One of the highlights of Summer term in British schools is Sports Day where tiny humans are encouraged by their owners to lob wellingtons, to run swiftly whilst shackled to another, and to carry an egg at tremendous speeds. An odd assortment of sporting challenges to the uninformed eye, but where did these events come from and what led them to being adopted as part of an annual ritual that results in countless adults losing half a day’s pay? In this treatise I explain the origins of the most common events and one or two that failed to make it into the latter half of the twentieth century.
Egg and Spoon Race – The Tudor Anglican Bishop of Worcester and Gloucester, John Hooper, demanded that a boiled egg be brought to him early every morning during Lent, as he sat upon a bare wicker chair in his Lenten cell. He proclaimed that “As Christ was born unto us and meanly swaddled, so an egg, the very symbol of Christ’s rebirth, should also be-eth meanly swaddled in nothing that exceedeth it in girth so much as the blessed swaddling excedeth the circumference of Our infant Saviour’s flesh. About ¼ inch tops.” He added “For was not the sacred head of John the Baptist, Christ’s cousin, not brought upon a plate before Herod Antipas? Putting Christ on a plate doth seem tactless.”
The Bishop was later executed by Queen Mary I who insisted that eggs could be served, as she put it, “on a bloody plate – I’m nae pishing about with yon spoon – fecking idiot.” This was an historical curiosity, partly because of the gratuitous swearing from a reigning monarch (not witnessed again until the reign of Charles III), but mainly because Mary I had clearly forgotten that she and Mary Queen of Scots were not one and the same person.
When Elizabeth I re-established the protestant church of her father, one of her first decrees was to install the ‘egg and spoon race’ in court to commemorate the martyrdom of Bishop John.
The Three-Legged Race – Before Beowulf had faced Grendel and even worse, his Mother, the legend tells us that he faced Thrīleggrgāt, a hideous goat-headed monster with three legs and no sense of personal hygiene. He was a creature who, according to legend, preyed on the Geats tribes as he was in a constant state of fury as no tailor was willing to fit him for trousers. We only have part of the dialogue of Thrīleggrgāt left due to the damage done in a fire in 1731 – “ . . . blōdgiath hosan beswincath!” – but we clearly get the gist.
As part of the re-enactment of the epic of Beowulf in medieval England, village children would dress as the monsters: Grendel, Grendel’s Mother, the Dragon, and, of course, Thrīleggrgāt. Two children would be lashed together at the leg, covered in goat skins and told to complain about haberdashery until the village blacksmith clobbered them over the head with a couple of iron buckets. This ritual evolved and eventually found its way into the modern school sports day, though nowadays the goat hides are optional, and only really used in rural parts of Lincolnshire.
The Sack Race – Finding himself in financial dire straits due to a protracted civil war against Empress Matilda, King Stephen of England, in collusion with his barons, hit upon the idea of taxing people’s feet. The Beatles, over eight hundred years later, alluded to this famous historical tax-related incident in their song ‘Taxman’, though they skirted over some of the more intricate social-historical details. Already on their uppers, the peasantry of the day were most aggrieved about this new fiscal-burden and many about the country developed innovative and inept ways of avoiding this foot tax. The village of Thrump in Lancashire took to wearing their shoes on their hands to deceive the taxman; the good folk of Dewkesbury decided to hide their feet in soft peat all day. And the inhabitants of Moistly on the Crimp in Bedfordshire claimed to be plum trees and therefore not in possession of feet. These strategies did not fool the tax collectors for long. In fact, the written accounts of the tax collector for the event in Thrump tells how he felt that the villagers were ‘cloth-heads’ with ‘nary a brain speck between them’ and that he’d had a more intellectually-stimulating conversation with the village goat.
The most successful of the avoidance schemes occurred in Little Blithering on the Wang. Here the inhabitants took to hopping about in large hessian sacks to carry out their daily business. When the taxman would appear, they would roll the sacks up and pretend they were 6lbs of turnips.
In later years the people of Little Blithering on the Wang would commemorate this event with the young people of the village donning the sacks whilst a local dignitary would play the role of Ol’ Josiah the Taxman and chase after them crying ‘turnips be buggered, you’re a filthy tax-dodger!’ until the last child was caught and awarded a brass flange.
The tradition spread across the county and eventually the country, though the role of Ol’ Josiah was eventually dropped and it simply became a sprint race. Interestingly, the role of Ol’ Josiah inspired Ian Fleming’s Child-Catcher in ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’.
Welly Throwing – A leading cleric, Æthelrum, in the early church in Mercia mistranslated the story of David and Goliath and thought that rather than a sling bringing down the fearsome giant, David had felled him with a carefully aimed sandal. As such, the Mercians would enter battle armed only with footwear. Mercia was conquered by Wessex in 879AD.
This shoe-based mode of attack was largely forgotten until in 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo, famously Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, took off his eponymous boot and lobbed it at Napoleon declaring that he didn’t want his sword “sullied by the stench of a bloody Frenchman”. Ironically, his rampant xenophobia failed to allow him to recognise the stench of his own boot which, according to contemporary historians, made the Duke of Elchingham vomit, and led to Jean de-Dieu Soult, 1st Duke of Dalmatia going blind in his left eye.
Patriotic folks back home in Britain wanted to honour the memory of Wellington and his victory and so lobbing a welly at a Frenchman became a popular event at village fetes. Eventually the Frenchman was lost (mainly due to the outbreak of WWI and it being seen as a faux pas to make a festive event of lobbing footwear at an ally), and it simply became about the length of the lob, before being adopted into the repertoire of sports days.
Obstacle Course – The great horse shortage of 1741 inadvertently led to the creation of the obstacle course race. There had been a big run on glue due to Kent having come loose at the edges, and so fox-hunting had to be done mainly on foot. A handful saddled up beagles but this wasn’t the same, and after a couple of inches the beagles would collapse and demand a cigarette.
The gentry of the day found themselves having to run and jump over hedges, across brooks and through thickly wooded glades on foot. And given that an estimated 86% of Georgian aristocracy suffered from gout, this proved unsuccessful, and in the words of Henry Fiennes Pelham-Clinton, 9th Earl of Lincoln, was “just bloody knackering” and “made Lord Monmouth as purple in the face as his blighted piles”. Seeking a less exerting pastime whilst a fresh crop of horses was grown, landed gentry took to inviting others over to their manors to leap over smaller objects in their gardens: low-lying herbaceous borders, through the ornamental fishpond, and up a medium flight of stairs with the promise of roast pheasant and quince jelly at the end. Le Comte de Rouens, who had fled his native France, pre-empting the bloody revolution by some fifty years, took up residence in the estate of the Duke of Malmesbury, and famously organised a particularly exhilarating course for an evening soiree he dubbed ‘Les objects étrange et diabolique’ – a name the Francophile Georgian Britain liked and through a process of anglicising, time and verbal erosion simply became ‘obstacle’. Quite why chucking a beanbag into a hoop became part of it is unclear, though a lot of hamsters were lost down wells in nineteenth century Glamorgan.
The Pinning of the Leper – Obsolete now since decimalisation, but whose origins are self-explanatory.
Relay Race – This has its origins in the Mexican Revolution where revolutionaries would compete to see who could get a burrito to General Zapata the quickest.
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