Let’s be honest about this; Janie and I are not doing anything much that might be described as adventurous at the moment. This pandemic era is not that sort of era. We’re doing a lot of charity stuff. We’re keeping fit. We’re in good spirits. But we are not indulging in adventure.
…but this year, it was my birthday card that had all the excitement.
John phoned me on the morning of my birthday. I hadn’t twigged it before, but he and Mandy had taken the opportunity to have a short break up in Yorkshire. John informed me that he had sent me a birthday card but he didn’t know when it would arrive and that it might be somewhat distressed-looking, having been involved in a road traffic incident.
John explained that he had stopped for fuel somewhere around Muker and put his mobile phone and my card on the roof of the car, making a careful mental note not to drive off before retrieving the phone & card…
…then he got distracted…
…then John drove off…
Excitement on the B6270 between Muker and Gunnerside; well shy of Crackpot
…until he heard a few “boomp” noises from the roof of the car and realised what must have happened. Apparently an expletive or two were the next couple of noises to be heard in the vicinity.
“worse than the door”
Meanwhile I was sitting in the flat, concentrating on John’s every word, my thoughts not wandering at all, thinking to myself that the punchline of the story must include the retrieval of the phone, because John was calling me from said phone…
…and the card didn’t look too shabby either
…and the card seemed to be minimally dishevelled; assuming the card before me was the original card from the story.
John continued…
…we drove back down the road towards Muker and as good fortune would have it, there was my phone in the middle of the road, undamaged…
…but no sign of your card…
…until we went a bit further back down the road and there was your card – also pretty much undamaged. It might have some tyre marks on the envelope though.
I told John that the card looked absolutely fine and that it had arrived a day in advance of my birthday, which is pretty good going given the adventure it had been through. I reported that the card was in good spirits and recuperating well at home.
I like to one-up John’s stories, so I thought I had better tell him the adventure of his birthday card, which I had posted that very morning.
I explained that I had gone to the local shop, chosen a card, returned home to sign the card, blown the dust off the little see-through-plastic bag which holds my assortment of postage stamps for just this sort of occasion, afixed an appropriate stamp and taken the card down to the post box at the end of my street, from whence it should have, by that time, been collected.
Your card should arrive at your house on the morning of your birthday, I said, but it seems that you won’t be there to receive it.
John explained that they would get home on the afternoon of his birthday. He also volunteered the opinion that the Yorkshire card story was a tad more exciting than the Notting Hill card story. I felt obliged, on this one occasion, to concede.
Anyway, John & Mandy’s drive home the next afternoon provided an excellent opportunity for Mandy, John, Janie and me to have a four-way catch-up chat and share a bit of the birthdays, albeit at a social distance.
Gerry Goddin At Cafe Rouge Clifton Gardens, February 2010. Photograph courtesy of John Random
2020 has been a truly rotten year, existentially, for the community of NewsRevue comedy writers, performers and directors that I befriended nearly 30 years ago when I started writing for that show in 1992.
I started writing for NewsRevue in order to become a comedy writer, not an obiturist. WILL YOU PLEASE STOP DYING, YOU LOT? IT’S NOT FUNNY.
Gerry tended to write gags and quickies more than sketches and songs. He was, for example, a regular contributor to The News Huddlines on Radio 2.
I have raided “The Stanton Files” and uncovered a couple of Gerry’s pieces. Here’s one of his quickies:
A quintessential Gerry Goddin quickie.
The “unfortunate” politician being lampooned was Hartley Booth, who had resigned his upwardly-mobile position in the light of suggestions that he had an affair with one of his researchers in early 1994. The commercial being parodied was the J.R.Hartley advert for The Yellow Pages:
I think Gerry wrote rather a lot of parodies of that advert – certainly NewsRevue had no shortage of such gags on a regular basis in the 1990s.
It was a moving moment, finding that sketch in Chris Stanton’s spring 1994 file. I can visualise Chris performing that quickie, using the voice that he went on, years later, to immortalise in his role as headmaster Mr Flatley in MI High:
But I digress, slightly.
I think of Gerry as having been around and about at NewsRevue from my earliest days there, in 1992. But I don’t see his name on the very earliest running orders I can find.
I have a feeling, digging deep into my memory, that Gerry was a relative novice comedy writer around the time that I got started and that he perceived us as people who were at a similar stage, starting down that road at a similar time.
What all this makes me realise, of course, is that although I have known Gerry for a long time and have probably spent more time in his company than I spent with any of the other deceased NewsRevue folk I have been writing about lately, I hardly knew Gerry at all.
It seems that none of us really knew Gerry.
He seems to have no next of kin. He seems to have abstained from talking to any of us about his life prior to comedy writing in the early 1990s…
…which makes the first 40+ years of his life a bit of a mystery to us all.
I think he once mentioned to me that he had Irish roots. I know that he had been a heavy smoker and recall that he was addicted to (prescription) nicotine chewing gum when I first met him. I think he might have had struggles with drink at one time; I don’t think he drank at all during the years I knew him.
But Gerry did have glory periods for NewsRevue – some directors liked his material more than others – and at times Gerry was more prolific with material than at other times. Here is a running order from 1995, rich with Goddin material.
Sadly most of Gerry’s archive is probably lost to posterity, unless the Random archive (which I hope we will examine antemortem) yields more fruit than the Stanton archive did.
But I did find one more Goddin sketch in the Stanton files – written jointly with Brian Clover, Spring 1995:
A lot of Tory ministers must have been resigning at that time
While not being forthcoming about himself, Gerry was nevertheless always keen to put people together and encourage collaboration. It was through Gerry that I met Helen Baker; Janie and I enjoyed many hugely pleasant evenings in her company and in the company of her wine tasting pals. At one of those (the last we attended, as it happens) Gerry put in a surprise appearance as guest impresario/songwriter of a musical piece intended for Eurovision – click here or below:
So Gerry wrote serious songs too. Who knew? Well, that charming gang at The Cabin knew. Perhaps they didn’t know that Gerry wrote for NewsRevue and The News Huddlines.
I don’t suppose that any of us really knew Gerry. I don’t suppose that Gerry wanted any of us really to know. Which is infuriating in a way…and sort of funny…and sort of sad…
…yet my life was enriched by having known Gerry. The world is at least one line shorter…or do I mean shorter of one-liners?…now Gerry has gone.
This final piece explores in a little more detail the origins of the modern game of tennis and explains how handicapping was central to modern tennis’s development in the late 19th century and then subsequently those modern tennis developments to handicapping pervaded real tennis.
In truth, it had all happened rather quickly for that modern version of the game. In the mid 19th century, lots of sporty folk had experimented with garden-based adaptations of tennis in various forms. A club for one form of lawn tennis, named pelota, was founded in Leamington Spa in 1872. Major Clopton Wingfield applied for a patent on his version of lawn tennis, Sphairistikè, in 1874.
The Marylebone Cricket Club, which was, by the 1870s, the guardian of the laws of tennis as well as of cricket, got involved around 1875, in an attempt to codify and standardise the laws of lawn tennis.
There followed a rather controversial set of processes, from which emerged, in the end, the laws of lawn tennis in a form very similar to those we know today, but not without some evident deep debate and acrimony.
Prince Otto von Bismarck famously said that “to retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making.” He was probably right. Perhaps for that reason, Julian Marshall’s early booklet on lawn tennis is silent on the controversy around the laws, it merely sets them out.
A rye smile at a German sausage
But I’m going to have a go at exploring the controversy and the somewhat tortuous journey.
The MCC Got A Bunch Of Lawyers & Sport Enthusiasts Together To Codify This New-Fangled Lawn Tennis Game…What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
According to the younger Heathcote, by 1875 lawn tennis was becoming chaotically ubiquitous in the gardens of England; opinions in The Field magazine were united only in the view that things could not go on like this, so the tennis committee of the MCC was deputed to form a code for this new game.
The scoring method that these esteemed gentlemen came up with was, basically, the method used in rackets. Only the server (hand-in) could score points; serve only changed hands when the receiver (hand-out) won a stroke; a game was first to 15 (with some additional clever stuff to “set the game” if the game gets to 13-13 or 14-14).
The original MCC code seems to have been little used. CG Heathcote briefly documents one or two matches played that way.
The attempt at standardisation started to get messy again, when Henry “Cavendish” Jones, one of the doyens of the All England Croquet Club, who had been instrumental in introducing lawn tennis to that club, decided, in 1876, to advocate the use of tennis scoring rather than rackets scoring for lawn tennis.
Henry Jones, aka Cavendish. Now that’s what I call beard.
Jones advocated the use of tennis scoring on the grounds that:
interest is better sustained and handicapping facilitated.
CG Heathcote describes this turn of events as “a crisis”, exacerbated by the fact that John Henry “Stonehenge” Walsh, then editor of The Field, was honorary secretary (having been one of the founders) of the All England Croquet Club. He was more a dogs and guns man than a tennis and croquet man in truth; he regularly organised field gun trials, often using the All England Croquet Club fields for that purpose. Don’t ask.
By 1877, not only had the objects of the All England Croquet Club been changed to include lawn tennis but the name of the club had become All England Croquet & Lawn Tennis Club (AECLTC) and a lawn tennis tournament announced for July 1877.
At this juncture of the story, CG Heathcote’s essay on lawn tennis gets a bit melodramatic:
“…a graver crisis was at hand, which should determine whether the game was to bask for a few seasons in the smiles of fashion, and then decay and die, as rinking [rollerskating] had done, and as croquet also for a while did; or whether it was to take its place permanently among recognised English sports, and so contribute to the formation of English character and English history.”
Just in case the above paragraph does not render you, dear reader, ashiver, Heathcote goes on:
“A vehement controversy had been maintained in the press on the relative merits and demerits of racket and tennis scoring respectively; nor was this the only topic for acrimonious discussion.”
He’s talking about the size and shape of the court, the height of the net, the position of the service line, the question of faults on serves…
“…had been argued at great length and with considerable bitterness, and yet unanimity seemed as hopeless as ever.
A small sub-committee of the AECLTC was formed for the purpose of framing the rules for the 1877 tournament. Step forward Julian Marshall (he of The Annals of Tennis, most of which was being pre-published as articles in The Field during 1876 and 1877), Henry “Cavendish” Jones and CG Heathcote, whose interest in “bigging up” this story might be connected with his role in the controversy’s resolution.
Wimbledon 1877, a success by any measure or scoring system
Needless to say, this second committee opted for tennis scoring rather than rackets scoring, although that original publication offers rackets scoring as an alternative method allowed within the rules if the players so choose. A type of hedge that might have graced many a fine field in Wimbledon or St John’s Wood.
All three members of that triumphant sub-committee played a significant role in the 1877 tournament. Henry Jones umpired. Julian Marshall was a losing quarter-finalist, losing to CG Heathcote, who went on to lose his semi-final but was awarded third place on a play-off. The winner of that first championship, Spencer Gore, was a local (Wimbledon) chap; primarily a cricketer and rackets player.
As an aside, the 1878 Wimbledon Championship was also won by a rackets player, Frank Hadow, who defeated Spencer Gore in straight sets in the final. Frank Hadow defeated everyone he played in that championship in straight sets. He also chose not to defend his title, thus becoming the only tennis player in history never to have lost a championship match. When asked to defend his title, Frank Hadow allegedly said:
“No sir. It’s a sissy’s game played with a soft ball.”
I don’t personally agree with Mr Hadow’s disparaging view of lawn tennis; I am merely reporting it to you.
The rules as used for that first Wimbledon Championship in 1877 and the resulting codification, The Laws Of Lawn Tennis, adopted by the MCC (perhaps somewhat grudgingly) and the AECLTC can be found in full in Julian Marshall’s 1879 booklet, Lawn Tennis – here’s the link again. Those rules are remarkably similar to the rules of lawn tennis that remain in use to this day; quite an achievement and perhaps testament to the natural elegance of the tennis scoring system.
Handicapping In Lawn Tennis
By all accounts, in the early days of lawn tennis, the use of handicapping was near-ubiquitous, apart from championship-type matches. Rules 14-22 in the 1879 Lawn Tennis booklet set out the handicapping system for lawn tennis.
Were they “laws” or “rules”? The main title page describes them as “laws” but the chapter page describes them as “rules”. Another controversial point for MCC/AEC<C debate, no doubt.
Much simpler than that for real tennis – the only cramped odds on offer for handicapping are “half-court” given by the stronger player. Numeric odds on offer are only points given, perhaps enhanced or mitigated by a bisque or two. See part three of this work, Odds Oddities, for more detailed notes on the various cramped-odds and points-based odds used in real tennis.
Note also that rackets-style scoring, offered as an alternative method in rules 24-30 of the Lawn Tennis book of laws, also come with some handicapping (odds) in rules 31 to 33; one or more points given, the privilege of retaining hand-in (serve) two or more successive times and/or half-court.
…by Mr Henry Jones in a letter to the Field under date July 7, 1883. The bisque, now abolished, was the unit, and all the possible degrees of merit were indicated by classes separated from the other by one bisque. For bisques there have been substituted at first quarters and now sixths of fifteen as the unit, but the general principle will be the same.
Henry “Cavendish” Jones, you might recall, was the geezer who advocated the use of tennis scoring in the Field back in 1876 and who umpired the first Wimbledon Championship. He went on to write his own small treatise on lawn tennis in 1888, which you can read in full on the internet archive, if you wish, by clicking here. But if you simply want to see/read what he was talking about in the matter of handicapping, I have extracted the relevant tables and pages from this public domain work and present them below. You can click through the images to the on-line book and zoom in on the pages that way.
You might want to get out your slide rules and logarithm tables to get your head around those odds.
Seriously, though, two important and influential ideas were introduced into handicapping by Henry Jones’s (or should I say Cavendish’s?) innovations.
Firstly, the notion of owed odds as well as received odds. In other words, the notion that the superior player might start behind love – on minus fifteen or minus thirty instead of, or as well as, the inferior player starting ahead by fifteen, thirty etc. For those of us who play tennis using handicaps today, the notion of owed odds as well as received odds is quite natural, but in the 1880s it was an innovation, at least to the extent that there doesn’t seem to be any documentary evidence of owed odds being used prior to that suggestion.
Secondly, the tabular format for calculating the handicap to be used for lawn tennis is a precursor to the algorithmic method we use today in real tennis.
Even before Cavendish published his own treatise together with the laws and his handicapping methods, his suggested use of owed and received odds had found wide favour in lawn tennis.
There follows, in the Dwight, a more lengthy exposition about bisques; not only a great deal of thought on when to take them but also some thinking about what their computed value might be, compared with the more regular forms of numeric odds.
Despite this added complexity, the use of handicapping in lawn tennis matches was ubiquitous in those early decades of the game’s popularity, used at pretty much every level other than the major tournaments, which (as with real tennis) were played at scratch. Perhaps that complexity did for handicapping in lawn tennis in the end; it is barely used at all in modern tennis; regrettably in my view. Perhaps handicapping will return to regular use in modern (lawn) tennis some day.
Early 20th Century: Yet More Mileage In Handicapping
Received wisdom appears to suggest that he was deemed to have had some odd ideas about many things, including odds, i.e. handicaps.
Miles, for reasons that I cannot fathom, deems “owe” handicapping to be impossible in real tennis:
Handicap by points are simple – they have not yet been brought down to the fineness of Lawn Tennis Handicaps. They still are only – Half-fifteen; Fifteen; Half—thirty ; Thirty ; and so on . One cannot owe Points : the system of Chases makes this impossible.
Those of us who use handicapping regularly know that this assertion about chases negating the use of owed odds is simply untrue. But this does indicate that, twenty or so years after owe handicapping was introduced into lawn tennis, it had not yet found its way into real tennis.
I very much enjoy reading Eustace Miles other ideas on handicapping, some of which I like for their weirdness, but wouldn’t attempt them myself, others (possibly still weird) which I enjoy trying or wouldn’t mind giving a try.
Personally I find a Cricket bat to be the best practice. It develops the wrist and the arm, though it may strain them also. It involves a very accurate timing of the ball, and a very accurate position of the body, and a very full swing. Pettitt is an adept with a small specially-shaped piece of wood: I believe that the original piece of wood was part of a chair. Needless to say, such an implement compels one to be extremely careful. An inch or two of misjudgment, and one’s stroke is a failure . Older players played with some other object, as a soda-water bottle.
Don’t try the ideas from the above paragraph at home, children…nor adults come to that. Miles also elaborates at length on cramped odds in those pages – it is well worth reading through to the end of that chapter on p221.
What I particularly like about Miles’s thinking on handicapping is his desire to encourage good sport and handicaps that help both players to develop their game.
Miles’s suggestive Chapter XLIV on Handicaps and Scoring pp303-306 has a great many ideas, some more practicable and sensible than others. Again it is well worth a read. He believes as a matter of etiquette that players should be prepared to take or give handicaps; he also suggests some subtle cramped-odds type things that the superior player might apply if the opponent stubbornly refuses to accept a handicap.
He advocates moving handicaps – i.e. making the handicap rise or fall as the match progresses. I particularly enjoy using these in friendly matches, especially in circumstances when the algorithmic methods of the modern computerised handicapping system are unlikely to work well enough; often the case in doubles where one player is recovering from injury or where one player is an unknown quantity.
Miles also advocates the use of left-handed play, both for the benefit of players’s bodies and also as a method of handicapping at times. I use this method myself, for the former reason in real tennis and for both reasons when I play lawn tennis with my wife, Janie. In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that Janie and I also use moving handicaps – owed and received – when we play lawn tennis, to great positive effect.
From The Tables Of The Late 19th Century To 21st Century Algorithmic Handicapping
Actually, the principles involved in the sophisticated lawn-tennis table-based handicapping of the late 19th century are remarkably similar to those we use today in the algorithm-based handicapping system at Real Tennis On-Line through the Tennis & Rackets Association.
On that site, following the centuries-old tradition of placing learned works about tennis on-line, in the public domain for all to see, Roger Pilgrim’s 2010 definitive guide to handicapping explains everything you ever wanted to know about the modern system of handicapping…but were afraid to ask. Click here to read and/or download that definitive piece.
Roger Pilgrim seems to make it his business to avoid being photographed at tennis matches, perhaps because he has no enormous beard or moustache to show off to the camera, unlike the Victorian and Edwardian folk who have mostly populated this piece.
But Roger has graced the tennis court with me, on several occasions. Despite the fact that he is far more experienced and a much better player than I shall ever be, we are able to enjoy playing tennis together through the wonders of the tennis handicapping system.
The handicap gets better very, very, very, slowlyHandicapping has come a long way since, in 1506, Philip, King of Castille (depicted) gave the Marquess of Dorset, the latter playing with his hand, fifteen in exchange for the former’s use of a racket
We ended up pursuing a rather convoluted route this Sunday for our East Acton FoodCycle run.
The gig started normally enough. There’s Janie, Father “Friar Tuck” Richard, Alannah & Francesco from a few week’s earlier, at Our Lady of Fatima Church, White City
FoodCycle provide us with an excellent app, Circuit For Teams, which does a wonderful job of listing our drops, linking to the satnav & optimising our route.
But this week something had changed. It might have had something to do with my upgraded iPhone. Circuit is now offering us a choice of satnavs, which is great, because we both like (and are used to) Waze, whereas it was previously hard-linked to GoogleMaps, which we like less.
But here’s the thing.
It seems that, in amongst all the upgrading excitement, but unbeknown to us, the app had switched on some functions that allow the app to take instructions by voice, using Siri, Apple’s voice control gizmo.
Early in our journey that day, Janie and I were chatting about travel, or rather our much diminished desire to travel at the moment. Janie pondered where we might want to go if/when the pandemic is over and we thus discussed Madagascar, where we were planning to go in 2018, until an outbreak of pneumonic plague there in late 2017 rather put us off the idea. (In the end, we went to Japan instead, in autumn 2018.)
After the first drop, the Circuits app seemed to be in a spin of re-routing and re-optimising. No matter, I thought, I know the way from White City to North Kensington for this second drop.
But the app was still in a spin ahead of the third drop:
… it keeps saying “route not possible”…
…said Janie, to which I merely said:
…ask it to re-optimise again – I know the way to our third drop anyway.
But Janie kept reporting that the app was failing to show a route for our journey and after our third drop, we were heading to Hammersmith to a new location and I really did want the app to show me the way…
…so I took a close look at the thing myself…
…the app had added “Madagascar” to the list of destinations and was trying (and for some obscure reason, failing) to route us to Hammersmith via Madagascar.
At this juncture I was reminded of the scene in the animated film, Madagascar, after the penguins have taken control of the ship in a “special forces style” operation, only to realise that they have absolutely no idea how to use the ship’s navigation systems. That scene is 1’40” into the clip below, all of which is well worth watching.
Much like the penguins, I tried pressing buttons to see what happens – in particular I thought it might be a good idea to remove Madagascar from the list of FoodCycle delivery destinations.
That worked. Once I deleted Madagascar and pressed “reoptimize route”, within a second or two, order had been restored and Circuits was again performing as expected and showing an excellent route for our deliveries.
Thus, in the next hour or 90 minutes, it was mission accomplished. Hurrah.
Because, when we have a lot of food to deliver for FoodCycle…
I am delighted that Ian Theodoreson has asked me to guest publish this charming performance piece.
The question of what should comprise my Desert Island Disc choices has occupied me for most of my adult life and I realise I am still some way from reaching the definitive selection. So I offer the following as an interim position.
When it comes to my favourite piece of music I wondered whether to include my current fave rave – ‘Drowning in Tears’ by Gary Moore…
…but think I ought to stick with the Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan-Williams which invokes memories of idyllic summer days past and has been part of my personal soundtrack for forty years.
In terms of my favourite book I did consider choosing ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ by Eric Maria Remarque but given I have read it so many times I have practically memorised it, I thought I would take John Steinbeck’s ‘East of Eden’ instead and enjoy its beautifully crafted analysis of the human condition.
So, I have cheated thus far by naming two books and two pieces of music, but there is no such equivocation when it comes to the ‘luxury’ object. It is, and always has been … a drum kit.
I have wanted to be a drummer for as long as I have wanted to be a fireman, which is basically for ever. For some reason my parents were not willing to indulge my passion and preferred my taking up the violin instead and by the time I left home other interests overwhelmed me and my ambition faded into the background. However a desert island seems like an ideal place to start learning as long as it comes with a never ending supply of drumsticks.
Like many of my generation I was transfixed by what is now termed classic rock, although always avoiding the heavier end of the genre. One group that didn’t particularly trouble my consciousness was Cream, despite being arguably one of the most influential bands of the rock era. Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and the drummer Ginger Baker could be considered the founding fathers of rock music.
Although Eric Clapton was the only one to go on to apparent greater exploits the music of Cream remains foundational despite the fact they only played together for just over two years from 1966 to 1968 before the irascible Ginger Baker decided he couldn’t stand touring anymore.
I was only eleven years of age when Cream split up and consequently knew very little about them so it was perhaps surprising that I entered the ballot at work to secure a pair of tickets for one of their four reunion concerts at the Albert Hall in 2005 – the only time they would ever play together again. My employer, Barnardo’s owned two debenture holder seats at the Albert Hall which they would allow staff to purchase, with a ballot being held if demand exceeded supply.
Given it was my p.a. who handled the ballot process it is perhaps fortunate that I was on holiday at the time the ballot was drawn as her phone call to tell me I had been successful was followed not long afterwards by a call from the full time UNISON official to let me know that his members were taking out a collective grievance against me. Fortunately he was joking.
So I subsequently found myself in the Albert Hall, surrounded by a crowd of ‘crusties’ all dressed in suits, having come, like me, straight from work, when it suddenly dawned on me that it was me who was the interloper. The music we were about to hear belonged to this older generation and in actual fact I probably only knew two songs that Cream had ever produced.
The guy sitting next to me looked nervous – he had been at the very last concert Cream had played in October 1968 and he was desperately worried that the moment he had dreamed of for over 36 years would be a crushing disappointment.
The concert was a triumph. Ginger Baker performed one of his trademark ten minute drum solos (while Eric and Jack went back stage to make themselves a cup of tea and finish the Times crossword) and the crowd got drunk on nostalgia.
At the end I asked my neighbour how he had found it. ‘Better than I dared hope’ he said. ‘How did it compare to 1968?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know, I was too stoned in ’68 to remember’ he replied.
If you can remember Cream in the 1960s, you weren’t really there
One impression that night that stayed with me from the concert was the mesmerising performance of Ginger Baker. He was notoriously mercurial character and not given to saying very much so it was surprising then to hear him speaking during the concert and particularly at the end of his mammoth drum solo when he ended up, in his gruff South London tones with ‘I thank you’. He had a very particular way of speaking, and this closing flourish stuck in my head. (Rohan has suggested he was channelling his inner Arthur Askey).
A few days later, with the noise of the concert still ringing in my ears, I was standing on the platform at Loughton tube station when suddenly the tannoy sprang into life:
‘This is a service update from the Loughton control centre. There are slight delays on the Circle and District lines and a good service on all other London Underground lines. I thank you’.
There was that voice again. I looked around excitedly at all my fellow passengers – Ginger Baker works in the control room at Loughton Station, isn’t that amazing – but no one else stirred. I went back down the stairs to peer in through the control room window but I was too late – a shadowy figure was stepping out of the room and closing the door behind him.
Could I really be the only person who knew that Ginger Baker has an alternative career working for London Underground? Did his colleagues realise who they were working alongside? Did he use a pseudonym? … so many questions lay unanswered.
It wasn’t the last time I heard his voice on the station tannoy…each time the announcement was signed off with his ‘I thank you’…but I tell you this, I haven’t heard it since October 2019, which is when Ginger Baker died. Coincidence or what?
Desert Island Discs? Desert Island frigging Discs!
Writing and performing at ThreadZoomMash can help us forget about the privations of lockdown?
How? By getting us to imagine the ultimate self-isolation, alone on some crappy desert island with JUST ONE poxy record? Even Roy Plomley and chums allow eight poxy records.
Look – I know that Desert Island Discs is a quintessentially BBC thing that people in Britain have loved for decades. A national treasure. I cannot deny the success of the genre. Nor can I deny its charm. Heck, I have often listened. I have often enjoyed the programme.
But I profoundly dislike the central conceit of the show. In particular the eight-record scenario leaves me feeling sceptical…or do I mean cynical…most times I listen to the show. Who can sum up their musical tastes and satisfy their thirst for music with just eight tracks?
I suspect that most guests go through a “style consultant” process, to help choose eight records that say enough about them to satisfy their fan base, while not turning too many people off them. That’s why so many people chose some Beethoven and/or Mozart. Unless they are UK politicians, who relentlessly choose a bit of Elgar or Vaughan-Williams; just to prove how very English or British they are.
Actually, that thought about politicians has brought dissembling insincerity to the front of my mind. By gosh, Rohan – this topic choice for ThreadZoomMash reeks of BoJo or DomCum levels of hypocrisy.
After all, YOU are the fellow who recently wrote the lockdown piece, Spotify vs Top Of the Pops. YOU are the fellow who once wrote a live show entitled, “What Listening To 10,000 Love Songs Has Taught Me About Love”. In fact, while you, Rohan Candappa, indulged yourself piloting the latter show at the Cockpit in 2017, a riot kicked off on the surrounding Church Street & Lisson Green Estates. It’s a minor miracle that you and we, your long-suffering friends in the audience, survived to tell the tale.
Anyway, my point Rohan, is that you of all people, the “Spotify, Top Of the Pops, 10,000 love songs” dude, should know how depleting, how devastating, this “one song per island” idea of yours is.
Oh no, not I. I will survive, there, musically. Here is my survival plan.
My object is my trusty friend, Benjy The Baritone Ukulele.
My book, which admittedly has yet to be published…but publishing my choice of book is, frankly, the least you can do for me in these circumstances, is: “The Complete Works Of English Language Song, From The Year c1220 to The Year 2020”. Ideally with chords & music as well as lyrics for the songs.
My one measly track will be a recording of my own mash-up masterpiece, helpfully spanning circa 800 years of English Language Song. It is entitled Mr Blue Sky Is Icumen In and it sounds like this:
MR BLUE SKY IS ICUMEN IN
Sumer is icumen in, the nymphs and shepherds dance
Bryd one brere, groweth sed and bloweth med
And don't you know, amarylis dance in green–ee-ee-een.
Lightly whipping o’er the dales, with wreaths of rose and laurel,
Fair nymphs tipping, with fauns and satyrs tripping
Mister Blue Sky is living here today hey, hey hey.
Mister Blue Sky please tell us why, you were retired from mortals sight, stars too dim of light.
Hey you with the angels face, bright, arise, awake, awake!
About her charret, with all admiring strains as today, all creatures now are merry…(merry merry merry merry merry merry merry merry merry merry merry merry merry merry merry merry-minded).
Mister Blue Sky please tell us why, you were retired from mortals sight, stars too dim of light.
Hey there mister blue, who likes to love, lhude sing cuccu;
Nauer nu, ne swik thu, sing hey nonny nonny nu.
Mirie it is while sumer ilast, in darkness let me fast,
Flow my tears, farewell all joys for years,
Never mind, I joy not in early, I joy not in early bliss.
Mister Blue Sky please tell us why, you were retired from mortals sight, stars too dim of light.
Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba
Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba
Postscript: The Evening Itself
There were eight of us live on ThreadZoomMash. Rohan Candappa made a short introduction, using John Donne (No Man Is An Island) as a helpful segway into the evening’s pieces.
Possibly it was the Tudor/Jacobean connection that encouraged Rohan to ask me to go first this evening. Possibly he simply wanted to get his own back on me. Who could blame him?
Adrian’s piece followed mine; a really charming rite of passage piece about an evening in 1985 when a 15 year old Adrian was “picked up” and taken to a party by a lovely girl while Live Aid was happening elsewhere.
I guess the Desert Island Discs theme encouraged most of the group to reflect on their lives. Terry certainly did a bit of that, but couldn’t resist the idea of Dessert Island Discs, suggesting that one might be macarooned on a dessert island. Thanks Tel.
Ian Theodoreson made me feel bad about my quip about mendacious politicians choosing Elgar and Vaughan Williams, as Ian admitted that The Lark Ascending would probably be his solo record pick. Sorry Ian – I do not think of you as a mendacious anything; quite the opposite. I guess some people really DO like Nimrod and/or The Lark Ascending best of all.
But Ian’s story mostly focussed on a visit to the Albert Hall to see a Cream Reunion Gig in May 2005. Ian subsequently became convinced that Ginger Baker was making the passenger announcements on Loughton underground station between 2005 and his departure from this mortal coil in October 2019. It’s hard to disprove that theory from where I am sitting.
Jan’s piece was charming and delightful. It focussed on her choice of book: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, which Jan apparently read when still ridiculously young and before she read the book for which Looking Glass is the sequel, Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. This I found fascinating as I do recall loving the earlier novel (Wonderland) as a small child but being perplexed and scared by the sequel. Jan’s made of robust stuff. Who knew? I don’t think Make Someone Happy by Jimmy Durante gets much business on Desert Island Discs these days, but Jan would chose it.
Kay also harked back to her youth and the ways she confused people by not conforming to their gender stereotypes. A beautifully constructed piece, full of Kay’s personality and culminating, with predictable hindsight, playing her choice of record, Rebel Rebel.
Geraldine’s poetic piece explored her young adult background; very different from any of ours. Somewhat earlier and in the USA. Evocative without being straightforward narrative, it can do with reading rather than describing, as my describing wouldn’t do it justice. I felt a little badly for the second time of the evening when Geraldine announced that her sole disc would be I Will Survive by Gloria Gaynor, the central lyric of which I had flagrantly pinched as a bridge in my short piece.
Then Rohan read a wonderful piece by John Eltham, who unfortunately was unable to join us for the evening. Not a straight line narrative. Like many of the pieces, it had a rite of passage at its core, by which I don’t mean “passage” in a Night Boat To Cairo sense (although that was John’s choice of record), but in a Bildugsroman sense. It was a beautifully crafted piece. Much like Geraldine’s, it defies description or rather I couldn’t do it justice with description. It should be read.
If we’re lucky, I might be able to persuade some of the others, including Geraldine and/or John, to publish their pieces on Ogblog so readers can judge the pieces for themselves.
In John Eltham’s case in particular this is a huge credit to Rohan as well as John. I remember John saying to me only a few months ago that he didn’t have the confidence to write ThreadMash pieces. He has now written two superb pieces, both brimming with self-assurance and flourish. I’m genuinely impressed and delighted.
Rohan, of course, couldn’t resist closing off the evening with a masterful pun, linking his opening, John Donne, with his ending, which was reciting the Eltham piece, or, as Rohan put it, the piece “wot John done”. Perhaps we haven’t progressed as far from the schoolboy skits and word plays as I hoped.
Still, it was a tremendous evening. With thanks to everyone involved, not least Rohan, for making it happen.
…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.
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.
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.
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
Bet you cannot leap in and out of those barrels between shots
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.
“How’s about I give you a punnet of strawberries for two bisques?”, Wimbledon, 1877
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.
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:
…it was with some trepidation I switched on the app on my next visit to my Notting Hill “Ivory Tower” the following Tuesday afternoon.
Once bitten twice shy, though. I now knew to regulate my own uptake of the calls by waiting a while between accepting a task and making the call, or between completing a task and confirming that the task was done and that I was available again.
Thus I was able to field another half-dozen or so calls while also completing the work tasks that I had undertaken to do that afternoon.
The last of those calls did want some shopping. The woman sounded old. With a heavy Caribbean accent, she almost apologised for needing help. Her son had been getting shopping for her all the while, but he had developed a chesty-something and the doctor had recommended that he isolate. Sounds sensible.
She didn’t need much and she hoped that I could get everything she needed from the pound shop on Portobello Road, which is just a couple of minutes walk from her place. Otherwise there is a Sainsbury’s (other supermarket chains are available) just opposite the Poundland (other pound shop chains are available)…
…that’s fine, I said, after making sure we had clarity on the payment protocol…
…I told her I’d be about an hour, as I resolved to finish my work, “shut up shop” in the Ivory Tower and get her shopping on my way back to Noddyland…
…no rush, she said, she didn’t want to inconvenience me too much.
…no trouble, I said, delighted to help.
It must have been about 17:45 by the time I parked up in Elgin Crescent (close to her place and the pound shop).
Photo taken lunchtime a few days later
It was a glorious sunny evening. The pavement outside the Duke of Wellington was heaving with trendy young folk eating, drinking and making merry. Trustafarians, mingling with local folk and people who work in the area.
This end of Portobello is the part where bijou Notting Hill meets social housing Notting Hill.
The street scene looked like Portobello as I had always imagined it before I moved to the area, but never really lived it, although I have lived in the neighbourhood now for well north of 30 years.
I hadn’t seen scenes like this since before lockdown…not since last summer…in truth I’d never really seen scenes like this before – it was as if the Notting Hill of my imaginings, back in the 1980s, when I chose to come and live here, had suddenly been brought into existence, filmically, in this time of pandemic. It certainly showed no signs of social distancing or increasing social need.
Social housing/bijou housing/social housing…
But just around the corner from that hedonistic street festival was an old lady who needs a few things from the pound shop so that she can get by for a few days; her son is ill and she was almost too proud to ask for help with her shopping.
Indeed, just up the road and around the corners are lots of people who need help, because my responder app goes off as often as I let it and the need for FoodCycle deliveries seems to be going up and up still.
But in many ways this is still the Notting Hill where I chose to pitch my tent 30+ years ago. It always was a strange mix of gentility and grunge.
Stand in the middle of Portobello Road at a suitable junction, such as the Elgin/Colville/Portobello one shown above, look one way and you can see boutique-style shops & The Electric…
…look the other way for the Sally Army, pound shops and (if you venture even further north), informal hawkers under the flyover on a market day.
Anyway, the pound shop indeed had all of the food items that my elderly client had requested. I had no idea that pound shops sold quality-stamped Danish bacon and posh-looking tubs of tiramisu for a pound each. Now I know.
Feeling like a mighty hunter who had landed his prey, I swaggered around the corner to my client with her swag. Old school Notting Hill, her place; a conversion in one of the many old, somewhat dilapidated, Victorian houses around there; not vastly different in architectural style from my place.
The client really did look old; late 80s or possibly even 90. She’d have hardly been a youngster when I moved in to the neighbourhood; she’d have been…
…57 or 58…
…that’s what I am now. There’s a pause for thought.
She thanked me. I wished her good luck and hoped she would enjoy her food.
Less than a minute later, I was back at the youthful throng of Portobello/Elgin:
Heaving even more, it was.
I couldn’t help wondering whether some of these trustas might deploy some of their energy towards volunteering. They mostly didn’t look as though they were demob happy after a hard day’s work. They mostly looked as though they had not yet been mobilised on much, ever, in their lives, other than looking good and having a jolly time.
As I drove back to Noddyland, I resolved to write up this little episode, but then realised that I hadn’t taken any pictures for the blog.
I then also realised that I had in fact never taken any pictures around Portobello. Back in the late 1980s, you didn’t tend to take pictures around your own environment…
…why would you?
So I resolved to return at lunchtime on the Friday and snap a few. They depict the market on a Friday lunchtime, rather than the hedonistic bar/cafe life of that Tuesday late afternoon, but the sun shone and I think I snapped a few nice pics around abouts my own manor.
The Government is encouraging people to try and get back to “normal”, whatever that might be, while the pandemic is in its summer recess. This doesn’t seem to have reduced the load on charities, such as FoodCycle, nor yet on the needs emerging for NHS Volunteer Responders.
What it is achieving, though, is a reduced volunteer force…
…Janie was back to work this week, but she’s not letting that stop her from continuing with the volunteering, at least for now…
…yet I get bemused looks from plenty of people when I tell them that our voluntary workload is increasing.
Two examples this week.
FoodCycle Marylebone 15 July 2020
Probably a temporary glitch, for this project, which we have been supporting by doing deliveries for nearly three months now. The delivery load has increased to three teams these past few weeks, but this week, try as they might, they could only find two so we needed to take on an extra half load.
That meant 16 deliveries; 32 bags full (sir).
Our previous record; 24 bags. “32 bags full sir” required some strategic stacking
Mostly on the Lisson Green Estate, plus one or two blocks on the Church Street side and a few up in Maida Vale; mostly people we’d delivered to before, which helps.
When there’s something strange……in your neighbourhood……who ya gonna call?……I said, who ya gonna call???…FoodCycle!!
As usual, we got a lot of satisfaction from this gig; huge amounts of gratitude from the guests who clearly need the food and really appreciate our help.
But it really was a bit of a marathon this week. Back to three teams for Marylebone next week; Janie and I are grateful.
The Day My NHS Volunteer Responder App Went Berserk, 17 July 2020
Since May, we’ve both had a steady stream of calls. Not all that many, frankly, but around a dozen gigs each (more if you count the “no shows”), which, from what I can gather, is significantly above average.
I think the run rate has been increasing slightly, but when the first eight weeks is metaphorical dot balls and the next few weeks is ones, twos and the occasional four, it is hard to be overly analytical about the rate.
Then came Friday 17th July.
I relocated to the flat, for the first time in months, as Janie was taking patients at the house and I thought it was about time I collected the post, flushed the loo, ensured the computer was working/updated properly and got on with preparation for the Z/Yen Board meeting. Frankly, now we do everything in the cloud, I could now do Board preparation work from pretty much anywhere without shlepping loads of files or papers.
I’m not entirely sure what triggered the storm that followed, but basically the NHS Volunteer Responder App decided that, as soon as I closed one call, it wanted to alert me to another one.
I didn’t really notice it earlier in the day. My first call took a while to close. An utterly charming South-East Asian woman – Vietnamese I think from the name – who didn’t answer the first time I called and then wanted to come off the calling scheme as she is no longer isolating and is returning to work. The first such call I have taken, I called the support line to establish the protocol for doing that – basically the woman herself needs to call the support line to be removed from the scheme.
Perhaps my first ever human (telephone) interaction with the scheme itself triggered a new status on my account…
Super-responder. Bit of a mug – probably will help pick up all the slack everywhere. Bombard with calls until this responder expires.
…or perhaps the algorithm detected “a new kid in town” around Notting Hill and there happened to be a lot of business around there on Friday.
Most of the calls were delightful folk who really appreciated the scheme, had used it when they needed stuff but didn’t, as it happens, need any help that day. One other person wanted to come off the scheme and I advised her on how to do that, now I am an expert on that protocol.
As the afternoon went on and my little “ivory tower” office heated up, I decided to return to Noddyland, taking one last call. I think my 12th of the day. A charming gentleman in Earls Court who did, on this occasion, as it happened, need a prescription collected and one or two other things from the pharmacy.
In truth, I was glad to at least have one of my calls today result in an errand, even though it was a little out of my way on a hot day.
I ran the errand and returned to my car, opened the windows and checked my messages.
I picked up one message from a client that absolutely needed dealing with before I could draw stumps on my working week, but my mobile phone battery was already running low (NHS Volunteer Responder does that) so I arranged a call with the client for 30-45 minutes hence, when I’d be home.
Then I cleared the good deed I had just done by clicking the “completed task” button.
The responder went off again instantly.
I realised that I should switch myself off duty, so I hit the “reject call” button and switched myself to “off duty”.
The responder went off again instantly.
The “off duty” signal must have crossed in the post with that one, I thought. So I rejected that call and started the engine of my car.
The responder went off again instantly.
I’m starting to sweat a little now. I rejected that call. I had now been off duty for a good two or three minutes.
The responder went off again instantly.
I rejected the call and closed down the app. That would shut it up, surely?
The responder went off again instantly.
People in the street are starting to look. It’s not a quiet thing, the NHS Volunteer Responder App. It has been borrowed from the Royal Voluntary Service GoodSam scheme for emergency defibrillation, so it sounds like an emergency alarm.
In fact, if you haven’t heard it before, brace your lug holes and listen to this:
There was only one thing for it, I deleted the NHS Volunteer Responder App from my phone.
That did shut it up.
I reloaded the app later on, once I had spoken to my client, cooled down and seen real umpires draw stumps on the test match day. In short, once I had fully recovered my composure.
Fully recovered
I dread to think what might happen if the UK Government’s world beating “track and trace” app can go into that sort of overdrive. Perhaps best not to think about it.
Joking apart, that bizarre day was unusually rewarding. Swathes of gratitude from people, many of whom don’t need a lot of help (or rather, they have their own sources of help) but feel much reassured by the periodic calls to know that they have a back up service that will seek them out if they find themselves needing the help. It must be a very vulnerable feeling, to be shielding for several months and needing people to help you. Even if we are mostly just providing some psychological comfort to shielding people, as much as the occasional “errand running” gigs that form part of the deal, I think it is a very worthwhile service.
Plenty of calls for me again the next day, too. So I think this is partly about a build up of demand and a reduction in supply. Anyone out there who hasn’t volunteered yet, simply because you’ve heard there is no demand…that’s not so…
…I trawled a great many authoritative (and some nonauthoritative) sources in search of the source of the tennis scoring system. In so doing, I also learnt a great deal about the odds, or handicapping systems that tend to accompany tennis scoring.
I also learnt that the origins of tennis, its scoring and handicapping are inextricably linked to the fact that tennis was widely played and observed as a wagering game, certainly as far back as medieval times. Enjoy the following example:
During the reign of Charles V . palm play , which may properly enough be denominated hand – tennis , was exceedingly fashionable in France, being played by the nobility for large sums of money ; and when they had lost all that they had about them , they would sometimes pledge a part of their wearing apparel rather than give up the pursuit of the game . The duke of Burgundy , according to an old historian , having lost sixty franks at palm play with the duke of Bourbon , Messire William de Lyon , and Messire Guy de la Trimouille , and not having money enough to pay them , gave his girdle as a pledge for the remainder ; and shortly afterwards he left the same girdle with the comte D ‘ Eu for eighty franks , which he also lost at tennis .
I love that 14th century story about my new friend, Philip The Bold, Duke of Burgundy. Of course, the detail might be more legend than history, but it forms part of a significant body of evidence that tennis was already a structured sport way back then, with wagering being “part of the scene”.
As an aside, Philip the Bold was not only well-known to be an enthusiast of jeu de paume (tennis), he was also a great enthusiast for the Pinot Noir grape; prohibiting the cultivation of the Gamay grape in Burgundy (1395), thus initiating that region’s fine wine tradition. Philip the Bold also initiated a musical chapel which founded the great Burgundian school of music. Tennis, wine & music – Philip was my kinda guy.
Medieval Kings & Their Love/Hate Relationship With Tennis
There is documentary evidence that Philip IV, Louis’s dad, bought the Tour de Nesle in 1308 and had a covered tennis court built within. While Philip was clearly keen on the game, there is no evidence that he played. It is said that the fashion for covered courts emanated from young Louis’s love of the game. That love also, perhaps, proved to be Louis’s undoing. Just a couple of years after succeeding to the French throne, Louis X died, age 26, apparently after playing an especially rigorous game of tennis at Vincennes, in 1316. Louis X thus became the earliest named tennis player in history.
Quarrelsome? Moi?
Louis X’s kid sister, Isabella, married Edward II of England. Isabella quite possibly murdered the latter; for sure she had him deposed and had her 14 year old son, Edward III, inserted on the throne of England. That allowed Isabella and her mate, Roger Mortimer, to dabble in ruling England as regents for a bit, until Edward III asserted himself, aged 18.
Anyway, my point is, Philip IV of France (Louis X’s dad), Edward III of England and Charles V of France (Edward III’s third cousin, Philip The Bold of Burgundy’s brother) all had one thing in common in the matter of tennis; they banned it by decree.
In truth, medieval kings made a bit of a habit of banning tennis (along with most sports and games other than warlike sports, such as archery) for the middling sort, while at the same time building tennis courts and letting their families and noble entourages play tennis at will.
That sort of hypocritical prohibition by decree continued well into the 15th and 16th centuries, which almost certainly helped the game become rather popular as an underground activity.
(As an aside, I have often attributed my own love of cricket to the fact that my primary school headmistress banned cricket in the school playground when I was 10, which inevitably led to clandestine games of cricket on the common whenever the opportunity arose – thank you Miss Plumridge. I don’t suppose the teachers who ruled Rosemead School were hypocritically playing cricket, while prohibiting their charges from doing so. But who knows? Anyway, I digress.)
Renaissance Tennis, Honour & Wagering
While we have strong direct evidence that noble folk wagered on their play and sometimes wagered big – Henry VIII has a great many well-documented, substantial losses from playing tennis – we also have plenty of indirect evidence that tennis was a popular game around which the players indulged in wagering and observers often indulged in gambling.
Heiner Gillmeister in his Cultural History of Tennis is unequivocal on this point:
…in the Middle Ages tennis was always played for money…
This seminal treatise on tennis was a youthful act of patronage by Alfonso II d’Este, who went on to become Duke of Ferrara and to patronise a great many works of art and science, not least the works of Torquato Tasso. An arty family, those d’Este folk. Alfonso II’s grandmother was Lucretia Borgia and his auntie was Leonora d’Este, who most probably composed the wonderful sacred music sampled below:
So Scaino’s commission to write his treatise on tennis came from a noble, art-loving patron; it is perhaps unsurprising that the treatise focuses on matters noble and honourable about the game, while ignoring the seedier, money-oriented side of the game.
Note how Scaino explains the reasoning behind the “win by two clear points” aspect of the scoring system:
It is to be noted that the game of tennis is of a beautiful and well-reasoned ordinance. The winning of points is called by the numbers 15, 30 and 45 and if the two teams have each won three points the score is “a dua”, meaning that the game is reduced to two points (became “à deux” or “deux à” in French, “deuce” in English) and not one! The method of fighting such a distinguished battle should be removed from any suspicion of chance or fortune. He who wins must be sure that he has won by his own valour, not by any outside favour. Who does not see now that the game could not be devised with good reason to end with only one point? The good and staunch Cavalier is judged not by one thrust of his lance; the elegant Dancer not by just one leap, however bold and skilful, but by prolongued dancing, and the sure and cautious Bombardier not by one discharge of his Artillery, but by many.
While the above reasoning does not preclude the use of odds, or handicapping, it certainly does not in any way allude to it either. But we do have plenty of evidence to support the assertion that medieval tennis was played for money and we also have documentary evidence of the use of handicapping, some 50 years before Scaino.
At Odds With Renaissance Handicapping: Meet the Bisque
The earliest reference to odds, or handicapping, that I can find, is from early 1506, reported in Julian Marshall’s 1878 book, The Annals of Tennis. It is an eye-witness account, by one of Henry VII of England’s attendants, of a “visit” to Windsor Castle by Philip The Handsome (another Duke of Burgundy, plus also King of Castille) and his Queen: Joanna The Mad of Castille.
Philip The Handsome, Duke of Burgundy, King of Castille, husband to Joanna The Mad, not long for this world
The Sattordaye the 7 of ffebruary…
Bothe Kyngs wente to the Tennys plays and in the upper gallery theare was Layd ij Cushenes of Clothe of gold for the ij Kyngs…
…wheare played my Lord marques [of Dorset] the Lord Howard and two other knights togethers, and after the Kyngs of Casteele had scene them play a whylle , he made partys wth the Lord marques and then played the Kyngs of Casteele with the Lord Marques of Dorset the Kyngs Lookynge one them, but the Kyngs of Castelle played wth the Rackets and gave the Lord Marques xv. and after that he had pled his pleasure and arrayed himself agene it was almost nights, and so bothe Kyngs Retorned agayne to their Lodgingss.”
There’s a lot of interesting stuff in that eye-witness account. That early 16th century period was a period of transition between hand-play and racket-play at tennis. Most scholars agree that the racket came into use around 1500. So the handicap described in the account has the King of Castille playing with a racket and the Marquess of Dorset playing with his hand, while receiving fifteen (i.e. starting each game 15-0 up). Personally, I’d prefer the racket, but perhaps the Marquess was a very handy player.
Sadly, the account doesn’t tell us who won the tennis match, but the story doesn’t end brilliantly well for the visiting monarch; who in reality was more a hostage than a guest of Henry VII. Philip signed some helpful treaties and trade deals to help bring his “visit” to an amicable conclusion. Still, within a few months, Philip The Handsome died in Spain; probably poisoned/assassinated there. This made Joanna The Mad even more distraught than usual, apparently.
Joanna The Mad, but possibly Joanna The Gaslit or Joanna The Misconstrued
Thomas Grey, the Marquess of Dorset, who as a youngster had been a ward of Henry VII, was, by 1508, sent to the tower as a suspected conspirator against Henry VII. Only the accession of Henry VIII the following year saved Grey, who had a decent run as a high-ranking courtier after that narrow escape. His grand-daughter, Lady Jane Grey, was not so lucky; famously the “nine day queen”.
Not that type of bisque
In days of yore, the most common currency in tennis handicaps or odds was the bisque. A player who receives a bisque per set can claim one stroke (point) ahead of that point being played, at any stage during a set. Any number of bisques can be given, but the use of other point handicaps, such as giving fifteen every game or half-fifteen (i.e. fifteen every other game) means that the number of bisques per set would normally have been limited to one or two, perhaps occasionally three or four. Bisques would also be used sometimes to mitigate handicaps; for example Player A might receive fifteen but give a bisque or two to Player B to make the overall handicap less than fifteen.
The object of the exercise with odds (or handicapping) is to even up the game between players of differing quality. In days of yore, it almost certainly evolved as a mechanism to make wagering simpler and/or more exciting; hence the terms odds and handicapping (both gambling terms) to describe the practice.
In real tennis, handicapping is still very much part of the scene in all but the very highest level of play, as I shall explain in the third piece in this series.
As for the origins of the term “bisque”, that is lost in the mists of time. Some say the term “bisca” is Italian for tennis court and gambling house, much as the term “tripot” in French has those two meanings. But Scaino doesn’t use the term bisca or bisque at all in his treatise. The term bisque (spelt bisquaye) first appears in writing in the 1582 paper Signification de l’ancien jeu des chartes pythagorique et la déclaration de deux doubtes qui se trouvent en comptant le jeu de la paume by Jean Gosselin, but the context implies that this form of handicapping had been in regular use for some time, as Gosselin assumes that the term will be understood by the reader.
Many subsequent papers and books on tennis go into a great deal of detail about the tactical use of bisques by the player who has been given the opportunity to apply one or more of them.
Indeed, by the start of the 19th century, a fascinating array of odds/handicaps had emerged, mostly no doubt to enhance the enjoyment of wagering & gambling on the sport, but also as part of the honour system, by which the contestants were seeking to even up the match, better to enjoy the sport of the occasion. It is the latter rationale that prevails in real tennis to this day, to great effect.
But those 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st century developments will be the subject of my subsequent scribblings. As will the intriguing notion that handicaps were an intrinsic part of lawn tennis in the early days of that game.
Tennis Handicap Tournament, 1918, Upper Arlington Tennis Club
Other Pieces On Tennis History
This piece is part two of four pieces. The other three pieces are:
