The best bar none in his 19th Century day: Jacques-Edmond Barre
This is the third of four papers on the peculiar origins and development of tennis.
In the second of the papers: Horrible Histories…
…I explored the phenomena of wagering and handicapping, which date back at least as far as the late medieval period for tennis.
The evidence suggests that handicapping (or “odds”, as handicapping was more commonly called in olden times) served a twin purpose:
- simplifying the wagers – i.e. evening up the contest, such that the choice of winner at the start of the match should be perceived as an even bet;
- facilitating good sport – the honour and joy of doing battle in a close competitive contest.
Traditional tennis offers a large array of mechanisms for handicapping, not just point adjustments, which were well documented by the early 19th century and which I shall examine shortly.
But by the mid to late 18th century, there had emerged a third purpose or style of handicapping which I’d like to explore briefly; a form of handicapping linked with showmanship demonstrated by tennis professionals.
Reproduced Courtesy of (and linked to) The British Museum Print Collection On-Line
In The Annals of Tennis (p43 et. seq, linked here), Julian Marshall describes the extraordinary antics of Monsieur Masson. Here is a taster:
Against the best of the amateurs [Masson] also played matches of the most difficult combinations. One of these was, that he should deliver the service seated in a barrel, in which he remained after serving, and from which he leapt continually in order to return each stroke of the amateur.
On the hazard-side, again, he awaited the service seated by the grille in his barrel, which he had to leave precipitately to play his first stroke, and in which he was compelled by the terms of the match to take refuge, before the amateur returned the ball again.
What a shame there were no CCTV cameras on court in those days to provide us with images of those feats. My good lady, Janie, simply doesn’t believe this story in the absence of visual evidence. Perhaps we could persuade one of the modern tennis professionals to deploy this handicapping method and provide us with some video of such play. I gladly volunteer my own services as the hapless opponent.
There’s not much else to find about Monsieur Masson and his antics, other than a few additional notes in the Marshall Annals on Pages 43 & 44, including the fact that Masson (unusually for the time) wore spectacles, that he developed a frowned-upon, sort-of scoop shot to return balls dropping nearly perpendicularly from the penthouse and that his offspring showed disappointingly little talent at the game.
Tennis was enjoying somewhat of a heyday in 18th century France until the revolution came along. A famous moment in the revolution, Le Serment du Jeu de Paume (or “The Tennis Court Oath”) is depicted in the 1791 Jacques-Louis David painting shown below.
But the tradition of tennis professional high jinks lived on into the 19th century. Jacques-Edmond Barre (depicted as the headline picture above), although he was from a modest professional tennis family, became such a great player that, in 1828, age 26, Barre was appointed “poumier du roi” by (post-restoration) King Charles X of France.
Julian Marshall sets out a famous example of Barre’s handicapping on P45 of The Annals Of Tennis:
On the same occasion [the day he enthralled and was appointed by the King] he had played a game with the Comte de Reignac, an officer in the Lancers of the Guard, in which he gave the latter “all the walls” — the longest possible odds of that kind, — and had won the match with ease.
At its conclusion, de Reignac sa id, “If you will give me my revenge in a few months, I will beat you, for by that time I shall have improved.”
To this Barre replied, “Comte, I will return next May, and I will give you the same odds again; and I undertake to walk on foot from Paris to Fontainebleau before the match.”
This was a bold wager; and he who made it must have not only had great strength, but also great confidence in his strength.
On the 5th of the following May, Barre started from Paris at daybreak, and at three o’clock in the afternoon, somewhat tired with his walk, he arrived at the place of rendezvous, having accomplished the distance, nearly forty-three miles, in ten hours.
After an hour’s repose he entered the Court, and played the match, which he won, apparently, with as much facility as on the previous occasion.
I’m sure the Comte de Reignac will have been a well-humoured fellow who took his humiliating return-match thrashing with good grace.
Both of the above examples are (extreme) examples of a genre known as cramped-odds, i.e. constraints on the mode of play, rather than points-based odds.
Before exploring the cramped-odds phenomenon in all its varied glory, perhaps best to set out the points-based odds.
What Is The Point Of Playing Tennis For Odds?
The earliest English work I can find that sets out tennis odds in detail is the 1822 book: A Treatise on Tennis By a Member of the Tennis Club, now attributed to Robert Lukin. (see Appendix pp 94-100). Images of a couple of pages follow but the links will show you the whole book.
In short, the basic currency unit of points handicap was the bisque. Little used today, it is a bit like a joker in a card game, in that a bisque enables the holder of the bisque to claim a stroke (point) at any time. Bisques date back at least to the 16th century, where we can find reference to them in French texts.
A great deal of strategy and tactics narrative in 19th century books on tennis revolve around when to take one’s bisques. They sound like great fun and must add some piquancy or frisson, especially if the match is being wagered upon or part of a tournament.
Bisques are rarely seen in any form of tennis in modern times, but I believe their use has survived in croquet, a game which adopted the bisque in earnest, certainly in its formal 19th century manifestation, if not earlier.
Odds of “half-fifteen” means that the receiver starts 15-0 up at the start of every other game, but never the first game of a set.
Odds of “fifteen” means that the receiver of those odds starts 15-0 up at the start of each game.
Odds of “half thirty” meant that the receiver would start 15-0 up on the first game of the set, then alternate between 30-0 up and 15-0 up at the start of each game. Note the past tense “meant” there – we now use “owe” odds as well as “receive” odds – I’ll explain the origins and development of those in part four – such that “half thirty” would not be used unmitigated in the modern game.
Back in the 19th century, odds were sometimes enhanced or mitigated by bisques. Thus, a player who was a bit too good to receive fifteen, but not quite good enough to receive only half-fifteen, might be presented with odds “receive fifteen but give a bisque”. Or a player who wasn’t quite good enough to receive just fifteen but was too good for odds of half-thirty might “receive fifteen and a bisque”.
There’s even a concept of a half or demi-bisque. Lukin suggests that the half-bisque is not used in England but is well-known in France. Marshall some 50 years later describes it as unusual and recommends agreeing in advance of the match what is meant by the term, as it was sometimes used to mean “one bisque every other set”, sometimes to mean “the right to annul a fault”, sometimes “to claim the point after one fault”, or sometimes “to claim chase-off for a chase”.
Lukin describes “Odds at Tennis” as a mechanism “to make a match equal; or in other words to put the inferior player upon a level with the superior.” While he doesn’t state that the main reason for doing this is linked with wagering, Lukin does, helpfully, pp 111-112, linked here and reproduced below, set out an appendix of “The Odds, As Usually Betted”.
At the end of P112, Lukin notes that chases make such betting odds
“very precarious: – to say nothing of the difficulty of making a match so near as to leave neither party the favourite.”
Don’t Cramp My Style With Your Odds
At the less numerical end of the odds scale, we have the various cramped-odds, of which Masson’s barrel-jumping and Barre’s power-walking are rare examples.
Lukin lists several examples in his treatise, probably quite commonly used in the 19th century but rarely used today other than for fun or training:
- Round Service – the serve must touch both the side and the rear penthouse to be a legitimate serve – this normally renders the serve easy to return;
- Half Court – obliging the better player to confine his balls to one half of the court lengthways (left side or right side);
- Touch-No-Wall – obliging the better player to ensure that there would be a second bounce before the ball reached any of the walls, which also renders the openings barred. This makes life extremely tough for the better player and much easier for the lesser player;
- Touch-No-Side-Wall – which renders out of bounds, for the better player, the side galleries and doors, as well as the side walls, but it does leave the dedans and the grille in play;
- Barring The Hazard – which renders the winning openings (dedans, grille & winning gallery) out of bounds for the better player;
- Barring The Openings – which renders all of the openings, including the winning ones listed above, out of bounds for the better player.
Cramped-Odds: odds, in giving which a player agrees to renounce the liberty of playing into some usual part of the Court ; or plays with some unusual dress or implement ; or cramps his game in some other way, by agreement. These odds may be combined with bisques or other Odds, either in augmentation or diminution.
In those pages Julian Marshall also, helpfully, in a footnote, explains the relative value of cramped odds in terms of points odds:
The value of ordinary cramped-odds, though varying with different players, is usually estimated as follows:
Round services = 15 or nearly half-30
Half-court = half-30
Touch-no-side-walls = half-30 and, perhaps, a bisque
Touch no walls = about 40
Bar-the-hazard (no winning openings) = about 15
Bar the openings = 15 and a bisque, or nearly half-30
Simples.
Julian Marshall’s Annals of Tennis was published in 1878, around the time that Marshall and his pals were sharpening their pencils and debating the rules, scoring and handicapping for a novel game with some similarities to tennis. It was known in some circles as sphairistikè, in other circles as lawn tennis.
Part Four of my series will cover the synchronicities and controversies bound up in the evolution of the modern game. Modern tennis offers fewer opportunities for cramped-odds but that didn’t stop handicapping from the ancient and modern games from strongly influencing each other at the end of the Victorian era and early part of the 20th century.
But before signing off this part of the story, I’d like to introduce one other character who was hugely influential during that Victorian period of the sport’s (or should I say sports’s?) development: John Moyer Heathcote.
A contemporary of Julian Marshall; clearly one of Marshall’s pals & adversaries, Heathcote was a real tennis player at the James Street Court, a barrister and a Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) committee member around the time that guardianship of the laws of tennis moved from the James Street Court to Lord’s. He was a central character in the group responsible for codifying the laws of real tennis and latterly modern tennis. More on that in Part Four.
In the late 19th century, John Moyer Heathcote wrote the Tennis section of The Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes (1st edition published 1890) – click here to view at Hathi Trust. I have managed to secure a facsimile copy of the 1903 edition myself. Heathcote borrowed (with permission) Julian Marshall’s text on the laws of tennis for that book, but added some fascinating notes on “Unwritten Law of Tennis”. Here is the most fascinating bit:
There is an ancient custom for which little can be said, except that it is an ancient custom, that a player who has lost a love set shall pay a shilling to the marker – a cruel and wanton aggravation of the annoyance usually felt by anyone who has been so signally defeated.
The refinement of this injury is carried even a step further in France: the marker on these occasions steps from his compartment into the court opposite to that occupied by the unfortunate victim, kisses the net-rope and saying, “bredouille, monsieur” [I am empty-handed, sir], makes a bow expressive of his claim to the customary douceur [sweetener].
I can find no other references to this “ancient custom”…
…but then, I find no old written references to other customs we know to be ubiquitous and ancient, such as the imperative that, on changing ends, the server-to-be enters the service end of the court before the striker-out-to-be leaves the service end and enters the hazard end. Woe betide any real tennis player who inadvertently forgets to comply with the change-of-ends custom.
I think the only possible explanation for that “big loser pays a shilling” custom is that the markers or tennis-court proprietors in days of yore were also, in effect, keepers of a gambling house. An uneven contest (which would probably have occurred due to the stubbornness of the loser in not taking sufficient handicap) would have much reduced the marker’s earnings from “the wager book” for that match. A shilling might have been sufficient (or at least some) compensation for the paucity of competition and resulting low interest from “spectating punters”.
Ancient customary odds: a King’s shilling for a bagel, or a “Silver Bagel Award”
Other Pieces On Tennis History
This piece is part three of four pieces. The other three pieces are:
Fascinating post Ged. Is giving “all the walls” the same as “no walls” despite sounding like the exact opposite?
Exactly right, Bail-out. “All the walls” is shorthand for “all the walls barred”.