History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Tag Archives | football

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The end of shipbuilding on the Thames

By on October 12, 2023 in Research in Focus

One of our MA Naval History students, Paul O’Donnell, has recently had a blog published by the Churchill College Cambridge, whose archive he used for his dissertation research.  His research there, using the papers of first Lord of the Admiralty Reginald McKenna, sheds new light on Arnold Hills, the eccentric chairman of Thames Iron Works, who were the last shipbuilders working on the Thames.  It was ironical that this firm, one of the few firms capable of building Dreadnoughts, should have closed down in 1912, at the heart of the Dreadnought arms race.  But as Paul explains, the company had an afterlife, as its works football team evolved into West […]

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Urban football as a nineteenth-century blood sport

By on May 21, 2021 in Learning in Focus

Second-year UoP student Mandy Wrenn discusses a 1846 engraving showing a large group of men playing football in the centre of the town of Kingston in Surrey, and the contemporary concerns over the control of urban spaces and popular leisure activities it reflects. This piece was originally written for the Fear and Fun module, taught by Dr Rob James and Dr Karl Bell. The primary source is set in 1846, at a time of continued transition in Victorian Britain from the past to modernity. The depiction of the game, with a large crowd of men playing a game of football in the centre of a town, will have been received […]

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“There comes a time when you’ve just gotta’ be a man”: An analysis of shifting on-screen representations of British masculinity in the post-Thatcher period

By on July 10, 2018 in Research in Focus

“Sam’s dissertation was an outstandingly researched piece of work. It synthesised contextual and historiographical issues regarding masculinity and film in the post-Thatcher era in a conceptually interesting way, and made great use of visual sources as a cultural lens from which to understand anxieties surrounding changing concepts of masculinity in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Sam demonstrated an excellent understanding of film culture, not just in the period studied, but across the twentieth century, and the way in which he revealed how certain masculine filmic archetypes were shaped and modified in response to the shifting contemporary climate was nothing less than compelling.” – Dr Rob James, Sam’s dissertation supervisor. […]

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