Adrian Smith The City of Coventry; A Twentieth Century Icon (2006)

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.For example, What would have happened to English rugby after1895 if all clubs had accepted broken-time payments ? is anabsurd speculation as the affluent southern clubs were clearly notgoing to compromise on their amateur status.10 On the other hand,the future of rugby league outside the north is worth consideringbecause between 1909 and 1913 there was a very real possibility thatthe Northern Union would become a permanent fixture in Midlandsworking-class life.This then is where imagination is tempered byharsh reality the historian goes back to the point immediately priorto what actually took place, and works through credible alternativescenarios.In a succession of intellectual assaults upon historicaldeterminism Isaiah Berlin posed as an ur-counterfactualist,emphasising plausibility as the sine qua non of any debatesurrounding contingency and probability.11 Ferguson draws onBerlin to support the argument that to ensure credibility, thecounterfactualist reduces contingency from diverse (infinite?)alternative versions of the past to a much smaller number of plausibleoutcomes, each of which assuming that there is more than one isrooted firmly in historical probability.12 The problem with this ofcourse is that men and women are not rational beings, and thereforetheir behaviour is rarely if ever determined by pure reason assuming that a rational course of action is obvious anyway.13Of course one of the key problems with counterfactual history isthe absence of necessary knowledge, or to use Ferguson s hijackedphrase, facts which concededly never exist.To counter thisobjection he insists that, We should consider as plausible orprobable only those alternatives which we can show on the basis ofcontemporary evidence that contemporaries actually considered[author s emphasis]. The argument is that people in the past wereinvariably faced with a variety of different futures unlike us, theyhad no idea what would in fact happen and the onus is on historiansto attach significance to all the outcomes thought about.Not to do134 THE CITY OF COVENTRYso is to fail to recapture the past as it really was ; assuming ofcourse that such a remarkable historicist achievement is sustainablein the first place.14 Thus, we need to get a clear idea in our mindswhat did not take place, but which to those present at the time couldso easily have come about.15 Seemingly this can only be done whenthere is sufficient documentary evidence to illustrate how and whycontemporaries considered hypothetical scenarios, in other words,that which did not actually come about.Notwithstanding an obviouspostmodernist challenge, Ferguson s counterfactual paradigmprompts a number of questions.Firstly, how much documentationconstitutes a bare minimum of acceptability, and secondly, whatabout all the primary evidence that hasn t survived? Also, is therenot a very real danger of the historian placing too much importanceupon those artefacts that have survived, and imposing a pattern ofcausation upon what is actually a random selection of survivingevidence?Nevertheless, Ferguson s insistence that counterfactual historystarts from the premise of only considering the alternatives that wereseen at the time as realistic is a seductive defence of virtualhistory.Richard Evans argues that working from a particularblueprint at a particular point in time confines the method to a verynarrow range of history - primarily political, diplomatic, and military at the expense of social and cultural.While retaining a healthyscepticism about methodology, should we accept Evans claim thatthe current fascination of so many (mainly male) political andmilitary historians with counterfactual history reflects itsinappropriateness to the study of essentially impersonal cognateareas within the discipline?16 Can not, to revisit Trevor-Roper, thehistory of sport be not merely what happened & [and] whathappened in the context of what might have happened ?17 Arguablythe focus should be upon sport per se, and not the actual competition.Ferguson s insistence insist that the variables must be minimised inthe interest of plausibility might suggest sporting events are ideal forpositing credible alternative outcomes ( Well Trevor, with suchevenly matched sides the result could have gone either way& ); or itmight equally signal their total unsuitability ( Well Trevor, anythingcould have happened this afternoon& ).It s clear that the student ofhistory needs to be especially wary when investigation of pureSPORT, COUNTER-FACTUAL HISTORY, AND THE TWIN CODES 135competition prompts almost unavoidably - speculation on whatmight have been.The Northern Union in the Midlands before the First WorldWar18In the Edwardian period the Northern Union made a concerted effortto establish a firm foothold in Leicestershire and Warwickshire, notleast because both counties boasted expanding manufacturing centressurrounded by smaller industrial communities, invariably miningvillages, in which families worked hard and played hard.Grassrootsrugby thrived, and the two senior clubs were already establishing areputation for cutting across class barriers in the interest ofmaintaining regional and even national success.19 Thus bothLeicester and Coventry paid generous expenses, and turned a blindeye to players who shared the same approach to the game as was bynow the norm up north.The Northern Union maintained informalcontacts with both players and officials and monitored growingtension between the two senior clubs and the RFU.In 1908 the RFUcharged Leicester with veiled professionalism , but found the clubnot guilty [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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