FIVES AT HARROW 1863-1991
A report by Dale Vargas, Master-in-Charge of Fives at Harrow (1975-82).
First published in the 1990-91 EFA Annual Report.
Early Days
Eton Fives was introduced to Harrow by E M Young, an Etonian who came to Harrow as a Master in 1863. The earliest surviving copies of the School paper, at the time, The Tyro, are coincidentally just of this date. The October 1st edition, 1864, has, under the heading Philathletic Intelligence the notice: "The new Fives Courts are completed but not yet ready for playing in." Nor do they seem to have been slow to get competition play under way as the March 1865 issue publishes the House Ties (current terminology for House matches), ten entries, the final being between The Revd. F Rendall's (Grove Hill) and The Revd. B F Westcott's (Moretons).
The first courts seem not to have been very good replicas of those at Eton and were described some years later as "peculiar rather than pleasing and appeared to have been constructed by a builder who had dreamt of an Eton court and copied his nightmare in bricks and mortar!" The earliest real patron of the game at Harrow was G M Hallam, an Old Salopian who taught at the School from 1870 to 1906, being House Master of The Park for the last nineteen of those years. As a result of his enthusiasm, four more courts were built in 1880. On reading the School records of the second half of the nineteenth century, one is struck by the minority status of Fives compared to Rackets. The Public Schools Rackets Competition had started in 1868 and Harrow and Eton had more or less monopolised it since then. Indeed, up to 1868 Harrow had fourteen victories, Eton six and Rugby one. There are Rackets reports several pages long in Harrow Notes and The Harrovian and regular features in The Field. Indeed the Fives appears to have been controlled by the Rackets Committee. For example, March 17th, 1883 entry: "Form Fives Ties. The prizes are given by the Racket Committee, the condition being that at least eight couples shall enter each division . . ." But on June 23rd, a hint of recognition: "We have much pleasure in announcing that the Head Master has presented the School a Silver House Racket Challenge Cup. Nor will the House Fives Competition be any longer neglected, as Mr Bushell has most kindly promised to present a Championship Cup."
Harrow v Eton
Then in the March 3rd issue of 1885 we read: "On Thursday the 12th ult., the Hon and Rev E Lyttelton, F Thomas and C Barclay paid a visit to our Fives Court, and showed us the way Fives are played at Eton." It is important to realise that there were no inter-school matches in any sport at this time. The Eton v Harrow cricket match had been played at Lord’s since 1805 but all the other matches were against clubs or scratch sides. Even in Rackets all the play was "in School" except for the Public Schools Championships, so the 1885 Eton v Harrow Fives match was a real breakthrough.
The match in 1886, when the Harrow pair were H F King and B R Warren, is recorded as a Harrow victory (although, in retrospect, that seems unlikely) but no scores are given and there is no mention of a match in 1887. And then from 1888 onwards we have the names and scores almost without omission through to the present day. In 1888, the Harrovian correspondent bemoans the fact that "Eton has thirty courts to our four." In 1889 the match warranted a report in The Field. Two more courts were built at Harrow in 1889 and a further six in 1892/93 in memory of Arthur Macnarnara, killed in the Alps, but the matches against Eton continued "an even tenor of defeat" till T G 0 Cole and R A Bullock won another victory for us at Harrow in 1897." A win at Eton, however, did not come until 1900 when A H Crake and F B Wilson won both at Harrow and at Eton. The 1898 report in The Harrovian comments: "we shall never turn out good Fives players so long as there is so little play among younger members of the School. Sixteen is much too old to begin, especially if you then only play once a week or so." The demands of Harrow Foootball were blamed!
v Charterhouse and Uppingham
The first match against Charterhouse was played in 1900, ("We beat them in their own court which to a Harrow
player is even more puzzling than the Eton court.") and the fixture continued annually becoming home and away from
1903. At this time Harrow had an outstanding pair, E H Crake and R E Eiloart, who for three successive years won
all their matches, home and away, against Eton and Charterhouse. In 1905 and 1906 they only dropped two games out
of the twenty-nine they played against rival schools. Their only conquerors were the Masters' pair, E M Butler and
G Townsend Warner, and it is to these two that the great development of Fives at Harrow at this time can be credited.
Butler had played in the inaugural Eton match in 1885 and he and Townsend Warner were at Cambridge at the same time
as Freeman Thomas, from whom they learned a lot about the game, and they passed on their knowledge on their return
to teach at Harrow some years later. Probably because R E Eiloart's elder brother was in the pair at Uppingham, the
Harrow pair travelled there to play in 1905. We are used to the fact that local rules abounded in these early games,
but the report of this match almost defies belief: "...the Uppingham courts are covered in with a glass roof and
this is 'in play', so introduces a new element to the game and new way of getting out of difficulties under the line
when the ball can be hit up against it." One wonders whether the Harrow pair were the victors of an elaborate hoax!
Inspired by the successses of Crake and Eiloart, a covered court was built at Harrow in 1908; it bears the inscription:
Hoc saxo
Per triennium uno tenore
Felicissimi consociati
Memoriae traduntur
E H CRAKE, R E EILOART
MCMIV, V, VI
As far as I know, the roof was not in play! Unfortunately the court was built in an isolated position and has since fallen into disrepair. It is now used as an annexe to The Sculpture School.
Edward Butler and George Townsend Warner
Perhaps I could digress just for a moment from the main story of Harrow Fives to say a little about those two remarkable men, Edward Butler and George Townsend Warner. Butler was the son and grandson of Harrow Head Masters. He was a classical scholar, captain of football and cricket at school, went on to Trinity College, Cambridge where he won Blues for cricket, lawn tennis and rackets. Amateur Rackets Champion in 1889, he was the archetypal school hero. His son, Guy Butler (who was also in the Harrow Fives pair in 1918) in addition to being captain of cricket, football and soccer, and Head of School, is best known as a multiple medal winner at 400 metres in the 1920 and 1924 Olympic games. George Townsend Warner, also the son and grandson of Harrow Masters (although his father had moved on to be Headmaster of Newton College, Devon), was an exact contemporary of Butler's, but in a different House. He was more academic than athletic at school, winning a History Scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge in 1883. He got a "first" and became a Fellow of the College in 1890. Both Butler and Warner returned to teach at Harrow in 1891. They were clearly good friends and shared a house together, an arrangement which continued for a year after Warner's marriage. Butler was the godfather of Warner's daughter and only child, Sylvia, who was to attain distinction in her own right. A recent biography is said "...to restore her to her real place as ... second only to Virginia Woolf among the women writers of our century." Had she been born fifty years later, she might have become a Fives player too!
Butler became House Master of The Park in 1906, Warner of High Street (now Bradbys) in 1905. The anonymous article on Harrow Fives in Fifty Years of Sport (1922) refers to George Townsend Warner as the man "to whom all Harrow Fives players of the last twenty years are indebted for such proficiency as they acquired."
E H Crake, writing at the same time, says "The two masters of the game when I was at Harrow were George Warner and Teddy Butler and though both were approaching forty at the time, Eiloart and I only managed to beat them twice while we were there, and we used to play them every Friday of each Easter term. George Warner had the best first cut I have seen in the game and his reach was tremendous, while Butler was absolutely safe and a genius in the art of placing, and we could not have had better teachers of the game."
Eiloart (who had been in Warner's House) became very close to the family and after George's sudden and early death in 1916, married his widow, Nora, three years later.
Butler retired from his House and the School at the age of 53. He then founded the Harrow Association (for Old Boys of the School) and lived to the age of 81.
Expansion under Lionel Ford
In 1910 a Fives playing Head Master arrived at Harrow. Lionel Ford, an Old Reptonian, had been an Assistant Master at Eton from I888 to 1901, then the Headmaster of Repton from 1901 to 1910. His arrival had a dramatic effect and in 1911 six of the courts were roofed and eleven new ones were built, eight of them being covered. But the Eton match reverted to a long string of defeats and the Charterhouse matches, up to then usually won by Harrow, were becoming more even as the opposition's standard improved. About twelve pairs were being played in the Masters' match, and a three pair match against Old Harrovians was played in 1914.
There were long articles in The Harrovian at this time showing the increased interest in Fives:
"...it would be a good thing for the Easter term to be looked upon as the Fives term, but co-operation of
House Football captains is needed."(1913) "Anyone found playing any other games except Fives in Fives Courts
will be fined 2s 6d." (1914) But then came the Great War; afternoons were taken over by OTC parades and Fives
was 'crowded out'. However, the School matches continued and fixtures with Aldenham (1918) who, like Uppingham
earlier, "play with a smaller ball," and Highgate (1919) were new ventures. Further fixtures during the twenties
included Liverpool Fives Club, Queens Club, Cambridge Old Harrovians and Old Etonians, mostly on an occasional or
irregular basis, but they reflected a gradual expansion of the game.
The Thirties - A Golden Age
And so into the thirties, maybe a golden age for sport in general. At Harrow it certainly was, with fine cricket sides, repeated victories in the Halford Hewitt Golf and Public Schools Rackets and with Fives no longer the Cinderella. Eton had been beaten at Eton by R B Hodgkinson and W M Welch in 1928 for the first time since the victory of Crake and Eiloart in 1906, and in 1929 Harrow pairs were to win both the new Public Schools Handicap Competition and the Kinnaird Cup. The first Oxford and Cambridge match was played in 1928 and the six pairs were to include five Etonians and four Harrovians (K C Gandar-Dower, G R McConnell, N M Ford and Lord Dundas). Gandar-Dower and McConnell were Kinnaird winners in 1929 and 1932, finalists in 1931. Welch and HG de Grey Warter won the Public Schools in 1929, J F M Lightly and Welch in 1930. Lightly and G F D Haslewood in 1931, J A S Collins and A H Henderson won again in 1933, and A P Cox and D J Q Henriques in 1936. And if a Harrow pair did not win, they were usually the losing finalists. In 1933 both the finalist pairs were Harrovian, as were three of the four semi-finalists in the under sixteen competition.
On the home front, matches against other schools were increasing; there were numerous fixtures against scratch teams, some with names such as the White Rabbits and the Wyverns. Fifteen pairs were regularly played against the Masters; there were eighteen in 1933. There was now a House Three-pair as well as a One-pair and a Torpid (under 16) competition and all these are chronicled in The Harrovian with a match report for each School match and House final together with full details of names and scores. 0 tempora, 0 mores!
The Forties, Fifties and Sixties
It could not last, and, of course, the bubble burst in 1939 just as it had in 1914. Although there was not the carnage of the First World War, the blitz somehow brought events even closer to home and Fives must have been far from the centre of people's thoughts. Miraculously, considering the School's proximity to London, little damage was done. Numbers at the School were reduced and Malvern College was evacuated from its Worcestershire home to share Harrow's buildings and grounds. School Fives matches went on, but the match reports are very brief and low key. Nor was there the joyous post war explosion that cricket enjoyed. Harrow did produce one outstanding pair in the fifties, M J Shortland-Jones and D J S Guilford, both of Druries, and both later to become Eton Masters, who individually and as a pair were to feature in no fewer than eight Kinnaird finals between 1953 and 1970. George McConnell returned to Harrow to teach and became House Master of Rendalls (1946 to 1961) but Fives was being squeezed not only by Rugby, Football and Rackets but now by Squash. Increasing demands on boys' time meant that the good games player was less inclined to combine other sports with Fives, except in a few Houses where there was a tradition or House Master's encouragement. So the Fives teams of the fifties and sixties were dominated by Druries (Mr K S Snell), Moretons (Mr J B Morgan) and Rendalls. There were some good School pairs: M J B Wood and L G R Wood, (unrelated), R L Milbourne and A de Grunwald, and de Grunwald and D W Norris spring to mind.
Towards the end of the decade much needed work was done on the courts; first the top six courts were refloored and lit, and when the second Rackets court was built in 1965, a Fives changing room was added. These top six courts then became the match courts.
Apathy in the early Seventies
As the sixties gave way to the seventies, a general apathy about organised games seemed to take a hold. The Harrovian, simultaneously with many other Schools' magazines, discontinued match reports, and records are very sketchy. Certainly it was a lean spell for Harrow Fives. The interested Houses had switched to Rendalls (Mr A L Warr), The Park (Mr C D Laborde) and The Head Master's (Mr G R R Treasure).
Further roofing improvements were made in 1975 to restore the number of rain proof courts to thirteen. A resurgence of interest about this time produced the first Harrow pair to reach the Schools final for twenty-five years, A F H Bell and N M J Hewens in 1977 - a reward for the author of this article, then Master-in-charge.
Eighties Renaissance
Since then progress has been even more marked. The arrival on the staff in 1981 of P G Dunbar, a former Schools' finalist from Highgate, injected more enthusiasm for the game which was rewarded by a Harrow victory in the Schools Championship in 1988 for M B de Souza-Girao and N R Chellaram. This was the School's first victory in this competition since 1936! They were not to have to wait so long to repeat it, J G Fleming and H D Duncan winning in 1991, the year when de Souza-Girao added his name to the list of Kinnaird winners.
The Future
It is pleasant, therefore, to be able to conclude this report on an optimistic note: Harrow Fives is looking as healthy in 1991 as in its golden age 1926 to 1936 or its purple patch 1904 to 1906, but one is aware, too, of the fragility of its position. Gone are the days when the Masters could put out fifteen pairs. Such is the diversity of activities available to boys nowadays that the competition for their time is intense. Everything depends on the dedication and enthusiasm of those entrusted with the management and coaching of the game, but Fives now happily co-exists with Rugby and Football, Rackets and Squash, a regular afternoon activity for some sixty boys.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fifty Years of Sport at Eton, Harrow, Winchester Chapter: Fives at Harrow - Published 1922
Lonsdale Library Vol. XVI Chapters 20, 21 - Published 1935
Harrow School Yesterday and Today by ED Laborde - Published 1948
The Tyro. 1863-66
Harrow Notes. 1883-88
The Harrovian. 1888-1991
Sylvia Townsend-Warner; a biography by Claire Harman - Published 1989
I am grateful to Messrs D J S Guildford, J S Golland and G R R Treasure for reading the proofs of this article and for making many helpful suggestions.
J D C Vargas
Harrow, May 1991
Constructed by Mike Fenn
15 May 2000
efa@etonfives.co.uk