No . 131 The Trusty Servant for the window of the schoolroom ’, by which is meant at that time VIIth Chamber ).
Evidence for a regular venue for ball games begins in the 17 th century . While the rest of the country was descending into civil war , Winchester College was disbursing payments for the wonderfully named sphaeristerium ( 1641 ) and , in positively barbarous ‘ Latin ’, le ball-place ( 1646 & 1652 ). The exact location is lost to history beyond being ‘ in the back parts of College ’. But in 1768 the Warden and Fellows ordered the creation of Ball Court in its current location behind School , when Meads was ceded to the scholars ‘ for their Airing and Play Place ’. The College accounts for Michaelmas 1769 record payments for chalk , gravel and an expensive net .
Ball Court survived the battle for Meads between scholars and Fellows . The Fellows had retained the former kitchen garden as their pleasure garden , equipped with its own bowling green from 1632 . But in 1780 the curmudgeonly fellow William Bowles , fed up of being disturbed on his walks in the gardens , petitioned for Meads to be annexed back to the Fellows and secured with a high boy-proof wall ; his diagram marks Ball Court as a place for ‘ flowering shrubs ’. In the event , the high wall was constructed on the line of the present 3ft wall and for ten years protected Meads for the Fellows and the one horse and cow each which they were allowed to graze ( two for the Warden ).
Were the Georgian scholars playing Uppers on their court ? Not initially . It was divided into three fives courts and the lower half of the wall of School was rendered to yield a truer bounce . According to Stevens ’ s Notions , ‘ In 1838 , the games played on it were bat-fives , hand-fives and rackets ’; he also mentions ‘ small crockets ’, cricket played with a stump and a fives ball . The court was
improved in 1852 by the replacement of the chalk with concrete and by the addition of the low wall c . 1890 .
The first mention of Uppers ( sometimes called Up-game ) comes in an 1891 letter from a scholar to his parents which says he has ‘ not yet begun regular [ Winchester ] football but just something called “ up game ” - which is ordinary [ Winchester ] football played outside racquet court at the back of School .’ By this time the other games had migrated to purpose-built courts : new fives courts were constructed in 1862 and 1882 and a rackets court in 1871-2 .
Stevens defines Uppers as ‘ a kind of soccer played on House yards and on Ball Court , usually with four a side ( 1900 on ).’ Evolved forms still exist in some houses . In Trant ’ s players are allowed two touches and can extricate the ball from unplayable locations by ‘ taking a none ’; rather than worms the game has two goals , called ‘ Big ’ and ‘ Little ’, which are the same size . In Phil ’ s it is called ‘ Two-Man ’ and players may travel with the ball as long as their kicks keep it off the ground ; they can also pass it between themselves in this way . The oldest person in Yard may hasten a drawnout game to its close by shouting an unprintable word and then interfering with the game in any manner while holding onto the rail by the steps .
How it ’ s going ( 2021 )
In other houses Uppers has devolved into soccer or various versions of pelting the ball at each other . But some houses do something completely different . The Chawkerites have developed a totally new two-player game , called ‘ Hajk ’ after its inventor Hajk Nzsdejan ( 12-17 ), in which competitors can only score from their own half ; a brief experiment with ‘ Hajk tennis ’ was abandoned when it turned into dodgeball with rackets , too dangerous even for pupils to countenance . Modern Hopperites prefer Mugging Hall cricket , with the light fittings caged to avoid damage . Beloeites play a peculiar game called ‘ Tree-Ball ’. A tennis ball is thrown up into the beech tree in the garden . Players compete to catch it on the full , or one-hand-one-bounce ; whoever does must attempt to reach the wall while the other plays try to stop him ‘ in any way they want – it can get rather rough .’
Alas , several of my pupil sources felt their games were in terminal decline . ‘ When I was in first year we were out in Yard every night . But the first years today just want to play on their computers .’ The youth of today are not what they used to be . But at least they ’ re not trying to wrestle in Chapel .
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