Sporting fashions in 1859

This is one of a series of entries are drawn from chapter 7 of my book, Mr Darwin's Incredible Shrinking World, and they all deal with life in that era. For background on the book, see the first entry in the series, Life in 1859, but if you just want to see the others, use the tag 1859, which appears at the end of each entry.

To most Americans and Canadians today, cricket is a mystery, but Abraham Lincoln attended a cricket match between Chicago and Milwaukee in 1859, and a professional All England cricket team toured Canada and the USA during the year, playing five matches, the first overseas tour in any sport. Taking a cricket team to the US back then was not as bizarre as it sounds from today’s perspective.

In 1859, cricket was very popular in the mid-Atlantic states, in Boston and the New England factory towns, but it could also be seen in Baltimore, Savannah, New Orleans, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and even San Francisco, a total of perhaps 300 or 400 clubs.

Cricket even inspired American inventions. In March, M. Doherty of Boston patented a cricket bat that would not jar or bruise, but which would send the ball further. The blade had a wooden shell filled with cork or similar material, while the handle was hollow and contained a strip of whalebone, but in 1859, the baseball craze started to bite, and soon cricket would be eclipsed.

The writing was on the wall for cricket in September, when the ball game for the Massachusetts state championship caused enough interest for several railroads to issue excursion tickets to Boston’s Agricultural Fair Grounds.

Many new sports arose around 1859, perhaps because the lawnmower was now mature technology. The original mower was developed in 1830 from a machine used to remove the nap from cloth, and it allowed smooth, true grass surfaces, something almost impossible to create with a scythe or with grazing animals, but organic mowers still had a presence. The Illustrated London News reported in the middle of 1859 that a lightning bolt had struck a sheep in London’s Hyde Park, summarily terminating its earlier sterling grass control services.

After about 1860, horse-drawn and then motorised mechanical mowers did most of the work.

Lawn tennis was developed in 1859 by a solicitor, Major Thomas Henry Gem and his friend, a Spanish merchant. The two were living in Birmingham, England, and played a game that they termed “pelota”, based on a Spanish ball game, which they played on Perera’s croquet lawn. This later came to be known as tennis, and 15 years later the two formed the Leamington Tennis Club, which laid out the rules of the game.

Croquet even featured in Alice in Wonderland.

In 1868, the All England Croquet Club was created to provide an official body to control croquet and to unify the laws. The club’s members leased four acres at Wimbledon in 1869, and tennis courts were added later when the croquet fad waned.

The club changed its name to the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club in 1899, and has held that name to the present day, even if the world just thinks of it as ‘Wimbledon’. Croquet had become a British craze in the 1850s, and the first recorded croquet game in the USA was at Nahant, Massachusetts in 1859.

Football was also emerging. In May, the rules for “Australian Rules” football were developed, though the Football Association, the founding body for the world game (or ‘soccer’, if you must) only wrote out its rules in 1863, with Rugby codes developing about 1870.

1859 was the year in which Allan Robertson, the world’s first golf professional died, still hating the new-fangled ‘gutties’, the golf balls with gutta percha in their hearts. They made the game too easy, he thought.

Not all sports owe their birth to lawn mowers. Polo was started in India in 1859 by the Maharajah of Manipur, Sir Chandrakirti Singh (who called it by a name which literally meant “horse hockey”).

It was the year lacrosse was named as Canada’s national sport and the first ice hockey game appears to have been played in Halifax in 1859 (ice hockey became Canada’s national winter game in 1994).

The first modern Olympic Games were staged in Athens, not in 1896 but in 1859! A Hellenic grain merchant named Evangelos Zappas convinced the Bavarian-born King Otto I of Greece to patronize an Olympic festival at Athens.

Otto was driven out of Greece in 1862, which caused the second Olympiad to be somewhat delayed, and these days, we take the second attempt of 1896 as the first of the modern series.

A Meyerbeer opera, Le Prophète, opened in 1849. It featured apparent ice-skaters (roller skaters), but that and an 1849 ‘spin-off’ ballet, Plaisirs de l’Hiver ou Les Patineurs helped to make roller skates popular, while Les Patineurs remains in the orchestral repertoire today.

In 1859, the Woodward skate with vulcanised rubber wheels, was unveiled in London, but people did more than demonstrate their own strength and agility. They went to see the experts in action.