Physical Education and Sport in Independent Schools, 2012. John Catt Educational Ltd
Dr Malcolm Tozer taught at Uppingham School for 23 years before becoming headmaster at Northamptonshire Grammar School and then Wellow House School in Nottinghamshire. Now retired, he lives in Cornwall.
The UK’s independent schools lead the world in showing how physical activity can be harnessed for its educational worth and personal development values. More than 700 of their former pupils have represented their country at sport at senior international level since 2000.
As HRH The Princess Royal writes in the foreword, this collection of essays seeks to help schools to review their current practice, question its purpose and assess the outcomes, so enabling governors, heads and senior managers to examine their schools’ contribution to the nation and ask what improvements can be made.
The Ideal of Manliness: The Legacy of Thring’s Uppingham, 2015. Sunnyrest Books
The inculcation of the ideal of manliness was the central educational purpose of the mid-Victorian public schools. This study traces its evolution in the first half of the nineteenth century and describes its realisation at Uppingham School between 1853 and 1887 during the headmastership of Edward Thring.
This ideal was distorted in the late Victorian years when the athletic contribution to Thring’s holistic model became the ideal in its own right, and then wholly perverted by militaristic and imperial motives in the early years of the twentieth century.
Thring’s ideal, however, lived on in the progressive school movement and eventually found general acceptance after the Second World War. Thring’s ‘manliness’ is the forerunner of the ‘wholeness‘ ideal of schools in the new millennium.
Fashionable Idolatries: Thring, Uppingham and the Mangan Model of Athleticism, 2017, Sunnyrest Books.
Victorian advocates and critics of the widely held belief that team games provided more than just physical exercise – a phenomenon variously described as athleticism, the cult of athletics or the games ethic – were, despite their different viewpoints, united in the conviction that it was more than a temporary craze. They were right, and these advocates and critics continued to argue for and against athleticism throughout its heyday, the period from 1850 until 1940. None, however, sought to explore and examine the reasons for its popularity and its longevity.
Athleticism had been conceived in the mid–Victorian public schools; it quickly found ready acceptance throughout Britain; and it was successfully exported across the British Empire and even further afield. Serious enquiry into athleticism’s purpose, however, had to wait until the 1970s when it was first identified by J. A. Mangan as an educational ideology – an ideology for the training of the young that promoted the playing of team games for the establishment of sound social attitudes and the development of morally correct behaviour. This monograph examines Mangan's model of athleticism and compares it with the educational practice at Uppingham School during the headmastership of Edward Thring (1853-1887).
Edward Thring’s Theory, Practice and Legacy: Physical Education in Britain since 1800, 2019, Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
The traditional picture of a Victorian public school assumes that it was founded on Thomas Arnold, Tom Brown’s Schooldays and rugby football. A Rifle Corps, Oxbridge Blues on the teaching staff, and an ethos of esprit de corps were all part of the system. The cult of athleticism reigned supreme.
This was not the case at Uppingham School during Edward Thring’s headmastership from 1853 to 1887. Here a balanced physical education of gymnastics, athletics, games, swimming and country pursuits flourished within a sane but revolutionary educational framework. Thring’s Uppingham, however, was an Athens surrounded by Spartan strongholds. The Spartans were kept at bay during Thring’s lifetime, but, after his death, they closed in and even claimed Thring as one of their own. His ideals were hijacked by the sportsmen and then perverted by the militarists.
Thring’s theory and practice of physical education lived on outside the traditional public schools, was adopted by the progressive school movement, and eventually found acceptance in all good schools. Its legacy can be found in the first National Curriculum for Physical Education and in all schools that value physical education as a vital ingredient of holistic education.
This book will inform trainee teachers, practising teachers and teacher trainers of the men and women who have strived since 1800 to secure a place for physical education in the curriculum for all pupils. Historians of education, gender, society and sport will find new material to illuminate their fields of study.
Puddings, Bullies and Squashes: Early Public School Football Codes, (ed.) 2020, Sunnyrest Books.
Puddings, bullies and squashes were terms used at Radley College, Uppingham School and Charterhouse to describe the melee, a feature of every early public school football game: half the school in one team attempting to drive the ball through the goal of the other half of the school in defence. The scrum of modern rugby is a pale imitation and soccer’s defensive wall just a flimsy substitute by comparison. This is the story of those early public school codes before the nationalisation of football by the Football Association from 1863 and the Rugby Football Union from 1871.
The 20 schools are Bradfield College, Charterhouse, Christ’s Hospital, Clongowes Wood College, Durham School, Edinburgh Academy, Eton College, Forest School, Harrow School, King’s School Canterbury, Marlborough College, Radley College, Repton School, Rugby School, Sherborne School, Shrewsbury School, Tonbridge School, Uppingham School, Westminster School and Winchester College. With a preface by sports historian Tony Collins tracing the sweep of these remarkable innovative versions of football.
Bright the Vision: Public School Missions from the Victorian Age (ed.) 2022, Sunnyrest Books.
Edward Thring, Headmaster of Uppingham School from 1853 to 1887, encouraged his privileged boys to remember the plight of the poor and to assist them through charitable donation and direct action. They responded by founding a public school mission in 1870, at North Woolwich in London’s East End. Over the course of the next 40 years, many more schools and two universities followed this example. Bright the Vision is the story of 22 of those school missions and their legacy. With contributions from HRH The Princess Royal, Dr Lucinda Matthews-Jones and the Rt Rev Dr John Inge, Bishop of Worcester, this wide-sweeping book describes some of the notable forerunners and forefathers of the Welfare State.
The schools featured are Bradfield College, Charterhouse, Cheltenham Ladies’ College, Clifton College, Dulwich College, Durham School, Eton College, Haileybury, Harrow School, Highgate School, King's School Canterbury, Marlborough College, Monkton Combe School, Radley College, Repton School, Rugby School, Shrewsbury School, The Leys School, Tonbridge School, Uppingham School, Wellington College and Winchester College.