Subject Guide: Sport and Exercise Science: Archives and Special Collections

Sport has been a key recreational activity of students at Durham University from its earliest days, with the oldest group photograph in the university archive being of a rowing four of 1860. However, it is generally not until the later 19th century that much of the regular sporting activities of the university were consistently organised, and recorded, augmenting earlier exercise such as beagling. Then sports espeically rowing, rugby, football, cricket, hockey, fives, athletics and tennis came to predominate, with students playing in teams at 3 levels potentially, for their college, for Durham Colleges or for the whole university. With the independence of Newcastle in 1963, one of those levels was lost as Durham Colleges became in effect the university. Some sports, such as rugby and football, regularly competed against local sides, but others often made do with inter-college competition, with rowing for instance rarely venturing to local regattas besides Durham’s own and the then annual races against Edinburgh, all taking place on the Wear. By the later 20th century, the variety of sports participated in at university and college level had grown considerably, to include such as badminton, basketball, canoeing, cheerleading, darts, lacrosse, netball, pool, squash, swimming, ultimate frisbee, and volleyball. Women participate as much as men, their earlier activities having been focused on largely rowing, hockey, netball and tennis. As an academic discipline, Sport and Exercise Sciences is a relative newcomer as a separate department, only being established in August 2018 with Prof Martin Roderick as the head. 

All of this is reflected in the university’s own archive, in central, faculty and departmental files of the university, in the records of the meetings of its various committees from Senate and Council down, in the exam papers, pass lists and mark sheets for the subject, and the university’s publications of such as the Gazette, Calendar, Journal, and Vice-Chancellor’s Reports, and newsletters and the like. There is much on sporting activities, including runs of group photos (supplemented by the Edis and Fillingham photograph collections), in the college archives, along with information and annual reports etc in alumni newsletters, year books, handbooks and the like. There are also records of the various university sports clubs, including such as the staff cricket club, and the overseeing students’ Athletic Union with also records of the award of the ultimate accolades for sporting achievement, palatinates and half-palatinates, with reports on many student sporting activities appearing in the student newspaper Palatinate and its various antecedents, especially New Durham. There are also records of the Maiden Castle Sports Centre where the major sporting activities are based, and even of some of the principal coaches, such as Wade Hall-Craggs (rowing, diaries in Add.MS. 1703), Alexander Macfarlane-Grieve (rowing, series of photo albums, all digitised) and Tom Whitworth (rugby, correspondence and ephemera). 

At the Catholic seminary near Durham of Ushaw College, sport was also an important component of college life, with the traditional football, cricket, and tennis games (although not rugby) complemented and often eclipsed by the popularity of games unique to Ushaw, including handball, and keeping up (also known as battledore). The most popular of game of all was cat, which was imported from Douai College and alleged to have influenced the development of American baseball. 

Various of the family collections (Headlam, 4th Earl Grey) also make mention of sporting activities in the North-East and beyond, featuring such as cricket and rowing, especially for the later 19th century. The Baker Baker papers also have some material on horse racing in the area in the earlier 19th century. Add.MS. 887 is a collection of material of Edward V. Lucas (1868-1938), a prolific essayist and lover of cricket. The Grey pamphlets contain a series of reports and other ephemera on physical education and training from around 1900. There is also the occasional 17th to 19th publication on sporting activities in the Classical World in collections such as Routh, Bamburgh and Ushaw’s Big Library.  

There is also material in the form of correspondence, diary entries and photographs, concerning sporting activities in the Sudan and Egypt (such as cricket, tennis, polo, football) during the first half of the 20th century, in the Sudan Archive in the papers of such as R.C. Garrett (especially the Sudan Football Association), D. Newbold, T.R.H. Owen, H.A. Romilly, E.G. Sarsfield-Hall, R.V. Savile, and G.R. Storrar.   

Field Sports are reflected particularly in the papers and book collection of Kenneth Whitehead (1913-2004), focused especially on all aspects of deer, and so including their stalking and shooting. Whitehead was a dedicated but discriminating hunter and shot game throughout the world, including Morocco, Ghana, the United States, Canada, Germany, Norway, Australia and New Zealand with many of these trips being recorded in his diaries and correspondence.  The archive comprises some 230 boxes and the book collection some 4,000 items.  

The Local Collection on open access in PGL in the Barker Research Library is redolent with histories of the university and its colleges, and also histories of other universities and schools in the area, which cover their sporting activities. There are also numbers of publications on specific sports in the North-East, especially its various football teams, though fanzines and programmes are not generally garnered. Also held are volumes on other sports such as rowing (the 19th century sculling matches on the Tyne) and cricket (the ups and downs of Durham County Cricket Club). Local sports clubs and teams also feature in the various more recent photo histories of localities; they often also feature in local directories. The microfilms of local newspapers are a further invaluable source of all sporting activity, especially in and around Durham, with reports of matches and analysis of teams.