No . 131
The Trusty Servant
Scholars on their Uppers
The Editor , Tim Giddings ( Co Ro , 09- ), investigates the esoteric world of schoolboy games :
Anybody walking along Meads path on a half-rem afternoon will see a gaggle of Collegemen on Ball Court , mostly wearing untucked school shirts and several wearing gowns . They will be belting a football back and forth between them . An ignorant observer might assume it was just a game of kick , but in true Wykehamist fashion there is a list of arcane rules to master . The Collegemen call it Uppers and essentially it is simplified Winchester football .
Ball Court is a rectangle bounded by the towering back of School on one long side and a 3ft wall on the other . One narrow end is backed by the Cloister Wall ; the other is open . The boundary at these two narrow ends , as in Winchester football , is called ‘ worms ’, and the apparently simple object of the game is to propel the ball over this line . The rules of dribble and tag obtain as in Winchester football ( essentially , if your team kicks the ball forward , you cannot kick it again until it has been played by the
How it started ( c . 1910 )
other team ). Every player is a kick , so they can handle a ball which has bounced . A scoring shot over worms must be either a ‘ down kick ’ ( below 5ft ) or have bounced off School . Tactically astute players can attempt a ‘ MacKinnon ’, which entails kicking the ball into Cloister wall such that it rebounds onto the eastern end of School before touching the ground . A current player tells me that this is ‘ more difficult to stop than a down kick , easier to execute than a rebound off School , and allows you to look cool while scoring .’
The existence of the MacKinnon , named after the recently departed NIPM , tactical supremo of OTH Winchester football , might lead some to assume that Uppers is a recent innovation . Not so : it is simply that the tradition is a living one . Pupils have always made up their own games in addition to the formalised , organised ones . Indeed , prior to the Victorian period , informal games were the only ones on offer .
William of Wykeham knew this well . His statutes ( 1400 ) ‘ strictly forbid at any time the throwing of stones and balls , and indeed of anything else , in the Chapel , cloister , stalls and Hall ; also leaping , wrestling and any other unruly and disorderly games ’, on the grounds of preventing the scholars from working , or damaging their possessions , or defacing the buildings ( Rubric 43 ). The scholars had to find outside places to play . This would have been difficult on the restricted site of the medieval school . It was bounded by a wall running west from the south-west corner of Cloisters and another running south from the south-west corner of the main buildings – essentially School Court . Beyond this were a farmyard and garden to the east and a triangular meadow to the south , but this was agricultural space rather than a sports field . The school was as much as possible a self-supporting community , growing its own fruit and vegetables , raising its own animals together with the hay to feed them , baking its own bread and brewing its own beer . Making room for games was not a priority .
In 1543 the College acquired the land of the dissolved Carmelites who had been based in a friary on the site of Musā and the rackets courts . The triangular meadow was doubled into a square and a new southern wall made of rubble from the demolished St Elizabeth ’ s College enclosed what we now know as Meads . The scholars perhaps entered it for an occasional airing as an alternative to the trek to St Catherine ’ s Hill , but it remained literally a meadow for two further centuries ; indeed the Carmelite half was planted with hops for the latter half of the 16 th century . The scholars were clearly playing ball games of some sort in the Tudor period : 14d was spent in 1545-6 pro duobus barris pro fenestris scole (‘ for two sets of bars
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