“Leather” and the Fighting Spirit: Sport in the British Army in World War I
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1931 General Harington declared that it was “leather” — in the shape of footballs and boxing gloves — that had won the Great War for Britain. During the First World War, sport — previously popular but unofficial in the British armed services — became formally integrated into the military system, both as “recreational training” and as an officially sanctioned form of leisure for other ranks. This article traces the process by which sport in the British Army was transformed from a mainly spontaneous and improvised pastime into a compulsory activity. It discusses the relationship between sport and war in the public school ideology of “athleticism”; examines the ways in which sport was seen to have military utility in raising morale, esprit de corps, and the “fighting spirit”; and demonstrates how the amateur model of sport came to be imposed on all British service sports as a result of the war. The article concludes that sport in World War I had real benefits both to individual soldiers and to the army as a whole.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it