Looking at action: a visual approach to nineteenth-century football history in the Netherlands

The Netherlands came late to 19th-century industrial revolution but when modernization occurred, it prompted an almost feverish cultural and social 'Anglomania'. Elite youngsters enthusiastically appropriated sports such as cricket and football, which were introduced and promoted by English native speaker teachers at boarding and private schools, and by anglophile teachers and pupils at municipal institutes of secundary education. As a contribution to the study of this process of 'sportfication', this article provides evidence of how at the Noorthey elite Protestant private school physical and mental training not only went hand in hand, but that social, educational and age differences and boundaries between pupils and teachers fell away. By utilizing action photo's and visual archive sources this paper demonstrates that, in addition to research based on texts and numbers, images can be a highly valuable source in sport history research, utterly worthy of critical commentary and independent interpretation.