Ian Louis Harris

Tennis Around The Time Of Thomas Gresham, Gresham Society Webinar Presentation, 7 October 2020

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?

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.

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.

Here is an extract from: “The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England from the Earliest Period” by Joseph Strutt, published in 1801.

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.

For example, Philip The Bold married Margaret III of Flanders, which explains why Cambrai (now in Northern France, then in Flanders) became the centre of the Burgundian school of music, but Cambrai was already famous for medieval tennis, as illustrated in a beautiful Cambrai Book Of Hours, c1300 which can be examined in full on-line, depicting many scenes from regular life, including several pictures depicting games of the jeu de paume or longue paume variety.

**Used with the kind permission of the Digital Walters Art Museum, creative commons licence 3.0**

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 15^th 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.

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.”

Thomas Grey, 2nd Marquess of Dorset & survivor

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.

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.

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015022223575&view=image&seq=35&q1=tennis

The character H, incidentally, is almost certainly a character based on Florio’s pupil at that time, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Video Samples Of Real Tennis Shown When Answering Questions

Bumping Into Old Friends Forty-Four Years Later, 15 September 2020

Tim Church (far left), Graham Watson (left bumper), Paul Deacon (right bumper)

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece about some schoolboy silliness from the 1970s, mostly revolving around my friend Paul Deacon, which included the above photograph:

Execution Scenes, Coin Tossers And Miscellaneous Silliness Recorded With Paul Deacon, 12 April 1977

In that piece, I promised to follow up the “bumps incident” in a further Ogblog piece, but subsequently that idea got mislaid amongst other musings and postings.

This morning, I woke up to discover this posting, from Paul Deacon, on my Facebook page; click here.

For those who don’t like clicking and/or object to Facebook, the following quote are Paul’s words on the matter:

Ian, with your recent birthday I thought of this legendary photograph of the ‘bumps’. However, with our advancing years it’s time to leave the school quad and visit pastures new.
[Several doctored versions of the above picture are displayed]
Which one appeals?

Thank you, Paul, for reminding me to write up the original incident. The time of year is apposite. It would have been around this time of year, I suspect September 1976.

My recollection is that we had witnessed somebody being given the bumps on their birthday; that was the tradition at our school and no doubt at many other schools past, present (even in these heath & safety, socially distancing, snowflakey times) and future.

Unfortunately, I chose to volunteer the information that, as my birthday takes place towards the end of the school summer holidays, I had always been spared the ritual humiliation of receiving the bumps.

Some 44 years later, I still have not mastered the art of keeping my mouth shut when it really matters. But I have got a bit better at that art. The bumps incident, so brilliantly recorded for posterity by an (as yet) uncredited photographer, was one of many salutary lessons.

There’s a lot to like about the headline photograph. Paul Deacon seems hardly able to manage my weight in the matter of deploying the bumps, Paul’s growth spurt arriving a bit later than most of ours, Graham Watson’s perhaps a bit earlier. Tim Church is feigning disconnection from the incident, but I am pretty sure he was egging the lads on or at least enjoying the show. One (as yet) unidentified boy depicted is either oblivious or indifferent to the whole matter, reading the notice boards. Another day, another schoolkid getting the bumps. This was not a special or unusual scene at Alleyn’s back then.

Anyway, Paul has relocated the central subject-matter in several eye-catching ways and asked me to choose a favourite. So here is a scrape of all five of Paul’s. I have added titles of my own and marked Paul’s homework.

I have awarded Paul an A* for those five pictures; I think they are wonderful. Unfortunately the Ofqual algorithm has downgraded Paul’s GCSE Photography to Grade U.

Nevertheless, the winner for me is that last one: Down To Earth With A Bump.

Many thanks again, Paul.

Ancient Arithmetic Appendix One: On The Use Of “Forty” Or “Forty-Five” To Count The Third Point In A Game Of Tennis

La vita inizia a quaranta – Life begins at forty

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:

Ancient Arithmetic: The Possible Origins Of The Tennis Scoring System, Part One Of Four Pieces On Tennis History

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”.

The earliest documented use of “forty” in English is referenced in the wonderful book Real Tennis Today And Yesterday by John Shneerson. It is in the 1591 book Second Frutes, by John Florio, another wonderful old volume that can be read and examined in full through internet facsimiles in the public domain – click here or below.

Extract from Second Frutes by John Florio, 1591.

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:

You haue fortie then, goe to, plaie

H, incidentally, is almost certainly a character based on Florio’s pupil at that time, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton.

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.

Natch.

Q.E.D.

Mistaken Identity South Omo Valley Style, Piece Performed At ThreadZoomMash & Review Of The Evening, 2 September 2020

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.

Journey To Ethiopia & Zanzibar, Placeholder & Links, 16 February To 9 March 2006

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:

04 ...the breasts are most likely unaltered P2190042

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.

A Birthday Card Adventure With An Old Muker, 28 & 29 August 2020

Let’s be honest about this; Janie and I are not doing anything much that might be described as adventurous at the moment. This pandemic era is not that sort of era. We’re doing a lot of charity stuff. We’re keeping fit. We’re in good spirits. But we are not indulging in adventure.

This time of year, John White and I often get together for our birthdays; mine the day before his. Last year, for example, we all did this…

Dinner At Kitty Fisher’s With John And Mandy, 28 August 2019

…but this year, it was my birthday card that had all the excitement.

John phoned me on the morning of my birthday. I hadn’t twigged it before, but he and Mandy had taken the opportunity to have a short break up in Yorkshire. John informed me that he had sent me a birthday card but he didn’t know when it would arrive and that it might be somewhat distressed-looking, having been involved in a road traffic incident.

John explained that he had stopped for fuel somewhere around Muker and put his mobile phone and my card on the roof of the car, making a careful mental note not to drive off before retrieving the phone & card…

…then he got distracted…

…then John drove off…

Excitement on the B6270 between Muker and Gunnerside; well shy of Crackpot

…until he heard a few “boomp” noises from the roof of the car and realised what must have happened. Apparently an expletive or two were the next couple of noises to be heard in the vicinity.

Meanwhile I was sitting in the flat, concentrating on John’s every word, my thoughts not wandering at all, thinking to myself that the punchline of the story must include the retrieval of the phone, because John was calling me from said phone…

…and the card didn’t look too shabby either

…and the card seemed to be minimally dishevelled; assuming the card before me was the original card from the story.

John continued…

…we drove back down the road towards Muker and as good fortune would have it, there was my phone in the middle of the road, undamaged…

…but no sign of your card…

…until we went a bit further back down the road and there was your card – also pretty much undamaged. It might have some tyre marks on the envelope though.

I told John that the card looked absolutely fine and that it had arrived a day in advance of my birthday, which is pretty good going given the adventure it had been through. I reported that the card was in good spirits and recuperating well at home.

I like to one-up John’s stories, so I thought I had better tell him the adventure of his birthday card, which I had posted that very morning.

I explained that I had gone to the local shop, chosen a card, returned home to sign the card, blown the dust off the little see-through-plastic bag which holds my assortment of postage stamps for just this sort of occasion, afixed an appropriate stamp and taken the card down to the post box at the end of my street, from whence it should have, by that time, been collected.

Your card should arrive at your house on the morning of your birthday, I said, but it seems that you won’t be there to receive it.

John explained that they would get home on the afternoon of his birthday. He also volunteered the opinion that the Yorkshire card story was a tad more exciting than the Notting Hill card story. I felt obliged, on this one occasion, to concede.

Anyway, John & Mandy’s drive home the next afternoon provided an excellent opportunity for Mandy, John, Janie and me to have a four-way catch-up chat and share a bit of the birthdays, albeit at a social distance.

Remembering Gerry Goddin, Comedy Writer & Man Of Mystery, Who Died 10 August 2020

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.

In January, we lost Nick R Thomas…

A Brief & Personal Tribute To Nick R Thomas, Who Died On 10 January 2020

…then, in March, Chris Stanton died…

Chris Stanton: Absurdist & Realist, A Personal Tribute, 9 March 2020

…and now, sadly, Gerry Goddin has also died.

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:

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.

I know that he lived in Ealing for a long while and ended up living in Northolt at the end of his days. I knew he lived in Ealing because, about three months after I met Janie, a small group of us, including Gerry, took our lives into our own hands by going to see Ben Murphy at Up The Creek in November 1992 – Janie and I ended up dropping Gerry off in Ealing afterwards, not too far from Janie’s place.

Up The Creek With Janie & Annalisa & Gerry Goddin But Without A Paddle, To See Ben Murphy, 28 November 1992

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

After our 1990s NewsRevue era, Gerry became a stalwart of our periodic Ivan Shakespeare Memorial Dinners, which started soon after Ivan’s untimely demise in 2000. I describe those dinners (and Gerry’s fairly regular role in them) in the second of three events in the piece you’ll find by clicking here. We were going to have a 20th anniversary “Ivan” this spring, but of course that wasn’t to be.

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:

Mousse Wine Tasting Of Syrah Wines Plus Gerry Goddin’s Unexpected Foray Into the World Of Eurovision, 2 November 2016

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.

Gerry Goddin.

Scoring Synchronicity: How Real Tennis Scoring Was Adopted For Lawn Tennis Scoring – Then Lawn Tennis Handicapping Methods Wormed Their Way Into Real Tennis, Part Four Of Four Pieces On Tennis History

Henry “Cavendish” Jones

The first three parts of this tetralogy explained the possible origins of tennis scoring and the rather murky world of tennis odds, or handicapping. If you missed the start of the series, you might choose to click here or below to start with the first piece.

Ancient Arithmetic: The Possible Origins Of The Tennis Scoring System, Part One Of Four Pieces On Tennis History

This final piece explores in a little more detail the origins of the modern game of tennis and explains how handicapping was central to modern tennis’s development in the late 19th century and then subsequently those modern tennis developments to handicapping pervaded real tennis.

The Emergence of “Modern” or “Lawn” Tennis

In my earlier pieces I relied quite heavily, as most writers on the history of tennis do, on Julian Marshall’s 1878 book, The Annals Of Tennis, which you can read in full on-line if you wish – click here.

Less well-known is Marshall’s short book, booklet really, on Lawn Tennis, published in 1879 – click here or the link below – again the whole thing is in the internet archive.

Another Book From the 1870s by Julian Marshall

Lawn tennis was very new when Julian Marshall wrote that booklet in 1879. The first All England Club competition (Wimbledon) had taken place in the summer of 1877, just a couple of summers after the game was first introduced to that (until then, i.e. from its founding in 1868, croquet) club.

In truth, it had all happened rather quickly for that modern version of the game. In the mid 19th century, lots of sporty folk had experimented with garden-based adaptations of tennis in various forms. A club for one form of lawn tennis, named pelota, was founded in Leamington Spa in 1872. Major Clopton Wingfield applied for a patent on his version of lawn tennis, Sphairistikè, in 1874.

The Marylebone Cricket Club, which was, by the 1870s, the guardian of the laws of tennis as well as of cricket, got involved around 1875, in an attempt to codify and standardise the laws of lawn tennis.

There followed a rather controversial set of processes, from which emerged, in the end, the laws of lawn tennis in a form very similar to those we know today, but not without some evident deep debate and acrimony.

Prince Otto von Bismarck famously said that “to retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making.” He was probably right. Perhaps for that reason, Julian Marshall’s early booklet on lawn tennis is silent on the controversy around the laws, it merely sets them out.

But I’m going to have a go at exploring the controversy and the somewhat tortuous journey.

The MCC Got A Bunch Of Lawyers & Sport Enthusiasts Together To Codify This New-Fangled Lawn Tennis Game…What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

A comprehensive account of the controversy is contained in the Lawn Tennis section of The Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes (1st edition published 1890) – click here or image below to see full text, authored by CG Heathcote, younger brother of the slightly better known JM Heathcote. Both are protagonists of the story; the latter was the author of the (real) tennis section of the same book.

According to the younger Heathcote, by 1875 lawn tennis was becoming chaotically ubiquitous in the gardens of England; opinions in The Field magazine were united only in the view that things could not go on like this, so the tennis committee of the MCC was deputed to form a code for this new game.

That committee was a high-falutin’ bunch in those days; Spencer Ponsonby-Fane, Edward Chandos Leigh, CG Lyttelton, William Hart Dyke & John Moyer Heathcote.

The scoring method that these esteemed gentlemen came up with was, basically, the method used in rackets. Only the server (hand-in) could score points; serve only changed hands when the receiver (hand-out) won a stroke; a game was first to 15 (with some additional clever stuff to “set the game” if the game gets to 13-13 or 14-14).

The original MCC code seems to have been little used. CG Heathcote briefly documents one or two matches played that way.

The code did make it to the USA, where, it is claimed, the first lawn tennis tournament was played, in 1876, on handicap, using rackets scoring. James Dwight prevailed, playing at scratch. 12–15, 15–7, 15–13.

We’ll return to Dr Dwight later in this piece.

The attempt at standardisation started to get messy again, when Henry “Cavendish” Jones, one of the doyens of the All England Croquet Club, who had been instrumental in introducing lawn tennis to that club, decided, in 1876, to advocate the use of tennis scoring rather than rackets scoring for lawn tennis.

Henry Jones, aka Cavendish. Now that’s what I call beard.

Jones advocated the use of tennis scoring on the grounds that:

interest is better sustained and handicapping facilitated.

CG Heathcote describes this turn of events as “a crisis”, exacerbated by the fact that John Henry “Stonehenge” Walsh, then editor of The Field, was honorary secretary (having been one of the founders) of the All England Croquet Club. He was more a dogs and guns man than a tennis and croquet man in truth; he regularly organised field gun trials, often using the All England Croquet Club fields for that purpose. Don’t ask.

By all accounts you didn’t mess with Stonehenge. Click here or above for on-line access to part of his book, The Manual Of British Rural Sports, 1856 (1867 edition attached, from whence the above picture came)

By 1877, not only had the objects of the All England Croquet Club been changed to include lawn tennis but the name of the club had become All England Croquet & Lawn Tennis Club (AECLTC) and a lawn tennis tournament announced for July 1877.

At this juncture of the story, CG Heathcote’s essay on lawn tennis gets a bit melodramatic:

“…a graver crisis was at hand, which should determine whether the game was to bask for a few seasons in the smiles of fashion, and then decay and die, as rinking [rollerskating] had done, and as croquet also for a while did; or whether it was to take its place permanently among recognised English sports, and so contribute to the formation of English character and English history.”

Just in case the above paragraph does not render you, dear reader, ashiver, Heathcote goes on:

“A vehement controversy had been maintained in the press on the relative merits and demerits of racket and tennis scoring respectively; nor was this the only topic for acrimonious discussion.”

He’s talking about the size and shape of the court, the height of the net, the position of the service line, the question of faults on serves…

“…had been argued at great length and with considerable bitterness, and yet unanimity seemed as hopeless as ever.

A small sub-committee of the AECLTC was formed for the purpose of framing the rules for the 1877 tournament. Step forward Julian Marshall (he of The Annals of Tennis, most of which was being pre-published as articles in The Field during 1876 and 1877), Henry “Cavendish” Jones and CG Heathcote, whose interest in “bigging up” this story might be connected with his role in the controversy’s resolution.

Wimbledon 1877, a success by any measure or scoring system

Needless to say, this second committee opted for tennis scoring rather than rackets scoring, although that original publication offers rackets scoring as an alternative method allowed within the rules if the players so choose. A type of hedge that might have graced many a fine field in Wimbledon or St John’s Wood.

All three members of that triumphant sub-committee played a significant role in the 1877 tournament. Henry Jones umpired. Julian Marshall was a losing quarter-finalist, losing to CG Heathcote, who went on to lose his semi-final but was awarded third place on a play-off. The winner of that first championship, Spencer Gore, was a local (Wimbledon) chap; primarily a cricketer and rackets player.

As an aside, the 1878 Wimbledon Championship was also won by a rackets player, Frank Hadow, who defeated Spencer Gore in straight sets in the final. Frank Hadow defeated everyone he played in that championship in straight sets. He also chose not to defend his title, thus becoming the only tennis player in history never to have lost a championship match. When asked to defend his title, Frank Hadow allegedly said:

“No sir. It’s a sissy’s game played with a soft ball.”

I don’t personally agree with Mr Hadow’s disparaging view of lawn tennis; I am merely reporting it to you.

The rules as used for that first Wimbledon Championship in 1877 and the resulting codification, The Laws Of Lawn Tennis, adopted by the MCC (perhaps somewhat grudgingly) and the AECLTC can be found in full in Julian Marshall’s 1879 booklet, Lawn Tennis – here’s the link again. Those rules are remarkably similar to the rules of lawn tennis that remain in use to this day; quite an achievement and perhaps testament to the natural elegance of the tennis scoring system.

Handicapping In Lawn Tennis

By all accounts, in the early days of lawn tennis, the use of handicapping was near-ubiquitous, apart from championship-type matches. Rules 14-22 in the 1879 Lawn Tennis booklet set out the handicapping system for lawn tennis.

Were they “laws” or “rules”? The main title page describes them as “laws” but the chapter page describes them as “rules”. Another controversial point for MCC/AEC&LTC debate, no doubt.

Much simpler than that for real tennis – the only cramped odds on offer for handicapping are “half-court” given by the stronger player. Numeric odds on offer are only points given, perhaps enhanced or mitigated by a bisque or two. See part three of this work, Odds Oddities, for more detailed notes on the various cramped-odds and points-based odds used in real tennis.

Note also that rackets-style scoring, offered as an alternative method in rules 24-30 of the Lawn Tennis book of laws, also come with some handicapping (odds) in rules 31 to 33; one or more points given, the privilege of retaining hand-in (serve) two or more successive times and/or half-court.

Lawn tennis odds started to take a shape of their own around 1883, according to CG Heathcote in his 1890 Badminton Library treatise:

…by Mr Henry Jones in a letter to the Field under date July 7, 1883. The bisque, now abolished, was the unit, and all the possible degrees of merit were indicated by classes separated from the other by one bisque. For bisques there have been substituted at first quarters and now sixths of fifteen as the unit, but the general principle will be the same.

Henry “Cavendish” Jones, you might recall, was the geezer who advocated the use of tennis scoring in the Field back in 1876 and who umpired the first Wimbledon Championship. He went on to write his own small treatise on lawn tennis in 1888, which you can read in full on the internet archive, if you wish, by clicking here. But if you simply want to see/read what he was talking about in the matter of handicapping, I have extracted the relevant tables and pages from this public domain work and present them below. You can click through the images to the on-line book and zoom in on the pages that way.

You might want to get out your slide rules and logarithm tables to get your head around those odds.

Seriously, though, two important and influential ideas were introduced into handicapping by Henry Jones’s (or should I say Cavendish’s?) innovations.

Firstly, the notion of owed odds as well as received odds. In other words, the notion that the superior player might start behind love – on minus fifteen or minus thirty instead of, or as well as, the inferior player starting ahead by fifteen, thirty etc. For those of us who play tennis using handicaps today, the notion of owed odds as well as received odds is quite natural, but in the 1880s it was an innovation, at least to the extent that there doesn’t seem to be any documentary evidence of owed odds being used prior to that suggestion.

Secondly, the tabular format for calculating the handicap to be used for lawn tennis is a precursor to the algorithmic method we use today in real tennis.

Even before Cavendish published his own treatise together with the laws and his handicapping methods, his suggested use of owed and received odds had found wide favour in lawn tennis.

James Dwight (he of that primordial American tennis tournament) published his treatise on tennis in 1886 – another book you can simply click through to and read here, on the internet archive. His short basic chapter on odds reproduced below and linked through to the on-line book:

There follows, in the Dwight, a more lengthy exposition about bisques; not only a great deal of thought on when to take them but also some thinking about what their computed value might be, compared with the more regular forms of numeric odds.

Image from the Wright & Ditson Lawn Tennis Guide 1894 – yet another 19th century tennis book available freely on-line in full

Unsurprisingly, the use of bisques was soon superseded by the use of fractions of fifteen; sometimes quarters, sometimes sixths of fifteen. The example below from The Badminton Library Lawn Tennis appendix of 1890.

Despite this added complexity, the use of handicapping in lawn tennis matches was ubiquitous in those early decades of the game’s popularity, used at pretty much every level other than the major tournaments, which (as with real tennis) were played at scratch. Perhaps that complexity did for handicapping in lawn tennis in the end; it is barely used at all in modern tennis; regrettably in my view. Perhaps handicapping will return to regular use in modern (lawn) tennis some day.

Early 20th Century: Yet More Mileage In Handicapping

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Eustace_Miles.jpg — Eustace “I Can See For” Miles

Eustace Miles, author of the 1903 book Racquets, Tennis & Squash, – click here to read or download the whole thing from the internet archive – was an intriguing character, famous not only for real tennis (1908 Olympic silver medallist, no less) but also for his advocacy of vegetarian and healthy diets, in his capacity as a restaurateur. You can read about him on Wikipedia – click here. (The bit in that piece about him living on two biscuits and a lentil was a standard “Punch gag” about veggies at that time and has no place in a serious article about a chap. Although other facts about him do suggest that he was one of those fellows who was rather asking to be the butt of jokes.)

Received wisdom appears to suggest that he was deemed to have had some odd ideas about many things, including odds, i.e. handicaps.

Miles, for reasons that I cannot fathom, deems “owe” handicapping to be impossible in real tennis:

Handicap by points are simple – they have not yet been brought down to the fineness of Lawn Tennis Handicaps. They still are only – Half-fifteen; Fifteen; Half—thirty ; Thirty ; and so on . One cannot owe Points : the system of Chases makes this impossible.

Those of us who use handicapping regularly know that this assertion about chases negating the use of owed odds is simply untrue. But this does indicate that, twenty or so years after owe handicapping was introduced into lawn tennis, it had not yet found its way into real tennis.

I very much enjoy reading Eustace Miles other ideas on handicapping, some of which I like for their weirdness, but wouldn’t attempt them myself, others (possibly still weird) which I enjoy trying or wouldn’t mind giving a try.

Take his thoughts on Handicap by Implements, for example:

Personally I find a Cricket bat to be the best practice. It develops the wrist and the arm, though it may strain them also. It involves a very accurate timing of the ball, and a very accurate position of the body, and a very full swing. Pettitt is an adept with a small specially-shaped piece of wood: I believe that the original piece of wood was part of a chair. Needless to say, such an implement compels one to be extremely careful. An inch or two of misjudgment, and one’s stroke is a failure . Older players played with some other object, as a soda-water bottle.
Racquets Tennis & Squash by Eustace Miles, pp218-219

Don’t try the ideas from the above paragraph at home, children…nor adults come to that. Miles also elaborates at length on cramped odds in those pages – it is well worth reading through to the end of that chapter on p221.

What I particularly like about Miles’s thinking on handicapping is his desire to encourage good sport and handicaps that help both players to develop their game.

Miles’s suggestive Chapter XLIV on Handicaps and Scoring pp303-306 has a great many ideas, some more practicable and sensible than others. Again it is well worth a read. He believes as a matter of etiquette that players should be prepared to take or give handicaps; he also suggests some subtle cramped-odds type things that the superior player might apply if the opponent stubbornly refuses to accept a handicap.

He advocates moving handicaps – i.e. making the handicap rise or fall as the match progresses. I particularly enjoy using these in friendly matches, especially in circumstances when the algorithmic methods of the modern computerised handicapping system are unlikely to work well enough; often the case in doubles where one player is recovering from injury or where one player is an unknown quantity.

Miles also advocates the use of left-handed play, both for the benefit of players’s bodies and also as a method of handicapping at times. I use this method myself, for the former reason in real tennis and for both reasons when I play lawn tennis with my wife, Janie. In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that Janie and I also use moving handicaps – owed and received – when we play lawn tennis, to great positive effect.

From Eustace Miles Racquets, Tennis & Squash , 1903

From The Tables Of The Late 19th Century To 21st Century Algorithmic Handicapping

Actually, the principles involved in the sophisticated lawn-tennis table-based handicapping of the late 19th century are remarkably similar to those we use today in the algorithm-based handicapping system at Real Tennis On-Line through the Tennis & Rackets Association.

On that site, following the centuries-old tradition of placing learned works about tennis on-line, in the public domain for all to see, Roger Pilgrim’s 2010 definitive guide to handicapping explains everything you ever wanted to know about the modern system of handicapping…but were afraid to ask. Click here to read and/or download that definitive piece.

Roger Pilgrim seems to make it his business to avoid being photographed at tennis matches, perhaps because he has no enormous beard or moustache to show off to the camera, unlike the Victorian and Edwardian folk who have mostly populated this piece.

But Roger has graced the tennis court with me, on several occasions. Despite the fact that he is far more experienced and a much better player than I shall ever be, we are able to enjoy playing tennis together through the wonders of the tennis handicapping system.

The handicap gets better very, very, very, slowly

Handicapping has come a long way since, in 1506, Philip, King of Castille (depicted) gave the Marquess of Dorset, the latter playing with his hand, fifteen in exchange for the former’s use of a racket

White City To East Acton Via North Kensington…& Madagascar!, FoodCycle, 2 August 2020

We ended up pursuing a rather convoluted route this Sunday for our East Acton FoodCycle run.

The gig started normally enough. There’s Janie, Father “Friar Tuck” *Richard*, Alannah & Francesco from a few week’s earlier, at Our Lady of Fatima Church, White City

FoodCycle provide us with an excellent app, Circuit For Teams, which does a wonderful job of listing our drops, linking to the satnav & optimising our route.

But this week something had changed. It might have had something to do with my upgraded iPhone. Circuit is now offering us a choice of satnavs, which is great, because we both like (and are used to) Waze, whereas it was previously hard-linked to GoogleMaps, which we like less.

But here’s the thing.

It seems that, in amongst all the upgrading excitement, but unbeknown to us, the app had switched on some functions that allow the app to take instructions by voice, using Siri, Apple’s voice control gizmo.

Early in our journey that day, Janie and I were chatting about travel, or rather our much diminished desire to travel at the moment. Janie pondered where we might want to go if/when the pandemic is over and we thus discussed Madagascar, where we were planning to go in 2018, until an outbreak of pneumonic plague there in late 2017 rather put us off the idea. (In the end, we went to Japan instead, in autumn 2018.)

After the first drop, the Circuits app seemed to be in a spin of re-routing and re-optimising. No matter, I thought, I know the way from White City to North Kensington for this second drop.

But the app was still in a spin ahead of the third drop:

… it keeps saying “route not possible”…

…said Janie, to which I merely said:

…ask it to re-optimise again – I know the way to our third drop anyway.

But Janie kept reporting that the app was failing to show a route for our journey and after our third drop, we were heading to Hammersmith to a new location and I really did want the app to show me the way…

…so I took a close look at the thing myself…

…the app had added “Madagascar” to the list of destinations and was trying (and for some obscure reason, failing) to route us to Hammersmith via Madagascar.

At this juncture I was reminded of the scene in the animated film, Madagascar, after the penguins have taken control of the ship in a “special forces style” operation, only to realise that they have absolutely no idea how to use the ship’s navigation systems. That scene is 1’40” into the clip below, all of which is well worth watching.

Much like the penguins, I tried pressing buttons to see what happens – in particular I thought it might be a good idea to remove Madagascar from the list of FoodCycle delivery destinations.

That worked. Once I deleted Madagascar and pressed “reoptimize route”, within a second or two, order had been restored and Circuits was again performing as expected and showing an excellent route for our deliveries.

Thus, in the next hour or 90 minutes, it was mission accomplished. Hurrah.

Because, when we have a lot of food to deliver for FoodCycle…

…we like to move it, move it…

The Secret Life Of Ginger Baker by Ian Theodoreson, Originally Performed By The Author At ThreadZoomMash, 29 July 2020

I am delighted that Ian Theodoreson has asked me to guest publish this charming performance piece.

The question of what should comprise my Desert Island Disc choices has occupied me for most of my adult life and I realise I am still some way from reaching the definitive selection. So I offer the following as an interim position.
When it comes to my favourite piece of music I wondered whether to include my current fave rave – ‘Drowning in Tears’ by Gary Moore…

…but think I ought to stick with the Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan-Williams which invokes memories of idyllic summer days past and has been part of my personal soundtrack for forty years.

In terms of my favourite book I did consider choosing ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ by Eric Maria Remarque but given I have read it so many times I have practically memorised it, I thought I would take John Steinbeck’s ‘East of Eden’ instead and enjoy its beautifully crafted analysis of the human condition.
So, I have cheated thus far by naming two books and two pieces of music, but there is no such equivocation when it comes to the ‘luxury’ object. It is, and always has been … a drum kit.
I have wanted to be a drummer for as long as I have wanted to be a fireman, which is basically for ever. For some reason my parents were not willing to indulge my passion and preferred my taking up the violin instead and by the time I left home other interests overwhelmed me and my ambition faded into the background. However a desert island seems like an ideal place to start learning as long as it comes with a never ending supply of drumsticks.
Like many of my generation I was transfixed by what is now termed classic rock, although always avoiding the heavier end of the genre. One group that didn’t particularly trouble my consciousness was Cream, despite being arguably one of the most influential bands of the rock era. Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and the drummer Ginger Baker could be considered the founding fathers of rock music.

Although Eric Clapton was the only one to go on to apparent greater exploits the music of Cream remains foundational despite the fact they only played together for just over two years from 1966 to 1968 before the irascible Ginger Baker decided he couldn’t stand touring anymore.

I was only eleven years of age when Cream split up and consequently knew very little about them so it was perhaps surprising that I entered the ballot at work to secure a pair of tickets for one of their four reunion concerts at the Albert Hall in 2005 – the only time they would ever play together again. My employer, Barnardo’s owned two debenture holder seats at the Albert Hall which they would allow staff to purchase, with a ballot being held if demand exceeded supply.
Given it was my p.a. who handled the ballot process it is perhaps fortunate that I was on holiday at the time the ballot was drawn as her phone call to tell me I had been successful was followed not long afterwards by a call from the full time UNISON official to let me know that his members were taking out a collective grievance against me. Fortunately he was joking.

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So I subsequently found myself in the Albert Hall, surrounded by a crowd of ‘crusties’ all dressed in suits, having come, like me, straight from work, when it suddenly dawned on me that it was me who was the interloper. The music we were about to hear belonged to this older generation and in actual fact I probably only knew two songs that Cream had ever produced.
The guy sitting next to me looked nervous – he had been at the very last concert Cream had played in October 1968 and he was desperately worried that the moment he had dreamed of for over 36 years would be a crushing disappointment.
The concert was a triumph. Ginger Baker performed one of his trademark ten minute drum solos (while Eric and Jack went back stage to make themselves a cup of tea and finish the Times crossword) and the crowd got drunk on nostalgia.
At the end I asked my neighbour how he had found it. ‘Better than I dared hope’ he said. ‘How did it compare to 1968?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know, I was too stoned in ’68 to remember’ he replied.

If you can remember Cream in the 1960s, you weren’t really there

One impression that night that stayed with me from the concert was the mesmerising performance of Ginger Baker. He was notoriously mercurial character and not given to saying very much so it was surprising then to hear him speaking during the concert and particularly at the end of his mammoth drum solo when he ended up, in his gruff South London tones with ‘I thank you’. He had a very particular way of speaking, and this closing flourish stuck in my head. (Rohan has suggested he was channelling his inner Arthur Askey).

A few days later, with the noise of the concert still ringing in my ears, I was standing on the platform at Loughton tube station when suddenly the tannoy sprang into life:

‘This is a service update from the Loughton control centre. There are slight delays on the Circle and District lines and a good service on all other London Underground lines. I thank you’.

There was that voice again. I looked around excitedly at all my fellow passengers – Ginger Baker works in the control room at Loughton Station, isn’t that amazing – but no one else stirred. I went back down the stairs to peer in through the control room window but I was too late – a shadowy figure was stepping out of the room and closing the door behind him.
Could I really be the only person who knew that Ginger Baker has an alternative career working for London Underground? Did his colleagues realise who they were working alongside? Did he use a pseudonym? … so many questions lay unanswered.

It wasn’t the last time I heard his voice on the station tannoy…each time the announcement was signed off with his ‘I thank you’…but I tell you this, I haven’t heard it since October 2019, which is when Ginger Baker died. Coincidence or what?

Desert Island Diatribe, A Performance Piece For ThreadZoomMash, Plus A Review Of the Evening,29 July 2020

Fuck you, Rohan Candappa.
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.

Introduction

Medieval & Renaissance Tennis

The Early Tudor Period

The Late Tudor Period, Cecil & Gresham

Further Reading & References

Video Samples Of Real Tennis Shown When Answering Questions

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Postscript One: A Video Of My Performance

Postscript Two: Links To Our Ethiopia Trip

Postscript Three: A Very Brief Review Of The Mistaken Identity Evening

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The Emergence of “Modern” or “Lawn” Tennis

The MCC Got A Bunch Of Lawyers & Sport Enthusiasts Together To Codify This New-Fangled Lawn Tennis Game…What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Handicapping In Lawn Tennis

Early 20th Century: Yet More Mileage In Handicapping

From The Tables Of The Late 19th Century To 21st Century Algorithmic Handicapping

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Postscript: The Evening Itself

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