Abstract
Athleticism, masculinity, and sports are intimately connected in most boys’ schools. Colonial versions of the famous British public school sprang up over the nineteenth century in an overwhelmingly Protestant, Anglo-Saxon Ontario. Foremost among them were what came to be known as the “Little Big Four” group of schools, Upper Canada College (Toronto, 1829), Trinity College School (Weston, 1865), Bishop Ridley College (St. Catharines, 1889), and St. Andrew’s College (Chestnut Park, Toronto, 1899). Training boys on the sports fields in Ontario’s elite boys’ schools provides an intriguing case study of athleticism, muscular Christianity, and class formation. While critically re-examining previous assumptions, this paper demonstrates that, from 1829 until 1930, the Ontario schools were active agents of “manly” character development. The Canadian “blue-bloods” were a colonial breed apart—exhibiting a strange skepticism about school traditions and practices that were “too British,” favoring Canadian rugby football and American baseball over cricket, and fond of satirizing “Rhubarb Kippering” in popular playground rhymes. This small circle of schools even appropriated the moniker “Little Big Four,” a junior version of the “Big Four,” the original name of the Eastern Conference of the Canadian Football League.
