Court service
I AM not sure whether it was admiration or contempt that crept over the face of my then deputy, a year ago, when I sloped into the office long after lunch.
“I was playing real tennis with a vicar at Hampton Court,” I explained, “and we had to restore ourselves at a riverside pub.” Whatever his true emotion, Jack’s response cut to the chase, as we practitioners of jeu de paume put it. “That’s so ‘on brand’,” he said.
The Vicar of Sunbury-on-Thames, the Revd Andrew Downes, has been duelling with me on a real tennis court for a few years. This is the original racquet sport — far more ancient than the lawn-tennis offshoot that emerged in the 1870s — played on a court with a penthouse roof running round three sides, a buttress on the fourth wall, and gallery windows, all of which reflect its origins as a game played in French monastic cloisters.
Some refer to the quadrant of the court with the buttress as “La Chapelle”, and, appropriately perhaps, the first world champion, back in the 1740s, was a chap called Clergé.
Ancient and modern
I FELL in love with the sport 30 years ago, during my first week as a student at Cambridge, when I visited the court on Grange Road and saw a couple of bottles of open wine and a cheeseboard laid out in the “dedans”, or the winning gallery, at the service end. “Now this is my sort of sport,” I decided.
When Fr Andrew and I play, the host buys lunch. My court is at Lord’s (named after a cricket-loving wine merchant rather than the Almighty), while he is a member at the 500-year-old court where Cardinal Wolsey was once the Church’s theological umpire.
It is a good place from which to keep an eye on clerical matters, sitting as it does at the intersection of London, Southwark, and Guildford dioceses, with the boundary of Oxford only ten miles away. Hampton Court is looking for a chaplain, but my opponent insists that he is very happy in his current parish. Good. I would not wish him to be able to practise every day and become too proficient.
Fr Andrew might like me to point out that he won when we last played in early March, although the overall series is quite even, and, in the past year, he leads 32-30 in games. Despite its ancient roots, we can input our results into a computer, allowing a handicapping system as well as a sign of where we are in the global pecking order.
As I type, I am the world no. 9646 (out of 14,870 on the database), while Fr Andrew is 10,226. I’ve always felt that sport is less about the results than how good the lunchtime company is.
Locker blocker
THE men’s changing room at Hampton Court has a locker with a brass plaque on it declaring that it belongs to HRH Prince Albert. This was Queen Victoria’s mixed-doubles partner rather than the future King George VI, who lost in straight sets in the first round at Wimbledon a century ago this summer.
The earlier Bertie went to Hampton Court for a game in 1848, and they set aside a locker for him which he never used again. That’s true feudal privilege for you — much more than a hereditary seat in the House of Lords.
Half a century after Albert died, in 1861, the splendidly named Sir Spencer Cecil Brabazon Ponsonby-Fane, sixth son of the Earl of Bessborough and president of the club at Hampton Court, wrote that the royal sports kit had been allowed to lie there festering for decades. “Some flannel garments and a racquet remained for many years,” he wrote, “until moth and corruption eventually consumed them.” A fate that awaits many of us.
Muscular Christianity
FORMIDABLE athlete though Fr Andrew clearly is, he doesn’t quite make my list of elite clergy-sportsmen, perhaps topped by David Sheppard, former Bishop of Liverpool and scorer of three Test centuries. Another contender is Gerald Ellison, Bishop of London in the 1970s, who twice rowed for Oxford in the Boat Race. In 1951, as Bishop of Willesden, he umpired the race but did not bring his alma mater any luck: Oxford sank soon after the start.
More than 50 years ago, another aspiring cleric had a part to play in the Boat Race, which this year is on Holy Saturday. In 1975, when the Cambridge cox fell ill a month before the race, a student at Trinity called Justin Welby was invited to recall Psalm 23 and lead the men’s eight beside — or preferably on — still waters. He steered the boat adeptly for three days in training near Ely Cathedral, and a member of that crew once told me he was convinced that, if Welby had trialled the next year, he would have been selected.
When I heard that story on the riverbank while covering the 2015 race, I approached Lambeth Palace for a quote, and was delighted that Archbishop Welby played ball. His spokesman informed me that His Grace thought that most coxswains were like Thomas Hobbes’s assessment in Leviathan of the life of man: “nasty, brutish, and short”.
Mistaken Identity
LENT in our parish progressed with the usual landmarks of the liturgical calendar: Marmalade Sale Sunday, APCM Date-Rearranging Tuesday, and World Book Day, which fell on a Thursday. I counted six Harry Potters and three Hermione Grangers at our parish school’s procession, which seemed a little down on previous years, though the half-dozen Oompa-Loompas was a rise.
The Vicar said that he might pop along later, wearing an academic gown and mortar board. “Barchester?” I asked. “Dumbledore!” he replied. It reminded me of my daughter’s confusion when she was about seven, and we went to the Palm Sunday procession from the vicarage to church, for which the curate was wearing a fabulous red cope. “World Book Day was last week,” she told me; “so why is Fr William still dressed as Superman?”
Spirit of the game
I HAVE written before of the close connection between All Saints’, Blackheath, and the world’s oldest open rugby club, founded near by in 1858, the year the church was consecrated. Recent Sunday-morning mini-rugby festivals have required me to confess and commune on a weekday.
My son captained Blackheath under-nines at a festival in Beckenham, played in memory of Christy Jordan, who died of a brain tumour just before his 11th birthday. Dozens of teams of young boys and girls linked arms in fellowship as they were told of Christy’s love for the sport. My eyes filled with tears when I saw a spaniel wearing a jersey in the Beccehamians’ colours, sitting in front of a photo of his late master as the children gave a minute’s applause.
That moment shared many elements of a church service — remembrance, solemnity, gratitude, community — and it ended with commandments and benediction as our host set out the rules. Finally, he got the children to repeat the most important one: “We promise to play with a smile on our face.” There are few better lessons for life.
Patrick Kidd, a journalist, is a churchwarden of All Saints’, Blackheath, in south-east London.
