The recently-released Netflix mini-series, The English Game, is definitely binge-worthy. It comes to us from the creators of Downton Abbey, but is set several decades earlier – during Queen Victoria’s reign. Netflix describes it as: ‘The invention of football [soccer] and how it rose to become the world’s game by crossing class divides.’ Writer and producer Julian Fellowes captures the passion for football across the classes and sympathetically sheds light on the condition of so-called ‘fallen women’ (women who are sexually active outside of wedlock). But is The English Game accurate? Not entirely…
A RadioTimes article traces the liberties taken by the Netflix production in terms of the FA Cup final of 1882/1883 and the characters Arthur and Alma Kinnaird, Furgus Suter, and his love interest, Martha Almond (actors Edward Holcroft, Charlotte Hope, Kevin Guthrie and Niamh Walsh). Another review for RadioTimes summarizes the ‘broad strokes’ with which Fellowes is known to paint his class stories, whereby ‘with a few notable exceptions, the toffs are all heartless bounders with sinister moustaches […] while the working class that opposes them is chiefly made up of plucky, good-hearted, salt-of-the-earth types.’ I love the humane portrayal of the mill workers, their football club, and the female characters. However, Fellowes has done a disservice to the elite sportsmen – especially the one whom he most vilifies (Alfred Lyttelton, played by Henry Lloyd-Hughes) – as well as to the larger political landscape that was shaping and shaped by class identifications.
The years covered by the beginning of the series (1879–1880) were truly exciting from a political standpoint. From autumn 1879 to spring 1880, William Ewart Gladstone (a Liberal) achieved overwhelming popular support as he wrested control of the country from then-Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (Conservative and imperialist). As I was watching The English Game, I couldn’t help wanting to place what I was learning about northern footballers within my understanding of the period. When I saw that Episode 2 opens ‘Six months later’ at an exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery, I thought that I could date the first two episodes as occurring precisely during Gladstone’s campaign and landslide victory. My belief stemmed from identifying Edward Burne-Jones’s painting The Golden Stairs as the artwork displayed on the easel. (Fig. 1.) A private viewing of this picture occurred on 30 April 1880 at the Grosvenor, followed by the public showing beginning 4 May. [Endnote 1]
On the one hand, this scene reveals some of the exquisite attention to detail in The English Game. The writers accurately associate Laura (née Tennant) Lyttelton (actor Kate Phillips) with Burne-Jones’s rendition of The Golden Stairs. Laura was a social darling and one of Burne-Jones’s favorites; he not only depicts Laura as one of the ladies on the stairs, but positions her as the central figure. She’s in the middle, with her ear facing the viewer. (Fig. 2.) The screenshot above shows Alma Kinnaird and Laura Lyttelton walking toward Burne-Jones’s large canvas. I wonder if we can see the staging as mirroring Burne-Jones’s composition for a split second. Figure 1 shows Laura listening to Alma, but also presenting her ear to Netflix viewers – like Laura in the painting, who listens to her friends as well as inviting us to hear.
We also know that Alfred Lyttelton saw this painting, beginning at least on 29 April 1880 when he visited Burne-Jones’s studio with his cousin, Mary Gladstone, who is also pictured (Gladstone, 29 April 1880, Diary, BL Add MS 46259, f 61r). (Fig. 2.) Lyttelton’s unpublished diary confirms that he additionally attended the private opening the next day. We can therefore precisely date this scene – and the opening of Episode 2 – to Friday, 30 April 1880.
On the other hand, the scene’s dramatization of a real event exemplifies a sort of window dressing of historical details. The English Game masquerades as authentically Victorian, while in reality oversimplifying, rearranging, and reinventing the past. First, the series skews the history of sport. Knowing the date of the Grosvenor Gallery exhibition led me to count six months before the unveiling of The Golden Stairs. Given this reckoning, the FA Cup that features in Episode 1 would have occurred in late October or early November 1879. In fact, the FA Cup Final of 1879 took place on 29 March 1879, with Old Etonians besting Clapham Rovers from Darwen 1–0. (Fig. 3.) (http://www.fa-cupfinals.co.uk/1879.html). Lyttelton had previously played for the Old Etonians, but he was not part of this FA Cup.
Second, the Alfred Lyttelton that I know from period diaries, correspondence and photographs is a very different character from the Lyttelton portrayed in The English Game. Yes, Lyttelton did sport that mustache and he was a champion footballer (playing for Cambridge 1876–78, the Old Etonians in the 1876 FA Cup, and scoring the only goal for England in the 1877 international match against Scotland). He was an even more renowned cricketer (captaining Cambridge, undefeated 1876–79, and playing four Ashes tests against Australia in the 1880s) and the holder of the amateur championship in royal tennis for a whopping fourteen years (1882–96) (Matthew). (Figs. 4 and 8.) However, his personality was unlike Henry Lloyd-Hughes’s characterization, as can be glimpsed by comparing the directness of gaze in a photograph of the real Lyttelton with a screenshot of Lloyd-Hughes’s haughty visage from the opening of Episode 2. (Figs. 5 and 6.)
In autumn of 1879, Lyttelton made history not by playing football, but rather by accompanying his uncle, then ex-Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, on the famous Midlothian Campaign (the area in and around Edinburgh, Scotland). Working-class enthusiasm for Gladstone’s humanitarian message was so great that Mary Gladstone (also part of the entourage) commented in a letter to Lyttelton’s sister, Lavinia: the ‘surging crowds’ were unlike any that even Queen Victoria had seen (1 Dec 1879, Correspondence, BL Add MS 46236, f 49r). What The English Game made me reflect upon was whether Lyttelton was included on stage as more than Gladstone’s nephew; he was also a star athlete in his own right. This interpretation would support The English Game’s overall portrayal of the importance of sport to northern communities, but it also qualifies the film depiction of Lyttelton by suggesting that the latter was a popular hero who added to Gladstone’s overall humanist message.
Lyttelton not only supported Gladstone in 1879, but political Liberalism also impacted his own persona. Returning to London early, Lyttelton found himself a popular dinner guest as the beau monde sought news from him as a front-line source (Lyttelton, 25 Dec 1879, Letters, p 48). He was thus commonly identified by national newspapers, upper-class society, and his closest family with championing the worker.
We know that Lyttelton’s values remained constant for a lifetime. Mary Gladstone observed of ‘Alfred’s nature – He was extraordinarily the same character from babyhood to manhood’; his nature ‘only deepened[,] broadened, mellowed.’ (To Edith Lyttelton, 15 Sept 1913 and 4 Oct 1915). At university, as a member of the Cambridge Apostles like his father before him, Lyttelton honed a deep respect for the right to individual opinion. The series’ representation of his scorn for his friend Kinnaird’s opposing viewpoint is frankly ridiculous.
Moreover, Lyttelton did not despise impoverished people. By 1878, he counted John Ruskin as a friend, the Victorian sage who concerned himself with working men, including speaking directly to them in a series of letters called Fors Clavigera (1871–84). In later life, too, Lyttelton expressed his concern to improve living conditions for laborers, including providing ‘open spaces, recreation fields, public concert and reading rooms’ in town planning reform (Lyttelton, Preface, p xii). Both Alfred and Laura Lyttelton were ‘beloved […] glittering souls,’ Mary Gladstone eulogized; they deeply affected ‘the hearts + lives of so many people’ for the good (19–24 April 1886, Diary, BL Add MS 46262, f 18v).
If Alfred Lyttelton did not actually play the 1879 FA Cup against Darwen, if he was not a snobbish scoundrel, and if The English Game waters down Laura’s famously spicy personality, then why are the Lytteltons even included? I should say here that the Netflix series is off by half a decade in the portrayal of Alfred and Laura’s mutual relationship, for they did not begin to court, much less marry, until 1885. The writers even omit the one personal detail that would have fit the plot’s concern with the condition of women: Laura’s tragic death from childbirth in 1886.
Perhaps the production simply required an antagonist to Arthur Kinnaird and Lyttelton fit the bill as one of the greatest amateur athletes who was known in football for his individualist footwork and tackling (‘bunting’, or jerking his hips instead of lowering his shoulders, according to Edith Lyttelton [p 11]). Lyttelton may have additionally appealed given his role decades later with attempts by the Football Association to persuade County Associations to take responsibility for both amateur and professional clubs; the counties replied that they were only amateur organizations. In 1907, Lyttelton presided over a mass meeting that, attempting to find resolution, led to the establishment of the Amateur Football Association (Peek et. al., p 272).
A greater responsibility to the past might have resulted in a richer plot that explored the nuances of response by liberal-minded men to the rising ‘professional element’ in their athletic pastimes. (Fig. 7.) Not least, the series overlooks Lyttelton’s closeness to four-time Prime Minister Gladstone. For Lyttelton’s contemporaries, a story about Lyttelton that completely ignored his uncle would have amounted to a speaking silence – like the proverbial elephant in the room. Gladstone was such a celebrity that it was then common knowledge that the Gladstone and Lyttelton children grew up more like siblings than cousins. It was also generally accepted that Gladstone personified political Liberalism.
The importance for the story of ‘the world’s game’ rests in the definition of Liberalism in late Victorian Britain: a care for humanist values in a period of rapid industrialism and capitalism.
Significantly, the historical people represented by the film comprise several notable Liberal families. Alma Kinnaird’s father was Liberal MP for the Scottish constituency of Wigtownshire and Arthur Kinnaird, also the son of a Liberal MP, sat on the Liberal benches himself when he entered the House of Lords in 1887 (Fishwick). In 1880, Lyttelton was a card-carrying Liberal and the son of yet another Liberal MP, as was Laura Tennant, the daughter of the then-Liberal MP for Glasgow. [Endnote 2]
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, many politically Liberal members of the beau monde – men and women alike – were concerned to open access to education and to widen political representation. Ladies and gentlemen addressed women’s issues, child welfare, accessible medical care and veterans’ relief. This group believed in a relational sense of self that ran something like this: How could a privileged individual feel fulfilled while there was so much suffering in the nation? This stance led to legislative reform, private-sector aid, and volunteering in squalid metropolitan and provincial districts. By 1884, settlement houses were being established in London’s East End slums in an attempt to ameliorate the conditions of poverty. Lyttelton’s extended family were pioneers in these movements, as I discuss in my recent book.
Even Arthur Kinnaird’s philanthropic interests were much better in real life than in the televised representation. Rather than awakening in the 1880s to a sense of social responsibility because of football and his wife’s persuasion, Kinnaird followed in the footsteps of both of his philanthropic parents. In 1870 – almost a decade before The English Game commences – Kinnaird improved the lives of impoverished boys as a volunteer teacher in London’s ragged schools and co-founded Homes for Working Boys (Fishwick).
For me, here’s the final take away: I thoroughly enjoyed watching The English Game, but I also regularly administered a pinch of salt. Alfred Lyttelton was not really a scornful villain, Arthur Kinnaird was charitable well before the events of Episode 1, and there is a much larger political panorama that intersects the story of football. The series is a highly entertaining, well-acted, beautifully written and fictionalized version of historical people and sporting events. Now, when can we expect Season 2?
Endnotes
[1] It’s significant that Burne-Jones’s painting was unveiled just days into Gladstone’s new administration. See Weliver, ‘Liberal Dreaminess and The Golden Stairs of Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898)’, The British Art Journal 17.3 (Spring 2017): 55–63.
[2] In later life, Lyttelton would become a Liberal Unionist MP in 1894 and a Cabinet Member (Secretary of State for the Colonies under Balfour’s administration, 1903–05). His son, Oliver, first Viscount Chandos, joined Churchill’s war cabinet (Matthew). However, during Gladstone’s political career (including the period represented by The English Game), Lyttelton was a loyal Liberal.
Cite As
MLA FORMAT
Weliver, Phyllis. “The Facts behind The English Game: Alfred and Laura Lyttelton.” Gladstone's Daughter: Living Liberalism. April 16, 2020. Web log post. Date accessed (http://www.phyllisweliver.com/new-blog-1/2020/4/16/the-english-game-facts-lyttelton ).
APA FORMAT
Weliver, P. (2020, Apr 16). The Facts behind The English Game: Alfred and Laura Lyttelton. Web log post. Retrieved from http://www.phyllisweliver.com/new-blog-1/2020/4/16/the-english-game-facts-lyttelton
Works Cited
Creston, ‘Football’, The Fortnightly Review, vol. 61 (1 Jan 1894): 25–38.
‘The English Game Review: Netflix Tackles Football and Might have Scored a Winner’. RadioTimes. 19 March 2020. Accessed 3 April 2020. (https://www.radiotimes.com/news/on-demand/2020-03-19/english-game-review-netflix/).
‘The English Game True Story: How Accurate is Netflix’s Origins of Football Series?’ RadioTimes. 20 March 2020. Accessed 3 April 2020. (https://www.radiotimes.com/news/2020-03-20/english-game-true-story-netflix/).
Fishwick, Nicholas. ‘Kinnaird, Arthur Fitzgerald, eleventh Lord Kinnaird of Inchture and third Baron Kinnaird of Rossie (1847–1923), footballer and philanthropist’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 23 September 2004. Oxford University Press. Date of access 3 April 2020, https://www-oxforddnb-com.ezp.slu.edu/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-50297
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— to Edith Lyttelton. The Papers of Alfred Lyttelton and Dame Edith Lyttelton, and their son Oliver Lyttelton (1st Viscount Chandos), Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge. 15 Sept 1913, CHAN/I/5/6; 4 Oct 1915, CHAN/II/3/3, f 6.
Lyttelton, Alfred. Diary. 1880. The Papers of Alfred Lyttelton and Dame Edith Lyttelton, and their son Oliver Lyttelton (1st Viscount Chandos), Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge. CHAN II/3/7.
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Lyttelton, Edith. Alfred Lyttelton: An Account of his Life. London: Longmans, Green, 1917.
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Peek, Hedley, Henry Charles Howard Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire, and Frederick George Aflalo, eds. The Encyclopaedia of Sport and Games. Vol. II. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1911.
Weliver, Phyllis. ‘Liberal Dreaminess and The Golden Stairs of Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898)’. The British Art Journal 17.3 (Spring 2017): 55–63.
—. Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon: Music, Literature, Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.