'The one great pastime of the people' : rugby, religion, and the making of working-class culture on the industrial frontier : Cape Breton & South Wales, 1850-1914

Abstract

The frontier in history has often been used to describe a geographic boundary or as a synonym for the Wild West. However, in those industrial regions of the Anglo-Celtic Atlantic World the frontier played a very different role. The coal mining regions of Cape Breton and South Wales exhibit remarkably similar development in the second half of the nineteenth century. Immigration, the centrality of religion, temperance, labour activism, and rugby football all play a fundamental role in the emergence of a distinct coalfield society. Mining transformed Cape Breton and South Wales and, during the reign of King Coal, the two peripheries occupied centre stage in an imperial economy. Britannia's Children, in far flung corners of the world, took with them memories of home and used those to begin again, to play once more the one great pastime of the people: survival.