informal children’s games and organised sports events alike, our places continue the sporting legacies woven into the people, collections and stories that we care for.