Talking of books 44 1 say
old sport"
Benny Green
I must move fast if I am to do any j tistice at all to John Arlott's latest literary gesture*. For one thing I have always rather liked the word "Companion" in preference to "Encyclopaedia" or "Dictionary", because there is something homely about it which dates back to some cosy Victorian dream of socialibity. A Companion is a book you take down from the shelf, not to educate yourself, or to mug up for an idiotic examination, or even to win a bet, but merely to while away the time in a pleasant way. So the great test of any Companion is to open it at random and see if it stays open. I try the experiment on Arlott and I find this, on page 791: POLO CROSSE, a team game played on horseback.... with a weapon formed by splicing a tennis racket on to the handle of a polo mallet and replacing the right gut with a looseone
I am hopelessly snared in the coils of the English genius for inventing games, and hardly have the moral strength to move onand try page 309, where I find:
FERRIER, Robert (1900-71) Association footballer for Motherwell, he captained that team . . . a brilliant outside left, he was born in Sheffield but taken back to his father's native Scotland at the age of three weeks and lived there for the rest of his life. He was thus the finest player of his time not to receive international recognition .. .
And so it goes on. From Aaltonen, Ravno, Finnish motor rally driver, to Zucchi, R, Italian' water skier. It is Romance, Romance all the way, eleven hundred pages of fantasy which is yet hard fact. There is no disputing either the usefulness or the companionableness of this Companion, and in making a few complaints I am only trying to help.
A certain provincial tendency to boost the
*The Oxford Companion to Sports and Games Edited by John Arlott (Oxford University Press £8.50). present at the expense of the past; can 1 take with due seriousness a work of reference which include Geoff Boycott but leaves out R. E. Foster, the only man in all history to captain the full England elevens at cricket and football? A certain clumsiness of touch in selecting entrants: Tony Canzoneri is in, but Barney Ross, who defeated him and was arguably the greatest welterweight between the wars, is out. A certain tendency to be dogmatic where God himself might hesitate: the great Fanny Blankers-Koen is defined as -probably the greatest all-round woman athlete of the century", whereas Mildred Babe Didrikson Zaharias, to mention just a few, only rates as "all-round athlete for the USA". A certain inconsistency within the scope of the Companion itself; there is a full page photograph of the South African Hampshire batsman Barry Richards but no entry on him in the text.
I confess also that I grieved for Leslie. Compton, who might have been granted entry for being the oldest footballer (38) ever to receive a first cap for England; for `Bah's Choice,' the most intelligent greyhound of all time, who gets no mention but would have been perfectly capable of sitting down in a nice quiet kennel and reading this Companion from-cover to cover; for poor old Dorando, the most famous athlete never to win the Olympic Marathon, who gets into my honours list for having arranged for his own heart to move further (half an inch) in the course of single athletic contest than any other sportsman in history; for that great old featherweight and lightweight Abe Attell, who comes out in the text as Atell; for the late Bryn Jones, whose entry includes the canard that the last war stopped professional football in August 1938; for Hughie Gallacher, whose entry sounds less spectacular than it might have done through the omission of the word "five" at a vital juncture.
On the credit side, the text is peppered with delightful items, for instance that Omar Khayyam mentioned basketball, that the Kent and England wicketkeeper Leslie Ames has a "middle name "Ethelbert"; that at the age of nineteen George Hackenschmidt hoisted a milkman's horse on his shoulders and carried it around; also I am honour bound to mention the superlative standard of the illustrations, and especially the photographs, which combine graphic beauty with unfamiliarity. Anyone who wants to get the measure of the Companion's visual impact has only to glance at the remarkable photos of Cyclo-cross, an American Bowling tournament, Sir John Cobham flying over Westminster Bridge, and priceless item entitled "Badminton under the Raj: India, c. 1912".
In nominating a favourite photograph and a favourite entry, I realise I am libelling half the contents of the book, but I must call a halt somewhere. The photograph of the tennisplaying Doherty brothers reclining indolently in flannels on the floor of a Victorian studio seems to me to sum up everything about old-time amateur sport, and I doubt if there is any reader in the world whose heart is so hard that he could withstand the blandishments of that cardboard moon in the background beaming down on a cardboard lake. As for my favourite entry, it too is a lawn tennis item; I append it with no accompanying comment, for any comment would be superfluous. Arlott has orchestrated a marvellous book, whose flavour is conveyed by this sort of thing:
DOD, Charlotte (1871-1962). British Lawn Tennis player, the game's first prodigy. In 1887, at the age of 15 years ten months, Lottie Dod won the Women's singles at Wimbledon ... After so many easy victories, Dod lost interest in competitive tennis. She became a champion golfer, a hockey international, a fine skater and the best woman archer in England. On court she was known as "the little wonder" at 12. Two years later she could beat many men. Her anticipation was so remarkable that she never seemed to make a hurried shot . , .
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