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11111E12
Compton Mackenzie
THE Russian victories at Henley provided an excuse for the clamant brotherhood of sporting journalists in the popular press to demand that Britannia should take her rowing more seriously. We are assured that cricket, football, lawn-tennis, golf and various other games must all be taken more seriously if we want to preserve the respect of the rest of the world. I should have thought we took them seriously enough already. It is a pity we do not devote as much popular attention to the selection , of a Cabinet as we devote to the picking of an English side 'for what has become that caricature of cricket which is called a . Test match. A combination of acrobatics and juggling offers the rubber-necked spectators at Wimbledon much enthralling entertaintnent, but can lawn- tennis on that level of accomplishment still be called a game? So long as association football provides a mimic war for the contending nations it may be an antidote to real war, but a match like that between Hungary and Brazil may presently provide a casus belli for two countries.
Fortunately there are a few genuine games left, among which is croquet. Mr. Bernard Darwin may not have meant to express contempt of croquet when he wrote of clock golf's being ` bought in a box like croquet' any more than I should intend to be contemptuous of golf if I wrote of its being bought in a bag. I abstain from arguing whether golf or croquet be the better game. If you require that exercise which is an euphemism for aperient then you will prefer golf, for it is playable all the year round, offers an incentive to take the air, and provides its devotees with an apparently inexhaustible variety of effort. On the other hand, if your inside demands no more than comparatively gentle exercise and if your mind is alert enough to enjoy a combination of billiards and chess in the open air, you will find croquet the ideal pastime.
That croquet is directly descended from the pall mall which was the favourite game of Charles II and his courtiers cannot be claimed with certainty. Pall mall vanished completely, but a game rather similar to croquet had long been played in Brittany and in some villages in the South of France. From there it seems probable that the game was introduced to Ireland, whence it was brought to England in about 1853. Between 1860 and 1870 the game became immensely popular in Great Britain and spread to India and the Colonies. Captain Mayne Reid, who had had an extremely adventurous career in America, which included being seriously wounded in the Mexican War, and came back to Europe to take part in the Hungarian revolution, found in croquet a substitute for active warfare. Besides his many tales of adventure he published a book about croquet in 1863 in which he rashly declared that the game had become ` the national pastime ' and was ` to be cherished as the tree of life.' The first all-comers' meeting was held at Moreton-in-the-Marsh, and in ,the same year the All England Croquet Club was formed with an annual champion- ship played for at Wimbledon. Then Major Wingfield in 1873 introduced lawn-tennis, which in its original form had been called Sphairistike. I am not joking. The World of June 14, 1882, was writing : ` Lawn-tennis has not to answer for many accidents, so that two in a week among the sphairistic ladies of Ireland seems alarming.' Croquet as a country-house pastime could not compete with the new game, and during the Eighties when the Renshaws popularised volleying croquet almost became as obsolete as pall mall. Volleying at first had been regarded, like reversing in the ballroom, as bad form. The correspondence columns of The Field nearly caught fire from the fierce controversy. At Oxford, even as late as 1901, we still called lawn-tennis pat-ball and regarded the half-blue that was awarded to the game as an insult to respectable sport. The revival of croquet began in 1894, and in 1896-7 the United All England Croquet Association was formed to take the place of the defunct All England Croquet Club. This as The Croquet Association is now the ruling authority in the game all over the world and is recognised as such in Australia and New Zealand, where croquet is very popular.
The ignorance about croquet is persistent. There is no wit so feeble but that it thinks itself entitled to attempt a facetious remark about croquet. One prevailing fallacy is that it is a malicious game from which the players only extract pleasure by viciously scoring off their opponents. Chess is not con- sidered a malicious game because pieces are captured. The only breach of kindliness at billiards is to pot your opponent for which you apologise insincerely when you do it by a fluke, but then with equal insincerity you .apologise for any fluke. Yet the billiard-player, like the croquet-player, must try to leave his opponent lying badly. It is not considered malicious at cricket to set three-quarters of your field close round the batsman to make him nervous.
Croquet demands as much delicate skill in the manipulation of a stroke as billiards, but it also demands almost as much strategic foresight as chess. Indeed, it should be a compulsory game for budding diplomats. There is no doubt that the ability of the average Russian official to play a good game of chess gives him a great advantage over the British diplomat accustomed to cricket and golf or the American diplomat accustomed to baseball and golf. Croquet would encourage the art of playing for an ultimate advantage, and at the same time it would not deprive the British or American diplomat of the fresh air he requires, and to which Russians seem com- paratively indifferent. Do not let me suggest by my remarks about exercise . that croquet is only a game for the old. To be sure, it is a game at which the old can hold their own with the young. The champion of 1953 is a young man of twenty, and there is no reason why he should not be champion in 1999 and pause in the middle of a break to look up at the next eclipse of the sun visible in Great Britain. All that he will need to preserve is his eyesight. That with hoops of their present narrowness is essential. That narrowness worried the late Dr. Benet. He was fond of croquet and, as one might expect, his strategy was good. However, both he and Madame Benet felt that the exclusiveness of the modern hoop was undemocratic, and when he was living at Aston Abbots near Aylesbury during the last war, Dr. Benet had all the hoops widened in order to give everybody a better chance : it was a typical gesture of that great little man.
To play croquet with Benet on what was not a full-sized lawn was to feel that the problems of Europe were soluble and to face the future in a mood of optimism because one had seemed to play so unusually well.
I ought to admit that one of the obstacles to the popu- larity of croquet is the need for a larger and smoother lawn than is required for country house tennis, because it is an undoubted handicap for a croquet player who aspires to be in the front rank if he is not always used to the majestic lawns of Hurlingham. Nevertheless, even on a small lawn. except for potential acrobats and jugglers, croquet is a better game than lawn-tennis. True, croquet offers no excuse to appear on the mkt in a bathing costume, and that is a handicap to its popularity in these nudistic days. However, it does allow leisure to the players, and leisure today is more precious than the ability to undress in public. This abominable summer prevents my trying to celebrate the beauty of croquet in an English June, but, after all, every outdoor game in summer except golf is at the mercy of our weather.
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