Sports Factor - 6/04/01: Traditional Pub Sports

Radio National's The Sports Factor

with Amanda Smith
6/04/01

Traditional Pub Sports

Summary: The Sports Factor goes on a pub crawl this week, to look inside the world of traditional pub sports, in England and in Australia.

The Freemason's Arms, in north London, is home to the last remaining London Skittles alley. This forerunner to 10-pin bowling involves flinging a "cheese" through the air at 9 hornbeam skittles. And it's a game with a rich terminology. Find out about the Gates of Hell, and the Landlady's Daughter!

Meanwhile, at the Frenches Club in Surrey, a Bar Billiards tournament is underway - the Ladies National Pairs Championship. And at the Lord Nelson Tavern, the Full Nelsons are playing the White Eagle Wanderers in the Geelong Men's A-Grade Darts League.

These sports were once immensely popular in pubs, but now leagues are being squeezed out to make way for bistros and poker machines. Nevertheless, there are still nooks and crannies where you can find people continuing the tradition, with a beer in one hand and a cheese, cue or dart in the other.
Details or Transcript:
THEME

Amanda Smith: This week The Sports Factor leaves the playing fields and fresh air of vigorous outdoorsy sport, and goes to the pub.

And we’re going on something of a trans-global pub crawl today: from London, England, to Geelong, Australia, for a look inside the world of traditional pub sports. English pubs have traditionally played host to dozens of these games, although many of them have disappeared now. Darts remains the most popular of the pub sports, in Australia as well as in England. Then there’s bar billiards; and the increasingly rare, but still played, Old English Skittles. The point of pub sports is, of course, that they’re played in the cosy indoors, with a pint of ale to hand.

So, first up, beer and skittles.

PUB ATMOS

Amanda Smith: This is The Freemason’s Arms, a pub in North London. It’s a pleasant, ordinary sort of a pub, and on a Tuesday night, just a few locals are in, sharing a quiet ale. They’ve probably got no idea though, that downstairs in the cellar, there’s some weird sport going on.

FOOTSTEPS ON STAIRS & SKITTLES SOUNDS

Peter Green: Oh, bollocks! That’s quite an easy shot, they should have got that one

CRASH OF SKITTLES

Peter Green: Oh, another bad throw. That’s half a tadpole.

Amanda Smith: Why half a tadpole?

Peter Green: Because one part of its head’s missing. (laughs)

Amanda Smith: This is London Skittles, also known as Old English Skittles. A pub sport which as you’ll find out, has a very rich and colourful terminology attached to it. It’s played with nine pins, which are made of hornbeam, and set in a diamond formation.

Skittles probably originated in the Middle Ages, and this version that’s played at the Freemason’s Arms is thought to be Dutch in origin. The Club Secretary and archivist is Guy Tunnicliffe, and he says that while there used to be dozens of versions of skittles played throughout England, London skittles is now one of the few remaining.

Guy Tunnicliffe: There’s three sorts of skittles in this country: Western Skittles, which is played in the West Country; there’s Long Alley Skittles, which is played in the Midlands; and this game, which is the most robust of the three, and the most difficult, is London Skittles, and uses bigger pins, bigger cheeses, heavy lignum-vitae cheeses which is a proscribed tropical hardwood.

Amanda Smith: Now I should just interrupt for a minute and say that when you talk about ‘cheeses’ we’re not actually talking cheese here, are we?

Guy Tunnicliffe: No, that’s right. ‘Cheese’ is a term probably once again back to its derivation in Holland maybe; it’s a cheese-shaped object, it’s more like a discus, a very hard round discus, weighting about 10 to 12 pounds in weight. I must say lignum-vitae is the wood used, Tree of Life it’s called. It’s now no longer possible to buy that wood in this country because it comes from the tropical rainforest. So most of the cheeses we still use are 50, 60 years old, which I don’t know, makes us worry a bit about whether we can continue if the cheeses break, which they occasionally do. But we’re fortunate, we’ve got enough to last us.

Amanda Smith: And I understand that this is the only club here with an alley in the UK, here at The Freemason’s Arms?

Guy Tunnicliffe: Yes, that’s right. It’s the last one left. When I say the last one, it’s the last public alley. I need to draw a distinction between the two. There’s a private club, the National Westminster Bank has an alley in Norbury in South London, and they still play there, but as it’s a private club it’s very difficult for the public to see it. We still go down there and play them in competitions, but they’re our last competitors if you like, we’re the last sort of dodo left. And sometimes we worry a bit about that, but we’ve managed to keep it within the club and play, like I say, against the Bank. In the ‘30s with the high point of the game, when there were hundreds of clubs all over London, it was pubs, working men’s clubs, all sorts of places it was played, and it was very, very popular.

Amanda Smith: It interests me that not only skittles but also other pub games like bar billiards seem to have had their rise and their heyday in the 1930s. Is that in any way linked to that being a period of economic depression? I’m struggling for reasons why they might have grown at that time.

Guy Tunnicliffe: The thing about the pub games is I think, they were probably played a lot even before the ‘30s, but under the Gaming Acts that were enforced in the country at this time, there were only five games that could be played in pubs for small stakes, and something to do with the popularity of these games I think had to do with the fact you could actually legally bet on them, rather than games you couldn’t. So you could play them in public houses, skittles is one, dominoes, shove ha’penny, bar billiards and cribbage were the five games. And even today, if you look behind a bar in England, you might see a little notice which says those five games are allowed, you’re allowed to bet on them.

SKITTLES

Peter Green: Oh, hit from behind.

Amanda Smith: Unlike in tenpin bowling, where you roll the ball down the alley to strike the pins, in London Skittles, the cheese is flung through the air to hit the pins at a full toss, and it looks amazing.

Nevertheless, this game of skittles is a forerunner to tenpin bowling. The transformation of ninepins to the tenpin game happened in North America, where the original game had also been introduced by the Dutch.

Guy Tunnicliffe: And they would have taken the game of ninepin to America, and it was played extensively over the east coast of America, involving quite a lot of gambling, low-lifes, criminal elements etc. A lot of the States began to be concerned and criminalised the game of ninepin, which was then deftly sidestepped by adding the tenth pin, changing the shape of the pins; instead of having a diamond formation like we have in ninepin, they changed it to a triangular formation like you get in tenpin. They sanitised the game as well. Over the years the game became sanitised, so you have now tenpin bowling, and tenpin bowling alleys, the family game etc. We get a lot of tenpin bowlers coming down here, coming looking at our game because of its origins, and because of what it led to, and we always try and explain to them that as far as we’re concerned our game is far more difficult; it’s three-dimensional in that the cheese flies through the air, whereas tenpin bowling the game is two-dimensional, you’ve just got length and width to worry about, not height.

SKITTLES ATMOS

Amanda Smith: Now apart from the archaic charm of Old English skittles, this sport also has a strange and wonderful lexicon attached to it.

Guy Tunnicliffe: Well the pins that are left lying on the frame are not removed, they’re left lying there. You can use those to knock other pins down, throw the cheese at those, and deflect off them; those are known as 'deads'. The people putting the pins up at the other end by the frame are known as the stickers.

Amanda Smith: Right, because of course you haven’t got automatic pin removal and replacement as in tenpin bowling alleys.

Guy Tunnicliffe: No, we don’t have pin setting machines or pin spotting machines, we use manual labour. Up until about 10, 12 years ago, we used to pay somebody to stick the pins up, and it was an interesting fact that during the course of this century, sorry, last century, (it is last century now) we only had two stickers, from 1900 right through to about 1960 there were only two stickers. One sticker, what was his name? Joe Turner I think it was, something like that, he stuck in this alley for about 50 years and retired in 1949, and then his successor took over and stuck in the alley till about 1968. And after that, we ceased paying them really.

Amanda Smith: So sticking has gone from professional to amateur?

Guy Tunnicliffe: Yes, that’s right. They were paid enough I think, it was like a part time job to them, but there was only a single sticker. Now if you work out the weight of each pin, there’s nine pins and each one weighs roughly about 8, 9 pounds and during the course of an evening we worked it out, the sticker, if there’s a single sticker, he’d be shifting a ton of weight in total. Nowadays with volunteer stickers we have two stickers rather than the one, and we get by it that way.

Amanda Smith: All right. So some other terminology: there’s things like 'Waterloo' and 'Gates of Hell' and 'London Bridge' and 'Tadpole'; what are all they?

Guy Tunnicliffe: OK, well after the first throw, you’re left with different combinations of what we call broken frames. Now the broken frame set-ups have all got names, and depending on where they’re placed, where the pins are placed, Waterloo is a difficult shot, was thought to have originated because it was a match-winning shot played against the pub called the Waterloo. The Gates of Hell is two very difficult pins to get. They’re the furthest distance away from the throwing end of the alley and you need to hit them at a right angle to actually get them. There’s a whole lot of shots, 6/4d shot, a brandy and soda, the umbrella, the candlestick, all the shots have got names.

Amanda Smith: What about the Landlady’s Daughter?

Guy Tunnicliffe: Oh I can’t tell you about the Landlady’s Daughter, but it involves two pins lying very close together and the object is to throw the cheese between the two pins and split the pins. The pins I might add are deads, they’re lying on the frame. But there is a cruder version of that.

Amanda Smith: Is part of the pleasure of playing London Skittles for you one of keeping alive this increasingly I guess, obscure English pub sport?

Guy Tunnicliffe: It is. Very quickly after I joined I wanted to sort of document it and record it in every way I could, mainly because I knew from the old Club Secretary a guy called Kevin Smith, all the documents had been lost in a flood, all the records and evidence had been lost in a flood, so I spent a lot of time rooting around libraries, including the British Library, not just for my own satisfaction but in order to write about it, and let other people know that it did exist, that it was dying and hopefully try and encourage people to come down and play. We do get new members coming down.

Amanda Smith: Yes well I did want to ask you, I mean is it dying, or is it still carrying on pretty well?

Guy Tunnicliffe: Well when I joined I think it was about 1988, it was dying; it’s still alive today, so we’re still here.

SKITTLES ATMOS

Peter Green: That’s an eight pin, so finish with an eight.

Amanda Smith: Beer and skittles at the Freemason’s Arms, the last remaining Old English skittle alley in a pub in London. And I was speaking there with Guy Tunnicliffe, the Secretary and archivist of the Hampstead Lawn Billiards and Skittles Club. And we also heard there from fellow player, Peter Green.

And the next stop on our pub crawl in search of sport is the Frenches Club, a working man’s club, in Redhill, in Surrey in England. And the room is full of women playing bar billiards.

BILLIARDS ATMOS

Amanda Smith: This is the Ladies’ National Pairs Championship, hosted by the Redhill Bar Billiards League. Well how is this particular pub sport played? Simon Tinto is the Chairman of the League, and organiser of this tournament.

Simon Tinto: Well the table is about the same size as a smallish pool table, six feet long, just over three feet wide. You play from one end of the table only, and instead of having pockets in the corners and halfway along the side cushion, we have nine holes in the table, and they have different scoring values. And obviously the object of the exercise is to put the balls down the holes. There’s a small D approximately 2-1/2 inches across and all the shots have to be played; your cue ball must be on the D with all shots. There are three obstacles, they’re called pegs, two white ones and a black one. If you knock a white peg over you lose your break; if you knock the black peg over you lose all your score, go back to square one. Right, that’s about it.

The scoring system is very simple. The game is timed, so on average 17-1/2 to 18 minutes, it varies a little bit, but 17 or 18 minutes per game, and obviously whoever’s got the highest score at the end of each game wins it.

Simon Tinto (on the PA): OK ladies, I want to tell you about the next series just to let you know that the highest break of the day so far 6,210 by Di Thorpe, well done Di, good break.

APPLAUSE

Simon Tinto (on the PA): The next series of games on Table 1, Ann and Karen Keane will be playing Gail Woods and Sue Mariner.

Amanda Smith: Gail Woods and Sue Mariner are the hot pair playing at this bar billiards tournament, former champions who are defending their title. Each of them started playing as a teenager, when they made their debut into English pub society.

Gail Woods: Well I started playing when I was probably about 17, when you first started going into pubs, and I think I had a boyfriend that played, so I started playing and joined the local league, and it sort of went from there really.

Amanda Smith: And you’ve won national titles?

Gail Woods: Yes, I’ve won the British Isles Ladies Open, I’ve won that twice, and we’ve won the Best Pairs twice before.

Amanda Smith: And what about you, Sue?

Sue Mariner: I’ve won the British Isles Open three times, and the Pairs again with Gail I’ve won it a couple of times, hopefully we win it again today. I’ve played for 13, 14 years.

Amanda Smith: How did you start playing?

Sue Mariner: My Mum actually played the game, so she roped me into it really. But it’s a good game, I enjoy it.

Amanda Smith: How often do you practice, or train?

Sue Mariner: I’m lucky, I’m one of the very lucky ones where I don’t practice an awful lot, I’ve got a young family so I don’t get the time anymore to go into the pubs and play it every night. I’m lucky that I can keep my standard high. One thing I would say about this game that is different to pool and snooker and billiards is that the women can compete against the men. Me and Gail being two of the top England players, can compete against the men, and we have five or six opens throughout the year where the women are against the men. So I think that that’s nice.

Amanda Smith: Do you drink while you’re playing?

Gail Woods: Try not to drink too much because obviously there’s a sort of limit where if you drink too much then obviously your concentration goes, and you become a little bit too brave, you know, and you’ve got to be careful. But I have been known to have a few drinks.

Amanda Smith: What about today, are you having a beer or something today while you’re playing in this tournament?

Sue Mariner: No, we’re concentrating on winning this today. We’re waiting till we’re through to the final, we’ll have one each to give us a bit of, steady our nerves for the final, hopefully we’ll do the business and then we can have a celebratory drink afterwards, yes.

Amanda Smith: OK Gail, you and Sue are playing your next round, so what’s happening?

Gail Woods: Well we’ve won the first leg by about 3,000 but it’s quite a tricky table, we’re having a bit of trouble with the brake sharp and we needing to get a lot of left-hand side on, but we’re struggling away and we’re sort of knocking in a few scores to keep it running on. Normally on these competitions the tables are all very, very flat, this one for some reason they had trouble setting it up because they only set it up yesterday because they come in purely for this competition, these tables, they’re not normally here. So some set up better than others and this one just hasn’t settled very well. You know, it makes a difference, the temperature, the room even, you know, for making them fast or slow.

Amanda Smith: What about the levels of smokiness? It’s a very smoky room.

Gail Woods: It does get very smoky unfortunately, that’s part and parcel of it. Adds to the sort of atmosphere I suppose but not very healthy I’m afraid.

Sue Mariner: We’re probably five-and-a-half-thousand up now, which is not going to be caught.

Amanda Smith: So you’re starting to relax?

Both: Yeah. (laughs)

Sue Mariner: And hope we don’t have to play this table again.

Opposing team congratulates Gail and Sue: Well done! Well done! All the best to you in the next round.

Simon Tinto (on the PA): And both competitions which will start in about ten minutes time I think, give you a bit of a break. The main competition, the match between two pairs of former champions, Josie Holborn and Sally Mortimer will play Gail Woods and Susie Mariner.

Amanda Smith: Tournament organiser, Simon Tinto is an enthusiastic advocate of the pleasures of playing bar billiards, and the place of bar billiards in the traditional pub culture of his country. Although, as that culture is changing, the place of this pub sport isn’t so assured.

Simon Tinto: You know, bar billiards doesn’t take up too much space, nor does a dartboard come to that, and there are other games, like shove ha’penny which is actually played on the bar, cribbage, which is a card game, all the old pub games use a relatively small amount of space that isn’t going to deny the landlord space that he might use for other purposes. And that’s the way it’s always been, and it’s great fun. Unfortunately these games are in decline a little bit, darts leagues are getting smaller, bar billiards leagues are getting smaller, but that’s mainly because the licence trade itself has changed.

Amanda Smith: In what way?

Simon Tinto: Well undiluted greed on the part of the breweries has had a part of it, a lot to do with it. Pubs have changed. There are certain pubs in Redhill for example, if I went into those pubs and said to the landlord ‘How about getting a bar billiards table in?’ he’d laugh in my face.

Amanda Smith: Why?

Simon Tinto: Because it’s not attracting young people, because young people go into pubs where a bar billiards table simply wouldn’t fit. And the pubs may like nice loud music, they’ve got video machines or whatever, maybe a pool table that they can thrash around on. Bar billiards isn’t a game like that, bar billiards is a gentle game, and I think these days a lot of youngsters, they see a bar billiards table and they think, ‘Oh that’s an old man’s game’. They’re wrong because there are some fantastic young players around, but that’s the perception of it to people who haven’t really seen the game before, and our battle with all the leagues is to attract young players because they’re the only future we have. I’ve even thought about going into the schools, but that wouldn’t work. I mean if you were a schoolteacher and somebody came in and said, ‘How about having a pub game in your school?’ and he says, ‘Hang on a minute, my kids are under 18, they’re not allowed to drink, what are you talking to me about this for?’ So it’s a tough problem, but we fight our annual battle with it and we’re not giving up.

Amanda Smith: Tell me more about the quality of gentleness you say this game encourages.

Simon Tinto: Well it’s a difficult point in a way. Because it’s not a game where you hit the ball at 100 miles an hour, you don’t impart huge amounts of backspin like you see snooker and pool players doing, because you don’t hit it hard, it’s physically not an aggressive game. You get backache if you’re bending over the table for a long time, but because it’s a game that you have to play very gently in order to play it well, maybe it brings out pleasant qualities in people that aggressive games might not do. I don’t know, it’s just my theory. Maybe it’s a bit too high minded for a pub game, but that’s the way I think about it.

Amanda Smith: Simon Tinto, from the Redhill Bar Billiards League in Surrey, in England.

Now you can’t talk about traditional pub sports without talking about darts. These days, darts remains the most prominent among the pub sports.

Early forms of darts started to grow in popularity in the UK in the 19th century, and according to James Masters, who’s a specialist retailer and historian of traditional games, there was an old form of darts, called Puff and Dart, which was a rather more dangerous game than the one we know today.

James Masters: Yes, Puff and Dart, I think it was an early version of darts in which they blew the dart, like a blowpipe, at the target, which I think wasn’t like a dartboard of today but just more like an archery target with lots of concentric things. And it’s said that in the early days one poor chap actually managed to suck a dart in rather than blow it; I imagine he was probably completely inebriated and unfortunately died as a result of this. But these days I suppose it’s much simpler to just throw them, so that’s perhaps why that started.

Amanda Smith: James Masters, of Masters Traditional Games, in London.

And the third and final pub on The Sports Factor crawl is the Lord Nelson tavern, not in England, but in the regional Australian town of Geelong, where the Full Nelsons are warming up for the league match against the White Eagle Wanderers.

PUB AND DARTS ATMOS

Amanda Smith: Now these days you can’t walk into any old pub around Australia and expect to find a dartboard. A lot of leagues have been squeezed out of pubs to make way for poker machines and bistros. Although John Stephenson, who plays with the Full Nelsons, says that in a regional centre like Geelong, darts can maintain its place in at least some pubs, like the Lord Nelson.

John Stephenson: This is the Geelong Men’s Darts Association, we’re A-grade players and there are probably something like 400, maybe 500 men players in the town and maybe 200 women players in the town. So this pub alone has about four or five men’s teams and maybe two or three women’s teams. It’s a very good pub for darts this one, in actual fact. There are some pubs that have changed, sometimes they’ve had a redecorate or something and decided against having the teams back in. Some teams can be a bit rowdy, so landlords tend to worry about the rest of their clients rather than the dart teams. If a pub’s only got dart teams in general in their pub and a small clientele, then they’ll look after their dart teams. But there’s sometimes a little bit of trouble, and you know, arguments will occur between certain people and it happens, you know. Some publicans ask you to leave and go and find another venue, which we do.

Amanda Smith: And when and why did you take up playing competitive darts?

John Stephenson: Oh, I started playing when I was about 16 years old, when I was first allowed in the pub to have a drink, you needed a reason to go in there, so darts was a good game, and I’ve always liked to have a drink, you know, but it’s not one of those games you can actually play if you’re too drunk anyway. It’s always been I’m afraid associated with big fat pot-bellied beer persons you know, but it’s not in actual fact the case. We don’t necessarily have to be blind drunk to be able to play the game, and I think, and more and more players nowadays are actually playing without drinking. So it’s not necessarily conducive to drinking, but in the old days I suppose that’s probably where we first started, and my first interest in it was probably because I could get into the pub in the first place. (laughs)

DARTS ATMOS:

Brilliant Darts!

Smack it home Chris!

(whack of dart on board)

Oh good effort Chris, good effort!

(competitor breaths heavily & whack of dart on board)

C'mon Johnno!

Amanda Smith: Gary Synnott plays with the White Eagle Wanderers in the Geelong Men’s A-grade competition. He’s also a former State player. And he thinks that the association of darts with pubs has given his sport an image problem. Even so, Gary’s sorry to see darts leagues being squeezed out of the pubs.

Gary Synnott: It’s moving away from a pub sport. There’s a few different dart clubs starting because there isn’t the venues around that there used to be. But of course it was born out of the English pubs. Obviously with emigration a lot of English, Irish and Scots people coming to Australia, they brought the game with them. And the pubs were pretty much behind it originally, and in many places like country towns they’re still in it, they see it as a way of keeping their regulars I suppose on side and spending a few dollars. And I love the pub atmosphere, and it’s one of the things I like about our Thursday night league in Geelong because it’s still pub orientated, and yes, travelling to different hotels and being an ex-publican myself I still enjoy that atmosphere. I suppose for that reason though, it has suffered too, because it doesn’t get the recognition of other sports, and it really is a sport; it’s a very individual sport it requires a lot of accuracy and a lot of nerves, of steel. And I think that the biggest thing holding the game back is the hotel image, the drinking and the smoking and people often refer to dart players as the not-so-elite athletes. There’s quite a few players now, especially at the top level that take a lot of pride in their appearance, their fitness and health conditions. So yes, a lot of the players don’t smoke and drink now when they play.

Amanda Smith: Tell me more about I guess the pleasure of playing darts, about the, I don’t know, the feel of the dart in your hand and standing before the board and stuff.

Gary Synnott: Look, winning in anything gives you great pleasure. For me, winning in darts always gave me pleasure and that’s probably why I’ve kept playing for as long as I have. The thing is, when you are playing well in a game of darts, you can almost feel what you’re going to throw, and the dart is a very comfortable piece of equipment for you. If you’re not throwing so well it can become very uncomfortable, and even seem quite heavy, and can be again, very demanding on you. What I like about the game of darts is it’s pretty much a grassroots sport that anybody can be involved in.

Amanda Smith: I guess you, through playing darts, you develop quite an ability at mental arithmetic?

Gary Synnott: It’s excellent for that. In fact I’ve been associated with a couple of different schools and actually introduced it for their remedial maths classes. And it’s proved to be very successful, because it gets the kids thinking about their numbers and subtraction. It’s also addition, of course you have to add up what you’ve thrown then you have to take it away from what you had to show what you’ve got left. Your multiplication tables come into a bit with your doubles and triples. Yes, very much so, it’s helped a lot of people with their maths, and believe it or not, there’s a lot of people who still have trouble, but yes, it does help.

DARTS ATMOS:

(whack of dart on board)

C'mon … c'mon Johnno!

Go Chris, smack it in there!

(whack of dart on board)

Yes, great arrows, great arrows, well done!

Thank you mate!

Amanda Smith: Yes, great arrows as they say in darts, at the Lord Nelson tavern in Geelong in Victoria. And that’s where the sporting pub crawl comes to an end for this week.

Michael Shirrefs produces The Sports Factor, and I’m Amanda Smith.

Guests on this program:

Guy Tunnicliffe
Club Secretary and Archivist for the for the London Skittles Club at the Freemason's Arms in north London.

Simon Tinto
Chairman of the Redhill Bar Billiards League in Surrey, England.

Gail Woods and Sue Mariner
Bar Billiards Pairs team.

James Masters
Specialist retailer and historian of traditional games.

John Stephenson
Darts player with the Full Nelson team in Geelong.

Gary Synnott
Darts player with the White Eagle Wanderers team in Geelong.