CHILL-OUT SUNDAY THE ELLIS RUGBY ENGLISH RUGBY ‘A SOCIAL HISTORY OF ENGLISH RUGBY UNION’ BOOK PREVIEW

The Ellis Rugby English Rugby book preview. ‘A Social History of English Rugby Union’

Tony Collins Author

Tony Collins is a British sports and social historian and author specialising in Northern England and rugby football.

Collins is a Professor of history and the Director of the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University. He also acts as a historical consultant to the Rugby Football League. Collins has been described as rugby league football’s “leading historian”. He has produced a range of material on the history of sports and the social contexts of events; as well as rugby league, Collins has written about rugby union.

Collins has four times been awarded the Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for Sports History book of the year his books, Rugby’s Great Split, Rugby League in Twentieth Century Britain, A Social History of English Rugby Union and The Oval World: A Global History of Rugby, winning in 1999, 2007, 2010 and 2016 respectively.

Here’s the Ellis Rugby English Rugby ‘A Social History of English Rugby Union’ Book Preview –

From the myth of William Webb Ellis to the glory of the 2003 World Cup win, this book explores the social history of rugby union in England.

Ever since Tom Brown’s Schooldays the sport has seen itself as the guardian of traditional English middle-class values. In this fascinating new history, leading rugby historian Tony Collins demonstrates how these values have shaped the English game, from the public schools to mass spectator sport, from strict amateurism to global professionalism.

Based on unprecedented access to the official archives of the Rugby Football Union, and drawing on an impressive array of sources from club minutes to personal memoirs and contemporary literature, the book explores in vivid detail the key events, personalities and players that have made English rugby.

From an era of rapid growth at the end of the nineteenth century, through the terrible losses suffered during the First World War and the subsequent ‘rush to rugby’ in the public and grammar schools, and into the periods of disorientation and commercialisation in the 1960s through to the present day, the story of English rugby union is also the story of the making of modern England.

Like all the very best writers on sport, Tony Collins uses sport as a prism through which to better understand both culture and society. A ground-breaking work of both social history and sport history, A Social History of English Rugby Union tells a fascinating story of sporting endeavour, masculine identity, imperial ideology, social consciousness and the nature of Englishness.

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