About Baily's Magazine of Sports and Pastimes

Baily's Magazine of Sports and Pastimes

Baily's Magazine of Sports and Pastimes was a British monthly sporting magazine published in London from March 1860 to June 1926. For its first three decades it carried the fuller title Baily's Monthly Magazine of Sports and Pastimes, and Racing Register; from 1889 it was known by the shorter title under which it is generally catalogued today. Across 796 issues and some 125 bound volumes, it recorded British sporting life — above all horse racing and other equine pursuits, hunting, cricket and a widening circle of country and club sports — in reports, biographies and portraits.

Few Victorian periodicals document a single world so completely for so long. Auctioneers and bibliographers describe complete sets as rarely found, and value the magazine both as a contemporary record of each season's sport and for its detailed biographies and fine portraits of the famous sportsmen of the era. A modern index and bibliography, compiled by Chris Harte and published in 2017, lists the contents of every issue from the first in 1860 to the last in 1926.

Origins at Cornhill in 1860

The magazine was first published in 1860 by A. H. Baily and Company of Cornhill, London. Cornhill, in the City of London, placed the magazine at the commercial heart of the capital, close to the clubs, auction rooms and business houses through which the racing and sporting world organised itself. Surviving early volumes, issued by Baily Brothers, were bound in green cloth with gilt vignettes of racing, fox-hunting and cricket on covers and spines — the binding itself advertising the magazine's three emblematic sports.

The timing was apt. Organised sport was expanding rapidly in mid-Victorian Britain, and its participants and followers wanted regular, authoritative coverage that went beyond newspaper results. A monthly could offer what a daily or weekly could not easily sustain: considered biographies, retrospective articles, fiction and verse on sporting themes, and steel-engraved portraits worth keeping in bound volumes.

The Racing Register and the Sporting Diary

The original title's reference to a racing register signals the magazine's first priority. Racing was the best-organised, best-financed and most widely followed sport of the period, and Baily's served its followers with reports, recollections and debate. Each monthly number was anchored in the calendar: surviving issues open with a sporting diary for the month, listing the occurrences of the sporting season day by day, before turning to the month's principal articles.

That structure — diary first, then biography, reports and miscellaneous matter, with a closing survey of news — gave the magazine a reliable rhythm its readers could navigate for 66 years. The July 1876 number, for example, moved from its diary to a biography of Alexander Baltazzi, articles on the park and on hunting country, a North versus South cricket match at Lord's, pieces on the distemper of dogs and on quail shooting near the Pyramids, and a substantial cricket section, before the regular closing feature.

Our Van and the Regular Departments

One department recurs across the decades: Our Van, the magazine's survey of sporting news and gossip with which issues characteristically closed. In the March 1874 number, Our Van follows reports on coursing and the Waterloo Cup; in other numbers it comments on the Derby, on Tattersall's and on the politics of the turf. Such a column gave continuity of voice to a magazine otherwise written by many hands, and it allowed Baily's to range across meetings, matches and controversies too miscellaneous for a full article.

Around the regular departments sat a miscellany typical of the Victorian sporting monthly: hunting reports from named packs and countries, such as a March 1874 account of the Hambledon Hunt under the heading Country Quarters; reminiscences by veteran contributors; fiction in serial chapters; and practical pieces on horses, dogs and guns. The magazine was, in effect, a monthly club room in print for readers who hunted, raced, shot and watched cricket.

Portraits and Biographies

The feature that most distinguishes surviving sets of Baily's is its portraits. Issues were embellished with engraved portraits, each accompanying a biography of a leading sportsman. Lists of plates printed in the volumes read as a roll of Victorian sporting society: peers, masters of hounds, owners, jockeys and cricketers, each given a frontispiece or plate and a biographical article within.

The practice continued to the end of the magazine's life and adapted to new sporting heroes. A later volume presented the Yorkshire cricketer George Hirst as its frontispiece portrait, with an article celebrating him as among the greatest all-round cricketers in England, tracing his career from village cricket at Kirkheaton, where he was born in 1871, through Huddersfield to his first appearance at Lord's for Yorkshire in 1892. The formula was unchanged from the 1860s — portrait plus career biography — but the subject was a professional cricketer of a new sporting age.

Cricket in Baily's

Although racing and hunting dominated, cricket held a permanent place. Christie's description of an early run notes cricket reports in each volume, with the game commemorated in the gilt vignettes on the bindings. Match reports, analyses of Oxford versus Cambridge and of great matches at Lord's, and profiles of leading players appeared alongside the racing matter, reflecting a readership whose sporting year moved naturally from the hunting season and the spring race meetings to the summer cricket season.

Later descriptions of the magazine's contents broaden the picture further: commentary on cricket and cricketers sits beside material on jockeys and racing, footballers, rowing and yachting, angling, actors and the theatre, and printings of poetry and literature. Baily's was never a single-sport paper. It followed its readers across the whole landscape of organised leisure as that landscape expanded between 1860 and the First World War.

Change of Publisher and the Shortened Title

In 1889 the magazine was taken over by Vinton and Company, and from that year it appeared under the shortened title Baily's Magazine of Sports and Pastimes. Some booksellers' and cataloguing accounts date the Vinton takeover to 1900, but the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, the standard reference cited for the magazine's history, gives 1889 for both the takeover and the title change, with Vinton continuing the magazine to its end.

The change of imprint did not break continuity. The monthly sequence, the portrait-and-biography formula, the sporting diary and the closing survey all persisted. Sets bound to match across the whole run — 125 volumes in one notable Christie's set, bound in half calf with hunting trophy tools on the spines — show how subscribers and libraries treated the Baily and Vinton years as a single, unbroken publication.

The Final Decades and Closure in 1926

Baily's continued through the Edwardian period and the First World War into the 1920s, long outliving most Victorian monthlies. It ceased publication in 1926, ending with issue number 796 in June of that year. A run of 796 monthly issues over 66 years places it among the longest-lived British sporting periodicals of its kind.

Its longevity is part of its historical value. Because it began before the codification of many modern sports and ended in the professionalised sporting world of the 1920s, its pages capture the transformation of British sport: the growth of organised cricket and football, the professionalisation of players such as Hirst, and the persistence, alongside those changes, of the older hunting and racing culture with which it had begun.

Bibliography, Sets and Legacy

The magazine's modern bibliography is unusually thorough. Chris Harte's Baily's Magazine of Sports and Pastimes: An Index and Bibliography, published by Sports History Publishing in 2017 in a limited edition, runs to around 380 to 390 pages and compiles a complete list of contents for each of the 796 issues, with a detailed introduction. That a single magazine should sustain such a work testifies to its continuing use by sporting historians and collectors.

Complete and long runs regularly appear in auction and antiquarian catalogues, described as valuable both as a contemporary record of the season's sport of all kinds and for the biographies and portraits of famous sportsmen. Individual volumes are held widely through the Internet Archive and other digital collections, where the diary, plates lists and contents pages of numbers such as those for March 1874 and July 1876 can still be read in full. Baily's endures, accordingly, not as a curiosity but as one of the principal printed records of Victorian and Edwardian sporting life.