My Jameson grandmother hoped that I would become a sportsman like her brother, Tommy Jameson. She gave me a Squash racquet and Fives gloves but, until I discovered Backgammon, competitive sports were not my forte – probably because I was always the loser.
Now, with the rule of six, Eton Fives has become fashionable but there are not many courts. You will recall that the game was invented by boys at Eton biffing around between the buttresses of College Chapel. If you are a competent Fives player, Eton Fives may be discombobulating. The pepper pot sticking out on the left of the picture is a game-changer. If you can plop a ball into the dead ground behind peppers you are quids in although, as you can see, your partner can lurk there just in case.
As we are harry-lockers in London I will save a visit to Eton to take a snap of the original Eton Fives court until another time. If you did not show sporting promise at Eton you were nudged into social services (I biked to Wrexham Park Hospital in Slough to change old men’s nappies et al) and the CCF. The staff at the hospital either left me to sit and read in A&E or allocated disagreeable tasks that they imagined an Etonian would blench at. On balance I preferred the latter. But I much preferred becoming an inept potter under Gordon Baldwin’s somewhat eccentric tuition. Because I was an unusually creative boy, I drew a picture of an egg cup, to give Gordon an idea of what I was about to create. Gordon Baldwin immediately scaled-up the project and now it’s an umbrella stand. It was a good call.
Of all the games which I have played, I would say that fives was the most satisfying as well as the most exhausting, demanding a degree of physical fitness which I only had as a teenager. I rate it up there with cricket as the two games I most enjoyed. My school, Christ’s Hospital, had eight rugby fives courts, built in 1902 and much larger than regulation size. There was no buttress, of course, but a very tricky door at the back of the court. If you could hit that on the cross bar the ball dropped dead and you won the point. I still have my fives colours on the wall of my study.I remember the Eton courts from the conducted tour you treated us to many years ago.Oddly enough I have just received a letter from my school soliciting a contribution to the cost of converting a squash court into another fives court. It tells me that, as I believe to be the case with football and rugby, provision for girls fives has grown exponentially and the courts are used for national championships for both sexes. I much regret giving up the game on leaving school.