Game on
Museums and galleries are among the heritage organisations taking part in this month's National Sporting Heritage Day. Deborah Mulhearn reports
Given that sport is such a big part of most people’s lives, our sporting heritage is not as celebrated as it could be.
To redress this, 30 September has been designated the first National Sporting Heritage Day, with the aim of bringing together communities, sports clubs and heritage organisations to highlight the UK’s rich sporting history and heritage.
The initiative is grassroots rather than government led, and is coordinated by the Sports Heritage Network (SHN) and the Sporting Heritage Learning Group (SHLG), a consortium drawn mainly from museums, archives and education specialists.
“Sports heritage needs to be conserved on a national scale,” says Justine Reilly, a museum consultant who has researched sports-related museum collections and is coordinating National Sporting Heritage Day.
“So many museums have sports collections and there is no doubt that the sector can support sporting heritage, but many museums lack confidence.
“Many have items that are inaccessible, or that they didn’t know they had and don’t know what to do with. With support these can be developed, and there is evidence that displays, exhibitions and events around sport create new audiences and repeat visitors. An example is Bradford Industrial Museum’s When the FA Cup Came Home exhibition, which celebrated Bradford Football Club’s triumph in 1911.”
“Every museum should reflect sport”
There are also thousands of small collections in non-heritage organisations, points out Reilly, in sports centres and social clubs, theatres, schools and hotels – containing photographs, ephemera, medals, trophies, kits and so on, that can become part of National Sporting Heritage Day and draw in new audiences.
“These collections show how communities fit together, and there’s a natural link back to local heritage venues,” Reilly says. “The aim of the day, which is loosely themed around the first world war, is to help people understand what sporting heritage is, where it is, and how it can be developed. There are pockets of activity but we need a more strategic approach.”
The popularity of the World Cup, Wimbledon, the 2012 Olympics and the Commonwealth Games, all demonstrate that people are fascinated by their sporting heritage, locally and nationally. After 2012, an Olympics museum was mooted, but the momentum was lost.
Kevin Moore, the chairman of the SHN and director of the National Football Museum in Manchester, however, believes that a monolithic centre dedicated to sport is the wrong approach.
“Yes, there should have been a legacy and celebration following the Olympics – there is sadly a sense that museums have ‘done’ sport for the time being – but that would not have covered all sports.
"The Paralympics, for example, have a natural home at Stoke Mandeville hospital where they started. Every museum can and should reflect sport, and the benefits of sports heritage and its appeal to new and different audiences are far reaching.”
The SHN is also launching an online museum at the Oral History and Sport Conference at the British Library in London on 19 September. The idea is to provide an online repository for sports collections and advice on how to upload material and care for collections, and curriculum and training ideas and links.
“Britain is the birthplace of modern sport,” Moore says. “People come from all over the world on pilgrimages to Wembley, Wimbledon, Lord’s and Twickenham – it’s one of our great cultural legacies. The website will be a much-needed repository where sports such as badminton, archery and hockey will also be recognised and represented.”
National Sporting Heritage Day will also be a reminder of the 114 country-wide Our Sporting Life exhibitions that were run in conjunction with the 2012 Olympics.
“This fantastic initiative in itself created a legacy, with museum collections being enriched, museums connecting with sports clubs and reaching new audiences, particularly hard-to-reach audiences,” Moore says.
“Sport is so important to local communities, and museums are a brilliant focus for that. It’s the local stories that lead to inclusion.”
Oral histories
“We see National Sporting Heritage Day as an opportunity to make people notice us, and for other museums to create a general display on sport,” says Mike Rowe, the curator at the World Rugby Museum at Twickenham Stadium.
“We have a three-year oral history project loosely connected to the sporting heritage day and ‘follow-ons’ inspired by the project.”
Micky Steele-Bodger, Mike Smith, John Kane and John Collins and many other rugby players from the 1940s onwards are being interviewed. “We are used to watching our sporting heroes in action, but having more in-depth material is invaluable,” Rowe says.
“Post-match interviews tend to be formulaic, so having these oral histories and personal reminiscences of the great teams and moments of our sport will add depth to the immediacy of the video and audio experience.”
Any museum in any location can take part, not just on the day itself, but by having sport embedded in their displays and programmes, Rowe says.
“There are three or four major sporting events every year and these are cyclical, so every museum can find some connection. As a museum inside a sporting venue we have much to learn from the museum sector at large in terms of display and interpretation, but we can show them the visceral and emotional connection to subject.”
In Liverpool, sport has a vast heritage and significance, through football most famously, but also boxing, golf, swimming and cycling. There is no dedicated sports museum in the city, however, or even a sports gallery within one of the city’s many museums.
Rather, objects, memories and stories connected with sport are embedded throughout the different galleries at the Museum of Liverpool, and depict its role in the community.
“We decided it was a better approach,” says Paul Gallagher, the curator of contemporary collecting at National Museums Liverpool (NML). “The football element, Kicking and Screaming, is actually quite small.”
While the presentation of sport usually has an air of jubilation, there is a darker side dealing with hooliganism, racism and tragic events such as Hillsborough. When it comes to painful memories, Liverpool has faced this sensitive subject head on.
Memories and wounds of the Hillsborough tragedy, when 96 Liverpool FC fans were crushed to death and hundreds more injured at the Sheffield ground in 1989, are still raw in the city.
Instead of a dedicated space, what happened at Hillsborough and the after-effects are told as part of the story of the 1980s, with items dispersed throughout the galleries: the Time Detectives gallery has a ticket belonging to someone who died; the script from the play Hillsborough by Jimmy McGovern is in the Writers’ Gallery; and an art mosaic created by an Everton fan is in another part of the museum.
“The story of Hillsborough is still being written and we are keen to collect personal stories,” Gallagher says. “We work closely with the Hillsborough Family Support Group and others. The aim is to capture a sense of place and time. Liverpool in the 1960s was a place of optimism, whereas Liverpool in the 1980s wasn’t, and Hillsborough is part of that story.”
Celebration of sport
Critics often say that sporting museums are a contradiction in terms, that the exhilaration of the moment cannot be captured, but Reilly dismisses this.
“Museums are all about animating the past, whatever the subject matter,” she says. “And sport is better placed than most subjects because of its massive popularity and significance in society. Sport exhibitions, like the Fashion v Sport exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, are amazingly popular, so I think that criticism is a bit of a red herring.
“Sporting heritage can and should be celebrated all year round,” Reilly says. “It’s what people love to do when they get together before, during or after a sporting fixture, and museums have an integral part to play in understanding this part of our cultural and social history.
"The first world war and sport is a rich theme to explore, but it is only a suggestion, and nor do events and activities have to be limited to one day. The day offers a way to tap into this, and who knows, next year it might be a week or even a month-long celebration.”
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist.
A tall and powerful winger from Lancashire with a kick like a mule was one of the most successful football players in 20th-century Britain.
Factory worker – and woman – Lily Parr scored over a thousand goals and outplayed many men. She played for the Dick, Kerr Ladies, a team formed at a munitions factory in Preston during the first world war. With men away at war, workplaces had to be filled with women, and women’s football teams started springing up throughout the country.
Despite a Football Association ban on women playing in their league grounds, which lasted for 50 years from 1921 until 1971, women’s football was hugely popular.
On Christmas Day in 1917, 10,000 people watched Dick, Kerr Ladies beat the nearby Arundel Coulthard foundry ladies’ team 4-0 at Deepdale, Preston North End’s famous ground. Within a few years women’s matches were attracting crowds of over 50,000.
In 1920 a match between Dick, Kerr Ladies and St Helens Ladies at Everton’s Goodison Park in Liverpool attracted a capacity crowd of 53,000, with 14,000 turned away. Dick, Kerr Ladies continued as a team until 1965 when it disbanded.
Parr was the first woman to be inducted into the English Football Hall of Fame at the National Football Museum in Manchester.
Laura Simpson, heritage tourism officer at Nottinghamshire County Council, has been busy talking to sports clubs, businesses and shopping centres across the county about National Sporting Heritage Day.
“I’m trying to join the dots between the heritage and sporting venues, and I’ve had a great response from the latter,” she says.
“We have so many sporting venues, including football clubs such as Nottingham Forest, Notts County and Mansfield Town, Trent Bridge cricket club, who want to develop a project about cricketers who went to fight in the first world war, the National Ice Centre and Nottingham Racecourse, who are offering free entry to anyone with an NG postcode on the day.”
An exhibition in Mansfield’s Beales department store will look at the legacy of sporting figures such as legendary cricketer Harold Larwood, who rose from a Nottinghamshire mining community to become one of the fastest bowlers in the world. It will also show how other county sporting personalities, including ice skaters Torvill and Dean, swimmer Rebecca Adlington, Paralympian ‘bladerunner’ athlete Richard Whitehead and boxer Carl Froch, can inspire and raise aspirations in people in the county.
Mansfield Business Improvement District (BID) is wholeheartedly behind the initiative – planning wheelchair basketball in the town centre, and behind-the-scenes tours at the Stags.
“It has taken someone outside of the heritage world to see the potential of this initiative and use it to draw people into the town centre,” Simpson says. “We could be trailblazers. Nowhere else could give such a county-wide response to National Sporting Heritage Day.”
To redress this, 30 September has been designated the first National Sporting Heritage Day, with the aim of bringing together communities, sports clubs and heritage organisations to highlight the UK’s rich sporting history and heritage.
The initiative is grassroots rather than government led, and is coordinated by the Sports Heritage Network (SHN) and the Sporting Heritage Learning Group (SHLG), a consortium drawn mainly from museums, archives and education specialists.
“Sports heritage needs to be conserved on a national scale,” says Justine Reilly, a museum consultant who has researched sports-related museum collections and is coordinating National Sporting Heritage Day.
“So many museums have sports collections and there is no doubt that the sector can support sporting heritage, but many museums lack confidence.
“Many have items that are inaccessible, or that they didn’t know they had and don’t know what to do with. With support these can be developed, and there is evidence that displays, exhibitions and events around sport create new audiences and repeat visitors. An example is Bradford Industrial Museum’s When the FA Cup Came Home exhibition, which celebrated Bradford Football Club’s triumph in 1911.”
“Every museum should reflect sport”
There are also thousands of small collections in non-heritage organisations, points out Reilly, in sports centres and social clubs, theatres, schools and hotels – containing photographs, ephemera, medals, trophies, kits and so on, that can become part of National Sporting Heritage Day and draw in new audiences.
“These collections show how communities fit together, and there’s a natural link back to local heritage venues,” Reilly says. “The aim of the day, which is loosely themed around the first world war, is to help people understand what sporting heritage is, where it is, and how it can be developed. There are pockets of activity but we need a more strategic approach.”
The popularity of the World Cup, Wimbledon, the 2012 Olympics and the Commonwealth Games, all demonstrate that people are fascinated by their sporting heritage, locally and nationally. After 2012, an Olympics museum was mooted, but the momentum was lost.
Kevin Moore, the chairman of the SHN and director of the National Football Museum in Manchester, however, believes that a monolithic centre dedicated to sport is the wrong approach.
“Yes, there should have been a legacy and celebration following the Olympics – there is sadly a sense that museums have ‘done’ sport for the time being – but that would not have covered all sports.
"The Paralympics, for example, have a natural home at Stoke Mandeville hospital where they started. Every museum can and should reflect sport, and the benefits of sports heritage and its appeal to new and different audiences are far reaching.”
The SHN is also launching an online museum at the Oral History and Sport Conference at the British Library in London on 19 September. The idea is to provide an online repository for sports collections and advice on how to upload material and care for collections, and curriculum and training ideas and links.
“Britain is the birthplace of modern sport,” Moore says. “People come from all over the world on pilgrimages to Wembley, Wimbledon, Lord’s and Twickenham – it’s one of our great cultural legacies. The website will be a much-needed repository where sports such as badminton, archery and hockey will also be recognised and represented.”
National Sporting Heritage Day will also be a reminder of the 114 country-wide Our Sporting Life exhibitions that were run in conjunction with the 2012 Olympics.
“This fantastic initiative in itself created a legacy, with museum collections being enriched, museums connecting with sports clubs and reaching new audiences, particularly hard-to-reach audiences,” Moore says.
“Sport is so important to local communities, and museums are a brilliant focus for that. It’s the local stories that lead to inclusion.”
Oral histories
“We see National Sporting Heritage Day as an opportunity to make people notice us, and for other museums to create a general display on sport,” says Mike Rowe, the curator at the World Rugby Museum at Twickenham Stadium.
“We have a three-year oral history project loosely connected to the sporting heritage day and ‘follow-ons’ inspired by the project.”
Micky Steele-Bodger, Mike Smith, John Kane and John Collins and many other rugby players from the 1940s onwards are being interviewed. “We are used to watching our sporting heroes in action, but having more in-depth material is invaluable,” Rowe says.
“Post-match interviews tend to be formulaic, so having these oral histories and personal reminiscences of the great teams and moments of our sport will add depth to the immediacy of the video and audio experience.”
Any museum in any location can take part, not just on the day itself, but by having sport embedded in their displays and programmes, Rowe says.
“There are three or four major sporting events every year and these are cyclical, so every museum can find some connection. As a museum inside a sporting venue we have much to learn from the museum sector at large in terms of display and interpretation, but we can show them the visceral and emotional connection to subject.”
In Liverpool, sport has a vast heritage and significance, through football most famously, but also boxing, golf, swimming and cycling. There is no dedicated sports museum in the city, however, or even a sports gallery within one of the city’s many museums.
Rather, objects, memories and stories connected with sport are embedded throughout the different galleries at the Museum of Liverpool, and depict its role in the community.
“We decided it was a better approach,” says Paul Gallagher, the curator of contemporary collecting at National Museums Liverpool (NML). “The football element, Kicking and Screaming, is actually quite small.”
While the presentation of sport usually has an air of jubilation, there is a darker side dealing with hooliganism, racism and tragic events such as Hillsborough. When it comes to painful memories, Liverpool has faced this sensitive subject head on.
Memories and wounds of the Hillsborough tragedy, when 96 Liverpool FC fans were crushed to death and hundreds more injured at the Sheffield ground in 1989, are still raw in the city.
Instead of a dedicated space, what happened at Hillsborough and the after-effects are told as part of the story of the 1980s, with items dispersed throughout the galleries: the Time Detectives gallery has a ticket belonging to someone who died; the script from the play Hillsborough by Jimmy McGovern is in the Writers’ Gallery; and an art mosaic created by an Everton fan is in another part of the museum.
“The story of Hillsborough is still being written and we are keen to collect personal stories,” Gallagher says. “We work closely with the Hillsborough Family Support Group and others. The aim is to capture a sense of place and time. Liverpool in the 1960s was a place of optimism, whereas Liverpool in the 1980s wasn’t, and Hillsborough is part of that story.”
Celebration of sport
Critics often say that sporting museums are a contradiction in terms, that the exhilaration of the moment cannot be captured, but Reilly dismisses this.
“Museums are all about animating the past, whatever the subject matter,” she says. “And sport is better placed than most subjects because of its massive popularity and significance in society. Sport exhibitions, like the Fashion v Sport exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, are amazingly popular, so I think that criticism is a bit of a red herring.
“Sporting heritage can and should be celebrated all year round,” Reilly says. “It’s what people love to do when they get together before, during or after a sporting fixture, and museums have an integral part to play in understanding this part of our cultural and social history.
"The first world war and sport is a rich theme to explore, but it is only a suggestion, and nor do events and activities have to be limited to one day. The day offers a way to tap into this, and who knows, next year it might be a week or even a month-long celebration.”
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist.
Lily Parr, the striker with a kick like a mule
A tall and powerful winger from Lancashire with a kick like a mule was one of the most successful football players in 20th-century Britain.
Factory worker – and woman – Lily Parr scored over a thousand goals and outplayed many men. She played for the Dick, Kerr Ladies, a team formed at a munitions factory in Preston during the first world war. With men away at war, workplaces had to be filled with women, and women’s football teams started springing up throughout the country.
Despite a Football Association ban on women playing in their league grounds, which lasted for 50 years from 1921 until 1971, women’s football was hugely popular.
On Christmas Day in 1917, 10,000 people watched Dick, Kerr Ladies beat the nearby Arundel Coulthard foundry ladies’ team 4-0 at Deepdale, Preston North End’s famous ground. Within a few years women’s matches were attracting crowds of over 50,000.
In 1920 a match between Dick, Kerr Ladies and St Helens Ladies at Everton’s Goodison Park in Liverpool attracted a capacity crowd of 53,000, with 14,000 turned away. Dick, Kerr Ladies continued as a team until 1965 when it disbanded.
Parr was the first woman to be inducted into the English Football Hall of Fame at the National Football Museum in Manchester.
The county champions of Nottinghamshire
Laura Simpson, heritage tourism officer at Nottinghamshire County Council, has been busy talking to sports clubs, businesses and shopping centres across the county about National Sporting Heritage Day.
“I’m trying to join the dots between the heritage and sporting venues, and I’ve had a great response from the latter,” she says.
“We have so many sporting venues, including football clubs such as Nottingham Forest, Notts County and Mansfield Town, Trent Bridge cricket club, who want to develop a project about cricketers who went to fight in the first world war, the National Ice Centre and Nottingham Racecourse, who are offering free entry to anyone with an NG postcode on the day.”
An exhibition in Mansfield’s Beales department store will look at the legacy of sporting figures such as legendary cricketer Harold Larwood, who rose from a Nottinghamshire mining community to become one of the fastest bowlers in the world. It will also show how other county sporting personalities, including ice skaters Torvill and Dean, swimmer Rebecca Adlington, Paralympian ‘bladerunner’ athlete Richard Whitehead and boxer Carl Froch, can inspire and raise aspirations in people in the county.
Mansfield Business Improvement District (BID) is wholeheartedly behind the initiative – planning wheelchair basketball in the town centre, and behind-the-scenes tours at the Stags.
“It has taken someone outside of the heritage world to see the potential of this initiative and use it to draw people into the town centre,” Simpson says. “We could be trailblazers. Nowhere else could give such a county-wide response to National Sporting Heritage Day.”