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AN OPEN LETTER TO THE BRITISH GAS CUSTOMER RELATIONS TEAM
2 NOVEMBER 2020
Thank you for your response to my complaint last month.
For the benefit of new readers, I complained about shortcomings in the establishment of a joint electricity and gas account which required me to spend 10 to 15 minutes unsuccessfully and eventually 45 minutes successfully waiting for my phone call to be answered. I would not have needed to phone British Gas at all, but for shortcomings in the on-line service which allowed me access to the electricity account but required me to phone to initiate the gas one.
I asked you not to blame the Covid pandemic for these shortcomings, but you spent some 35% of the words in the substantive part of your response doing just that. I did not complain about the delay in commencing the gas service, as I am aware that you were one of two suppliers involved. But you spent some 30% of the words in your substantive response implying that Opus might be to blame. (The previous supplier was Octopus).
To be clear, only British Gas is to blame for:
the fact that the on-line system worked for the electricity account on commencement but not for the gas account;
providing no means for me to initiate on-line activity for that gas account – there was simply a clear message on the screen telling me to call a particular phone number;
such dire staffing on that phone line, I waited an hour before speaking with someone.
The reason I didn’t want you to blame Covid is because I KNOW that British Gas can staff telephone lines adequately at the moment. The sales team responded to my calls very rapidly. British Gas has chosen not to staff adequately the customer services phone. I strongly suspect that the dire service level I experienced is regular fare for your poorer and more vulnerable customers, who might lack the literacy or IT skills to use the on-line systems and webchats (if/when available, which in my case, you realise, they were not).
You end the substantive part of your response with a delicious question:
“In terms of complaint resolution, other than apologies, could I ask what are you requesting?“
I find this question hard to answer. Perhaps some of my friends and contacts have ideas, which is one of the reasons I am publishing this letter openly. If I get any great ideas from my personal network, I shall pass them on to you.
But I suspect that your question is a veiled way of asking “how much compensation do you need to go away and not come back?” I shall leave the answer to that question to you. I spent an unnecessary hour just waiting for you to answer the phone and I have spent a further 90 minutes or so actually getting my problem resolved and writing to you.
At minimum wages levels that equates to £21.80. At my commercial charge out rate it equates to £1,000. Somewhere between those two figures feels right to me.
Whatever you decide to provide as compensation to Buffalo Woodfield Limited, I pledge personally to donate that sum to FoodCycle, the charity which my wife and I are supporting through the pandemic by doing food drops to the needy. My friends and contacts will eagerly await the donation figure.
I genuinely want British Gas as a supplier to look after poorer and more vulnerable customers properly. You are a large organisation which can make bigger and bolder choices than small companies like mine and individuals like me. Currently, in the matter of customer service, you are making bad customer care choices. Do better.
With best wishes
Ian Harris, Director, Buffalo Woodfield Limited. Complaint Reference number: 5022907658.
Postscript
Seventy minutes after sending the above complaint (and posting it on Facebook & Ogblog) I received correspondence offering £200 as a goodwill gesture.
Perhaps only subscribers can see the above piece but here, on fair use principles, is the sentence that made me gulp my coffee:
In that role of peacemaker, he also trekked in 2011 into the forests of Chhattisgarh to oversee the handover by Maoist rebels of five abducted policemen.
Janie and I were in Chhattisgarh in February that year. Intrigued, I Googled the incident to see if, as I suspected, it occurred when we were there and near where we were.
So, the hostages were taken on 25 January 2011 and a hostage crisis started to unfold in Narayanpur on 3 February when demands were made by the Maoists and interventions planned by Agnivesh and others.
Janie and I were due to visit Narayanpur for market day on 6 February, but our host, Jolly, assured us that it would not be a good idea to go there and said he had revised our itinerary to see equally or even more interesting tribal people and markets nearer to Bastar.
Of course, we had been warned before we travelled to Chhattisgarh that it was a politically volatile place and that our itinerary might be subject to last minute change.
But what a wonderful day we had on the back of that change.
And how extraordinary to learn, after nearly 10 years, that the reason for that change was a hostage crisis that was being resolved by one of our human rights heros in the place we were supposed to visit.
We can’t (in practical terms) travel at the moment, during the pandemic, but Janie and I were all-but transported, through time and space, back to that 2011 adventure of ours in the central plains of India. Invigorating, it was.
Bernard Rothbart (left) – with thanks to Mike Jones (right) for the image
I don’t believe in ghosts. No ifs. No buts. I don’t believe in ghosts.
By which I mean, actually, that I don’t believe in revenants; the animated corpses and undead beings that haunt the living throughout folklore.
Possibly because I don’t believe, I don’t particularly care for ghost stories.
I do, however, especially care for Ghosts, a play by Henrik Ibsen, written in 1881. I first encountered this play when studying drama at school. I thought it was a cracking read.
I subsequently had the honour and privilege to see the 1986 Young Vic production with Vanessa in the lead…
…Vanessa Redgrave, dears. In theatre circles, you merely say “Vanessa”.
More recently, in 2003, Janie and I saw the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden’s production of Ghosts directed by Ingmar Bergman, with Pernilla August in the Vanessa role; Mrs Alving.
Intriguingly, the title of the play in the original Norwegian and Danish, is Gengangere and Ibsen disliked the translation of the title as “Ghosts”. The word gengangere has the double-meaning of revenants and events that repeat themselves. Ibsen felt that the word ghosts fails to express that second meaning.
For sure the play Ghosts is about being haunted by events and the past repeating itself.
As is my story, about an event more than 40 years ago.
Many of my former schoolmates, like me, are haunted by the sudden, untimely death of Bernard Rothbart, one of our biology and chemistry teachers. He died by his own hand, at the school, in December 1979. Mr Rothbart sat in his car in the teachers’ car park and ingested potassium cyanide. He was 29 years old.
I was reminded of the event about six years ago when a fellow alum mentioned on our alumni Facebook group how much he’d been affected by the incident. It kicked off a several-hundred comment thread.
…helping me to recover the memory of my Uncle Manny’s funeral, 18 months later, at Bushey Jewish Cemetery, the same location as Mr Rothbart’s.
I had been asked…almost begged…to attend Bernard Rothbart’s funeral, as the teachers felt nervous about attending a Jewish funeral and wanted my help to explain the relevant laws and mores. I think they also felt that a Jewish pupil might help put the grieving Rothbart family a little more at ease with the Alleyn’s School contingent.
In truth I felt a bit of a fraud. I had never attended any funeral before, so it was a case of the partially blind leading the totally blind. I had to pump my parents for information ahead of the day and brief the other Alleyn’s attendees based on my folks’s briefing, rather than the direct experience I think they were hoping for.
I had also been one of Mr Rothbart’s less attentive chemistry students. I recall thinking self-centredly at the time that the sight of my utterly hopeless mock A-level exam paper might have driven poor Mr Rothbart to cyanide.
I had meant to write up that strange experience; Bernard Rothbart’s funeral, when I mentioned it in my recovered memory piece about Uncle Manny & The Hoover Factory…
…in 2017, but didn’t get around to it at that time.
A few months ago, I received a message, out of the blue, enquiring whether I had ever got around to writing up my Bernard Rothbart piece. The message came from one of the fellows who had been larking around out of bounds that day in 1979 and found Mr Rothbart in his car.
I promised that I would write up the piece soon, but just didn’t have the spirit to delve into that particular memory during this strange summer.
Then, a few weeks ago, Janie & I learnt that a close friend’s former partner, Mitchell, had hanged himself on his sixtieth birthday. We can only try to imagine Mitchell’s mental state. Mitchell’s story felt like a haunting echo of the Bernard Rothbart story.
Now I am preparing to go to my first socially distanced funeral, a few days before I read this piece at ThreadZoomMash.
More than forty years since my first funeral; I have now been to many. This one will be a humanist cremation at Hoop Lane. I have even been to plenty of those.
But, like 1979, I don’t really know how to behave at this funeral.
I’m part of a different tribe now. Everyone must follow novel, social-distancing mores… now.
Yet still, I sense the gengangere, the ghostly echo of repeating events.
Postscript: Reflections On The Evening
Reflecting a few days after the event, my thoughts have been very much provoked by the readings that evening.
Adrian Rebello’s choice of Ghosts as the theme bothered me a little at first, as I thought that theme might yield a more homogeneous collection of pieces than usual. In fact the selection was very diverse and I thought the quality extremely high. As a group, I think we are getting better and better at writing short pieces for recital.
I didn’t take notes as I wanted to reflect on these pieces impressionistically and also imagined (correctly) that some of them could not really be described without spoilers. So I will say little about some pieces, which does not cast judgment on their quality.
Rohan Candappa went first and talked about several Ghost-themed songs from our youth; There’s A Ghost In My House by R Dean Taylor, Ghosts by Japan, Ghost Town by The Specials, Ghostbusters by Ray Parker Junior and finally (obvs?) Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush. Rohan prefaced the piece by asking us all to think about 16 February 1978 (the day Wuthering Heights first appeared on Top Of The Pops). As it happens I have already Ogblogged my experience at that time; I would have been in rehearsal for Andorra that evening so (unusually for that era) would have missed TOTP that night:
Kay Scorah went next with a very creepy story about a lost twin…or two. It’s creepiness was enhanced by the sense that she was telling a true story. It transpired from the discussion afterwards that the story was largely based on truth.
Ian Theodoreson’s story was very much a true story about strange ghostly happenings (and unhappenings) at the former Mary Datchelor School Building, when Ian was working there as Finance Director of Save The Children. I first met Ian in that setting, as it happens, some time before the haunting events that Ian described. I have my own mixture of haunting memories of that time, despite the happy ending to my Save The Children story:
Terry’s story, about the loss of a child, was very moving as well as spooky. Terry has a direct, sparse style of writing and delivery that works well generally and worked especially well for this piece.
Then my piece (above).
Then David Wellbrook’s story, which fitted well with his new-found ability to write suspenseful horror/thriller stories, such as his Dahlesque piece, “The Gift”, which I read out at the fourth ThreadMash. The Ghosts one this evening had lots of twists and turns…
…but not as many twists and turns as Julie Adams’s piece. Her piece had more twists and turns than the ghost train ride that was central to her story. How she managed to pack such a rich, complex, diverse, funny and horrifying story into 800 or so words I have no idea. Julie is one of the less confident writers in our group, because that’s how she is, not because she has grounds for lack of confidence in writing. But if ever I have sensed that her lack of confidence in writing is misplaced it is with this piece, which was a tour de force and genuinely shocking. Unfortunately Julie wasn’t able to join us that evening, but Adrian was able to read her piece out brilliantly well.
Geraldine Sharpe-Newton wondered about extreme of old age in her piece, exploring the idea that the very old, tucked away neatly in care homes, might be a form of living ghosts prior to their clinical demise. As always with Geraldine, it was beautifully structured, steeped in clarity and wisdom; I found myself, as usual, wanting to hang on to every word.
Fiona Rawes (Flo’s) piece was a haunting piece about a pet. Writing about ghosts of species other than humans is quite rare and/but Flo’s style, which tends to focus in delicious detail on miniature domestic stories, worked beautifully for this piece.
John Eltham’s piece was a very well crafted ghost story about a hill-runner rescued from a near-death experience. John is another of our less confident writers but he is proving each time he writes that he has a gift for writing and that his stories deserve to be heard. John is also extremely good at delivering his stories as the spoken word.
Jan Goodman’s piece was an hilarious, post-modern ending to the evening. Upon learning the theme, she had immediately worked out in her mind the sketch of a great story. Unfortunately, she hadn’t quite worked out how to fit such a complex story into 800 words and had left the writing task until a little too close to the deadline. So instead of dropping that idea and writing something else, she wrote the story of that sketchy idea and her subsequent struggles…let’s face it, failure…with that story idea. It was a very amusing piece and it must have spoken to many if not all of us who have had that type of struggle in our time.
Adrian hosted the evening extremely well. I thought he had ordered the pieces very cleverly, as his joins were very confident, but he admitted at the end of the evening that he had decided to sequence the pieces using the simple method of listing the recitals in the order that the pieces came in…and then “winging it” for the joins.
Well winged, Adrian. Indeed, well done everyone. It was a great evening.
The video clips shown at the end of the webinar are embedded after the transcript below
Introduction
In 1561, Thomas Gresham, while residing in Antwerp, provided “bridging finance” to a young travelling spendthrift, Thomas Cecil; William Cecil’s son, who had been living beyond his means in Paris. A few months later, Thomas Cecil and his travelling tutor, Thomas Windebank, took sanctuary under Thomas Gresham’s roof in Antwerp. It seems likely that one of young Cecil’s dalliances in Paris had required the dynamic duo to move on from Paris in a hurry.
Th0mas Cecil, once he was a few years older and wiser
“I see, in the end,”said the disapproving father in a letter to Windebank on 4 November 1561,“my sone shall come home lyke a spendyng sott, mete to kepe a tenniss court.”
This reference, to be found in J.W. Burgon’s monumental 1839 two-volume Life & Times Of Sir Thomas Gresham, seems to be the only mention of tennis to be found in any biography of Thomas Gresham to date.
Facsimile of J.W. Burgon p427 of Volume 1
Tennis does not seem to have been a big thing to Thomas Gresham. But it was a very big thing to the Cecil family and it was a big thing in Tudor times.
So why did William Cecil, who was such a massive tennis fan he even built a tennis court at his house on the Strand, write in such disparaging tones about tennis in this context?
William Cecil with disapproving look
And how on earth did this minor Cecil family intergenerational gripe find its way, some 40 years later, into a subplot of Hamlet?
It is my intention to use this tiny fragment from Thomas Gresham’s life as a MacGuffin, or plot device, to describe tennis and the colourful characters that populated the game around the time of Thomas Gresham.
Medieval & Renaissance Tennis
Humans have played ball games with implements since the very dawn of civilisation. The Epic of Gilgamesh, which was written some 4000 years ago, uses stick and ball games as a plot device more than once.
But the game we call tennis emerged in medieval times, around the 12th century, probably initially in French monastery courtyards and subsequently in noble courts. Known as Jeu De Paume in France, this walled, galleried courtyard game played with hard balls became known as tennis in England.
Today we call the game “real tennis” to distinguish it from the modern, 19th century game played with vulcanised rubber balls on open courts of grass, clay, etc.
Real tennis is often referred to as a sport of kings. 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.
Quarrelsome? Moi?
There are three characteristics about Renaissance tennis that might seem alien to lovers of the modern variety of this sport which are vital to understanding what it was about in the time of Thomas Gresham:
it was originally played with the hand (hence the name “Jeu De Paume”) but by around 1500 the use of the racket was emerging, the racket becoming ubiquitous within 100 to 150 years;
the game was a wagering game. If the players were of uneven quality, “odds” or “handicapping” would be deployed, such that the stakes would be an even bet. Odds might be deployed through scoring (the lesser player being given points), through the cramping of the better player through restricting their use of the court (e.g. banning certain galleries or walls) or a mixture of those handicaps. We still use handicapping today in real tennis for all but the top level competitions;;
noble folk and monarchs tended to become very fond of the game for themselves and their own sort…while taking great pains to prohibit lesser folk from playing of tennis or such sports.
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 .
Philip The Bold, Duke of Burgundy – 14th Century loser?
As an aside, Philip the Bold was not only well-known to be an enthusiast of tennis, he was also a great enthusiast for the Pinot Noir grape; prohibiting the cultivation of the Gamay grape in Burgundy (1395), thus perpetuating 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.
Tennis-loving royals and nobles married for strategic, territorial alliance in those days. I don’t suppose that “spreading tennis across parts of Europe that other games couldn’t reach” was central to that strategy, but such marriages seem to have contributed to the spread of the game…or in some cases possibly the tennis history of the place might have attracted the marriage.
Longue paume, or field tennis, is an outdoor variety of the game, versions of which were played across all tiers of society, which probably adopted the use of implements before jeu de paume. Elements of modern tennis and cricket derive from it. It is still played today, mostly in Picardy. It is probably the variety of the game that Edward III was banning with his infamous 1349 prohibition of sports.
Jeu de paume, the court version, almost certainly became established in Spain and the Low Countries before it became established in England. So long before Thomas Gresham popped up in Antwerp, a famous court had been established there, in Borgerhout.
The Early Tudor Period
Prior to the Tudor period, the limited popularity of tennis in England was restricted to the clergy and guilds of craftsmen in larger towns and cities in the south. The clergy tended to play the game themselves while prohibiting others from doing so; hence we have some written evidence of the game.
Henry VII, tennis enthusiast, painted 29 October 1505, by order of Herman Rinck
But the Tudor monarchs were very keen on the game, so it became a more widespread, noble sport in England from the late 15th century. It is well documented that Henry VII was a player and a fan. He liked to wager on his games and his substantial losses are well documented in royal accounting documents, as are those of his more-famously tennis-keen son, Henry VIII. Naturally those monarchs were also keen on banning the game for all but the right sort.In 1493 Henry VII decreed that, “…no sheriff or mayor or any other officer…suffer any man’s servant to play at the dice or at tennis.”
Henry VIII, who neither said “anyone for tennis?” nor did he write Greensleeves
During Henry VIII’s time, several noble courts were built and several others were planned. At Austin Friars, following the dissolution of the monasteries, Thomas Cromwell planned to build a tennis court in his garden but did not see through his plans. Drapers Hall now stands on that site.
Austin Friars Copperplate c1550
But Thomas Wolsey’s court at Hampton Court Palace did get built. There is still a court on the original site (albeit a Stuart period replacement) to this day. I have had the honour and pleasure to play there.
Dedanists Norman Hyde (left) & Christie Marrian (right) defending Henry VIII (grille)Me, marking a rubber from the Hampton Court dedans, having just (successfully) fought my own
The only other court in Great Britain that remains from that period is the Falkland Palace Court, built between 1539 & 1541 by James VI of Scotland. It is the only jeu quarré court – i.e. an older design of outdoor court, without an interior (dedans) still in use in the world. Janie and I had a delightful game there in 2018.
Believe it or not, I succeeded in hitting the ball through one of those small portholes, known as lunes, more by luck than judgement I assure you, in the course of our match. Some say that such a shot merits just one point, others say that it completes a game and yet others say that it determines the entire match. Needless to say the four of us debated that matter at length in a neighbouring hostelry after the match.
Talking of eye-witness accounts of tennis matches, there is a fascinating report 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, in early 1506:
Philip The Handsome, Duke of Burgundy, King of Castille
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”. Coincidentally , one of his other grand-daughters, Mary Grey, pops up as a house guest for Thomas Gresham in 1569, thanks to William Cecil again, perennial supplier of house guests to Thomas Gresham. A politically sensitive and expensive guest, Mary Grey stayed with the Greshams, much to their chagrin, until 1573, by which time Sir William Cecil had become Lord Burghley.
The Late Tudor Period, Cecil & Gresham
William Cecil was a contemporary of Thomas Gresham; the two worked well together on matters of state and commerce from the early 1550s onwards. Cecil became Elizabeth’s Secretary of State in 1558. By 1560 he was ensconced in Cecil House on the Strand on the site that is now the Strand Palace Hotel and The Lyceum Theatre. Cecil House had a tennis court designed by Henry Hawthorne, the Royal Architect. It was by all accounts quite a small court with unequal lengths of penthouse along both side walls; it might have been used for hand tennis rather than racket tennis.
By that time, the prohibition of sports such as tennis had been clarified through several of Henry VIII’s statutes. Noblemen and those with an annual income of £100 or more were permitted to possess a tennis court on their own property.
Henry VIII’s 1541 statute included a system of licencing for public tennis courts and bowling alleys. Mary I abolished such licences in 1555. Elizabeth reintroduced a system of licencing for tennis courts circa 1567.
So when William Cecil vented in 1561 that his son Thomas was “mete to kepe a tenniss court”, he was not talking about the dignified tennis court that graced Cecil House. He was referring to barely reputable or even disreputable places, more or less gambling dens, frequented by “idle and misruled persons”, as the Mary prohibition statute described them.
William Cecil was an intriguing and important character during the second half of the Tudor period. Fortunately for us, he had a tendency to keep everything and to insist on his correspondence being kept, which is why we have such a rich treasure trove of material on his life and those around him, such as Thomas Gresham.
Another fascinating character who entered and stayed in William Cecil’s orbit for many decades was Michelangelo Florio, an Italian pastor who converted to Lutherism and escaped execution in Rome by the skin of his teeth around 1550. William Cecil helped establish Michelangelo Florio in London, where he became pastor to the Italian Reform Church in the City of London and chaplain to Lady Jane Grey. On this occasion, William Cecil himself gave his guest house room which led, rumour has it, to a scandalous affair with one of Cecil’s servants which resulted in Florio’s marriage to the servant and the birth of the more famous Renaissance humanist John Florio.
Soon after John’s birth, Lady Jane Grey became the nine day queen, succeeded by the Catholic Queen Mary, at which point London was not really the place for a firebrand Italian Lutheran pastor and his family.
John Florio
In the early 1570s, John Florio, steeped in a humanist education, returned to England. Around 1578, William Cecil (by then Lord Burleigh), sponsored John to study at Oxford where he excelled and the rest is history. Florio wrote several wonderful works and translated many others, not least Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. Florio’s own works include First Frutes & Second Frutes, which are basically primers in the English and Italian languages. Chapter 2 of the Second Frutes book (pp15-29) is a dramatised story of a day going to play tennis with the intention to go on to the theatre afterwards.
There’s a good deal of insight into Tudor tennis in that little drama, which is a fascinating and amusing read. But Shakespeare it isn’t…
…however there are those who believe that John Florio was Shakespeare. I think those people are mistaken, but I do believe that Shakespeare probably met John Florio (through their mutual patron, the Earl of Southampton). Or at the very least Shakespeare will have read several of Florio’s works, not least the Frutes books and the Montaigne translations.
Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford
Of course there are a great many “alternative Shakespeare authorship” theories, the most popular of which, Edward de Vere, Earl Of Oxford, was yet another of William Cecil’s long-term house guests; his ward for about 10 years from 1562 and subsequently Cecil’s son-in-law. In the early 1590s Oxford unsuccessfully attempted to marry off his daughter Elisabeth to the Earl of Southampton.
These geezers were all moving in similar circles, but that, to my mind, does not provide credibility to such “alternative authorship” theories about Shakespeare. But what do I know?
What is widely believed and is almost certainly true is that the character of Polonius in Hamlet was based on William Cecil and the character of Laertes, Polonius’s ne’er-do-well son abroad, based on the young Thomas Cecil. Scholars have suggested the Cecil connection for a great many reasons. For our purposes, Act Two Scene One of Hamlet has the sole mention of tennis in Hamlet, in a context that is reminiscent of the sole mention of tennis in Thomas Gresham’s biographies.
A stained glass representation of Polonius
So was Thomas Cecil “mete to kepe a tenniss court” in the end? He was less adept at stately matters than his dad and less adept than his younger brother, Robert, who became the first Earl of Salisbury and built Hatfield House. Robert Cecil didn’t build a tennis court there, but his Victorian descendants built a fine one, a refurbished version of which is still in use there today.
Hatfield House Tennis Court
But still Thomas Cecil had a pretty successful career. He inherited Cecil House, changing its name to Exeter House when he became the first Earl of Exeter, so to that extent he did keep a tennis court.
The Old Rectory, Wimbledon
He also bought, in 1576, The Old Rectory and most of the land that is now Wimbledon Park, where he developed Wimbledon Palace.
Thomas Cecil didn’t develop tennis courts in Wimbledon. But 300 years later, some other fellows did develop tennis courts, of sorts, around there, which was the start of a sustained, global, commercial sporting success. Thomas Gresham would no doubt have approved.
Wimbledon Championship, 1877
Further Reading & References
Ian Harris’s Ogblog Tetralogy On The Origins Of Tennis:
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
It is pretty clear from the medieval texts I covered in the article, Ancient Arithmetic, that tennis game scoring, since time immemorial, was a four point system described as 15, 30, 45 and 60:
Yet in modern parlance we use the number 40 to represent the third point, rather than 45. Most writers, if they mention the matter at all, suggest that 40 is merely an abbreviation for 45. The 1822: A Treatise on Tennis By a Member of the Tennis Club, now attributed to Robert Lukin, also referenced in Ancient Arithmetic, simply states that the score is called:
…40 or 45.
But since I published my tetralogy of pieces, several people have contacted me wondering about this forty/forty-five matter, so I thought I should delve a little deeper. Not least, I wondered how recent (or ancient) the use of forty might be. Also, is there actual evidence that “forty” merely is an abbreviation for “forty-five”.
John Florio was an Anglo-Italian with a fascinating back story of his own. His “Frutes” books are basically primers in the English and Italian languages. Chapter 2 of the Second Frutes book (pp15-29) is a dramatised story of a day going to play tennis with the intention to go on to the theatre afterwards. There’s a good deal of insight into Tudor tennis in that chapter, which is a fascinating and amusing read. But the key phrase for this purpose is spoken by the character H on P25:
But the habit of abbreviating “forty-five” to “forty” dates back at the very least several further decades…possibly even back to time immemorial.
Heiner Gillmeister buries the relevant factoid in a footnote within his excellent 1997 book,Tennis A Cultural History, which is also referenced in the main Ancient Arithmetic piece.
…quarante for quarante-cinq seems to be attested, at least by implication, for the year 1536.
Gillmeister (via Christian Schmitt) references Mathurin Cordier (Corderius, a fascinating character who was a humanist theologian, grammarian and pedagogue) from his De Corrupti Sermonis Emendatione, of 1536, in which the author is admonishing schoolboys for their sloppy use of language:
Caeterum omnino ineptum est quod pueri dicunt “quadra” pro “quadraginta quinque”.
Besides, it is totally useless to say “square” instead of “forty-five”
WTF? Kids abbreviating to absurdity. Who knew? Obvs.
Let’s be honest folks, most of us have been known, on occasion, to say “thirty-five” rather than “thirty-fifteen”…
…or “fift” rather than “fifteen”
…or “van” rather than “advantage”.
Mea culpa…or, as the young folks might say, “meculp”.
In syllable terms, we’re shaving but one syllable in English, when shortening forty-five to forty. Likewise in French; quarante-cinq to quarante. But in Italian, shortening quarantacinque to quaranta is an even more understandable five syllable to three syllable drop. The Latin equivalent, quadraginta quinque to quadraginta would be a six to four shift.
But the extra shave in Latin from quadraginta quinque to quadra really is going too far. Or not far enough; why stop at “quadra” when you can monosyllabically say “quad” and save yet another syllable?
Did the young really have such an abbreviated approach to language, even in the first half of the 16th century?
Yup. It seems they did. Perhaps we humans have done so since time immemorial.
My favourite novel that uses mistaken identity as its central plot device is Scoop by Evelyn Waugh. William Boot, a genteel nature correspondent, is sent as a foreign correspondent to Ishmaelia, a crisis-ridden East African country, as he has been mistaken for his adventurous distant cousin, John Boot. There are predictably hilarious results.
Ishmaelia is a thinly veiled fictional version of Abyssinia, now known as Ethiopia, a place that Evelyn Waugh had visited in 1930 as a special correspondent for The Times. Waugh wrote up his African travels in a wonderfully funny book, Remote People.
In one amusing scene, when Waugh and his entourage had travelled into the heart of Ethiopia, a guard takes an interest in Waugh’s possessions. Waugh tells us that the guard:
…in exchange showed me his rifle and bandoleer. About half the cartridges were empty shells; the weapon was in very poor condition. It could not possibly have been used with any accuracy and probably not with safety…
More than 75 years after Waugh’s visit, Janie and I journeyed to Ethiopia, where we encountered a great many tribespeople with such weapons and ourselves were the victims of a form of mistaken identity.
We spent a few days in the South Omo Valley; a tribal part of Southern Ethiopia near the border with South Sudan. We had a fascinating time there.
Our small lodge was near some Karo villages. On our second day, we had arranged to visit Turmi, a Hamer tribe village, on market day.
Our guide, Dawit, asked us if we would mind if a local tribesman, Adama, join us in the vehicle. Adama is, unusually, half Karo & half Hamer; he wanted to visit his Hamer friends and relatives. Adama had trekked to our lodge in the hope of hitching a ride. Naturally we agreed and had a peculiar conversation with Adama, through Dawit.
Adama wanted to know more about us. He wondered how much cattle we owned.
Dawit passed on my reply; we don’t own any cattle.
Adama asked what other types of livestock and how many of them we owned.
Dawit broke it to Adama, gently, that I had told him that we own no livestock at all.
Adama said that he felt sorry for us; he hadn’t realised that we were poor people.
Dawit tried to explain to Adama that we come from a society where wealth is not measured in livestock.
“He says he understands”, Dawit told me.
I looked at Adama and smiled. He smiled back. The smile was a smile of pity. Of course he understood. Ian and Janie were proud people who did not want to be perceived as poor. But by the sound of it we came from a pitifully poor tribe, universally blighted with a chronic livestock shortage.
We had been mistaken for paupers…or had we? In Karo and Hamer terms, we were/are indeed poor.
Turmi market was wonderfully colourful, bustling and friendly.
Livestock is unquestionably an important feature of that society.
We visited a Karo village later that same day, on the way back to our lodge. We had heard that the Ethiopian Government had just built the village its first school, which was due to open later that year, but had provided no consumables for the school. Janie and I always take a few boxes of biros with us when we travel in the developing world; we thought this place well suited to a gift of 100 pens.
The chief of the village was delighted and hastily arranged a ceremony for the gift.
Once we had ceremoniously handed over the pens, the chief – showing no concern for social distancing whatsoever – embraced me, spat over my shoulder three times and (through Dawit) explained that Janie and I were now honorary members of the village.
Janie and I then spent some time in OUR Karo village. I wonder whether the World War One vintage Lee Enfield 303 rifles the villagers were carrying had been around since Evelyn Waugh’s visit some 75 years earlier? Or perhaps they had found their way to the South Omo Valley from the 1970s Alleyn’s School CCF arsenal.
To celebrate our new-found membership of the Karo tribe, Janie tried her hand at hair adornment…
…then one of the Karo body artists reciprocated with some face painting, after a false start using all white face paint, he quickly made up a small batch of dark face paint.
So, as honorary Karo people, I suppose we weren’t mistaken for poor people, we ARE poor Karo people. We have no livestock and we have no antique weaponry. But we do have some exceptionally rich memories of our time with those remote people.
Postscript One: A Video Of My Performance
Below is an “uncut” video of my performance, published with the kind permission of the ThreadZoomMash participants.
Postscript Two: Links To Our Ethiopia Trip
If you would like to know more about our 2006 visit to Ethiopia, you can find a placeholder and links here, but at the time of writing this piece I have not yet Ogblogged my journals.
If you just want to look at our photos from the South Omo Valley, the Flickr link below has an album with the best 80 of our photos from there:
Postscript Three: A Very Brief Review Of The Mistaken Identity Evening
I don’t think that Kay Scorah imagined that she was choosing a dark topic when she chose Mistaken Identity, but the vast majority of the pieces were very dark indeed.
Let me put it this way. Terry went first, with a creepy piece about the grim reaper visiting the wrong potential “reapee” by mistake. It was almost as creepy as the following short scene from one of my favourite dark movies…
…and Terry’s piece was one of the least dark pieces of the evening.
John’s brilliantly structured story involved Northern Irish and Islamic terrorism echoing in the life of one female character.
Julie’s story was a beautifully crafted, shocking piece about horrific, fatal domestic abuse.
Adrian’s story, which started lightheartedly enough, ended with the murder of a young man mistaken for a mass murderer.
In a near-futile attempt to lighten the mood before a short break, Kay scheduled Jan’s story, which was a poetic piece full of mystery about a potential re-encounter with a former lover..or was it merely mistaken identity?
After the break, David resumed the dark theme with a thriller about a man kidnapped by thugs for mysterious reasons; but was it a case of mistaken identity?
Then the mood finally got a bit lighter, with Geraldine’s thoughtful piece about her early days in New York and how status seemed to be identified (mistakenly or not) simply through one’s job title, place of origin or even merely one’s name.
Before my piece, which was the last, Ian T told us about several of his doppelgängers; Jeremy Corbyn (I don’t think so, but judge for yourselves), an Ecology party candidate in 1983 named Ian Newton and a man in a red coat at a church parade who looked so much like Ian that even Ian himself thought the other fellow might be him.
Perhaps I should have done my own doppelgänger story, not that I have delusions of grandeur about my scribblings:
It was a great evening, as always. Many thanks to Kay for organising it, to Rohan Candappa for the original idea upon which ThreadZoomMash is based and also a huge thanks to all of the participants.
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.
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.
