Products, Training and Technology

Day, David ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6511-1014 (2022) Products, Training and Technology. In: A Cultural History of Sport: In the Age of Industry. The Cultural Histories Series . Bloomsbury Academic, London, pp. 77-98. ISBN 9781350024045 (hardback); 9781350183032 (online); 9781350283077 (ebook); 9781350283084 (ebook)

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Abstract

There was no clear break with the past in the leisure activities of most of the population in nineteenth-century Britain, which witnessed an acceleration of a pre-existing tendency towards an expansion of the commercial leisure industry, invariably driven by small-scale capitalist entrepreneurs. From the 1840s onwards, popular culture was transformed as leisure activities were repackaged to accommodate a growing population and an expanding urban, industrialized environment (Golby and Purdue 1999: 120). The need for stable, punctual, sober, and disciplined workers became important for manufacturers and the Factory Acts established rationally organized clear divisions between work time and leisure time (Justman and Gradstein 1999: 118–119). In eighteenth-century Manchester, hours in the hand-spinning factories had fluctuated with seasonal demands and the availability of raw materials, so workers had continued to mix leisure with work, but owners, recognizing the substantial fixed costs associated with running a factory, were enforcing multi-shift work and a strict 75-hour week in mechanized factories by around 1820 (Huberman 1995).