Traditional pub games in Britain - lecture.

This is the transcript for a lecture I gave at chelsea college of art on the 18th of January...

For as long as there have been pubs there have been pub games. The problem with understanding the history of pub games in Britain is that prior to the 17th century games played in pubs were played by people who did not write, therefore these’s games were passed on through word of mouth, and often confined to the microcosm of the single pub. So what is known about pub games prior to this time is derived from records from prohibitions issued by the crown. Out of interest the earliest of these is a prohibition issued by Henry III in the 13th century to prohibit members of the clergy from playing dice or chess.
This first slide shows a painting by Adriaen Van Ostade, depicting a typical pub scene in17th century Europe, it was painted around 1674/5. Van Ostade and his contemporary, such as Jan Steen (shown here in the next slide) at this time were focusing on painting images of social realism, and therefore gave an insight into how pubs and games formed a part of everyday life. However in Britain artists were not focusing on scenes such as this until the late 18th century where it was focused far more on caricature, as appose to social realism.
So here are a couple of pub facts.
• There are over 50,000 pubs in Britain, however they are closing at a rate of about 6-7 every day.
• Eight out of ten adults consider themselves pub goers, and over 15 million people drink in a pub at least once a week.
• There are 759 pubs in Britain called ‘The Red Lion’, 626 pubs are called ‘The Royal Oak’, and 427 pubs are called ‘The White Hart.
• The most popular pub game in Britain is dart, which in 2005 was recognised as a sport by combined sports councils of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
• Second to darts as favourite pub games is pub quizzes, staged at 44% of all pubs. The oldest and largest league in Britain is the Merseyside Quiz league, which started in Bootle in 1959, however the first recorded quiz league is at a working man’s club in York in September 1946.
• Thirds most popular is pool, which although assumed to be an American import is actually based on a smaller version from Australia, France and Italy.
• Lastly on this list, as Britain’s fourth most popular is skittles, particularly in the West Country and south Wales. There are over 150 leagues and over a thousand alleys in Britain.
• Two of the strangest pub games I have come across in my research for this lecture are pipe smoking contests, which although now rare still exist in some pubs, one being the Bull in Harpole, Northamptonshire, where such contests have been staged since at least 1856 (these contests now take place in the beer gardens). The second is Rifle Shooting, where there is a rifle range in the pub itself, often in a hole in the wall. This seems a particularly ill thought through game to play in an institution design almost solely for drinking. However it has been a traditional pub game since the 2860’s, under the sponsorship of the National Rifle Association as a response to the threat of French invasion.
I’m now going to show you an extract from the 2009 channel four documentary ‘The Red Lion’…

The reason I showed this clip is to show the range of different pubs in the country and how they are used, from the traditional ‘old-man’ style pubs, where socializing and community is more the focus to pubs such as witherspoons, where the focus is more on cost effective drinking. However one looks at the pub as an institution though, it still forms a major part of everyday life for many people and a focus of the community. I am from a largish village/town in Kent called Sevenoaks. In Sevenoaks there are 10 pubs, there used to be a lot more, but slowly but surely they have been shut down. The pubs are as follows. Round the corner from my parents house is ‘The New Inn’ and ‘The Castle’ (we never go in these two, the new inn is a bit dodgy and the castle is just weird), wetherspoons and the oak tree (these are both the under age drinkers pubs), the checkers (this pub has perhaps one of the stupider landlord, he could smell gas in the basement, so went down to have a look, the light wasn’t working so he got out his lighter and blew up the pub, lucky he was thrown behind a door by the blast so didn’t get hurt and it was the morning so the pub wasn’t open yet, but the market is outside the pub and the blast blew the doors off the cellar into the street.), the ‘very PC’ly named ‘The Black Boy’, which is where the city types go, ‘The White Hart’ (our gastro pub), ‘the halfway house’ and then lastly ‘the anchor’ and ‘the rifleman’. These two pubs are the only two left that tilt towards the traditional. In the rifleman (which was my local) there is a pool table and a bar billiards table, a darts board, and the landlord keep a 1940’s bar skittles set behind the bar, which has little Stone’s green ginger wine bottle as the skittles. The anchor, in town, holds a traditional meat raffle; where there is a chance to win 15 different cuts of meat if you buy a ticket. This is something that I am told was once very traditional in Kent but has died out, probably because it’s a bit odd. The reason I have talk about the pubs in Sevenoaks is to give a little bit of a background into my interest in this subject. I have described the different types of pubs in Sevenoaks and the different pub cultures you find in each of them. I am not a drinker by any means; to be honest I am quite happy with a cuppa tea, and get odd looks by going into pubs to order just a coffee or juice. However it is a particular pub culture that I like. Where I’m from in Sevenoaks is very traditional, and countrified. There is a pub for example that has a big sign on the door that says, no food, no lager and no children. People drink real ale, have pork scratching and pay the type of games I will be describing. And with this comes a certain culture, a traditional culture, where they is a community in the pub that is welcoming and friendly. you often have to gain respect in this group and it doesn’t take kindly to new coming, but after 21 years of living in one place they might finally except you.

I am going to talk about six different categories of pub game in this lecture, pushing and shoving games, ring games, skittles, board and dice games, cue games, and lost games.

Firstly I will look at ‘Pushing and Shoving’ games. As the name suggests these games involve an object, normally a coin, weight, or wooden counter, being pushed or shoved along a polished surface. These games include shovel board, shuffleboard, shove ha’penny, push penny, shove groat. In Scotland they have their own variety, a type of table-top curling called ‘summer ice’.
This slide shows example of Shove ha’penny. A Ha’penny is a half penny and refers to the coin that the player pushes down the board. The game consists of a long smooth board that is placed on the flat of a table. The board is marked with horizontal lines two inches apart, (about 1 and a half times the size of the coin) with a square of blackboard on each side. The gaps between these lines are known as beds. Each player in turn places a coin at the foot of the board, which is then struck with the palm of their hand, so that it slides towards the top. The aim is to get the coin to stop between two of the lines, if it is touching the line it doesn’t count. Each team must get the coin to land between each line three times in order to win. At the ends of the lines there is a square of blackboard. When a player scores a point a tally is drawn on the square of blackboard corresponding to their team. The horizontal lines on the board are often groves as appose to just drawn on, this is so that if there is question to whether the coin is touching the line or not it can be decided by running another coin along the grove, if the coin in question is touching the line then it will move when the coin run between the grove touches it, thus deciding the point. When the player has shoved the coin between the lines three times it is known as a ‘sergeant’ .If you have already scored three coins between two lines and the coin lands there again then the point is given to the other team. The rules to this game, like most pub games vary depending on the area you are in, for example in Guernsey they insist that you get the coin between the lines five times, known as a ‘sergeant major’, or ‘gold watch’.
The game of shove ha’penny has suffered a decline since the 1970’s. for example in 1973, there were a recorded 27 shove ha’penny teams in 25 pubs, they have all since disappeared. However it is still possible to find shove ha’penny in pubs in Britain, for example at ‘The Cockpit’ pub in Blackfriars, there is a hinged shove ha’penny board that can be pulled down when you want to play it. It is also making a come back in a more technologically advanced way, as this clip of a shove ha’penny app for windows phones shows.

The next type of games that I will be looking at is ring games. These are probably the simplest type of target games, and have been played in homes, playgrounds, pubs and fairgrounds for centuries. At British pubs there are three major ring games still found, rings, ringing the bull and indoor quoits. There is also a Suffolk version of the latter known as caves. Apart from the simplicity of these games, they are favour as they are cheap, and don’t take up a lot of space in the pub.

I am going to focus on a game called ringing the bull. This is the most simple and the probably the most annoying of all pub games. An upturned hook, often in the shape of a bull’s horn is fixed to the wall at the same height as the bull’s eye of a dartboard. Six of seven feet away from the hook, a length of cord is suspended from the ceiling. At the end of this cord is attached a ring, usually brass, about two inches in diameter. The player takes hold of the ring steps back to a mark on the floor a further six feet away and swings the ring so that it flies onto the hook, thus winning a point. At first this look like an easy game, but the level of hand to eye co-ordination required is quite spectacular, and locals that make it look easy as anything have actually spent years practicing. Rules for this game vary from pub to pub due to the altering way in which this game needs to be set up. It is set up around the lay out of the pub, therefore the lengths of cord, throwing distances, ring sizes and types of hooks may vary. For this reason there cannot ever be an inter-pub ringing the bull league, as the advantages would always be weighted to much in favour of the home team. This game is truly frustrating to play, you try for ages to get the ring on the hook, and it comes so close so often, but not quite, and then a local comes over and shows how its done first time. The following slide shows a video of this game being played at the rock inn, at Chiddingstone Hoath in Kent. I was at this pub at the weekend playing this game for the first time, and on my first go it took about 10 minutes for me to get it on the hook (the people in the video are actually my mum and dad), however it is surprisingly addictive and draws you in. No-one knows how old this game is or where it originated, but there are a number of theories. One of this is that, because this game is played at a pub called ‘Ye Olde trip to Jerusalem’ in Nottingham, which is called this due to the fact that crusaders stopped there in 1189, it is said that the game may have been brought back from the Holy Land. Although the origins of this pubs name have since been traced back to only 1799, and there is no record of a pub on the site before 1483. The oxford English dictionary has traced the first reference of it to 1851, stating ‘it is, or was, common in the ale-houses of Cheshire, and is called ring-the-bull’. The tense in this sentence suggests that it was played before 1851. A pub historian called Rob Magee found further evidence of the game being around at this time in a magistrates report in Stalybridge, Cheshire, in 1869, in which boys were caught playing cards at the globe Inn, while men were playing ‘bull-ringing’ for beer money. A version of this game is also played in the Bahamas, and is called the Bimini game. Here is it produced commercially, however its makers deny claims that the game was brought over by pirates in the 18th century, instead claiming that Ernest Hemingway played it first during a fishing trip to the Bahamas in the 1930’s (however he doesn’t mention this in any of his writings). Other than this there is no evidence of any similar game in Europe, suggesting that this is a truly unique, British pub game. The game can also look very different depending on which pub you are in, some are just single hooks on the wall, like this one from ‘Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem’, or a painted bull on a board with a hook for a nose, such as this one from the ‘White Lion’, in Cray, North Yorkshire. Or it can even take the form of a stuffed bulls head with a hook drilled into the nose, such as the one in the earlier video at the ‘Rock’ in Chiddingstone Hoath, Kent (which is just a couple of villages along from Sevenoaks, the town I’m from). Experts in this game can do trick such as throwing the ring while standing with their back to he hook, or swinging the ring so that it swings once just over the ring, swings back to the player then back round again and lands on the hook. Some experts have even claimed to have ‘ringed’ a cigarette that has been impaled on the hook, without disturbing the ash.

As I mention earlier, skittles is Britain’s fourth must popular game. The word skittles is first recorded in 1630,but there are several records of games of this nature before then. In Thomas Hughes novel ‘Tom Brown Schooldays’ he writes ‘Life isn’t all beer and skittles; but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman’s educations’, and similarly in Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers Sam Weller says ‘Life ain’t all porter and skittles’. The most common form of skittles is this one pictured, where the game is played in a similar fashion to ten-pin bowling. However I am going to talk about bar skittles, which is a smaller version designed to be placed on the bar, and looks like this.
There have been several games that have been transmuted from outdoors to indoors, miniaturised and put onto a table or bar in the process. With bar skittles not only was this an advantage as it becomes a less strenuous game, but also because during the winter skittles alleys in the pubs are too large and draughty to heat properly. There are several versions of bar skittles; hood skittles is a version played in Leicestershire, where you have a table, which looks a bit like an armchair. It has an attached hood from which the game takes it name. This hood is formed of netting on a frame, and is designed to trap any skittles or the ball, a bit like a table version of a cricket net. Another version is known as ‘Duddlums’. This game was known to be surviving in only one pub in Britian, the Vigo Inn, at Fairseat, Kent, however in 2007 this pub closed for repairs, thus signalling the death of this game. In this game there is a table with one end open and the opposite with raised edges. On the far end there are nine pins set up in a diamond. The player stands nine feet back from the table and throws a disc, known as a cheese, so that it will land at the beginning of the table and then slide to the back, knocking over the pins, like a mix between skittles and curling. There are now no original duddlum tables in existence, however a society in Dover has a replica of the original from the Vigo Inn. The version of bar skittles on the slide is called, ‘Devil among the tailors’. It is the most familiar version of bar skittles. In this game a small wooden ball is attached to alight chain or chord to a swivel at the top of the pole. The pole stands upright on a board, where there are nine pins, arranged in a diamond with one in the middle. The game is played by the player throwing the ball away from the player and clockwise around the pole. The player must try and knock down as many pins as possible with every throw. Each turn comprises of three throws. If all the pins go down in one or two throws, they are re-set, so the maximum score possible I can be achieved again in the next throw, so the highest possible score on each turn is 27. Usually a game lasts until a player get either 101 or 121 points, depending on how it is played. However the player need to get this score exactly, towards the end if you need for example 3 points and you get six then you stay the same until you get exactly three points. This game is very common on the continent, in France it is called ‘le birinic’ or ‘le burinig’, in Germany it is called, ‘pendelkegelen’. The name ‘devil among the tailors’ is said to have come from an incident in London theatre in 1805, when a play called the tailors: a tragedy for warm weather (which was a revival of a burlesque first staged in 1783) This play annoyed tailors so much in the capital that they staged a riot inside and outside the theatre. The magistrates called the special constables, the constables called the cavalry, and the life guards (the cavalry) ‘skittled’ the rioters…which I guess is a bit like kettling, but more violent. However another pub game historian has since claimed that a game existed prior to this event called ‘devil among the tailors’. This game is still very common in Britain, probably due to the convenience of keeping such a small board. There is apparently a good set at the Bricklayers arm in Putney, just down the road from here.
There is another game along the skittles line, that I came across whilst researching for this lecture that I found interesting, it is called Aunt Sally. It originates from Oxfordshire, and its roots come from the English Civil war, when the royalist troops would play a game called, ‘throwing the cocks’. This game involved tying a live cockerel to a stake, and then charging people to throw sticks at it. Whoever killed the bird could take it home to eat. This game was reportedly mostly played by young men and boys on shove Tuesday. This game developed into a form where a figurine head of an old woman was made with a clay pipe in her mouth. The object of the game was to throw sticks at the head in order to break the pipe. The game bears a resemblance to a coconut shy or skittles. Today this game is still played, but instead of a figurine head of an old woman it is a ball on top of a plinth about 10cm high, known as a dolly, which is then placed on a metal spike. The object is to throw sticks at the ball to try and knock it off, without hitting the metal spike. Successfully hitting the ball off is called a ‘doll’, however if the spike is hit the score does not count and is called an ‘iron’. The name Aunt Sally is thought to derive from an American fairground game imported in the 1850’s.

So, board and dice games. These games are probably the best suited to pubs because the sets can be kept behind bars when they are not need, making storage easy. They can also be played anywhere in the pub. Anyone who lives in the new cross area may well know the ‘Montage arms’. I lived in new cross for the first two years of being here at Chelsea, and the monty was just down the road from us. It is a truly odd pub, decorated with all sorts, old guns, model ships, an inflatable crocodile, boots, anything you can think of hang from the ceiling. And it is run by an old couple, who tend to spill most of your drink before you get it, but they are very lovely so you forgive them. At this pub there are a variety of board games you can play, more modern than the ones I’m about to talk about, such as Essex monopoly. They have there own unique way of storage for these games, there is a small car at the back of the pub, driven by two zebra’s, the games are piled in a trunk at the front of this car.
The games I’m going to talk about however are more traditional. I find these games the most complicated, so I am going to focus on one game that I know well. It is called shut the box. Shut the box is a dice game, played in a baize-lined tray, with a display of numbers on hinged panels. The rules of the games vary from pub to pub, but generally there are as follows. At the start all the numbers are opens, as such. (new slide). The player must throw two dice and close any number or combination of numbers that adds up to the total of the dice. So, for example, it the player throws a six and a three, it could be used to shut a nine, an eight and one,, seven and two, six and three, or five and four. Once a number has been shut it remains shut for the rest of the game. The same player then rolls again, and continues to shut numbers until either all the number are down, or the player roll a number that they cannot make with the number left up. Any numbers left up become the score for that player. So for example if there is a two, four and five still up and the player rolls a six then they cannot make that number and they score is eleven. (However in some variation the score from this would be the three figures put together, and therefore 245). The game continues for the number of rounds agreed at the beginning of the game. The winner is the player with the lowest score at the end. It some variation it is the rule that if a player succeed it shutting all the numbers in one turn then they win the game outright. In Britain this game was first mention in 1965, in Timothy Finn’s ‘The Watney Book of Pub Games’. Finn came across it in the Channel Islands and reported that it had been introduced there by a enthusiast called ‘Chalkie’ Trowbridge in 1958. However in a subsequent of this book he reports to have found an older shut the box set in Hayley Island, from the 1950’s. French game historians claim that this game is very similar to a French game called ‘fermer la boite’, and as you can see from the slide it look exactly the same, however it is unclear whether this game originated from France or England.

One of Britain’s favourite pub games is pool. However pool is the latest in a long line of cue games that dates back to the 16th century, firstly as Billiards. Shakespeare writes Cleopatra says to her lady in waiting ‘let us to billiards’, and although the real Cleopatra probably wouldn’t have said this, the fact that Shakespeare writes about in this play from 1606-07, proves it was a well established game at this time. Most historians agree that until the 15th century this game was played outdoors on the ground with hoop, rather like croquet, but using a mace rather than a mallet to strike the ball. (The maces were similar to putters in golf). By Shakespeare’s time however the game had moved indoors, and into a table-top game. Mary Queen of Scots, for example, complained that her billiards table was taken away from her shortly before her execution in 1587. I have read about the original object of the game, but I don’t quite understand it, but I will explain it anyway. In early billiards the object of the game was to propel an ivory or wooden ball from the near end of the table, through a wooden hoop positioned at the far end of the table, then work it back again to the ‘king’ which was a free-standing wooden pin. The final trick was to bring the ball as near as possible to the king without knocking it over. The six pockets in the table weren’t originally targets, but hazard’s that you might knock your opponent’s or your own ball into. If a player toppled the king they have to begin over again. But how one score points in this game I am unsure of. However after that rather vague description of traditional billiards, I am not going to talk about the game of billiards itself, I am instead going to talk about a game more common in pubs, bar billiards. Bar billiards is a lot smaller than billiards itself and has the advantage of the fact that a shot can only be taken from one side of the table, therefore access to the other sides of the table isn’t necessary and it can be fitted into pub more easily. A bar billiards table has nine holes with scoring ranging from 10-200. The scoring pattern looks as such. (new slide). On both side of the 100 hole stands two white pins, and in front of the 200 hole there is a black pin. When the players put in the money the timer releases one red ball and seven white balls. The timer gives seventeen minutes of play, before the bar drops to stop balls begins returned to you. The first player must use place the red ball on a spot just in front of the black pin, and then place a white ball on a spot on the far end of the wooden shooting area. The aim is to hit the ball into the highest scoring hole. The turn continues until the player does not hit a ball into a hole. If a player hits over a white pin they loss all there points for that turn, if they hit the black pin they loss all there points for the entire game, putting there score back to zero. The player also losses the points for the round if they fail to hit another ball altogether or if they hit a ball back into the wooden shooting area. When a ball is potted it returns to the player and can be played again, however once the bar is dropped inside the table the balls stop returning and the players aim is then to pot the remaining balls, leaving just one white and the red. Then the players must take it in turns to shoot the red ball aiming to get it into the 200 hole. This is the most tense moment of the game, because it is extremely hard to get the ball in the 200 hole without knocking over the black pin. This is the deciding shoot, it does matter if you are losing at this point, because your opponent could knock over the black pin and loss all of their points. For example the score could be 10 to you and 2000 to your opponent, but if they knock over the black pin then you will win 10-0.
Finally I am going to talk about one specific lost game that I am familiar with as my neighbours have a board. This game is called Bagatelle. In my research for this lecture I found it very hard to find any information on this game, however because I have first hand experience of it I can talk a little about it. This game is basically an early version of pin ball. The board looks like such. There is a draw at the bottom where the balls are kept when not in play. The player then takes one of a ball and puts it in the area to the right. At the end of this is a sprung level, which the player pulls back and the releases. This hit the ball up onto the board. There are a number of nails and holes on the board to which the player must try and make the ball land. The nails are either there to knock the ball off of, or in some cases an enclosed area, worth a certain amount of point that the ball can land in. the holes are targets to get the ball into and worth points. The game has to be made very specifically, even if it does appear quite random. The angle of each nail is very important, as it will make the ball bounce in different ways, and the seasoned player will learn how to shot the ball in order to obtain the maximum points. if a nail is moved even slightly then it can change play completely. This game is thought to originate from France during the reign of King Louis XIV, when someone took a billiards table and narrowed it, placed pins on end and made players shoot balls with a stick or cue from the other end. This game became popular in Britain, but few exist now. During the American Revolutionary war some French soldiers took the game with them to America and it soon became very popular. The game eventually evolved into the modern game of pinball, which is now more popular in pubs, since its rise in the 60’s.
So after talking to you for the last hour about traditional pub games you might be still think, why is this important. Pub games are a true measure of social history, they were invented by the common man, for the common man, and are an institution run by the common man. They are a tradition, and much like folklore they tell us about the community from which they originate and how the people in these communities spent there time. No two pub games are the same and they differ from area to area, this is because they were made with the materials the community had to hand and with the values that meant something to that community. The focus on particular games can tell us something about the people who lived in the area, and the values they held. But most importantly they hark back to a time of community, a time when people lived and worked in one single area; their whole lives could exist in one hamlet. The pub was an important place, a space that wasn’t home and wasn’t work, it is an in between space, where one could get away from the burdens of these institutions. Pub games are a vital part of our social history.