My Grandpa: Lew (or Lou) Marcus, with his older brother Max
Meet my Great Uncle Max Marcus (1878-1952). He was the oldest of the multitude of Marcus siblings to venture from the old country to Blighty. My Grandpa Lew (1892-1959) was the youngest of the siblings.
But where exactly did the Marcus family venture from?
The family legend has been vague to say the least. Before the term “self-identify” had been invented, the Marcus family self-identified as “Litvak musicians”.
The word Litvak is a Yiddish term for Jews of Lithuanian (or more generically places we would now call The Baltics) origin. For families like ours, who came to Britain in the late 19th century, that meant that they would have been Russian subjects in The Pale Of Settlement before coming to Britain.
Great Uncle Max as a young man – c1900
The other matter of clarity from the family legend was that Great Uncle Max came to England with his wife, Leah, as an advance party, establishing themselves, at least to some extent, before the rest of the family followed towards the very end of the 19th century.
I did a little bit of on-line genealogy around 2011, liaising with my cousins Ted & Sue, which yielded very little about the family origins. It did encourage me at that time to interview my mother, plus cousins Jacquie Briegal and Sidney Pizan (the latter being Max’s grandson) – I have quite a few notes and yarns for future pieces, but almost nothing on the Baltic origins.
1901 census shows 9 year old Grandpa Lew with parents and some siblings in Whitechapel
I couldn’t find Max and his nascent family in the 1901 census when I looked in 2011. But I did find them in the 1911 census. In April 1911, Max and family were in Great Yarmouth. Once established as a musician in England, for much of his working life, Max split his time between London and Yarmouth. The picture below is probably Yarmouth.
Max playing double-bass with a small band, which I refer to (in PDQ Bach terms) as a schleptet.When in London, Max played with De Groot at The Piccadilly & Regents Palace Hotels
In the 1911 census, Max claims that he and Leah come from Austria. This claim is a stretch, almost worthy of the UK Government 110 years later, in its extremely loose association with the truth.
In reality, Viennese waltz music was all the rage in those days; it was probably “professionally convenient” for Max to hold himself out as an Austrian exponent of waltz music. It is almost unthinkable that Max (or anyone else from the Marcus family) had ever so much as set foot in Austria (or any part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) before 1911.
Max, Leah & emerging brood circa 1907. Far right is my Great-Grandma Annie.
Max and Leah’s offspring and descendants turned out to be a pretty musical lot. On the far left of the above picture is my mother’s cousin Sid, who ended up as a first violin in and sometime leader of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. Harry, the younger boy in the above picture was, by all accounts, an even more talented violinist but suffered from stage fright, so made his career teaching.
To the right of Harry (Harry’s left) in the above picture is Becky, who became Becky Pizan:
mother of Sidney Pizan (who, along with my mother, provided the family pictures you are enjoying);
reportedly a very gifted pianist in her own right (as was, according to my mother, my own Grandpa Lew);
grandmother of the artist Adam Green, whose extraordinary, almost accidental research a few weeks ago has led to a swathe of discoveries.
I thoroughly recommend that you click through to Adam’s piece about my mother’s musical cousin (Adam’s Great Uncle) Sidney Marcus and the discoveries that flowed from that- click here or the link below.
For those who just want to skim the topic, Adam has helped to identify Sid Marcus as The Saw Player on several 1930s recordings, such as the following:
My mum always referred to Sid as “a multi-instrumentalist” without going into too much detail. I hadn’t previously twigged that Sid’s “fifteen minutes of fame” second instrument was the hand saw.
Adam, via Radio 3 and Ron Geesin (composer, writer and self-confirmed absurdist), established that Max and his family, in the 1921 census, stated that they came from Kovno – now known as Kaunas, the second-largest city in Lithuania.
Adam says in his piece that he was a bit surprised, as he thought that branch of his family hailed from Riga.
My take on the matter, having been bitten by Max’s 1911 claims, was that Max on census day was not a 100% reliable witness to his own origins, but that Kaunas was unlikely to be a complete lie (unlike Austria) as it was unlikely that anyone in England would give a fig about which Baltic town Max and family might hail from.
I decided to redouble my efforts and try a bit harder to find Max and his branch in the 1901 census. I had drawn a blank when I looked back in 2011 but I hadn’t looked that hard.
As it turns out, I should indeed have looked harder back in 2011, although the search engines might not have been so good back then.
The 1901 census page for Max, Leah & Simon [sic] Markus [sic]
The trick was to look for Leah and to ask the search engine to be non-exact in the matter of surname (as well as first name) spelling. Thus we find Marks (latterly known as “Max” – we have since learnt that he was previously known as “Mendel”), Leah and baby Simon (latterly known as “Sidney” or “Sid”) in Back Church Lane Whitechapel, very close to the rest of the family and very close to Tobacco Dock, from whence it seems the family was scraping a living in the tobacco business in those early days.
Let’s drill.
Where are they saying they come from?
Let’s drill some more and zoom:
Max comes from Nidy and Leah comes from Yugger?
OK, so in 1901, before they had mastered the English language and how to spin with it, Max and Leah admitted to having been born in different places. I am pretty confident that “Yugger” is the way the census dude wrote down Leah’s attempt to tell him that she was born in Riga.
What about Nidy? I’m pretty sure Max was telling the census dude about Nida, Lithuania.
Now I’m going to be honest here and admit that, until I did this research, I had never heard of Nida, nor had I even heard of the Curonian Spit, the 60+ mile long sand dune depicted below.
In the late 19th century, Nida was an art colony. Confusingly, the northern part of the Curonian Spit now shown as Lithuania was, at that time, part of Greater Russia, whereas the southern part that today is part of Russia, including Kaliningrad was, at that time, Königsberg, part of Prussia. As my mum would have said, “don’t start”.
For a family of musicians, I suspect that Nida, with its relatively wealthy Prussian visitors, was a suitable place to spend the summer season and earn a decent crust, even if you retreated to Kaunas for the winter and urban gigs…
…and then it dawned on me. Great Yarmouth is also a summer season town, built on a spit, albeit a smaller spit than that massive Curonian one.
When Great Uncle Max chose to divide his musical time between London and Great Yarmouth, I’ll guess he was simply continuing the family tradition from the old country, having found a coastal place that reminded him just a little of his youthful summers on the Baltic Coast.
Of course there is a fair amount of supposition in this, but it is hard to imagine why Max would invent an answer to “where were you born” by falsely giving the name of a holiday town on the Baltic Coast.
Perhaps we can find some corroborating evidence on this. I note that Max, Leah and Sid had two boarders sharing their Back Church Lane home in 1901, Michael Freedland and Marks Freedland, both of whom also claimed to have been born in Nidy (Nida). So here is a shout out to possible descendants of the Freedland Brothers – has your family history handed down stories about where your family came from and how they came to England? Because it seems likely that those young men’s fortunes were, at least to some extent, conjoined with that of the Marcus family, from the old country and for a while in Blighty.
To close, my favourite picture of Max is the one below, from 1936, with young Sidney Pizan, dressed up and out for a stroll in Westcliff-on-Sea. It seems he really loved his coastal resorts, did Great Uncle Max.
Afterword: Extracts From E-Mail Conversations With Ron Geesin Casting Doubt On My Nida Theory But Not Necessarily On My Litvak Waterside Theory
Ron to Ian 4 April 2022:
“…On your latest research, hold on a minute! On the next page of the 1901 Census, there’s a ‘Caroline Davis’ ‘Needle Worker’. This gives the enumerator’s written forming of N and W, quite different to each other. So the Marcus entry has to be ‘Widy’…”
“…and there’s a village just outside Kaunas called Vijûkai. Could this half mumbled and ‘interpreted’ by an ill-informed enumerator come out as ‘Widy’? It’s not uncommon in Censuses for people to sometimes state their real original village and then later state the nearest town.”
Ian to Ron 5 April 2022
“…I don’t find the “Vijûkai” for “Wida” idea convincing, although it is just as convincing as my own wild theories! There would have been many long-since destroyed shtetls near Kaunas of which one named Wida or similar is quite possible…”
Ian to Ron 13 April 2022
“…Apropos your thoughts on Vijûkai, which feels to me a long way from anything that might be pronounced or written as “Widy”, there is a neighbourhood near that place which feels more “Widy” to me, named Vaišvydava
Both of those neighbourhoods are on the outskirts of Kaunas and the general area had a significant Jewish population back then, so it is plausible that we have found our Widy. Not on the lagoon coast but it is on the riverside coast! The general area is named Panemune…
Unable to muster the time or energy to write an 800-900 word piece on the topic “The Deadline” in the genre “Fiction” for our first live ThreadMash in two years, I instead submitted the following 920 word letter of apology.
Dear Kay
I regret to inform you that I shall be unable to submit a ThreadMash piece on the theme “The Deadline” in the genre “fiction” by the due date.
Normally I’m good with deadlines. I’m nothing like the writer Douglas Adams, who was so lousy at deadlines, publishers knew not to bother setting them for him. Adams famously said:
“I love deadlines; I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by”.
Although I am relatively good at meeting deadlines, naturally I tend to leave written pieces until the last minute; who doesn’t?
At the turn of the century, having foolishly agreed to write a charity textbook, I managed to meet the deadline only by dint of arranging to have some wisdom teeth removed and thus being forced to stay home for two weeks of convalescence for which I set myself a 2,000 words per day target to get the last 20,000 words of the book done on time.
It was on that occasion I learnt, for the first but not the last time, that book publishers don’t expect the authors to meet deadlines, so I was met with five weeks of silence until the editor picked the thing up at their appointed time. The same thing happened when my co-author Michael and I submitted the first draft of “The Price of Fish” on deadline; five weeks of silence because the so-called deadline isn’t a true deadline.
You don’t want truth, do you, Kay?
You want fiction.
Our first book, "Clean Business Cuisine" was fiction. We wrote it without a publisher and therefore without a publisher’s deadline. Once we had a publisher and a production schedule, I arranged the first book signing with what seemed to be plenty of leeway for the production deadline. But of course we ended up with a race against time to get copies of the book to the book signing location, Halifax, ahead of the event. That “skin of teeth” deadline was met, just. I even turned up at the venue on time myself; but in my rush to change into my dinner suit that evening, I forgot to take a pen with me to the venue. That’s right, I turned up at my first ever book signing without a pen. As the venue was a youth theatre where the narrowest writing implement to hand was a permanent marker pen, this was an existential crisis for the book signing, until a customer showed up with a pen to lend me for the evening.
I could have fleshed out that deadline story, but it is a true story about fiction…not in itself fiction.
Actually I have a bit of a problem with deadline stories in fiction. They tend to follow a predictable pattern, whereby suspense is generated through the device of a deadline, often, especially in thrillers, through convoluted circumstances.
The Perils Of Pauline is a classic example of ludicrous deadline, or cliff-hanger thrillers. For bizarre reasons, villains in this type of story seem compelled to condemn their potential victims to a death that will scare them for several minutes before killing them, allowing time for the victim to extricate themselves from danger, or for a hero to arrive and rescue the victim. Bond villains are another example of fiends with this monstrous flaw. I find these fictions implausible and not to my taste.
I did consider writing a topical pastiche of the thriller deadline story, in which the villain tries to construct the cliff-hanger scenario, having tied the potential victim to a railway track, but the locomotive-driven demise is confounded by excuses from the track and train operators apologising for delays caused by Brexit, Covid and latterly Putin. Meanwhile the hero’s efforts to rescue the potential victim are similarly impaired by Brexit, Covid and Putin excuses from would-be suppliers of motor vehicles, horses and rope cutting equipment. The risk of the victim dying of neglect becomes an interesting additional angle to this otherwise simplistic, predictable storyline.
I should add, parenthetically, that The Perils Of Pauline never did have the heroine tied to a railway line; that specific scenario was used several times in the copycat series The Hazards Of Helen.
Joking apart, my dear Kay, this whole business of people being unable to set a sensible deadline and then meet it is no longer funny. It is inundating me with needless tasks and starting to get me down. The worst example of this Brexit, Covid, Putin (or BROVIN syndrome, as I call it) is the “temporary” pipe which has been dangling around our Notting Hill Gate home for more than two years, while the flat above mine awaits a not especially complex plumbing solution. An elephant gestates in fewer than two years. The entirety of our street, Clanricarde Gardens, including the shops adjoining each side of the main road, was built in the 1870s in fewer than four years. I feel like going onto the Bayswater Road and protesting about it, but a large bunch of other protesters have beaten me to it and taken root there.
No, the real truth, Kay, is that BROVIN syndrome has finally got to me. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am unable to generate 800-900 words between now and the deadline.
Sorry about that.
With love and very best wishes
Ian
PS You may complain in writing to the ombudsman, ICAT (The International Court for the Arbitration of ThreadMash – Justice R Candappa presiding). But don’t expect a response from ICAT before the deadline.
“Temporary” trailing pipe since December 2019Clanricarde Gardens – whole street constructed 1869-1873Local protests about other matters, more pressing than trailing pipes
The Evening Itself
We had a good time at The Tokenhouse – a venue that Rohan booked in quieter times; we suspect that they will seek larger groups henceforward.
It was wonderful to see many members of the gang in person again after so long. Unfortunately several were unable to attend – Kay’s last minute Covid indisposition reminded us why we hadn’t been together in 3D for so long.
Kay did join us via Zoom, however. Her story had a dystopian past quality to it that was only tangentially about deadlines…
…contrast with Jill’s dystopian future story about existential deadlines.
Several of the stories (Jan’s, Flo’s & Adrian’s in particular) managed to weave romance into the deadline scenario; in two cases ideas around internet dating and social media flirting were front & centre.
Rohan and David can explain for themselves what their stories were about, while Adrian probably couldn’t provide a logical reason why he ended up in a pantomime lion costume at the end of his performance piece.
Jan, Julie, Flo & Jill, keen to pose rather than look naturalDavid posing as his natural self, half capuchin monk, half capuchin monkey Adrian, no longer donning his lion outfit (don’t ask)
This piece of amateur research was triggered, towards the end of 2021, by a casual enquiry by Carl Snitcher, a leading light in the Dedanists & Real Champions world, while we were on our way to play a match at Hampton Court Palace.
Carl was wondering whether the asserted date of 1740 for the first real tennis champion was accurate. Some had suggested it was not. I was the only amateur tennis historian Carl had to hand at that moment.
The answer to the exam question: “Did Clergé become the first tennis champion in precisely the year 1740?”, is a reasonably straightforward one; I shall answer it briefly in the next section of this piece.
But I realised, on engaging in this small piece of research, that, far more interesting than the numerical, “when?” question, is the more human query, “who on earth was this initial tennis champion Clergé?”
Other great players of this time (1740- 1753) were Clergé, the elder Farolais, La Fosse, Barcellon (the father), and Barnéon. Clergé was the most remarkable…
Paumiers qui acquirent, il y a trente ou quarante ans, une certaine réputation de force, furent les sieurs Clergé, Farolais pere, La Fosse, Barcelon pere & Barneon ; — le sieur Clergé étoit le plus vanté…”
…except in the matter of dates, where Manevieux is saying “these past thirty or forty years” rather than stating specific dates. Manevieux no doubt spent several years writing his amateur treatise.
As an early music lover, I am at home with the use of “circa” for dates derived from estimates based on best available evidence. I find the term “circa 1740” suitably precise yet hedged for the starting date of Clergé’s pre-eminence.
Who Was This Manévieux Fella?
Before we explore the story of Monsieur Clergé, I’d like to delve a little into the author, Manévieux , upon whose 1783 writings our knowledge of the early tennis champions is based.
He is almost certainly otherwise (or more completely) known as Louis-Claude Bruyset de Manévieux, who published a couple of other works, in particular a eulogy to his great uncle,Jean André Soubry (1703-1774), Treasurer of France in Lyon.
One of my bugbears is that we have no picture of Clergé, nor of Manévieux for that matter, but there is a contemporaneous portrait of Soubry, which will have to do in the “eye candy” department for the time being:
Portrait by Nicolas de Largillière, presumed to be Jean André Soubry, c1729
In the 1783 tennis treatise, Monsieur Manévieux describes himself as an amateur. Whether he means amateur tennis player, writer or historian is unclear. Sounds like my kind of guy in any case.
Manévieux dedicates the treatise to Le Comte D’Artois, who went on to become Charles X after the Bourbon Restoration. As a youngster, Charles, Count of Artois was famous for his drinking, gambling and womanising (presumably he wasted the other 10% of his time), the fashionable rumour of the time was that Charles was having an affair with his sister-in-law, Marie-Antoinette. He famously won a bet with Marie-Antoinette that he could get his architect, François-Joseph Bélanger, to design and build a party palace within three months. The result, at enormous expense, was the 1777 Château de Bagatelle.
Charles, Count of Artois, painting attributed “after Antoine Callet”, c1775
Charles, Count of Artois was unusually keen on tennis for a French royal of his era. Thierry Bernard-Tambour (good name for a tennis historian, Tambour) in his article on 18th century royal paumiers, registers, from royal archives that that…
Janvier-Jacques [Charrier] became the King’s paumier in 1763, also [paumier to the] Count of Artois
and
[ball making by] Etienne Edmond [Quillard] in 1765 for the Dauphin and the Count of Artois
…which means that Artois did play tennis from his infancy. The Manévieux dedication suggests that Charles retained an interest in the game into adulthood. Shneerson (pp76-77) provides some fascinating insights into Charles’s extravagant behaviours and spending around the game. D’Artois apparently had a hissy-fit when spectators applauded his opponent in a public court. After that, he only wanted to play on private courts. Between 1780 and 1786 he had his architect, Belanger, build him a court on the Boulevard du Temple – as much for drinking, gambling and womanising as for watching/playing tennis if the designs are anything to go by. That was probably the last pre-revolution court built in France.
Charles spent several years in England during his exile from France, during which time he is known to have played regularly at the James Street (Haymarket) court, spectators presumably having been warned not to cheer the future King of France’s opponents.
But let us now return to Monsieur Clergé himself.
Wikipedia (Unusually Not) To The Rescue
My usual starting point for research of this kind is Wikipedia, but on this occasion, at the time of writing (December 2021), Wikipedia was having a bit of a shocker in the matter of our first named tennis champion, Monsieur Clergé.
Parenthetically, it is amusing to note that Louis de Rouvroy,The Duke of Saint-Simon founded his own fame and reputation as a memoirist on the back of his annotations of Dangeau’s memoires, despite stating that Dangeau’s writing was:
of an insipidity to make you sick.
Still, the period of the Dangeau memoires; 1684-1720, covered the last 30+ years of The Sun King, Louis XIV’s reign and the early years of the Louis XV era.
Here is an example from the autumn of 1685:
Sunday 4 November 1685, in Fontainebleau. – The King went to shoot; My lord [Louis the Grand Dauphin] did not go out all day; he made the good jeu de paume players play, and Jourdain played better than little Breton or little Saumur had ever played, as people say at that time.
I am not the first tennis historian to trawl those 19 volumes for nuggets of information about tennis, nor will I be the last. It is mostly pedestrian stuff, but I discern and summarise the following:
tennis was on the whole falling from favour in royal circles during that period;
more or less only in the autumn, when the royals were at Fontainebleau and Versailles for the hunting season, does tennis feature at all in their lives;
younger members of the royal family would “have a go” – Louis the Grand Dauphin was still having an occasional hit in the earlier period of those diaries. For example, on 3 December 1686, he played on the three-day old new court at Versailles – the Grand Dauphin continued to play regularly there throughout the winter of 1686/87, but the novelty of playing there soon wore off for him;
there was more enthusiasm for watching professional players play than for having a hit themselves – the royals tended to watch if the weather was too poor for hunting and/or if they were entertaining visiting dignitaries, such as exiled English royals;
one of the Jourdain brothers was the pre-eminent player in the mid 1680s at least;
in October 1687 the professionals at Fontainebleau petitioned The Sun King for a licence to exhibit their skills in Paris; this he granted:
Thursday 9 October 1687, in Fontainebleau. – The King saw the good players of jeu de paume play, who asked that they be allowed to take money to see them play in Paris; it would earn them money, and apparently the king will allow them.
Sunday 26 October 1687, in Fontainebleau. – The king saw the good players of jeu de paume playing, and granted them the privilege they asked for; they will play twice a week in Paris, and will be displayed like the actors. They are five: the two Jourdains, le Pape, Clergé et Servo.
I believe the above mention of Clergé The Elder to be the only one by Dangeau himself. There is a further mention in the autumn of 1690 which comes from a Saint-Simon footnote, the detail presumably extracted from Mercure:
Thursday 12 October 1690, in Fontainebleau. – The bad weather made it difficult for people to go hunting. – The king led the exiled royals [James II & Mary of Modena] of England to the tennis court, where the great players played (1).
(1) “The weather was so bad in the afternoon that we could not go chasing the deer. So we only went to the game of jeu de paume, where a game between the Jourdain brothers and le Page, Clerget [sic] and Cerveaux against them, gave a lot of pleasure.” (Mercure of October, p. 297)
The great journalistic tradition of mis-spelling names goes back at least to the 17th century
Eagle-eyed lovers of tennis might have noticed that the account suggests that the exhibition match might have been three-a-side, or possibly three-against-two. Accounts from the 17th and 18th century, such as they are, suggest that such matches were quite common at that time – possibly even the norm for exhibition matches.
What Do We Know About The Initial Tennis Champion, Clergé The Younger?
The first thing to say is that there must have been an elder and younger Clergé, despite some histories suggesting that the Clergé referred to by Dangeau in 1687 and the Clergé referred to by Manévieux as being pre-eminent for some years from c1740 might have been one and the same person.
Even those of us who marvelled at the skills displayed at Lord’s, until recently, by nonagenarians Robin Simpson and the late Major Jan Barnes, would admit that the giddy heights of skill described by Manévieux are probably only at their peak for a decade or two or (at a push) three.
possibly a son, or grandson, of a player of the same name, mentioned above [by Dangeau]
…while in Real Tennis Today and Yesterday, John Shneerson is more resolute:
probably the grandson of the Clergé who played in front of Louis XIV.
I agree. The tennis business tended to be a family business, in those days to an even greater extent than it is today. Assuming our c1740 champion Clergé was the grandson of the Louis XIV petitioning and performing Clergé, it is probable that the father was also “in the business”.
In truth, we know almost nothing about the early life of the younger Clergé.
The Master Paumiers who acquired, over the past thirty or forty years, a certain strong reputation, were Messrs Clergé, Farolais (the father), La Fosse, Barcelon (the father) & Barneon. Mr Clergé was the most extolled by the strength of his first stroke, which he executed perfectly. He was the man who played the doubles game best, taking only the shots he had to, according to the rules, bolstering & warning his second, strong or weak, to take the ball. Very different from other players, who tend to make their second useless, by hogging the whole game.
When Clergé had taken the serve [hazard end], he advanced to the last [winning] gallery, appearing to defend the galleries with volleys from boasts, cross-court forces and shots off the tambour, warning his second to play the others. On the service side, he would take his place in the line of four tiles [around chase one-and-two] near the [dedans] post, where he volleyed forehand or backhand the forces or boasts off the main wall. He preferred to allow the ball to land a chase than to move from this position & let his second play all the other shots.
Nobody, in a word, was nor will be held in higher regard, not only for the strength of his game, but also for the strength of his character – Mr Clergé was a totally honest paumier. There was no deceit to his game nor did he succumb to the commercial interests that sooner or later tend to prejudice the professional player; he never played for money.
It really does sound as though he was a great bloke, Clergé, as well as a great player.
We think we know just a little more about his later life.
Between those two notable/notarised events, we find our hero assisting Louis Joseph, Prince of Condé in putting the finishing touches on his jeu de paume court at Chantilly, in 1756/1757.
It was Clergé who put the finishing touches on that Chantilly jeu de paume and who also acted as paumier to Louis Joseph, Prince of Condé for some while after that:
It is to Henri-René Clergé du Gillon, master paumier, that we entrust the regulatory finish of the room, to namely “the black painting of the Jeu de Paume three separate times”. Finally, we equip the room with nets and we buy different “utensils” needed for the game for nearly 1,500 pounds.
By that time, Guillaume Barcellon had been appointed paumier to King Louis XV, in 1753. Modern historians suggest that Clergé’s supremacy as a player had probably waned by then and that Barcellon was the champion player for a dozen or so years.
We also know, based on an undated mention in Manévieux, that Antoine-Henri Masson at one time (probably after 1765, once his supremacy had been established) challenged and defeated Clergé and Charrier, having given them half-fifteen in handicap.
La Taille et La Taille the younger, Bunelle, Clergé, Farolet, Masson, Charrier and Barcellon
But, when Manévieux lists paumiers and their courts at the end of his 1783 treatise, the name Clergé is absent. Possibly he had retired, possibly he had died between 1775 and 1783.
There might now be enough evidence gathered in one place (I’m pretty sure this article is more comprehensive than anything previously published about Clergé) to enable a keen historian to dig deeper and uncover more.
Picture This: Henri-René Clergé du Gillon, aka “Clergé The Younger”
I mentioned earlier that it seems such a shame that we have no portrait of the first champion of tennis, the first sport to establish a continuous world championship.
We have images of Barcellon and Masson, who followed soon after Clergé The Younger, but none of our hero. Perhaps he eschewed pictorial publicity as well as pay for play.
So I decided to commission a fine artist – the only amateur fine artist I had to hand at that moment – to create an artist’s impression of what Clergé The Younger might have looked like.
“Nobody was nor will be held in higher regard, not only for the strength of his game, but also for the strength of his character ”
There you have it – Clergé The Younger – he looks and sounds like such a fine chap.
Acknowledgements
With grateful thanks to the many encouraging and helpful people whose comments and ideas have shaped and are shaping my scribblings on tennis history. In particular thanks to Thierry Bernard-Tambour for additions and corrections (currently in process).
In a month during which almost everything was cancelled, apart from work, charity, exercise and political shenanigans…
…the adverb colander has literally (did you see what I did there?) helped to keep me sane. This relative sanity, despite the fact that the adverb colander is one of Rohan Candappa’s crazy ideas.
Last year, Rohan wrote and narrow-casted (within our little ThreadMash writing community) an adverb-inspired vignette each day during advent, having asked the ThreadMash community to send in three adverbs each. Rohan would draw that day’s adverb from the colander depicted above.
This year, Rohan again asked us all to chime in with adverbs, but this time the colander randomly allocated out those pesky modifiers for all of us to have a go…or two…or three.
I offered up:
Undeniably, Infrequently & Tediously.
The colander responded with the following adverbs for my inspiration:
I don’t much like soccer football. I’m certainly not one to be deeply affected by a football match. But one match is deeply embedded in my psyche. The Republic of Ireland v Albania in May 1992.
Bobbie and I went to Ireland for a week at that time. My first proper break since my back injury two years earlier and my first ever visit to Ireland. I didn’t take a camera and I didn’t take a notebook, making it the least documented trip I have ever taken abroad.
That football match between Ireland and Albania dominates my memory for two reasons.
Firstly, I remember that, in the build up to the match, the Irish media was full of news about the visiting Albanian team. Initially RTÉ news worried, on behalf of the visitors, because the weather was unseasonably cold in Ireland and the visitors reported an insufficiency of warm clothing. Two days later, RTÉ news appealed to the people of Ireland, asking them to stop sending jumpers, cardigans and the like to the Albanian team’s hotel, because the visitors were now inundated with warm clothing.
A deeply charitable nation, the Irish.
Also a nation deeply passionate about their sports teams.
The Republic of Ireland had done unexpectedly well in the 1990 Football World Cup. This May 1992 match was at the start of the qualification campaign for the next World Cup.
By the time the night of the match arrived, Bobbie and I had moved on from Dublin to Cork. Bobbie is a keen football fan whose dad was Irish. We resolved to watch the match in a suitable-looking pub near our hotel.
As usual in Irish pubs, Bobbie and I were warmly received as guests.
There was much genial chatter about the warm clothing news items. The vibe was also charged with keen expectation. The throng expected their now-successful Ireland team to win a qualification match against Albania.
At half time and beyond, with the score still at 0-0, the atmosphere in the pub became tense. Bobbie whispered to me that we should make a hasty exit if the match failed to go Ireland’s way.
Mercifully, Ireland scored a couple of goals in the last half-hour of the game, turning the mood into a memorably shebeen-like party, with plenty of drinking, singing and dancing, until late into the night.
Rigorously Draft v1.0
Not SARS-CoV – other coronaviruses are available…
Sally was super proud of her efforts over the past few months. The Advercol plc Covid Protocol Guide: DRAFT v1.0. Fifty carefully crafted pages, cross-tabulated with government guidelines, referencing journal articles on Covid protocol best practice and in-depth consultations with diverse Advercol stakeholders.
Last Friday, Sally had finally submitted the fruits of her labours for internal review to her boss, Jonathan, The Human Resources & Organisational Development Director.
Around 11:00 on Monday, Sally received a meeting request for a Zoom with Jonathan to discuss the Draft Guide. A 15-minute slot on Thursday afternoon at 16:45. Jonathan must be pleased with her work, otherwise he would have scheduled a longer session to go through the document with her in detail. Sally clicked the accept button with a satisfied grin on her face.
Over the ensuing days, Sally imagined the reaction her diligence might have engendered. A nomination for a National HR Award, perhaps. Her work would fit well in the HR Innovation category and/or possibly Health & Wellbeing. A Best In Show award, even, would not be beyond the bounds of possibility.
Yes, this Covid Guide assignment might well turn out to be career-defining for Sally. It had required attention to detail and boy had she deployed her trademark rigor. No wonder Jonathan had chosen her ahead of “Sloppy Simon” for the task. Simon had acquired his unfortunate epithet before lockdown, when Jonathan had described Simon’s attempt at a revised Diversity and Inclusion Policy as “sloppy”, in front of the whole team. Poor Simon.
Thursday afternoon couldn’t come soon enough for Sally. She clicked the link as soon as the clock on her computer clicked from 16:44 to 16:45. It seemed to take an age for Jonathan to arrive, just after 16:51.
“Afternoon, Sally”, said Jonathan. “Let’s try and keep this brief. I need to take the kids to their after-school activities at five. OK? Great. Covid Guide. You’ve clearly put a lot of effort into this.”
“Thanks, Jonathan”, interjected Sally, “I’m glad you noticed”.
“Yes. Right. Thing is, Sally…”, Jonathan continued, “this Covid rules business is a bit of a moving target, don’t you think? I mean, the government changes tack more often than most people change their undies…”
“…indeed, Jonathan”, said Sally, “that’s why I have written protocols to cover so many eventualities…”
“…so we don’t want to over-complicate matters ourselves, do we, with too many in-house rules and stuff?”, continued Jonathan. “We could do with something a little more high-level and generic, don’t you think?”
“…umm, well, I thought…”
“…yes, indeed. So I have asked Simon to come up with a couple of pages. Quick and dirty. That should do us for now. This more detailed material might come in handy later, if or when this whole Covid thing ever settles down. OK? Oh, and Sally – let’s have a little chat about time management and proportionate effort at your next appraisal. OK?”
“I’m leaving you”, said Emily. “It’s the final straw. Everything I do, you criticise and redo nerdily.”
Stuart was taken aback. “But all I did was rewrite the shopping list in logical, aisle-by-aisle, item-by-item sequence. That’s basic logistics. It saves loads of time at the supermarket. Who wants to trudge back and forth in that crummy place, wasting valuable time?”
“I do”, Emily yelled. “I want to wander aimlessly around the aisles if I choose to do so. Sometimes, I want to spot and buy goods serendipitously. I want to live – I want to be free”.
There was a long silence. Emily looking for signs of reaction on Stuart’s face. Stuart studiously avoiding Emily’s glare.
“Get real”, said Stuart. “Anyway, there’s no such word as nerdily”.
Emily jolted, then asked, “how the hell do you work that out?”
Stuart explained. “Nerdily is not in the Microsoft spellcheck and, more importantly, it’s not in the Scrabble dictionary. No. Such. Word. As. Nerdily.”
“Be that as it may, Stuart”, said Emily, “but everything you say and do, you say and do nerdily”.
“What If this Adverb Colander Thing Goes Viral?” I Hear Many Readers Ask
We’ll need a bigger colander…
…like this FoodCycle one which Janie and I helped rescue from the Greenhouse Centre kitchen – but that’s another story:
A few weeks ago, I played an especially close and exciting real tennis tournament match at Lord’s, emerging victorious – in straight sets but by the narrowest of margins in each set.
Exhausted but happy, I stopped at Porchester Waitrose on my way home, to pick up bread and other comestibles for my supper.
But I discovered the in-house bakery covered in tarpaulin, with signs reading, “No Entry” and “Due to a leak in our ceiling we have had to close down this area…”
Opposite the bakery were mostly bare shelves, where normally the bread would be. But one shelf was fully stocked, bulging with packs of brioche loaves and brioche rolls.
“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”, I said to myself. In the circumstances; who wouldn’t?
The English expression. “let them eat cake” is, in fact, a loose translation of the phrase, “qu’ils mangent de la brioche”.
I don’t like the loose, English translation. Brioche is, in my opinion, a rich form of bread. Classified as viennoiserie, brioche is almost pastry, but not a piece of cake.
Bread, pastry, biscuit, cake; these distinctions might seem trivial or inconsequential. Yet, in the early 1990s case of McVities v HMRC, the very VAT status of Jaffa Cakes hinged on whether that particular delicacy should be defined as a cake (zero-rated) or a chocolate-covered biscuit (standard rated). The tribunal ruled that the product had nine characteristics, some cake, some biscuit, but on balance determined it to be a cake.
Two hundred years earlier, Marie Antoinette’s place in history was determined, formally, at the hands of the French Revolutionary Tribunal. Unfortunately for Marie Antoinette, her informal reputation is entwined with the phrase “let them eat cake” or “qu’ils mangent de la brioche”, despite the fact that there is no evidence that she ever used the phrase and a great deal of evidence that she couldn’t possibly have originated it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau coined the phrase in his Confessions, attributing the anecdote to an unnamed “great princess”. Rousseau wrote Confessions between 1765 and 1769, when Marie Antoinette was still a nipper and before she had ever been to France.
Rousseau might even have made up the anecdote. Another possibility is that the anecdote originated with Marie Theresa of Spain, about 100 years earlier.
Marie Theresa was consort to Louis XIV, The Sun King, during an extremely lavish era – when Versailles was transformed from a hunting lodge into the opulent palace we now associate with Versailles.
Marie Theresa died in 1683, before the Versailles tennis court was completed, but her son, Louis, The Grand Dauphin, played an inaugural game on that court in 1686.
Roll the clock forward a hundred years again, to 1789. The Versailles tennis court played a crucial role in the French Revolution. In June 1789, the Third Estate or National Assembly of commoners, found themselves locked out of the chamber by order of the King.
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, suggested that they congregate instead in the nearby Royal Tennis Court of Versailles, where they swore a collective oath, similar in style to the US Declaration of Independence, “not to separate, and to reassemble wherever circumstances require, until the constitution of the kingdom is established”. 576 of the 577 members of the assembly took the oath.
The Tennis Court Oath was a seminal moment in the progress of the French Revolution. Ironically, though, the tennis court oath neither benefitted the reputation of tennis nor that of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin.
Jeu de paume, as the French call real tennis, virtually died out in France in the aftermath of the French revolution. In tennis’s 17th and 18th century heyday, there were hundreds of courts in Paris alone.
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was a doctor who opposed capital punishment. He advocated the use of a quick, painless blade mechanism, but only in preference to the more torturous methods of execution commonly used. It was much to the doctor’s chagrin that the deadly mechanism acquired his name. There is an urban myth that Dr Guillotin was himself thus decapitated during the reign of terror. It is true that A Dr Guillotin met that fate, but not Dr Joseph-Ignance Guillotin, who was imprisoned, but survived the reign of terror by the skin of his teeth.
I mused on all these matters that evening, a few weeks ago, while munching my brioche and reflecting on winning a tennis match by the skin of my teeth.
The oath I had heard on the tennis court that evening was the single expletive, “shit”, used by my opponent so many times, he got a warning from the marker (umpire). I wondered how many of the 576 subscribers to the original Tennis Court Oath were reduced to such lesser, expletive oaths, soon after their revolutionary gesture.
Changing the social order, like brioche, is not a piece a cake.
My Grandma Anne died 40 years ago, just shy of 90. If you went to central casting to get a balabusta/babushka for the role of family matriarch…
…with her shock of jet black hair, presumably from a bottle for most of her life, plus her heavily-Russian-accented voice…
…Grandma Anne Harris would have fitted the bill perfectly.
Grandma’s outstanding involuntary comedy moment was in 1972, when she solemnly announced, as we drove on a family outing, away from Streatham, along Bedford Hill, that I shouldn’t play on the common any more, as bad things happen to people who go there. Someone had cursed the place. It took us a while to work out that she had heard a radio programme, not about Tooting Common, but about Tutankhamun, which was all the rage in London that year.
By 1981, Grandma Anne was in and out of hospital all too regularly. Her age had never previously been a topic of discussion. But my mum was concerned that every time Grandma was taken into hospital, the age she stated on admission was going down. 87…86…82…
…on what turned out to be her last admission to hospital, mum went ballistic when she first looked at Grandma’s notes.
“Look at this”, hissed mum to me, “72-dash-80-plus-question-mark. I’m going to get this put right straight away”. Mum was a numbers person and as far as she was concerned you don’t mess with numbers.
Don’t mess with numbers
A senior nurse assured mum that the hospital team was fully aware that Grandma Anne was in her late 80s, pushing 90, and that she was receiving appropriate care…
…which might well have been true, but sadly, Grandma Anne died in that hospital bed.
————————————————————–
Roll the clock forward 30 years. My mother was just shy of 90. Unfortunately mum’s grasp on numbers and much else was all mixed up by then. The onset of dementia, which had been gradual for some time, kicked in and kicked on in a rush. Three months before her 90th, my mum went into Nightingale; the care home at which she had volunteered for many decades.
Janie and I made a big fuss for mum’s 90th birthday, inviting mum and the family over for an afternoon party at our house.
Mum, Angela, Janie and Me
Mum liked being the centre of attention and over the ensuing weeks talked a great deal about her big birthday event with her friends at Nightingale.
But mum became convinced that the birthday had been her hundredth, not her ninetieth.
On one occasion when mum was talking to me about her 100th party, I challenged her.
“You are 90, mum, not 100”.
“I’m 100. And I’m your mother. Don’t argue with your mother.”
On another occasion, after I’d taken mum back to her room, I was accosted by a brace of her friends.
“Your mum is driving us all mad. She keeps telling everyone that she is 100. There are quite a few people around here who really are 100. It’s not right. She’s just turned 90, hasn’t she?”
“What do you want me to do about it?” I asked.
“Tell her”.
“I’ve told her…and she’s told me not to argue with my mother”.
“It’s wrong. Sort it out.” The Nightingale Mafia had spoken.
Mum in her role as Nightingale poster child
I discussed the problem with one of the senior care nurses, who patiently explained to me that people with dementia have their own subjective reality which might differ from our own reality and from objective reality. It’s better to join the loved one in their subjective realities rather than challenge them with our own realities.
This seemed a compelling and compassionate argument…
…until I thought about it a bit more and said…
…“I can roll with that…sort of…but what about mum’s friends’ realities. They want me to stop mum driving them potty with her nonsense about being 100. How do I deal kindly with those conflicting realities?”
After a momentary pause, the nurse said, “welcome to our world”, with just a modicum of compassion.
————————————–
Having reflected for the first time on these experiences jointly, my thoughts, like the age claims of both ancestors, are all mixed up.
The family legend about Grandma Anne was that her declining age claims were born of vanity and an unwillingness to accept her antiquity.
But possibly dementia had started to take its toll on Grandma at that age. In her own, disoriented way, grandma was subtracting 18 from her age; while mum added 10 in her confusion.
Should we have accepted Grandma Anne’s subjective reality that she was 72? Might that last hospital stay have gone better had everyone treated her as if she were a 72 year old, rather than a 90 year old? It couldn’t have gone much worse; Grandma Anne came out of hospital that time in a box.
Since the one explained/depicted above, ThreadMash has been ThreadZoomMash; a virtual story writing and telling club.
We had seven stories and one apology (from Terry), the latter being so detailed and heartfelt, Kay read the apology at the start of the evening. It was, in its own way, a ThreadMash story.
Jill’s story was really a piece of philosophical musing about technology, moral dilemmas, decision making with and without machines, governance, government…it was truly mind-blowing. I do hope Jill will allow us to publish her piece more widely soon. If/when she does, I’ll add a link here.
Then my story, echoing the moral dilemmas but not the technology.
Rohan’s piece also seemed to echo at least one of my themes; his distinct yet overlapping stories possibly being multiple realities about the same staircase.
After a short break, Ian T’s moving piece about an ill-fated meal of spaghetti bolognaise with his dad and (yet another strange echo) a central theme of parental dementia.
It really is quite extraordinary how such a simple, three word title, “All Mixed Up” with no further guidance from Kay, led to so many overlapping themes. This does tend to happen at ThreadMash and I find that aspect of the overlap fascinating.
Geraldine read us some fragmentary musings, which are on their way to being a set of elegiac meditations on her experiences during the pandemic.
Kay instead reminisced about her time in New York in the late 1980s. Part confessional…
…we learnt that it was Kay who has denied us UK citizens the Marathon Bar, helping rebrand that Mars product as Snickers. Kay is also to blame for M&Ms in the UK, apparently – I shall find forgiveness for Kay in my heart eventually – but not yet…
…partly an ode to Dorothy Parker and partly Kay’s own poetic efforts from that time.
Last but not least was David Wellbrook’s sprawling sequel to his previous post-modern story about a chancer named Myrtle (or is she named Candice?) about whom David is writing rather sordid stories…or is she writing David instead? We met some new characters this time, including Lady Kumquat, the infeasibly young wife of an elderly Knight of the Realm. We were also introduced to an infeasibly hilly part of Norfolk named Bishop’s Knuckle.
There was plenty of time for discussion of our various pieces and general chat too.
As always it was a superb evening. Whether virtual or face-to-face I always get a boost from these ThreadMash events.
And finally…
…just in case the trusty WordPress engine fails to connect my “forty years on” diary piece about Grandma Anne’s last few days and the aftermath of her demise, here and below is a link to that piece.
Not much else to say, really, other than the fact that the rain that we dodged resulted in flash flooding and all sorts in West London, so I think we did the right thing to abandon the ground when we did.
After the “no spectators at all” season of 2020, I was among the first to see live test cricket in England in 2021.
Despite the first test being at my home ground of Lord’s, ahead of the day I felt strange…almost anxious…about spectating under the Covid pandemic protocols.
The first Lord’s test was designated to be MCC members only, with only about 25% of the ground occupied.
The regular Lord’s thing is for members to have a “licence to rove” with other members and friends throughout the members’ areas. This year we had to apply for and then choose a socially-distanced seat, anywhere around the ground, some weeks in advance of the match.
Thus I imagined that the experience, for me, might be more akin to many of my visits for county championship matches. I quite often choose to venture alone, with a pile of reading and modest snack-picnic, choosing to sit in a less-popular corner of the ground.
I promised King Cricket (KC) that I would write up the experience for his site.
While King Cricket match reports on professional matches mustn’t mention the cricket itself, Ogblog has no such rules.
Frankly, there was not much to report on the cricket. England bowled pretty well, yielding only 250-odd runs but only taking three wickets.
The vibe where I was sitting, in the Mound Stand, is described in the above linked piece.
The ground was zoned. Not only were we only permitted to sit in our allocated (socially-distanced) seat, we were only permitted to wander within our chosen zone.
I was in Zone C for Day One.
I wandered along to “Checkpoint Charlie” underneath the Media Centre, between Zone C & Zone B. I usually chat with a friendly regular steward, Rob, there. There he was, in Zone B. I waved at him.
I fully expected Rob to shrug and for me to tell him that I planned to join him in Zone B on Friday. But no. Rob crossed the barricades, did that elbow thing that has replaced handshakes and we had a chat, more or less as normal, just socially-distanced.
Day Two: Thursday 3 June 2021
The Stewards tried, with limited success, to use barriers to stream pedestrians back and forth. The barriers didn’t work very well, but the limited numbers of pedestrians ensured that there were no log-jams.
Here is a link to my King Cricket scribblings on the matter of Day Two in the Allen Stand:
Suffice it to say for now that I spent the day in the Allen Stand, just beside the Allen Stand Gap, whence the headline photo and the above picture of the Compton, Edrich & Media Centre were taken.
The Allen Stand, close to the holy-of-holies (The Pavilion) was, naturally, in Zone A.
This picture is taken from the “Checkpoint Charlie” between Zones A & C.
I finished reading The Great Romantic – a book about Nevil Cardus by Duncan Hamilton, which I reviewed for King Cricket:
The cricket on Day Two was excellent. England fought back well to limit the further damage to only 130 or so runs. Then, after losing two early wickets, batted without further damage until stumps.
I eagerly anticipated Day Three, which I had chosen to spend in The Warner Stand, which would have completed my experience of the trilogy of Zones in Zone B.
Day Three: Friday 4 June 2021
But you know what they say about plans.
Sometimes no amount of planning can save you from the inevitable
The weather forecast earlier in the week had predicted fair weather for the whole match – perhaps a slightly cloudier day on the Friday.
What happened instead was rain.
All day.
I did other things instead…and to some extent did the things I had intended to do at the cricket elsewhere instead.
King Cricket might or might not chose to publish my account of Day Three. One way or another, though, I’ll self-publish or link to that account in the fulness of time.
I witnessed Devon Conway score a test century (indeed, in his case, a double-century) on debut at Lord’s. He is only the sixth batsman in history to achieve that feat.
Apart from Harry Graham, who was the first to achieve that rare feat in 1893, I have seen, live at Lord’s, all the other people who achieved it:
John Hampshire (I met him a few times, including at Lord’s but never saw him play live)
Sourav Ganguly (I saw him play at Lord’s on the following India tour, in 2002)
Andrew Strauss (I was at his debut test the day after that innings, having seen him achieve the century on TV)
Matt Prior (I actually witnessed that debut innings).
Conclusion
Just look what it means to him…
It really was wonderful to see live cricket again. What more can I say?
Rohan Candappa’s brief, for the May 2021 ThreadMash event, was as follows:
All being good, lockdown is scheduled to loosen its collar on Monday 17 May…
…I’m suggesting a theme that encourages us to reclaim some of the things that have been appropriated over the last year and a bit. Things like words. So I’d like you all to recover, repurpose and re-imagine the following words via the stories you write and share:
Rohan says, “never explain” and I have in part explained. Let’s allow my story to tell it’s own tale from here.
HANDS
I have two cack-hands.
Kind people, on observing that I play tennis off both arms, describe me as ambidextrous. But the word “dextrous” should not be used to describe me.
The truth is, I am ambi-cack-handed; neither dextrous with my right nor with my left hand.
For most purposes where only one hand is involved, I use my right hand. Writing and drawing for example. But I do those things cack-handedly. Computers have saved me from a teacher-predicted lifetime of illegible handwriting misery.
I have always brushed my teeth with my left hand. Some experts suggest this means that I am a natural leftie who mistakenly adopted right-handedness for most tasks. But concerted attempts to use my left hand as a child was a bigger disaster than my using the right hand…apart from the left-handed tooth-brushing.
Then along came the need to shave.
FACE
In the late 1970s, an American entrepreneur named Victor Kermit Kiam The Second announced that he was so impressed with the Remington electric shaver his wife bought him as a gift, he henceforward would eschew the use of the wet shavers he had used throughout his life and…
…get this…
…Victor Kiam bought the company that made Remington shavers.
My dad was way ahead of Victor Kiam in switching from blades to Remington electric shavers; by the late 1970s, dad had several of them. Two at the house, plus one at the shop, where dad’s routine required a five-o’clock shave, removing shadow ahead of late afternoon customers (or mostly lack thereof, by the late 1970s). Dad was not ahead of Victor Kiam in the matter of entrepreneurship.
In my early days shaving, I used dad’s spare Remington at home to remove the odd visible patch of dark fluff from my face.
When I set off for Keele University in autumn 1980, dad lent me that spare Remington, plus lotion bottles (pre shave and after shave) plus an old spare illuminated art-deco-style shaving mirror. The makeshift electrical wiring and plugs for that paraphernalia looked like a physics experiment.
But whereas prior to Keele, my facial hair only became visible once every few days, I soon started to notice daily patches of hair and started to shave regularly.
Increased Remington use combined badly with regular intake of beer, cigarettes and the rest. My face and neck became sore losers of facial hair; itchiness and blotchiness abounded.
For my second term at Keele, Dad switched my loan from the old Remington to a more modern foil-headed electric shaver…
…but the skin irritation persisted; possibly it even got worse.
Thus, over Easter 1981, contra-Kiam as it were, dad and I agreed that I would switch from electric to wet shaving. Dad rebundled my loan, replacing the Remington with the Rolls Razor he had used as a young soldier during the war.
This contraption, which they stopped making before I was born, was a metal box containing a strop and a re-useable safety razor. You would sharpen the blade on the strop, then detach the razor for your wet shave. Eventually you would change the blade, which, if memory serves me well, required a screwdriver and a fair bit of dexterity.
The other thing that needed dexterity was the safe use of such a safety razor.
We could not buy the company that had made Rolls Razor – it had gone bust by then – but we should have invested in the makers of styptic pencils and sticking plasters.
I recall seeing several horror films towards the end of my first year at Keele; The Amityville Horror and The Shining spring to mind, so I had plenty of suitable similes to describe the bloody bathroom scenes of my early Rolls-Razor efforts. I did eventually get the hang of it and wet-shaved for the next 25 years. Left-handed.
SPACE
But why did a long-haired ha’porth of a student, with two cack hands and a skin-sensitive face even bother with shaving?
The answer lies not in the facial hair itself, but in the space between the patches of facial hair.
It was OK for the youngsters who were blessed with a full growth of facial hair at the age of 18. Simon Jacobs, for example, had five-o’clock shadow from the start at Keele. But most of us looked ridiculous with sparse facial hair.
I recall Richard Van Baaren naming our Lindsay F-Block corridor’s five-a-side football team ‘Tempted ‘Tache, in honour of fellow undergraduate males’s failed attempts at moustaches. No, I didn’t play for that team; I have two left feet as well as two cack-hands.
Inadequate facial hair was like a flashing neon sign saying JUVENILE…BOY…NOT YET A MAN. That tell-tale wispy, fluffy face space had to go, even if the result was bloody carnage, born of cack-hands.
Oliver Wise called me out of the blue in March and asked me if I would be prepared to do something similar to the Gresham Society talk as part of a series of on-line events that his club, Boodle’s, has been holding during lockdown.
How could I possibly say no to Oliver? He probably doesn’t even remember it, but he gave me a great deal of encouragement when I started playing real tennis at Lord’s. I’m sure he does that with everyone; his view is that the handicapping system allows newbies and duffers to play with advanced players, so all should be encouraged to participate.
Anyway, I said yes to the Boodle’s on-line talk/discussion and we agreed a storyboard or semi-script with pictures and video clips that went roughly like this.
Playing The Odds: The Storyboard
Oliver: Can you briefly explain how real tennis differs from its offshoot, lawn tennis?
I’d like to answer that question in two respects – in terms of the history of the games and the nature of the games themselves.
Lawn tennis emerged in the mid to late 19th century, following the invention of vulcanised rubber. So when Boodle’s was founded, in 1762, the term “tennis” would refer to the game we now call “real tennis”. Indeed, the use of the single word “tennis” to refer normally to lawn tennis rather than real tennis dates from the early 20th century.
Real tennis is a rich and complex game played, mostly in indoor courts with gallery openings, penthouse roofs, targets and hazards, as well as the central feature of a net, shared between both real and lawn tennis. In France, real tennis is called “jeu de paume”, or “palm game”, which provides some insight into the game’s emergence by the 12th century in France…
…at least that’s when the earliest records emerge. The game was played with the hand. This stunning late 13th century picture from the Cambrai Book Of Hours shows a monk instructing his pupils in the game.
I love this picture; one of the oldest if not the oldest image of real tennis action. The master is unquestionably wearing gloves; the pupils also, perhaps.
You might have noticed that the pupils are learning to play with their left hands – both hands will have been used until the notion of a racket emerged, at which point one-handed forehand and backhand play will also have evolved. The switch from hand play to racket play probably started around the advent of the Renaissance and was all-but complete by the end of the Tudor period.
Just a few comments about the game at this stage; we’ll explore more as we go along in our discussion. The racket and balls for real tennis differ significantly from those used for lawn tennis. The racket is significantly smaller and irregularly shaped; some say the shape is an enlarged palm, others simply that the asymmetric shape assists shots that need to be taken near to the side walls and the nicks. The racket is highly strung; in my case much like its user. The balls look superficially like modern tennis balls, but they are hard items made from a cork core (in medieval times human hair was bound as the core), webbing and a covering of wool felt, hand-made, only approximately regular in shape.
The court is even more asymmetric than the implements. Serving is only done from one end – the bottom end as depicted. The receiving end is known as the hazard end.
The ball is hit back and forth across the net and must be sent back over the net on the volley or after the first bounce. But only a few designated areas of the court are places where a shot might win the point outright, although there is a better opportunity for the server than for the receiver to hit an outright winning shot. Only one gallery opening on each side is a winning target; all of the other gallery openings lead to chases, as does all of the floor at the service end and half the floor at the hazard end. In real tennis, the second bounce does not normally determine that the point has been won, but that a chase has been laid.
[Explain one or two chases using the mouse pointer on the picture]
After one or two chases are laid (depending on the score), the players change ends and the serve therefore switches from one player to the other. The player who has laid each chase then needs to defend their territory – i.e. ensure that their opponent lands a second bounce further away from the rear wall than the chase they laid. The winner of the chase scores the point for that chase.
Apart from the matter of chases, the scoring system for real tennis will be familiar to lawn tennis people. 15-30-40-game. Normally six games to win a set.
Here is a CCTV clip from Lord’s, in which the service has just changed ends after the setting of two chases. Mr Snitcher, now serving, is trying to defend the five yard line for the first chase and the three yard line for the second chase. The score is 30-30 and I am leading by 5 games to four. Oliver Wise will pick up the commentary:
Oliver: (after explaining the two chases that determine the set). Would you please tell us a little about some of the colourful characters from the history of the game.
Ah, that’s one of my favourite topics.
There is documentary evidence of tennis as a royal pursuit from the early 14th century. Tennis’s first “star”, for all the wrong reasons, was Louis X of France, known as Louis The Quarrelsome.
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.
That event also initiated a long and rather sordid tradition of monarchs or heirs to the throne dying in unusual circumstances with tennis standing accused of being central to their demise. We could have an entire talk on real tennis horrible histories if you fancy…no, thought not. But one such demise is relevant to Boodle’s and its links with tennis from Boodle’s earliest days. Frederick Prince of Wales died in 1751, purportedly from a lung injury sustained on the real tennis court some three years prior to his death. Horace Walpole said so and this is the received wisdom handed down from those Georgian times. Presumably there was a well-recorded incident in which the Prince was injured by “wearing one in the chest”. We’ve all occasionally sustained such bruises. Modern historians and doctors think it unlikely that a chest injury sustained three years earlier would cause such a death. More likely it was a pulmonary embolism. But the hard ball sports of cricket and tennis, which Frederick had loved and patronised, took a reputational hit in England for the rest of the Georgian era, reviving as the Victorian era evolved.
So, at the time that Boodle’s was formed in 1762, there was really only one public court of note in the whole of London; The James Street Court near the Haymarket; a short, pleasant walk away from Boodle’s. It was sometimes referred to as The King’s Court as Frederick Prince of Wales was said to frequent the place. He had a reputation for enjoying sport and gambling. At that time, public tennis courts were in part for gaming or gambling as well as for playing the sport.
It is unsurprising that many of the gentlemen who founded Boodle’s, with their love of gaming and sports, were tennis enthusiasts.
Charles James Fox was an early noteworthy…some might say notorious, member of Boodle’s. He was leader of the House of Commons and Foreign Secretary multiple times in the Georgian era. Fox was an inveterate gambler, womaniser and lover of things and fashions foreign. The Conservative historian, Lord Lexden, has compared Fox’s manner with that of the current Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. Fox was also, according to the Georgian equivalent of the tabloids, a keen tennis player.
Here is a quote from the Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, Wednesday, July 2, 1777:
“Charles Fox is become conspicuous at the tennis court. When he leaves off play, being generally in a violent perspiration, he wraps himself up in a loose fur coat, and in this garb, is conveyed to his lodgings.”
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington was a more conservative character than Fox, both politically and behaviourally. Wellington was another notable member of Boodle’s and another Boodle’s member whose tennis exploits found their way into the papers. Wellington built a tennis court at Stratfield Saye. He even played a few sets there with Prince Albert when the Royal couple visited in 1845. The Illustrated London News reported that:
“we noticed this recreative adjunct to the mansion of Stratfield Saye when chronicling the Royal visit last week, when his Royal Highness Prince Albert enjoyed this olden game”.
But The History of Stratfield Saye does not record the Duke of Wellington as the star tennis player of that court. That history reports that Wellington’s…
“butler, Phillips, became one of the finest players in England of his day, successively beating all the best French players with whom he contended”.
Some years earlier, in 1820, when Robert Lukin turned the James Street Court into a tennis club, Lukin wrote to Wellington inviting him to become a member of the new Club, enclosing a list of the members who had already subscribed; Wellington graciously accepted the invitation. It would be fascinating to compare that 1820 founding members list from The James Street Court Club with the 1820 members list of Boodle’s, to see how much the membership overlapped. I’d guess quite a bit.
Oliver: One of the things I have always loved about the game is the use of a handicapping or odds system. Does the use of handicapping have ancient roots?
Unquestionably so, Oliver. We have written records of the use of handicapping as far back as the Renaissance.
There is no coincidence in the fact that the terms odds and handicap both originate from gambling. From the very dawn of civilisation there is evidence that people have liked to gamble on games of skill as well as on games of chance. We have certain, documented evidence from the middle ages onwards of noblemen and gentlemen gambling on tennis.
The fellow depicted, Philip the Bold of Burgundy, is one of my favourite colourful characters from the history of tennis. Here is a story about him, from an 1801 English book about sports and pastimes:
“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.”
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 15th Century Burgundian school of music. Tennis, wine & music – Philip was my kinda guy…and might I hazard to suggest, also a Boodle’s kinda guy?
Coincidentally, the earliest written reference to handicapping I can find is from a 1506 account of a “visit” to Henry VII at Windsor by Philip The Handsome, a subsequent Duke of Burgundy and also King of Castile. I say “visit” in inverted commas because it seems that the Castilian Royal couple were shipwrecked off the coast of England and Henry VII decided that they should remain in England until they signed a trade deal between Castile and England. There might be a Brexit technique lesson in this sorry tale, but let’s focus on the tennis aspect. I shall read the contemporary account, which is charming:
“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.
The evidence suggests that handicapping served a twin purpose: – (a) – to 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 – (b) facilitating good sport – the honour and joy of doing battle in a close competitive contest.
But by the mid to late 18th century, there had emerged a third purpose or style of handicapping which I’d like to explore with you; a form of handicapping linked with showmanship demonstrated by tennis professionals.
In The Annals of Tennis by Julian Marshall, the antics of the French star player of the mid 18th century, Monsieur Masson, are described in some detail. Here is a particularly vivid extract:
“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.”
My wife, Janie, refuses to believe this story in the absence of CCTV footage. We also know that Monsieur Masson visited England in 1767, just a few years after Boodle’s was founded. He took on and soundly thrashed the English champion of the time, Mr Tompkyns at Whitehall Hall on April 10th.
In fact tennis was enjoying somewhat of a heyday in 18th century France until the revolution came along. There were hundreds of courts in Paris and hundreds more around France. A famous moment in the French Revolution, Le Serment du Jeu de Paume (or “The Tennis Court Oath”), a gathering in a tennis court near the Palace of Versailles is depicted in this 1791 Jacques-Louis David painting. The revolution led to a dramatic decline in French tennis in the ensuing decades, only partially abated by the Bourbon Restoration that followed Napoleon’s defeats.
Which brings us neatly back to the period, about 200 years ago, when Robert Lukin turned the James Street Court into a tennis club and also produced the first English language book on tennis, c1822, A Treatise On Tennis By A Member Of The Club. In this book, the author, believed to be Lukin himself, sets out over several pages all of the different handicaps in use at the time and provides some commentary on their use and their relative betting values.
The basic unit of handicapping was the bisque, whose history is documented as early as the Renaissance and which was used in several games and sports. 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.
There are two distinct types of odds or handicaps for tennis; one being the points-based odds I have just described, the other being known as “cramped odds”, which restrict the better player in some way. Lukin’s book goes into those at some length. They mostly involve preventing the better player from making use of particular features of the court. Most of these handicaps are now obsolete or only used occasionally in fun and friendly games. “Barring The Openings”, for example, renders all of the openings, including the winning targets such as the grille, the dedans and the winning gallery, out of bounds for the better player. One interesting handicap was named “Round Service”, which required the better players serve to touch both the side and the rear penthouse to be a legitimate serve, which normally renders the serve easy to return.
To demonstrate the difference between a round service and a decent serve, I have found some very rare hand-held video of me serving to a certain Mr Wise. In the first clip, I accidentally deploy a round service, which Oliver despatches into the dedans gallery to win the point without a moment’s hesitation.
In the second clip, I produce a serve of decent length and cunning, which lead to a better outcome for my pair. Discerning viewers will notice that I was able to send my second shot to hit the tambour, which is a jutting out bit of wall on the hazard side of the court. The handicap “ban the tambour” remains in use even in the modern game for the more extreme handicaps.
In fact this might be a good moment to show some wonderful footage you pointed out to me, from the 2016 Boomerang Doubles Tournament, when the final was contested between a very uneven couple of pairs, but went right down to the wire. Would you kindly do the honours and talk us through the video sequence, Oliver?
Oliver introduced/explained and then let the clip speak for itself with the Aussie commentary. Clip runs for 2’25” from the start point of 43’35”
Oliver then explained the following highlights reel, of Rob Fahey playing Camden Riviere, which has 6’00” of sound footage but we showed just the first two minutes or so, to give people a flavour of real tennis rests at their very best]
Questions From The Audience
Questions included the following topics:
further examples of extreme handicapping, such as the exploits of Jacques-Edmond Barre, who walked from Paris to Versailles before thrashing a challenger on an extreme points handicap;
The source references for those pieces are as follows:
Tennis: A Cultural History, Heiner Gillmeister, A&C Black, 1998 or Tennis A Cultural History (Second edition), Heiner Gillmeister, Equinox Publishing Ltd, 2017
Real Tennis Today and Yesterday, John Shneerson, Ronaldson Publications, 2015
Willis Faber Book Of Tennis & Rackets, Lord Aberdare, Hutchinson, 1980
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