What Happened at Harrow?
The True Story of the Origins of the Game of Squash
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 IT BEGINS with a boy and a ball. Homo ludens, man at play, is rather more precisely boy at play. Our boy is bored, he is tired of work in the fields or the cobwebby entanglements of arithmetic and puella/puer. He plays. He plays outside in the sun and fresh air. He plays a simple game of slapping the ball with his hand against a wall—handball, the oldest ball game known to mankind. Over time our boy tires of the lack of speed and range of movement. He pulls out a shepherd’s crook or the leg of a broken stool or a broom. And he plays his game, striking the ball against the wall.
The story of squash starts with a boy and a ball and then leads to France almost one millennium ago. In the 12th century in French monasteries, young brothers invented the game of tennis. They took the ancient game of handball and moved it indoors, into the cloistered courtyards of the abbey. Each Easter they strung a net across the middle of the yard and slapped a ball back and forth. In time the monks played all year and their game grew in complexity, especially after they started using racquets—wooden sticks with the gut of an animal strung in a gap at one end.
Within a couple of centuries tennis was the national sport of a dozen European countries. In the year 1600 there were over 1800 courts in Paris alone. Every King of England and France played; legend has it that Henry VIII was on court when he was told of the beheading of Anne Boleyn. Tennis, however, was not a game for the masses. It had byzantine scoring, a dozen different serves, and a regulation court with idiosyncratic hazards and a huge length that recreated a monastery’s courtyard.
Within a couple of centuries tennis was the national sport of a dozen European countries. In the year 1600 there were over 1800 courts in Paris alone. Every King of England and France played; legend has it that Henry VIII was on court when he was told of the beheading of Anne Boleyn. Tennis, however, was not a game for the masses. It had byzantine scoring, a dozen different serves, and a regulation court with idiosyncratic hazards and a huge length that recreated a monastery’s courtyard.
The people, therefore, took the game into their own hands. In the early 18th century, prisoners at the Fleet, London’s notorious debtor’s jail, borrowed tennis racquets and created an outdoor ball game (probably a few noblemen, fallen on hard times, wistfully recalled their happy days playing tennis). Their game was called racquets and it was exactly what our boy was doing—hitting a ball against a wall. The Fleet prisoners used tennis racquets but the ball was an unsqueezable little pellet of tightly wound cloth, and instead of a large indoor court, they smashed it against a plain wall in the back courtyard at the Fleet.
Racquets was decidedly simple. You could play anywhere there was a wall, and just a racquet and some sort of ball were required. First one to 15, and to win a point you had to be serving. With no back walls, it was a game of finesse and dropshots, not just bashing a ball. Men were very much taken with the game, finding it a pleasant distraction after a pint of beer or a hard day’s work. By the reign of George III there were hundreds of makeshift courts in tavern yards and side alleys through London and other British cities, each with its own unique features and rules.
Not content with using existing yards, they started building specific places to play racquets, all of various sizes, but rarely with four walls and a roof. James Knox, a Scot, built the first court in the US, a three-wall version at the corner of Allen and Hester Streets in downtown Manhattan in 1799, modeling it after a court he saw in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A second court, built a few years later, was called the Butcher’s Court, for the men who played there were the aproned meat dealers who had shops along the Bowery.
It was a splendid game, requiring great activity and good sight, as the ball could be made to hit the various projections and openings by a skilful player and come off at all angles or drop dead
In 1820 the first racquets world champion was crowned—he was a prisoner at the Fleet. A vintage sketch of the Harrow School “Corner” where boys in the 1800’s started smacking balls against the courtyard walls.
 ON A HILL TEN MILES west of London lies the prestigious boarding school, Harrow. In the 19th century Harrow boys played racquets. At the time Harrow fielded organized teams for just soccer and cricket and sometimes relay races; much of the time, especially for younger boys unable to make the varsity 11, Harrovians spent casting around for other amusements. There was “toozling”—throwing stones at birds, a game that meant a severe flogging if caught by a master—and there were organized fistfights, which did not incur punishment if held on the milling ground, a grassy stretch of lawn below the main schoolyard where it was also legal to smoke.
Above the squalor of the milling ground was Old Schools. Built in 1682, the three-story facility was the heart of Harrow. For many years Old Schools was the only school building. Inside, the Fourth Form room, officially for sophomores but generally the main classroom, was where graduating seniors carved their names in the dark wood: Churchill, Byron, Peel and other famous names are still there today. When it rained, which being England it did quite often, the boys used their classroom as a field. “A good deal of rough play went on there,” wrote Charles Merivale, Harrow class of 1818. “I have seen cricket practiced there with great vigor and racquet-balls flew about plenty.”
The boys roomed in giant Elizabethan houses near Old Schools, and they played racquets in the yards and alleys at the houses. The yards varied in composition, with hazards peculiar to each: The walls were crenellated with water pipes, chimneys, ledges, doors, wired windows and devilish foot-scrapers that, as one old Harrovian remembered, “into which the ball could be played to score a point, as it never came out.”
The chief place for racquets was the schoolyard, a colossal gravel and paving-stoned playground surrounding Old Schools. One part of the yard, called “The Corner,” was particularly well suited for racquets, as it had three good walls including a front wall with a buttress that dropped the ball straight down and a waterpipe that might send it anywhere. The seniors, of course, claimed “The Corner” as their territory.
“In those days we played racquets in the schoolyard,” wrote Charles Roundell, class of 1848. “The Sixth Form against the school building, with the wall of the milling ground at the back, the Fifth Form on the wall opposite the school steps, the Shell [a class for first-year boys] in the corner to the right. The Sixth and Fifth Form games, owing to their different local conditions, differed much in character. In the Sixth Form game it was compulsory to serve on the big chimney, back-handers from Leith’s Wall being also compulsory, and a principal feature of the game; but a return back-hander from the milling-ground wall was not compulsory, but optional. Some of the happiest hours of my school life were spent on the Sixth Form ground. Those were games indeed, and worthy of the gods.”
THE GODS, nonetheless, wanted a more uniform game. In 1850 Harrow constructed two open-air racquets courts in a steeply pitched apple orchard below the milling ground. Although the bill came to £850, Harrovians found the courts appalling. One, like a soldier with an amputated leg, had a missing side wall, the other had a back wall that rose a mere three feet, and both were made with rough stone that made bounces as unpredictable as the pipe-covered walls of the house yards.
 The Fives courts at Harrow. Fives is handball played in a court amidst obstructions and hazards such as drainpipes and buttresses. There are versions named after almost every English public school: Eton, Rugby, Marlborough, Winchester and Cheltenham.
Unsatisfied, William Hart-Dyke, class of 1856, got involved. Hart-Dyke was the reigning racquets world champion and could not stand such decrepit courts. He formed a committee of Harrow alumni to raise money and in November 1864 built, at a cost of £1,600, a covered racquets court. In January 1865 Hart-Dyke and a professional from Torquay inaugurated the court with an exhibition. Today, 135 years later, the covered racquets court still stands at Harrow and is still used by the Harrow racquets team each winter.
Filling up the orchard around the new court, Hart-Dyke put in four Eton fives courts and three Rugby fives courts. Fives is handball played in a court. There are versions named after almost every English public school: Eton, Rugby, Marlborough, Winchester and Cheltenham. Eton fives, invented amid the mossy drainpipes at Eton, is played on a narrow court with many buttresses and hazards, while Rugby fives, created at the prep school that also thought up the sport of rugby, has an unadorned court 28 by 18 feet, with side walls that slope towards the back wall and a two and a half foot tin on the front wall. Sound familiar?
Racquets, with a court that could be played in all winter long, rain or snow or just overcast, boomed at Harrow. School tournaments attracted hundreds of boys, and Harrow entered the first Public Schools Racquets Championships in 1868. The school dean, Sam Hoare, coached the team until 1870 when, as one old boy wrote, “increasing years and rotundity deprived him of his pristine activity,” and a racquets professional from London was hired.
With the rising popularity of racquets came a shortage of court time. The younger boys, especially, could rarely find a moment when they could jump on a court or “The Corner.” The sport, with its long racquet and bullet-hard ball, was also difficult for an inexperienced, weak-armed Fourth Former to learn, particularly in the small yards where split-second decisions occurred in each rally.
The young boys of Harrow, therefore, created a gentler, slower version of racquets. This was a time, you must remember, when sports were not codified. Any
A current racquets court (Harrow court pictured above) measures 60’ long by 30’ wide, and is made of granite. The ball features an acrylic center wrapped with twine and multiple layers of tape—it travels at 180MPH!
Any game could mutate each week, according to the whims of the boys who played it. At Harrow they punctured a ball made of India rubber (rubber was first vulcanized in 1839 and came in vogue as material for a ball in the 1840s) and shortened the racquet. Viola! Here was a new game. This bastardized version of racquets was called soft racquets or baby racquets or squash-ball racquets or child’s squash-ball.
“Attached to each house is a pupil-room, in which private reading and Latin verse and prose composition, to say nothing of surreptitious lessons carved on the desks and walls, is the order of the day,” wrote Sir Douglas Straight, class of 1867. “Adjoining this there is generally a yard, where an anomalous description of cricket and a still more peculiar version of racquets, with a ‘spat’ and an India-rubber ball, are the staple sources of amusement.” The yards at the Harrow houses were perfect for soft racquets, as was “The Corner” in the schoolyard where they played doubles with much fervor. But how did the game get its court?
 In December 1923 the Times of London printed three letters to the editor from men on a Tennis and Rackets Association committee that was trying to standardize the squash ball. “Surely the name squash indicates a rubber ball with a small hole and a consistent bounce?” contended one, G.J.V. Weigall. A few days later came a letter from E.L.W. explaining that at Harrow, where the game had been invented, they had always used a rubber ball with a hole in it.
Memories then flooded in about Harrow and the origins of squash. One correspondent recalled playing squash in the house yards and the various “projections, mouldings and (in our case) wired windows...coupled with the quaint effect of a cut on the soft ball, all of which multiplied the strokes and added most delightfully to the skilful player’s game.” Another, Mark Fenwick, class of 1877, mentioned that “the old ball with a hole in it which we used at Harrow in the ‘seventies was a very slow affair, and in the winter months when the open courts were damp, it required considerable force to make it hit the back wall full pitch.” Long after graduating, Fenwick continued to buy his squash balls from “Judy” Stevens at Harrow. “Our old squashes were rather smaller than a Fives ball,” wrote a third. “They used to make splendid water-squirts in the early ‘sixties.” The best balls, wrote “Old Harrovian,” were sold by Sam Hoare, and “were slightly thicker and therefore bounded better” than the balls sold in town. In a careful description of the two courts in the yards at Head Master’s House, one of the larger dormitories, R. Stewart-Brown, class of 1891, noted “play was nearly all backhanded, and a very powerful stroke was thus developed. It was a splendid game, requiring great activity and good sight, as the ball could be made to hit the various projections and openings by a skilful player and come off at all angles or drop dead.”
The greatest letter, in length and gravity, came from a Viscount in the House of Lords, Dunedin, class of 1868. The school’s racquets champion in 1868 and “keen on squash,” Dunedin described the pleasures of playing squash doubles in the schoolyard, and, with an aficionado-like expertness, he listed the dormitory yards and other colorfully-named spots in the town of Harrow where squash was a daily event: Monkey’s, Bradley’s, Vanity Watson’s, Butler’s, and Young Vaughan’s. He recalled the opening exhibition at the covered racquets court by “Bill Dykes, the amateur champion, who was only taken from us not very long ago....” He also noted that Eton fives, with its many obstacles, “took on fairly well” after the courts were built in 1864, but Rugby fives, with its plain court, was scorned by Harrovians. “The Rugby courts did not, I know, have half-a-dozen games of fives played in them,” wrote Dunedin. “They obviously invited the familiar squash, and were immediately appropriated for that purpose.”
Rising from the dead, from Lullingstone Castle in Kent, an 87-year-old Hart-Dyke wrote the final letter to the editor of the Times on this subject. He declared himself alive, saying, “all grief may be reserved for a departed twin brother.” To the matter so well and consistently covered on page five of the Times he said he made the Rugby fives court with squash in mind: “These, I can well remember, I intended for play with a racket and indiarubber ball. I fully agree with Lord Dunedin that these courts obviously invited the familiar squash, and from that sprung the idea of the Harrow squash court.”
So we now know that on some gray, wintry day in late November 1864, two young boys of Harrow walked into a Rugby fives court and, with their rubber ball and short racquets, first played the game of squash.
THROUGHOUT the rest of the 19th century squash was looked upon as a mere starting kit for the real game of racquets. “The game is very and deservedly popular,” wrote E.O. Pleydell-Bourverie in 1890. “Familiarity with the flight of balls generally and with the handling of a racquet is thus acquired and if the player feels drawn in that direction—and those who become proficient at the softball game usually do—he proceeds to a regular racquet court, where it takes him a comparatively short time to adapt the knowledge and skill he has acquired to the requirements and the rapid flight of the orthodox racquet ball.”
Yet the boys at Harrow loved squash. They continued to play in the yards and filled the Rugby fives courts every afternoon. In December 1871 the school newspaper carried a letter complaining, “We should not always see the Fives Courts occupied by boys playing Racquets, as we do now.” At times it was not a pretty sight, as one observer, M.C. Kemp, recorded in the 1880s while visiting the Rugby fives courts at Harrow: “Rather can the casual spectator, strolling through the courts, complain that young players too often are content to make their early efforts with racquets well-calculated to damp their incipient zeal. Racquets with but few strings unbroken, with great holes, through which a ball will often vanish, or more ignominious still, get stuck, are too frequently seen in the hands of the young. What fun, I wonder, can they imagine they derive from the game under such conditions? And yet they look serenely happy, and repeat regularly the performance, destined to wiser eyes and older heads to end in disappointing failure!”
They looked serenely happy because their game asked for speed and endurance and shotmaking, a combination not critical to racquets. Indeed wiser eyes and older heads might have realized that a century later squash would have 50,000 courts and 15 million players worldwide, while racquets could claim less than 40 courts in use and about 1,000 regular players.
By the turn of the century the Harrow game, now called squash racquets, was considered a separate and legitimate sport and had moved well beyond its nursery. In the summer of 1897 Harrow converted the three 1864 Rugby fives courts’ walls into wood from stone. Squash had by now left its origins as a pick-up game in a yard, where water pipes and foot-scrapers were welcomed additions. But squash was still at heart a game of hitting a ball against a wall, a game for a boy at play.
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