“Leather” and the Fighting Spirit: Sport in the British Army in World War I
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".