Manuscripts and archives at the Library have traditionally been associated with scholarly, academic subject areas – literature in particular, also religion, music, and more recently, politics. Times, however, have changed. The Library must now collect and interpret sources reflecting all aspects of Welsh life, both traditional as well as new areas of study, and there can be few more popular areas of interest at present than the study of sport, whether it be the history of sport, the sociology of sport, sport science and so on.
At present, the Library has only three ‘sporting archives’ as such: records of the Football Association of Wales, records of the South Wales and Monmouthshire Football Association, and the scrapbooks of the Pontypridd born boxer Frederick Hall Thomas, popularly known as Freddie Welsh.
However, fleeting, sketchy glimpses of sporting activity throughout Wales spanning many centuries can be found in early printed works, manuscripts, estate and family archives, as well as photographs and drawings held by the Library. For example, details of punishments handed down to Sunday sportsmen can be found among the records of Church and manorial courts; records of the Court of Great Sessions also refer to sports related transgressions, including details of a riotous assembly in the town of Pembroke in 1789 where a number of people gathered in the streets to play ‘football’, and a ‘pitched battle’ in the parish of Llanbadarn Fynydd in 1830 between two men who fought eighty-five rounds for two hours (both men, one of whom subsequently died from his injuries, were, according to a witness, ‘in attitudes for fighting and striking each other’); parish vestry books contain references to payments made to glaziers to put in new windows in churches as a result of damage caused by ball games such as football, tennis and fives; and other references in estate collections vary from the brutal ‘sport’ of cock-fighting to the genteel sport of bowls.