British Bulldog is a tag-based playground and sporting game, commonly played in schoolyards and on athletic fields in the UK, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and related Commonwealth countries, as well as in the U.S. and Ireland. The object of the game is for one player to attempt to intercept other players who are obliged to run from one designated area to another. British Bulldog is characterised by its physicality (i.e. the captor inevitably has to use force to stop a player from crossing) and is often regarded as violent, leading it to be banned from many schools due to injuries to the participants.
The game is a descendant of traditional chasing games recorded from the 18th and 19th centuries, which partially evolved into collision-sport-related games during the early 20th century by the inclusion of lifting and drifting tackling techniques. In a sport's historical context, like its predecessors, British Bulldog has been used as a skill-and-drill device to reinforce and further develop locomotion skills fundamentally vital to American football, rugby, soccer, hockey and related team sports.
Name and regular use
While the game of British Bulldog is a conglomerate of different sources and pre-existing rules, the origin of the name is not entirely clear. In his book The Nation's Favourite, Guardian author Mathew Clayton (Free University of Glastonbury) clarified that, unlike other games, British Bulldog did not emerge until the 1930s. According to Cambridge District Scouts the game has been practiced under that name since then at several British Scout meetings.
Around that time, the game is mentioned in various newspapers, e. g. in February 1933 in The Kingston Whig-Standard, Ontario, Canada, and in April 1934 in the Londonderry Sentinel, Derry, Northern Ireland.
One of these early sources dates back to 1 March 1934. In an article from the Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail, it is described how Cub Scouts managed to lift a player off the ground as they shouted "British Bulldog!" In the Buckinghamshire Examiner from June 15, 1934, British Bulldog has been called "the most popular of all games" among the Scouts. Sources appear throughout England, always in connection with the Boy Scout movement, especially from the area of Great Yarmouth (Norfolk).
After spreading northward, British Bulldog has been recorded in Roxburghshire and Stirlingshire, Scotland, several years later. Falkirk Herald stated that the game "was successfully tried out in the dark" by the Scouts, which soon became a variation of the game ("British Bulldog in the dark").
In December 1942, Burnley Express in Lancashire reported a modified form of the game, incorporating rules of rugby football. More details appeared in 1949, when the rule of lifting a person was gradually displaced in favour of football tackling.
Although the game has already been known in the United States under different names, and possibly originated there from earlier decades, the name 'British Bulldog' was adopted by the Boy Scouts of America, likely during the turmoil of World War II. At the time, the national emblem of British Bulldog not only represented the economic and political strength of the British Empire but has also been applied to Winston Churchill, characterizing a person of sheer will and fortitude and a staunch antagonist against the Nazi regime.
Apart from that, extensive game descriptions in connection with the name 'British Bulldog' did not appear in scientific treatises and periodical literature until the 1940s (e.g. in January 1941 in a dissertation by athlete Winston Alexander McCatty in the Canadian journal The School, Secondary Edition, published by the Ontario College of Education, University of Toronto, and in June 1944 in Boys' Life magazine in an article by William "Bill" Hillcourt, Boy Scouts of America).
In the U.S., the game spread slowly. While Scout troops in Tulsa, Oklahoma or Bluffton, Ohio were still playing their own school ground game of 'Black Man', Boy Scouts in Paterson, New Jersey had been practicing British Bulldog since the second half of the 1940s. The Daily Republican newspaper (Monongahela, Pennsylvania), published on May 13, 1949, proclaims that "a new game entitled British Bulldog was introduced to the Scouts".