Guest post by John Pym: Games Ancient and Modern

Mr Beebe (Simon Callow) fights with an Edwardian tricycle at Foxwold in the 1985 film of A Room with a View. (Merchant Ivory Productions; Sarah Quill photographer)

An eight-minute video, La Roue, No. 29, in the series ‘Children’s Games’ by the artist Francis Alÿs: A barefoot boy in a green and yellow football shirt and red shorts – the colours of the Congo national football team – rolls an empty tyre up a huge slagheap. The heap, among the highest in the world, is composed of the fine waste from the Etoile copper mine on the outskirts of Lubumbashi in the Katanga region of southern Congo.

The boy fits himself inside the tyre and bowls down the slagheap. We see his calm smiling face from inside the tyre. At the bottom of the slagheap the tyre gently topples over and the boy stands up to be greeted by his friends who sing ‘The Mampala Etoile mine has been defeated. But Mampala, our great black mountain – we are pushing to find a solution!’ An internet search reveals that ‘Mampala’ is a Congolese football star, and that the great black mountain of waste contains sufficient cobalt to make that valuable material worth extracting – a heroic nickname and a possible solution.

I saw this remarkable video in the Belgian pavilion of the 2022 Venice Biennale.

Among the pencil-written letters my paternal grandfather Evey Pym sent to his wife Violet from France during the First World War was one that concerned a bicycle that Violet had recently acquired. Was the bicycle safe? She must take the greatest care. Violet – a close friend of the Calderons, Kittie in particular – no doubt simply intended to ride down the half-mile drive of Foxwold, the family home in Kent, and then along a peaceful country lane into the village of Brasted where almost all daily domestic needs could at that date be satisfied. The world was changing; women were asserting their independence.

What, I wondered sitting in the shade outside the Belgian pavilion, would Evey have made of that little African boy inside his tyre fearlessly descending the great back mountain?

Edwardian middle-class men may have worried about the safety of their wives riding bicycles – indeed we still worry today about everyone on bicycles – but they loved games and they would all, I’m sure, have raised their hats, my grandfather included, to that little boy and his tyre.

Foxwold in the 1880s/early 1890s, probably from a painting by Jane Hannah Backhouse Pym

Foxwold, in its heyday in the years before the First World War and up to 1927, the year when Violet died and Evey’s long widowhood began, was a home to games-playing. The Calderons undoubtedly played croquet on the fifth and most spacious of Foxwold’s six terraced lawns, as George was very keen on the game. The sides of the exacting croquet hoops were parallel, not wide angled and easy to pass through, and the house rules did not allow a player to place her foot on her ball and send an opponent’s ball decisively into the rhododendron bushes.

When I was a boy in the 1950s, and first knew Foxwold, we played croquet all the time from spring to autumn, as my own grandchildren do today with the same set of hoops and three of the same four chipped balls. I remember one of my grandmother Violet’s younger brothers, Roy Lubbock (b. 1892), a Cambridge don who taught engineering and had a hand in aircraft design during the First World War, smoking a cigarette in an amber holder and from his great height meticulously calculating through smoke and round spectacles the precise angle of strike.

Foxwold’s croquet set today

From the 1890s on, women and men, boys and girls, all played croquet together in mixed teams – with dogs sometimes contributing. Just as they shot arrows at straw targets and played field hockey, lacrosse, shuttlecock, bowls (each mahogany sphere identifiable by its countersunk dots, and impressively unmanageable to a small boy), deck quoits and clock golf – the ‘l’ was silent to the Edwardians, and indeed to my parents, both born in 1908.

The twelve-hole golf ‘course’ began on one of the lawns Kittie Calderon had laid out for Evey and Violet and then continued through the gap in a yew hedge, down steep banks and stone steps, and across rough chertstone paths. Each hole had a white-painted sunken iron circle and an appropriate Roman numeral, also white and made of iron, which was set in the grass nearby. When we played in the 50s and 60s the twine on the handles of the Edwardian (or perhaps Victorian) putters often came away in your hands.

Indoors we played Mahjong, again following our own rules, with a beautiful ivory-and-bamboo set perhaps brought back from China by one Sir Edmund Backhouse (b. 1873), a distant and enigmatic relative known as ‘The Hermit of Peking’. Card games were de rigueur in the evening, sometimes those forgotten French games of Bezique and Piquet (guidance available in a modern edition of Hoyle’s Rules), but more often Racing Demon and Hearts, and on quiet nights Clock Patience. I have my maternal grandmother’s fold-up card table with its dark brown velvet surface worn away in four patches where the ladies laid their cards – and I can see her now carefully playing Patience after tea with a small elegant pack of continental cards with some regal figure such as Marie Antoinette or Louis XVI decorating the back of the cards.

We played Up Jenkins – a sort of seated hide-and-seek – with a concealed 6d coin and hoots of hilarity as the hands of the lead player went ‘creepy-crawly’ across the table. There was also an exciting Edwardian horse-racing game with a huge green-baize cloth marked with all the jumps of the Grand National. This was a household in which, before the First World War, everyone rode and – before the advent of bicycles – most could drive a dog-cart to the village and to church services.

I remember the satisfying heaviness of the lead horses-and-riders going round the pretend Aintree course and the perils of all the jumps being expertly explained. My father Jack and his brother Roly rode their ponies to school through the woods and across a stream, unaccompanied, when they were quite small children. And my sister Carol has an oil painting by George’s brother Frank Calderon of ‘Master John Pym’ on one of his mounts. ‘It didn’t look like me or my horse,’ Jack said.

‘Master John Pym’ and his horse, by W. Frank Calderon, 1916 (Courtesy of Mrs Carol Taylor)

Hunting, on horseback and on foot, following the Beagles, was also a huge part of country middle-class Edwardian life. Rabbits existed to be shot (and eaten). The glass-fronted Foxwold gun cabinet, against which was stacked the games equipment, was locked, but a key was always left in the door. It was a source of fascination to me as a child. I unlocked the doors of the cabinet, examined the two double-barrelled shotguns and a hammer gun dating from the 19th century judged too old to be used.

Beneath the guns were two drawers full of loose cartridges of various weights of shot, rag pulls to clean the guns, tins of oil and several boxes of bullets – these were for a bolt-action .22 rifle which, after much pestering, I was eventually allowed to use for target practice on the croquet lawn. My mother, whose father had been killed by a ricochet bullet in 1915, instructed me in the rudiments of gun safety – and then, as I remember it, I was just sent down the garden with a lethal weapon and box of bullets, aged – what? – twelve or thirteen. Was this attitude a legacy of the Edwardians? Of an era when ‘health and safety’ was an issue not yet invented?

In the summer of 1985, the American director James Ivory arrived in London to film the English portion of Ruth Jhabvala’s adaptation of E.M. Forster’s novel A Room with a View, first published in 1908. He needed an Edwardian house set in the Surrey hills. This would be transformed into ‘Windy Corner’, the home of the widowed Mrs Honeychurch and her daughter Lucy, for whom at the end of the film the whole world will open up – and the riding of bicycles would, along with much else, no longer be an issue.

Foxwold, situated a few miles from Surrey, on a ridge of green sandstone, fitted the bill. Those who have seen the film will certainly remember the woodland scene in which Lucy’s irrepressible brother Freddy, the deceptively somnolent George Emerson and the wonderfully encouraging clergyman Mr Beebe throw off their clothes – and every vestige of Victorian propriety – and leap into ‘The Sacred Lake’, and behave like exuberant boys in a paddling pool on an endless summer afternoon.

Watercolour by Roland Pym of the ‘Sacred Lake’ scene in A Room with a View, made during the shooting of the film at Foxwold, 1985. The names underneath refer (left to right) to the actors playing Freddy, George Emerson, Cecil, Lucy, and Mrs Honeychurch, with soundman Ray Beckett. (Courtesy of the Estate of Roland Pym)

On the old Foxwold croquet lawn, with its narrow approach steps on which George Emerson takes Lucy in his arms and bestows on her a second passionate kiss, the director recreated another moment of Edwardian playfulness – a game of ‘bumble puppy’ in which two players bat a tennis ball, attached by string to a post, back and forth and round and round. Bumble puppy was not in fact, as far as I can recall, one of the games I discovered beside the gun cabinet. But there it is, in a classic movie representing the Edwardian age and standing in for all those other games that George and Kittie and their friends and family so happily played in the years before Europe erupted in August 1914.

Minnie Beebe (Mia Fothergill) playing bumble puppy in the film of A Room with a View (Merchant Ivory Productions, 1985)

© John Pym, 2022

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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’  Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.