feature about fives BY JOHN REYNOLDS published in valet magazine in autumn 2022
Fives article in valet magazine 2022
An ode to an unfashionable game
By John Patrick Reynolds
Fives is the best ball game in the world to its proponents but there really aren’t very many of those and to the rest of the world the pastime is practically unknown.
I love the British sport of fives immensely, and work as a consultant on fives court construction and renovation projects, but even I can’t claim this quirky detail of British sporting culture to be anything other than that. Quirky because there is never a referee, players serve for their opposition, and it’s played on a court which resembles an outside corner of a medieval church. Quirky also in that I wouldn’t bank on your having heard of it, much less on your being aware that more than 1,000 children are about to take part in the National Schools’ Fives Championships, to say nothing of the fact that there is a modest building programme which has seen about ten courts built over the past decade with three more planned for a state school in Berkshire.
This is because, in a sports-mad country, fives is the forgotten game—practically a secret—and yet, in centuries gone by, it played a major role. It was Britain in general and its public schools in particular that codified and exported many of the currently dominant global sports, but this is one that stayed (mostly) at home, keeping a low profile. When was the last time you, reader, heard of an acquaintance playing fives, much less played it yourself? (If you have, we probably know each other.)
In a nutshell, fives is the British variety of a game that pops up all over the world in various guises. It basically consists of bashing a ball against a wall with your hand or a bat, with the winner losing fewer rallies than his opponent. You might have heard of the Basque pelota, the Latin-American jai alai, Irish handball, or American one-wall handball, among others, many of which appear to have arisen independently; and even when there is probable cultural cross-pollination, it is lost in the mists of time.
In its current form (or rather, forms), fives has been played in public schools, grammar schools, and universities around Britain for more than 150 years, but the game evolved organically for centuries before that, typically played against church walls, possibly because they offered a flat surface without low windows that was accessible to everybody. There are still discernible playlines on the back walls of church buildings across the country, such as in Mere, Wiltshire, where the churchwarden’s accounts from 1705 record a payment of four shillings rendered to the church on account of a window broken at the hands of local fives enthusiasts.
As a result of this decentralized ubiquity, there are various extant versions of fives that owe their nature to the particular shape of their courts. The three main ones are named after the schools that first built courts in that form: Eton, Rugby, and Winchester. The three-walled version, Eton fives, is the most widely played and was the first whose original site was replicated; the first courts were originally built in 1847. Much like real tennis, Eton fives is a game of hazards, with ledges and structural features around which the ball will ricochet; its plainer sisters, Rugby and Winchester fives, both take place within four walls, and lack most of the Eton court’s architectural quirks.
The main feature of an Eton fives court is a legacy of the game’s fifteenth-century church-side origins: An angular protrusion on the left-hand side that is copied exactly from the original court between the buttresses of Eton’s gothic chapel, which schoolboys used because it formed a handy area to play in. These days it’s called the ‘buttress’, but in the original space it’s actually a stone handrail, with the added feature of a drain hole at the foot of it (called the ‘dead man’s hole’). These eccentric additions are faithfully replicated because they improve the game. The inclusion of the ‘buttress’, for instance, introduces a way of killing the ball mid-court, or at least of making a shot more difficult to return. And a shot into the ‘hole’ won’t emerge at all. The buttress also makes it largely a game for two pairs of players: Someone is always needed to man the area in front of it, and the absence of a back wall requires a second player behind it. The play line is high—about 4'6'' for Eton Fives (two feet lower for Rugby and Winchester)—and as a result, rapid exchanges of volleys are commonplace, while the other versions see the players sitting deep. Another difference lies in the nature of the ball. Made of rubber and cork, it is slightly smaller and lighter for the Eton version, so while all players wear leather gloves, these are somewhat larger and heavier for the Rugchester versions.
The origin of the name ‘fives’ is something of a mystery. It probably has nothing to do with the query as to whether the listener would care for ‘a bunch of fives’—alluding to a punch to the face—and is more likely to be a reference to the original scoring method: Points were often recorded by tallies—vertical strokes of chalk, with every fifth point a diagonal stroke, forming clusters of five points resembling four-bar gates. These origins are reflected in the scoring—sets are often up to fifteen (although not always; the scoring is complicated) over a maximum five sets—and in the fact that historically fives has sometimes been called ‘a game of tallies’.
It’s hard now to imagine the central place that fives once had in the nation’s sporting consciousness. A hundred years ago, four chief sports were practised in British schools: cricket, association football, rugby football, and fives. Every one of the original seven public schools (as per the Act of 1868) had fives courts, as did most of the dozen Headmasters’ Conference schools of 1869. It’s also not unknown among grammar schools, with Wolverhampton GS and St Olave’s in Orpingdon fighting a brave rear-guard action to this day. In the early nineteenth century, there was a court for a local version under what is now the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. Matches drew huge crowds.
At the present time, about eighty schools in the UK maintain fives courts, and there are a few in universities, Cambridge being home to both Eton and Rugby varieties. There are four public courts at the Westway Sports Centre in west London (where I can sometimes be found), but even among those who went to a school with a court, if it features at all in the memory, it’s more likely to be a place where cigarettes were smoked, illicit liaisons with the opposite sex took place, or where one escaped the curse of mandatory cross-country running.
Although current holdouts tend to be in institutions favoured by monied elites and in the occasional country house, fives used to be wildly popular throughout the industrial northeast, where miners and steelworkers held ‘world championships’ that followed local sets of rules. There are perhaps half a dozen one-wall fives courts still standing in and around Durham, mostly forgotten backdrops to pubs and village greens. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it had been referred to as the national game of Wales, but while matches in the South Walian valleys were watched by thousands, now just a single court is extant; located in the mining town of Nelson, it attracts the occasional visiting enthusiast, but is mostly just a curiosity. Welsh speakers called the game pêl-law—meaning simply ‘ball game’—but the similarity of the name to pelota appears to be a coincidence. There are still fives walls throughout the West Country, where it was perhaps spread by French prisoners from the Napoleonic Wars, but the one-time purpose of these grand structures is all but forgotten.
The existence of fives is periodically acknowledged in these islands’ literature. In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom once muses that were he to come into money, he’d buy a country house with ‘a tennis and fives court’, while in Brave New World Aldous Huxley imagines ‘A double row of escalator fives courts’ in the West End of London, but does not, unfortunately, expand on what ‘escalator courts’ might look like. One of the most famous literary acknowledgements of fives is to be found, of all places, in Roald Dahl’s autobiography Boy, where the author/master of the twist-in-the-tale, who learned the game at Repton School, waxes lyrical about the ‘subtle and crafty game’ of fives, in which ‘the quickness of the eye and the dancing of the feet’ are all that matters.
Cricket, soccer, and rugger have captured the world, so the fact that fives has remained something of a homebody makes its few outlandish incursions all the more pleasing. The courts that were once built in New Zealand and Australia have pretty much all been demolished, apart from one at Geelong Grammar (‘the Eton of Australia’, I’ve heard it called, if you please), while it hangs on by a thread (but I suspect it always did) in Switzerland, where it’s played by a few dozen enthusiasts in Zurich, Geneva, and the Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz, in the mountains near St. Moritz. A court has just been built in Mexico by old boys of that school. There’s also a court at Schloss Wellenburg in Augsburg, Germany, the family seat of Prince and Princess Fugger-Babenhausen and family, which was used for matches between staff and royalty as recently as the 1960s, while there’s a splendid set of renovated courts surfacing at Kuala Kangsar College in Malaysia.
A version of fives was played in India, where a court was the site of a notorious slaughter of rebels at Vellore during the Indian Mutiny. A curious exception to the game’s decline is Nigeria, where it was introduced by ex-public school man J. S. Hogben, who worked as a teacher in the north of the country in the 1920s (a court was recently built in Lagos in the south, but I’ve not heard that it sees much use). The Fives Federation of Nigeria reports that there are many thousands of players in Nigeria, which would mean it’s probably more popular there than in its home country. A Nigerian official (Umar Kabir, the secretary to the Emir of Katsina state to be precise) once told Reuters that ‘It looks simple but it has subtle skills that take intelligence. This is why Nigerians are so good at it.’ In the absence of a powerful centralized body that can impose global rules, local players only use a tennis ball, and good luck to them.
A good game of fives tends to take the form of cooperative exercise, helped by rules that appear designed to ensure an even contest. In Eton fives, a player who loses two points in a row is required to swap roles with his partner, to try and lower the chances of a long losing streak. Indeed, fives players and spectators derive more joy from a long rally, rather than a quick victory. The unusual ledges and hazards in Eton fives serve to make games seem like a kind of human pinball, in which the aim is to keep the ball in play for as long as possible despite the improbable bounces and ricochets. Meanwhile, the close presence of four players makes it a pleasantly chatty game.
I’m a firm believer that fives encourages generous behaviour and that the game has had a salutary effect on my character. My long hours playing the game have strengthened my ability to see things from others’ points of view, and to treat others as I would hope they would treat me; this is the attitude one is required to cultivate in a fives game. It’s also kept me alive—and I don’t think that’s an exaggeration; I stopped smoking and lost weight to carry on playing. In fact, once I stop typing this, I’m off to play a game on courts just north of Hampstead Heath.
There is no prize money in the game, no public acclaim, and no referees, even at the highest level. This last might sound a detail, but it’s possibly the game’s most attractive and significant factor because it means that players have to be their own referees; that is to say, they themselves have to declare when they have broken the rules governing how to hit the ball cleanly. They alone can rule on whether they have been impeded and a let should be granted, if the ball has bounced twice, or if they were denied a point due to obstruction—or were wrong-footed and wouldn’t have reached the ball anyway. Fives is a stylized form of socializing, a condensed vision of civilization, a hymn to Britishness; the phrase ‘it’s not cricket’ would really be better applied to this pastime.
My suspicion is that as soon as you are continually responsible for your own conduct (as you must be if there is no referee to intervene), you tend to behave as well as you can. If you answer only to yourself, you only let yourself down if you behave badly. Players do, however, always retain the freedom to be honest or dishonest, generous or mean-spirited, big-souled or small-; play fives with anybody and you’ll get to know them very quickly.
I’ll leave the last word, however, to the historian William Hazlitt (himself a keen fives player), who wrote in 1817 upon the death of John Cavanagh (‘regarded as the greatest fives player in Regency London’, Cavanagh plied his skills on the Trafalgar Square court): ‘It may be said that there are things of more importance than striking a ball against a wall—there are things indeed which make more noise and do as little good, such as making war and peace, making speeches, and answering them, making verses, and blotting them; making money and throwing it away. But the game of fives is what no one despises who has ever played at it. It is the finest exercise for the body, and the best relaxation for the mind.’