‘Flannelled Fools are Strutting About Tennis Courts’: Lawn Tennis in Britain During the Great War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the connections between (lawn) tennis in Britain and the Great War (1914–1918). While previous historical research has suggested a four-year hiatus, in fact the sport continued to be played during the war, recreationally and among servicemen/women and more elite players in exhibition matches. Anecdotes about the cessation of tournaments and restricted play were interspersed with debates about the appropriateness of continuing play recreationally, as the ‘gentleman in tennis flannels’ became a symbol of public censure. Alongside enlistment, tennis players responded to the call byoffering their club facilities to the war effort, digging up courts to plant vegetables, hosting charity matches, and providing entertainment for convalescent soldiers. This analysis highlights the significance of tennis as a vehicle to promote a kind of British identity, as responses to the war as seen through tennis reflected broader sporting ideals, privileging amateurism, fair play and the ‘stuff upper lip’.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".