13 APRIL 1991, Page 31

Billiards in the open air

Roy Jenkins

QUEEN OF GAMES: THE HISTORY OF CROQUET by Nicky Smith Weidenfeld, £16.95, pp.177 Ionce had a long audience with the late Emperor of Japan. We had obviously both been concerned to find subjects to keep us going. I had been told that he had written 13 books, mainly on marine biolo- gy. I endeavoured to 'show awareness', as editors encourage political writers to do, but he deflected my compliments, at once modestly and grandly. 'No, no', he said, 'I do not write them myself, I employ schol- ars to do that.'

He, in return, seemed to have been told that my main private occupation was play- ing croquet, and with immense politeness had absorbed a good deal about the game. Miss Nicky Smith's current work was not available to him, although he, or his Court Chamberlain, had become as well informed as if they had followed closely her regular contributions to Country Life under the appropriate pseudonym of Arthur Mallet. The only trouble was that he appeared to think that I was a world-class croquet play- er. I could not tell him that I employed professionals to win championships, and I felt it would have been an anticlimax to say that my experience was mostly confined to post-prandial foursomes, often on roughish ground, which was best compensated for by making the hoops a little wider than regu- lation, after weekend country lunch parties. So both our subjects were founded on ele- ments of misapprehension.

Nevertheless, I did spend a considerable amount of time in the 1960s and 1970s more so than I do now — on the croquet lawn. This was partly because I often played on my own, having discovered that it was a good form of patience. These soli- tary sessions could take the form of seeing in how few strokes one could get round the long course of ten hoops and the stick, and sometimes, if everything went right, achiev- ing it in under 20. This was quite good Practice discipline, although I always dis- liked being made to play with others the bastard game of golf croquet with its one stroke a go as opposed to the full game of roquets, croquets and the possibilitiy of long breaks.

More frequently, however, I made my patience take the form of the full game but playing all four balls myself, which at least avoided the tedium of waiting for others. The disadvantages were the difficulty of remembering what point in the course they had each reached, the curious fact that one's loyalties became attached to red and yellow, or less frequently to black and blue, which made it difficult to try equally hard with the unfavoured pair of balls, and at the end of the session the very limited sat- isfaction to be gained from victory over oneself. However, I suppose it provided good practice as well as fresh air, and improved one's performance for more competitive but still strictly informal encounters.

At least since the 'foot on one's own ball and opponent into the bushes' form of play went out circa 1890, I have never been able to understand the theory of croquet being a peculiarly vicious and bad-temper-produc- ing game, as compared with, say, tennis. It is not exhausting, it has a certain gentle rhythm, and its billiards in the open air aspect, with the verdure of country lawns substituted for the smoke-filled saloon bar traditions of billiards itself, ought surely to produce calm and benignity. Yet in prac- tice I do recall the most epoch-making row with Anthony Crosland at Ann Fleming's, perversely on an otherwise perfect spring day. I also recall that his wife urged him on with loyalty whereas mine merely com- mented on the ludicrousness of two allegedly grown-up Cabinet ministers quar- relling over the position of the ball. I also recall a disputatious game, played in a sum- mer twilight, with Teddy Kennedy who was partnered by Senator Tunney, the son of the old boxer. But I think that was entirely due to my irritation as the prospect of vic- tory over a Kennedy, always a good thing to achieve, slipped needlessly away under the incompetence of my partner (who was Kennedy's brother-in-law, so perhaps there was collusion). Happily my games with the literary editor of The Spectator, mostly on that same lawn which produced the erup- tion with Crosland, have never ended quar- relsomely. Otherwise I might not be writing this piece today.

Nicky Smith is very informative about the history and current state of the game, and mostly writes clearly and tautly. She is, however, muddling about dates. Having convinced me that croquet, imported from Ireland, had first become a serious 'garden game' in England in the 1860s, she then announces that it was exported to Australia by settlers in the 1850s,

whose personal baggage often contained a boxed set of croquet equipment — a stan- dard part of the paraphernalia of the Victorian middle-class family.

Nor can I decide, fluctuating one way and the other, whether or not she has a sense of humour about her game. At times she assumes a sort of Jennifer's Diary inconsequential glossiness. Thus, of the World Singles Champion of 1989:

He is a cheerful character whose most singu- lar characteristic is his relentless control of his game. A trained carpenter who also stud- ied for a career in the priesthood, Joe Hogan is a great exponent of adopting the 'right psy- chology'. Like most of the New Zealand play- ers, this seems to consist of an undemonstrative but unyielding determina- tion to win.

At other times she adopts the moral uplift tone of an old-style preparatory school headmaster whose school is not quite worthy of him: Five years later they [the United States] have already made great strides towards this goal [of 'strength in depth'] and in the meantime have invested croquet with an enthusiasm which has been sadly lacking in the British game.

My reaction to this is to paraphrase King George V's response to H.G. Wells's 1917 complaint about an alien and uninspiring court. 'I may be uninspiring', he said, 'but I'll be damned if I'm an alien'. I feel that I may lack 'strength in depth', but I'll be damned if I'm unenthusiastic. I once played in three inches of snow when grooves had to be constructed between the hoops. Once made, the balls ran in them remarkably truly.