Five Centuries of Fives
(extract from Country Life - March 25, 1976)
In the spring - the end of March and early April - many fives players, men and boys, compete in one or another of four championships. These are not the only open competitions for fives each year, but they are the ones which bring the best players together for the season's end. At Eton fives the men's championship is for the Kinnaird Cup; at Rugby fives, the single's title is for the Jester's Cup. The schools' competitions are for pairs only at Eton fives, doubles being the only reasonable form of play; at Rugby fives they are for singles and doubles. Players nurtured in Winchester-type courts, which provide a third kind of modern fives, will play in the Rugby fives competitions, for these players have no competitions of their own.
A companionable and exhilarating game
Between 300 and 400 players will take part in these competitions. They will expect little publicity for their exertions and will get even less than they secretly believe they deserve. But in spite of this, their enthusiasm will remain undimmed since what they are doing is carrying on, in a slightly more sophisticated manner, the age-old intimate pleasure of hitting a ball against a wall with their hands. Nothing is more remarkable about the game of fives than the affection in which it is held. There is something intensely companionable about playing with three others in a confined space; a companionableness which extends to giving opponents a fair sight of the ball without intervention of a referee. And there is something unusually exhilarating in hitting with either hand a small hard ball which bounds with just the right amount of resistance to the force of the blow. All fives players will respond to the sentiments and sentimentalities (although outmoded) of the Eton song (1891) that expressed in seven verses the merits of the game.
Send the "service" slow and high;
Hold your tongue, and mind your eye;
Turn and twist, and duck and dance,
Volley, when you see your chance;
Hit them hard, and hit them low,
Thus your score will upwards go!
Equally they will credit the willingness of Marlburians playing the Rugby game one hundred years ago to leap from their places at breakfast "stinting stomach of Hall loaf and pat" in order to "pleasure one's hands with fives" by reaching the notice boards in time to book a court.
Flavours of Fives
Eton fives is justly named, for the modern court is faithfully modelled on the one so long used on the college chapel steps. Rugby has no such special claim; the plain court game getting its prefix perhaps, from the number of Arnold's men who became headmasters at other schools, introducing there the only kind of fives they knew. Curiously Rugby, for many years, had Eton courts as well as Rugby ones, although the former were little used.
The Winchester court is plain, with four walls like the Rugby one, but not quite rectangular, having a buttress, or tambour reminiscent of the one to be found in real tennis courts where handball games of fives were sometimes played. However, all over the country, in spite of the standardisation of Rugby and Eton courts forty years ago, there are hybrids of different shapes and sizes giving entertaining games.
The origins of Fives
Although the etymology of "fives" is still obscure, players have come to accept that the word means the fingers of the hand acting in unison as in a "bunch of fives". The word was not used before the 17th century, but long before that the game was being played. Richard Mulcaster the 16th century headmaster of Merchant Taylor's School, had this to say: "The little hand ball whether it be of some softer stuffs, and used by the hand alone, or of some harder, and used with rackette .... against a wall alone, to exercise the bodie with both the handes in everie kind of motion." Handball the Irish game, has kept a softer ball, fives has not.
By the 18th and early 19th centuries fives was constantly recorded. Dr Johnson was hazy about the matter - "a kind of play with a bowl" the Dictionary said - but Parson Woodforde played in the churchyard at Babcary - buttresses made for good angles and, in prodigal fashion, betted on the result. Hazlitt wrote ecstatically about Jack Cavanagh's play, and Lord Torrington, that matter-of-fact observer, referred to the fives playing men and boys of Oswestry who "batter the church walls".
There is still a Hand and Racquet public house in Whitcomb Street, Picadilly, near to the site of the Royal Tennis Court, marked with a plaque, in Orange Street. Tennis courts had many uses, and the advertisements of Thomas Higginson, 1742, are particularly revealing. He "kept" tennis courts and at least one fives court. At his Holborn tennis courts there was "Fives-playing in the Tennis-Court, and Billiards at the same place". At his "Fives-court at the bottom of St Martin's Street" it was for "Fives-playing only either with Racquets or Boards, or at Hand-Fives, at 2d, 3d or 4d, a Game". Boards may have been the small wooden bats used for bat fives at schools in the next century.
Boys flocking to the reformed and new public schools as boarders in the late 19th century found fives satisfying. Long before exercise was compulsory there was keen competition for courts. Soon the makeshift arrangements at many schools were replaced by bespoke courts of one shape or another. It was not until interschool matches were started at the end of the century that anyone worried about the disparities between courts and rules.
The First Laws of the Game
The 20s and 30s of the last century saw these matters to some extent resolved. The Rugby Fives Association was founded in 1927; by 1931 the rules of the game and the dimensions of a standard court had been agreed. By coincidence the Eton Fives Association published "the first authoritative set of laws" in 1931, more than fifty years after the first set of rules had been produced by Old Etonian, A. C. Ainger. It was therefore in the 1920s and 1930s that competitive play began in earnest.
An Enthusiast's Game
An enthusiast for the game might well be pardoned for believing that fives has never been more popular than today. More matches are played between schools than ever before, more competitions are held for men and boys, and more players take part in them. The Eton Fives Association had forty affiliated schools, the Rugby Fives Association, fifty, the EFA besides the Jesters (who naturally figure in both lists since they were started as a Rugby Fives Club in 1928), has numerous Old Boys' clubs and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The RFA has fewer Old Boys' clubs but more universities, ten in fact, and three or four other institutions of which the Bank of England and Manchester YMCA have long fives histories. Nevertheless new courts are seldom built, although Oxford University now has two new Eton fives courts. Such success as fives enjoys, and it really is considerable among players, is largely the result of fine records of the two Associations. No minor games have ever had more devoted attention or better orgainsation than have Rugby and Eton fives.
With so much enthusiasm and good management around, it is unlikely that fives will decline in popularity among those who play. Growth is another matter. The games are physically hard because of the bending and agility required and painful if the hands are young or soft.
A Players' Game
Spectators are few, and little effort has yet been made to cater for them; still less to get money out of them. There is not much regret about this; fives are players' games, and what players prize most, apart from the play, are the camaraderie on court and the spirit in which the games are played.
J. A.
Constructed by Mike Fenn
5th May 2001 2001
efa@etonfives.co.uk