Topical Guide 245
Mark Dorset
Games: Croquet
THE CROQUET ground rules that have been kept by the Hubers fill a small book generations old, maintained and expanded by successive occupants of the narrow house and passed along with the house itself. It makes an interesting historical document. Of the following samples from this book, the entry made in 1910 is of particular interest, because it was added to the rules by Lorna, in her hand, when she was nine.
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 2
The origin of croquet, like that of many other sports, is obscure. Although the game has been played in roughly its present form for about one hundred years, its antecedents extend back many centuries. As long ago as the fourteenth century, peasants in Brittany and Southern France amused themselves playing a game called Paille Maille, in which crude mallets were used to knock balls through hoops made of bent willow branches. This ancestral version of croquet persisted, and by the seventeenth century, Pele Mele, as it was called in England, had become popular with Charles II and his court. Diarist Samuel Pepys, in his entry of April 2, 1661, wrote that “I went into St. James Parke, where I saw the Duke of Yorke playing at Pesle Mesle — the first time that I ever saw that sport.” Pall Mall, as the game came finally to be called, was played with a curved club, a wooden ball, and two hoops. The court was often made of powdered cockleshells, and the hoops were decorated with flowers. The game lost favor in the 18th and 19th centuries, and little was heard of it until the 1850’s. . . . According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “croquet” is a form of the word croche, an old North French word used to mean “shepherd’s crook”. …
Wherever its origins lie, croquet was introduced into England from Ireland in the early 1850’s by one Mr. Spratt, who had been given a set of croquet implements by a Miss McNaughten around 1840. Miss McNaughten informed Mr. Spratt that the game had been introduced into Ireland but that she had seen it in its primitive state in either Southern France or Italy. The crude and rustic game observed by Miss McNaughten was played with hoops made of willow rods. The villagers constructed the mallets by boring a hole in a hard, knotty piece of wood and inserting a broomstick for the handle. Mr. Spratt kept the croquet equipment for several years before selling it to Mr. Jaques, an enterprising young man, whose family is the foremost manufacturer of croquet equipment today. It was Mr. Jaques who brought the game to notice. Incidentally, the unfortunate Miss McNaughten perished in a fire soon after giving the equipment to Mr. Spratt.
By 1865, croquet had achieved wide acceptance and had spread throughout England and its colonies.“Croquet: Lore and Legend” extract from: Croquet: The Complete Guide to History, Strategy, Rules and Records by James Charlton & William Thompson, via the Oxford Croquet website
Gadgets: Slide Rule
No player may drive the ball of another player in a downhill direction. [1856 — just three years before Lieutenant Amédée Mannheim, of the French artillery, developed the form of slide rule that endured until the development of the electronic calculator]
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 2
Amédée Mannheim entered the École Polytechnique in Paris in 1848 at the age of 17. Two years later he went to Metz where he attended the École d'Application. Although slide rules existed before Mannheim’s time, invented by Oughtred and Gunter and others, it was Mannheim who standardised the modern version of the slide rule which was in common use until pocket calculators took over. . . . It was while he was a student at Metz that the ideas for this slide rule came to Mannheim. . . .
After graduating from the École d’Application in Metz, Mannheim became an officer of the French artillery. After several years in the military, Mannheim was appointed to the École Polytechnique in Paris, while continuing his army career. His first appointment at the École Polytechnique was as a répétiteur in 1859, then in 1863 he was appointed as an examiner. In the following year Mannheim was appointed as Professor of Descriptive Geometry at the École Polytechnique. . . .
He continued teaching at the École Polytechnique until he retired in 1901 at the age of 70. He made numerous contributions to geometry and for his outstanding contributions to the subject he was awarded the Poncelet Prize of the Académie des Sciences in 1872. He studied the polar reciprocal transformation introduced by Chasles and applied his results to kinetic geometry. Mannheim’s own definition of kinetic geometry considered it to be the study of motion of a figure without reference to any forces, time or other properties external to the figure. He also studied surfaces, in particular Fresnel’s wave surfaces.J. J. O’Connor and E. F. Robertson, “Victor Mayer Amédée Mannheim” on the website of the International Slide Rule Museum
Currently reading in bed: Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time by Natalie Hodges.
The New York Times review is here.
[more to come on Tuesday, April 26, 2022]
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.