Polo, as you may have heard, is something of an upper-class pursuit. A sport that requires multiple horses for each player over the course of a single match isn’t something that little kids can pick up on the street. It’s not an accident that Ralph Lauren’s aspirational clothing brand co-opts the image of a polo player and magnifies it beyond of all semblance of proportion.
It’s polo’s association with the wealthy and the famous that led to one of the more engaging exchanges of letters that I’ve come across in the archives. Prince Philip, the Queen’s husband, is something of a polo fanatic. Well, I have a feeling he doesn’t play much these days, seeing as he’s now almost 90 years old. But in his youth, it seems as if there was no better way to spend a Sunday than playing polo.
Therein lies the problem (and how His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh is likely to end up in a PhD dissertation on postwar Christianity). Back in the 1950s, sabbatarian groups like the Lord’s Day Observance Society didn’t take kindly to anyone playing sports on Sundays. The Lord’s Day was for churchgoing (twice, if possible), prayer, and quiet time spent with the family. In the eyes of the LDOS, virtually everything else was a sin against God and destined to bring about national ruin (seriously – here’s what they said about a 1966 bill that would have allowed theatres to open on Sundays: “the Bill […], if passed, […] will result in a further departure of our Nation from Almighty God, His Word and Commandments, with both ill effects upon the spiritual and moral life of the nation and the certain removal of the Divine Blessing from us as a people.”
So you can imagine why the Lord’s Day Observance Society wasn’t too happy about Prince Philip playing polo on Sundays, especially with hundreds of paying spectators there to watch him (and the other seven players). For a period in the mid-1950s, the LDOS was writing to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, every year, pressing for Fisher to do something about 1) Philip’s Sunday polo playing and 2) the Queen’s presence at said polo matches. Reading this correspondence, it’s pretty clear that Fisher wanted nothing to do with this dispute. He didn’t have much sympathy for what he saw as sabbatarian fanaticism, and he definitely didn’t want to piss off Prince Philip or the Queen. But in 1955, prompted by the Free Church of Scotland going public with its criticism of Philip’s Sunday polo-playing, Fisher delicately raised the issue with Philip. While being careful to avoid personal criticism of Philip’s Sunday activities, Fisher warned that Sunday polo by a member of the Royal Family might provide ammunition for “all who are now constantly seeking to invade the domesticity of Sunday rest and recreations, and who when the time comes will press very hard for legislation to remove all restrictions upon the full secularisation and commercialisation of Sunday”.
Philip’s response to Fisher, unfailingly polite, began by agreeing with Fisher on the sanctity of Sunday, the importance of churchgoing, and the undesirability of any paid labor being done on the Sabbath. This included professional sports on Sundays: “I would resist at all costs any suggestion of professional Sunday football. I would go further. I would ask all organisers of charity cricket or football matches on Sunday not to ask any professional to play in them.” He went on to suggest that any recreation that involved “killing” (hunting, fishing, and the like) should be avoided on Sundays.
And yet, in spite of this apparent sympathy for a certain degree of sabbatarian rigor, Philip wasn’t at all ready to give up his Sunday polo. As an amateur sportsman, his participation in Sunday polo would not violate his stricture against payment for activities performed on Sundays. Nor was it his fault that spectators were interested in watching the game and willing to pay to do so. “As far as I am concerned I would not mind playing behind a screen without anyone looking on but unfortunately the club which organises the game cannot afford to do this. It encourages people to pay to come and watch in order to reduce to some extent the expense of the game.”
These “expense of the game,” it seems, was in large part paying the wages of the grooms, timekeepers, and bus-drivers that made the game possible and easier for spectators to watch. Philip deemed these “paid services” “unfortunate,” but ultimately worth the while, since he needed physical activity on Sundays to “relax and refresh” himself from the hard mental work of the rest of the week. “It so happens that I like playing polo.”
So there you have it. Wage-earning on Sundays? Bad. Unless, of course, it enables someone else to relax, enjoy themselves, and re-charge the batteries for the next week, especially when that someone is married to the Queen.
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