Friends of Wandsworth Common — Heritage Talk
Parts Two and Three — Duelling, Bare-Knuckle Fighting, Quoits, Cricket, Rugby, Football, and Tennis
Philip has a lot of material to get through, and we are all eager to know what Parts Two and Three of Turf Wars consist of. Over to Philip.
This is not just Part Two — it is Part Three as well, because Part One got curtailed and became Part Two, and there was still the rest of it. It was originally commissioned as part of last year's Heritage Fortnight, and it has only taken me a year and three months to produce, so I can now think about something else. Possibly.
The topics today: duelling, bare-knuckle fighting, quoits, cricket, rugby, football, tennis, and much else besides. Some of it is not really about sport at all — it is about Wandsworth Common itself: about what made it conducive to certain kinds of sport at one time, and a restriction on other kinds of sport, particularly ball sports and team sports, later on. The Common had to be completely transformed, and what we have is essentially a palimpsest — endless rewriting of the Common according to whatever sports happen to be currently popular.
Very briefly: what started me on all this was an aerial photograph taken a couple of years ago, when the ground was just beginning to dry out. Superficially it shows football pitches, but look more closely and there are circular running tracks, a softball diamond, all sorts of things. Enable were very helpful in explaining what they had put where and why. There are three cricket pitches that have been in place for more than a hundred years. There is touch rugby, a softball pitch, and a set of changing rooms — though there used to be more on the Common.
In the past, the Common was roughly twice its present size, and in the 1740s John Rocque's map shows it as extremely rough ground. Grimm's images from the 1770s show lakes and ponds scattered throughout, an odd house here and there, willows and elms. Gordon Bradley's painting of 1835 gives a sense of how different it was: St Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey visible from here; sheep, donkeys, horses, cows, ducks, geese and pigs everywhere. You cannot play football or bowls on that kind of ground.
We covered the letter from young George Brydone Bruce, writing from All Farthing Manor in the 1770s to his sister — sport first, condolences to Aunt second — the hare and hounds runs of the nineteenth century, the hopping Calico Printer of Wandsworth, pedestrianism and Robert Inwood of Tooting, trotting on Trinity Road, velocipede racing, stag hunting, the escaped leopard of 1846, cockfighting, shooting, and bird-singing competitions at The Carpenter's Arms on Chatham Road.
This is an image of a duel, and duelling was quite common on Wandsworth Common. You might ask what duelling has to do with sport — I hope to establish the connection. First, though, a literary warm-up. Does anybody recognise this passage?
Lady Barbara Modish ran away to Gretna Green with Handsome Jack Castleton, but poor Jack was afterwards shot in a duel by Lord C on Wandsworth Common, and Lady Barbara died of a broken heart.
That is from Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost — Lord C being Lord Canterville. Wandsworth Common appears in roughly twenty or thirty novels of the period; I have quite a collection of them.
The reason is not difficult to work out. Mogg's map of 1810 shows the road from London towards Portsmouth, and all the way along it are duelling grounds. The closest to London for a while was Battersea Fields — now Battersea Park — then Wandsworth Common, then Putney Heath and Wimbledon Common. But here is something curious: a lot of the duels described in contemporary newspapers as taking place on "Wandsworth Common" were actually on what we would now call Wimbledon Common or Putney Heath. How do you reconcile that? Because part of Wimbledon Common is Wandsworth Common — not what we would call Wandsworth Common, but a Wandsworth Common in the old sense. The parishes of Putney, Wandsworth and Wimbledon meet at a point, and the duelists would meet at that point. Why? Because you could only be arrested by the parish constable or policeman of that specific parish. If they saw him coming, you simply stepped aside into the next parish.
We do, however, have our very own example. From the newspapers:
Yesterday morning a duel took place on Wandsworth Common between a gentleman in the neighbourhood of High Street, Lambeth, and his confidential clerk. After an exchange of three shots, the latter unfortunately fell and expired almost immediately.
Several things to note. This is not an aristocratic or political duel. It is middle class, and relatively late. Three shots rather than one or two indicates that at this period they could carry on shooting at each other until one was killed. In almost no other cases did anyone actually die — they were often wounded, but the point was the ritual, not the killing. Here is another example, from 1831:
A meeting took place on Wandsworth Common between Gill, Lieutenant of the King's Hussar Guard, and Finleyson, in consequence of a very serious dispute at one of the clubs. After receiving his fire without effect, Gill fired in the air, when an explanation took place satisfactory to the seconds; and the parties, after becoming reconciled, left the field.
And the most recent example I found:
Two London actors have just fought a duel over the reputation of a lady. The lady's champion challenged the other gentleman to a set-to with Nature's weapons, and the meeting took place on Wandsworth Common, resulting in the complete discomfiture of the duellist who had made the defamatory charge. That may not be a strictly legal way of settling a quarrel, but it is English and manly, and eminently calculated, if not to prove the rights and wrongs of the case, at least to show that neither combatant is afraid to take the risk of a sound hiding.
This is fisticuffs, not pistols. But the principle is the same: honour is satisfied. Duelling is rule-bound, formalised behaviour — you have your seconds, the exchange is controlled, and it is no accident that in a boxing ring you still have seconds who look after the fighters. That is the sporting connection I wanted to establish.
Which brings us naturally to Tom Sayers, probably the most famous pugilist in mid-nineteenth-century England — and he started his career on Wandsworth Common. He came from Brighton, moved to Camden to stay with his brother-in-law, a builder who had a contract to build parts of Wandsworth Prison, so we are talking about 1848–50. He later became world famous when he went to America for the first world championship bout — the American's name has slipped my mind, but I have the full account and it is remarkable.
Young Tom was a bricklayer, learning his trade on the prison site. He got into an argument with the foreman — much older and larger — and they went at it in the first bushes on Wandsworth Common. In his own account he describes being knocked repeatedly into the gorse:
In every round Tom was knocked into the first bushes… he was twisted as though he felt their stings. "Do you know, I felt those prickles all over me for weeks afterward." But he trounced the chap.
Tomlin — the foreman — had to run from the law afterwards, hiding in barrels in Tooting until his friends could rescue him. Tom Sayers went on to a distinguished career; his plaque is on his house in Camden, and his grave in Highgate Cemetery is attended by a stone effigy of his faithful dog. Which brings me to a brief story: somebody thought Tom Sayers had a lot of money and decided to kidnap the dog for ransom. Tom's response was magnificent. He sent a letter back saying he was very happy to leave the dog with the kidnappers, because the dog ate so much and caused so much trouble that they would soon want to give him back. They did.
John Buckmaster, in his recollections of the 1840s, recalls walking out on the Common and seeing men playing at cricket balls and quoits. Quoits was played on Wandsworth Common until the twentieth century. The principle is simple: a stake in the ground, and you throw either horseshoes — if you are poor — or specially made metal discs, and try to ring the stake. There was a quoits pitch on the Bolingbroke side of the Common, though I do not know exactly where. It deserves more attention than it usually gets.
Cricket is the great sport of the nineteenth and early twentieth century on the Common, and I would go further: it is arguable that we have Wandsworth Common at all because of cricket. That sounds like hyperbole, but such was the enthusiasm for the game towards the end of the nineteenth century that the risk of the Common being taken away and built upon was very real. The first thing John Buckmaster did — in 1863, nearly a decade before the 1871 Act — was to go and talk to the cricketers at the County Arms. He said: if you want to protect your cricket pitch, you need to think about preventing Lord Spencer from selling it all off. Spencer had every reason to do so: he had already sold the land for the railway lines, sold the Freemason School site, sold the Royal Victoria Patriotic School for girls. The cricketers were the first group to mobilise, and we owe them a good deal.
The earliest reference I have is from 1827, when a "new ground" was created. By the 1820s, Wandsworth Gentlemen were competing against the Marylebone Cricket Club — the MCC — on a field roughly where the Frying Pan area is now, just to the side of what would become the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum. The Wandsworth Gentlemen beat the MCC. The full story is too good to rush, so I shall save it for another time.
Beyond the gentlemen's games, cricket on the Common was extraordinarily varied: fourteen bricklayers versus fourteen carpenters and plasterers, all employed by a Mr Todd who lived at Aucklands on North Side; Wandsworth Working Men versus Wandsworth Teetotallers; nine players and two gentlemen versus twenty-one gentlemen and one player. The distinction between a "player" and a "gentleman" was money: a player was paid to appear; a gentleman was not. Generally speaking, the players did all the bowling, because it was physical. And then there are the team names: the Wandsworth Literary and Scientific Institution Club versus the Battersea Literary and Scientific Institution Club; the Butchers versus the Bakers; a one-armed man against a one-legged man for one pound aside. Cricket on the ice on the Black Sea pond. And — a rarity — a women's cricket match on Clapham Common in 1811, for a colossal sum of money. Five hundred guineas, I am told, is worth approximately £56,800 today.
Space was always a problem, as it is on any common. This is a recurring theme all the way through to the twentieth century, and it is the principal reason why the large area known as "the extension" — the land that had been part of the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum — was eventually acquired for cricket pitches: three of them, to avoid accidents. A boy was killed by a cricket ball. Mrs Nixon of Heathfield Cottages refused to return cricket balls that landed in her garden. Letters to the press complained of broken windows. The London County Council felt obliged to find more land, and the extension was the answer.
One practical consequence of cricket worth noting: the path now known as The Avenue — the curving path with trees on both sides near the Hope — follows the exact boundary of the old Spencer Cricket Club pitch. Lord Spencer had staked out and chained off a substantial area opposite the Hope as a private cricket ground. When the club eventually moved to Loxley Road and then further south towards Magdalen Road and Burntwood Lane, the trees they had planted along the boundary remained, and the path followed. Before the Spencer Club, the paths went at random across the Common. The Avenue was consciously designed as a boundary and has outlasted its original purpose by a century and a half.
How did we get from the rough, wet, gorse-covered Common of the early nineteenth century to the dead-flat playing fields of today? Edward Thomas's autobiography of his childhood — written in 1913, just before his death in the First World War — gives the best account I know of life on the Common for children. He grew up on Wakehurst Road, and his description of the Common in the 1880s and 1890s is vivid:
The Common offered many temptations to more irregular games and aimless rovings, for it was an uneven piece of never-cultivated gravelly land. Several ponds of irregular shape and size, varying with the rainfall, had been hollowed out perhaps by old gravel diggings. It was marshy in other places. Hawthorn and gorse clustered tall and dense in great and little thickets. Tall elms and poplars stood about irregularly. The level spaces suitable for cricket, football and tennis were not many.
And:
The Common, even though the railway ran through it parallel to Bolingbroke Grove and only two or three hundred yards away from it, was large enough to provide us with many surprises and discoveries for years. We could spend all day on it without thinking it small or having to retrace our steps. We wandered about it with or without our hoops, for any kind of hiding or hunting game. The thickets were excellent. We played the other games in the open spaces.
The Bolingbroke field today — from the Chivalry Road end right the way through to Nightingale Lane — is dead flat, with hardly a tree and certainly no thickets or gorse. The secret world Edward Thomas describes could not possibly exist there now. How did the transformation happen?
The first step was to flatten it, fill in the ponds and gravel pits, and stop people dumping refuse on the Common. Then the Metropolitan Board of Works, which took over management in the 1880s, installed five thousand drainage pipes to drain the ground — without which you could play neither cricket nor football. And then there are the railway embankment mounds.
A map of 1868 shows ponds everywhere, streams, and gorse and furze across much of the surface. By 1893, the map shows the ground already cleared, a bandstand by the Three Island Pond, trees dotted around — but no mounds. A map from 1913, however, shows distinct mounds — in exactly the places where they stand today. I went out recently with Lewis to remap them, and their positions in 1913 and now are identical. Scratch the surface of the mounds and you find rubble, but only in certain places. My conclusion — and Lewis thinks it plausible — is that bomb debris from the Second World War was piled onto these spots to dispose of it without disrupting the flat playing surfaces on either side. It could not be spread across the Common, so it was concentrated in mounds that happened to be out of the way of the pitches.
Edward Thomas believed the mounds were spoil from the cutting of the railway. He may be partly right for some of them — the Brighton Railway company that acquired this pocket of land did dig out the gravel and clay to level the line further south; if you go to Balham Station, you are very high up and looking down, and the line has to be evened out. But the absence of mounds on the 1893 map, when the railway had long been established, suggests the railway alone cannot explain everything.
Not everything on the Common fits neatly into the familiar modern sports. There is a game called rugby netball, invented almost simultaneously on Wandsworth Common and Clapham Common. It was played in the summer to keep rugby players fit, and it still existed in the 1970s — the last time I saw it played. The basket was enormous — four feet across or more. The rules allowed tackling but not below the knee or above the shoulders; you could pass forward; you could lob the ball into the basket. These were all-male games, generally speaking, in my recollection, but it is a brilliant game and ought to be revived.
There is also a very rare photograph of girls playing team games on Wandsworth Common — almost certainly the girls of Clapham County Girls' School, which opened around 1909–11, wearing very long dresses. Hockey on the Common, before the First World War. The Battersea Polytechnic lady gymnasts playing cricket against the male members of the Polytechnic Gymnastics Club. These things happened; the photographs exist; they are just not well known.
Which brings me to tennis, and to a lawnmower. Ransomes' lawnmower, to be precise — you cannot have a lawn tennis game without one. The Ransom family, who invented the rotary lawnmower and the one you could ride upon, had a member living on North Side who was one of the most important figures, alongside John Buckmaster and Alison Rosenthorn, in saving the Common. The same Ransom family — a Quaker family, and a marvellous one.
A postcard from the period reads: "They are all tennis mad here. Every spot on Wandsworth Common was covered with tennis players." Many of them, perhaps even a majority, were women and girls — out on the Common in the clothing of the day, with dogs wandering around, very temporary nets that you had to own yourself and put up and take down. One photograph shows a group playing just outside where we are sitting now, on the triangular area that is now the children's playground — which in my youth was a putting green and miniature golf course, and before that had a bandstand. The people in Dodicott Road and Baskerville Road really did not like that bandstand: letters to the press complained that lying ill in bed one did not wish to hear a dance band or a military band playing fifty yards away.
By around 1911, photographs show tennis being played on the Common just across the railway line — and after 1922, when the courts were moved over to this side, such images stop. The London County Council published a proud statement about the spread of public tennis courts on Wandsworth Common — grass courts at that point, and the point was that they were public: for ordinary people, not just those who could afford private sports clubs. Half the surface area of the land between the Common and Magdalen Road was at that time occupied by private sports clubs — cricket pitches, rugby and football grounds, hockey, tennis, bowling clubs — available only to those with money. The public courts changed that.
And by 1922, the London County Council had decided to build hard courts. The grass courts went, and what you see today is what we have had since.
Audience: You mentioned the women's cricket match — five hundred guineas. What is that worth today?
Philip Boys: I am told approximately £56,800. Colossal.
Audience: You referred to the first cricket match against the MCC at the "new ground." A few months ago I sent you a note to say that in the 1950s, I am reasonably confident there was a tarmac pitch in the middle of that area. Can anyone confirm that?
Philip Boys: I would very much like to know. Graham, who grew up in Swanfield Road, might well remember. I will ask him. My memory for anything before last week is increasingly unreliable.
Audience: We haven't touched on football at all, or the Bowling Green, or much of the Extension's history. Is there a Part Four?
Philip Boys: I would be very happy to do one. The history of the Extension — what people now call the cricket field — is almost a separate topic in itself. Fascinating, and the cause of an enormous amount of trouble over the years. Football, too: there is a great deal to say. Consider it commissioned.
Audience: I heard from someone at the Bolingbroke Bowls Club that there was a theory the Bowling Green was dug and made by prisoners of war. Is there any evidence for that?
Philip Boys: That is really interesting. I know the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum for girls was emptied in the First World War to make way for the Third London General Hospital, and the whole of this area was set aside for wards and huts for the injured — except this small lozenge-shaped section. The London County Council were endlessly delayed in developing it because patients were still there into the early 1920s. Clearing the ground took a long time, but they did begin work on this section earlier.
The question is where the prisoners of war would have come from, because there was no prisoner of war camp near here that I know of — Wandsworth Prison was not that kind of institution. But German prisoners were used extensively for agricultural work, so it is not implausible that they might have been used for ground works. And if it happened, it will appear in The Gazette — the monthly magazine of the Third London General Hospital — all issues of which are online, and of which I have some copies. Somebody should look.
Audience: It is curious that a Scottish newspaper mentioned the hospital. And equally curious that The Gazette of the Third General Hospital is lurking in archives in Melbourne.
Philip Boys: Yes — a great many Australians and New Zealanders were treated at the Third London General Hospital, and a number of them are buried in Magdalen Road Cemetery. Troops from the Antipodes were training here before the hospital even opened — there are autobiographical accounts of marching up and down on the Frying Pan, the parade ground, and then when thoroughly exhausted, heading to the Freemasons pub, because they were Australians and New Zealanders and where else would you go. The Melbourne archives have an almost complete run of The Gazette, but they are missing Issue Number One. I have it, and I am going to send them a copy so they have the complete set.
Further instalments — football, the Bowling Green, the Extension, and tennis in depth — to follow.
This is a History Boys Magic Lantern Show.
Website: History: Wandsworth Common