Sport in History

8 Months on from the book, A Most Unsuitable Game: Celebrating Scottish Women’s Football Fifty Years After the Ban was completed and released, the Sports and Leisure History Seminar series is pleased to announce an event to celebrate the book and discuss it with its three main authors and editors, Professor Fiona Skillen, Dr Karen Fraser and Julie McNeill.
In this seminar, the editors, in a panel chaired by academic and journalist Dr Raf Nicholson, reflect on the compilation of the book and the continued lack of general knowledge about the women’s game in Scotland. It will also reflect on what we have learned in the process of collating and editing the book, working with authors of different genres and experience, and promoting it to both the football and wider communities.
This will not be centred on promoting the book but is rather to illustrate lessons that we learned to be shared with those who may wish to undertake a similar venture.
The panel does not intend to use formal PowerPoint led presentations but would propose a more informal talk given by the three of us using a panel discussion format.
We would also welcome questions from the audience, either at the time of the panel or in advance, if the panel slot on the programme allowed for this.

Biographies:
Professor Fiona Skillen is a professor in History at Glasgow Caledonian University. Her research focuses on women’s sport during the late 19th and 20th centuries where she has published extensively in this subject area. Professor Skillen has also completed a FIFA-sponsored project on the history of women’s football in Scotland, 1850-1939.

Dr Karen Fraser is an independent researcher associated with the University of Stirling. Her PhD research focused on the history of Women’s Football in Scotland from 1960 to 2021. While she has worked on different aspects of the history of Scottish Football, her focus remains seeking to uncover the untold history of women’s football in Scotland.

Julie McNeil is the poet-in-residence for St Mirren FC charitable Foundation and the Makar of the Hampden Collection. She is also the co-author of the award-winning Mission Dyslexia series for Neurodivergent Children.
Thia podcast is a British Society of Sports History (BSSH) production from the UK's leading society for the history of sport.. You can find the podcast on all social media & major podcast platforms here.

Likewise, Click through to the BSSH website for further information on our events and to find out how to join the British Society of Sport History: https://www.sportinhistory.org/
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In the earliest depictions of the schoolgirl in British girls’ fiction, she is far from the hockey stick wielding tomboys recognisable in the stories of Angela Brazil and Elinor Brent-Dyer, instead restricted to crocodile walks and movement-limiting dress codes. Over the first decades of the twentieth-century, popular depictions of the schoolgirl radically changed her into a games fanatic, distinct from both her Victorian literary ancestors and the real modern schoolgirl she ostensibly represented.

The advent of the sporting schoolgirl in girls’ media offered revised codes of what was considered acceptable behaviour for girls, re-envisioning Victorian femininity to incorporate a patriotic, masculinised vision of modern girlhood which presented sport as a gateway to the previously inaccessible heroism and honour available to boys. Through sport, the increasingly stigmatised stereotypes of ill-health and melodrama attached to Victorian womanhood were rejected in favour of an emotionally restrained and physically active masculine girlhood. This seminar looks to a range of early twentieth-century authors such as Brazil and Dorothea Moore to investigate how representations of sport offered a tool by which femininity was redefined for a new century of athletic women and girls.

Atlanta Tsiaoukkas is a PhD student at the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at the University of Cambridge. Her research explores Victorian and Edwardian girls’ school fiction, and she is widely interested in the development of girls’ cultural identities and their popular representation in British and Irish media.
Thia podcast is a British Society of Sports History (BSSH) production from the UK's leading society for the history of sport.. You can find the podcast on all social media & major podcast platforms here.

Likewise, Click through to the BSSH website for further information on our events and to find out how to join the British Society of Sport History: https://www.sportinhistory.org/
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you were watching or were at the England Vs Wales football match last month, you may have seen a cap ceremony that saw Frank Soo, the first Asian player ever to play for the national team (albeit in semi-official matches only) and the only man of East Asian descent to date, receive a posthumous cap for his nine appearances for the England team during World War 2. But who was Frank Soo? And much like his contemporary pioneer Jack Leslie, why was he forgotten by football for many years?

We're honoured to be joined on the podcast by Alan Lau, co-founder and chairman of the Frank Soo foundation, who has spent 8 years tirelessly trying to promote the legacy of Frank Soo as well as be a champion of community football, but primarily the Chinese and East Asian Community, both in the UK and overseas.

Alan's championing has been recognised in football, when Alan won the Watford FC Community Sports & Education Trust Equality Champion award in 2023. But Alan is an inclusivity champion in the wider world of football, holding roles as an FA EDI Community of Practice Ambassador, as well as serving as chair of the Hertfordshire FA's IAG (Inclusion Advisory Group) & the FA County IAG Chair's steering group. He additionally serves on the national council of the Football Supporters Association.

But Alan is here today to talk about the work he's done with the Frank Soo foundation and educate us a bit about Frank Soo and the importance of Asian inclusivity into football.
Thia podcast is a British Society of Sports History (BSSH) production from the UK's leading society for the history of sport.. You can find the podcast on all social media & major podcast platforms here.

Likewise, Click through to the BSSH website for further information on our events and to find out how to join the British Society of Sport History: https://www.sportinhistory.org/
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Join Max Portman as he speaks to a true legend of academic sports history in Professor Tony Collins, Emeritus Professor of History at De Montfort University and a Fellow of the Institute of Sports Humanities at Loughborough University. The two are discussing Tony's new book Roy Francis: Rugby’s Forgotten Black Leader, published by Bloomsbury Sport in June 2025.

Tony's book covers the life of Roy from his humble beginnings in Brynmawr in the Welsh valleys where the circumstances surrounding his birth were contentious, through his journey to the North of England, where he made his name, first as a player in the 1930s and 1940s, before a managerial career that carried through until the 1970s. Across the interview, Max and Tony discuss Roy's father Lionel, an interesting character in his own right, Roy's wartime service, which involved a brief sojourn into rugby union, and how Roy broke down not just racial barriers in the pre-windrush era, but also revolutionised rugby league into the modern age as the first black manager in rugby league history.

If you love Rugby League, sports or are interested in hearing a new chapter of Black British history, then this is the perfect epsiode for you!!

For more information about the podcast, please visit: https://www.sportinhistory.org/ or https://shows.acast.com/sport-in-history-podcast
Thia podcast is a British Society of Sports History (BSSH) production from the UK's leading society for the history of sport.. You can find the podcast on all social media & major podcast platforms here.

Likewise, Click through to the BSSH website for further information on our events and to find out how to join the British Society of Sport History: https://www.sportinhistory.org/
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So many of the world’s sports have their origins in Britain. Why is this? How did sports innovate and evolve in step with social upheaval, and political and cultural change? Why did British forms of play become so influential around the world?

Richard Holt explores all these questions and more in a new edition of Sport and the British: A Modern History. For over thirty years Sport and the British has been the standard work on the history of sport in Britain, and the new edition provides a complete rewrite of the original text, incorporating the most up-to-date research.

The original text, published in 1989, has been described as the "Bible of British sports history". In this new edition, Professor Holt provides a complete rewrite of the original text, incorporating the most up-to-date research in the field and we were lucky to have such an esteemed panel in Raf Nicholson, Rob Colls, Dil Porter and Tony Collins join Richard Holt in discussing the book at length at the Institute of Historical Research in London in what was a record crowd of 70+ for the Sport and Leisure History Seminar series and chaired by BSSH Vice-chair Amanda Callan-Spenn.
Thia podcast is a British Society of Sports History (BSSH) production from the UK's leading society for the history of sport.. You can find the podcast on all social media & major podcast platforms here.

Likewise, Click through to the BSSH website for further information on our events and to find out how to join the British Society of Sport History: https://www.sportinhistory.org/
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.