A Literary History of Croquet Trivia Quiz

Answer: Flamingo/Hedgehog

"The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing: and when she had got its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away ..." (from Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland").

In 1866, Carroll also invented a variant of croquet known as castle croquet. This involves four players each controlling two balls, and is still played today.

Answer: Rudyard Kipling

Kipling was born in 1865 and lived in Bombay for the first five years of his life. He is named after Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, England. After leaving school, Kipling spent a further seven years in India and his most famous work, "The Jungle Book", is set in the country.

The quotation is taken from "Cupid's Arrows" a short story that was first published in 1888 as part of the collection "Plain Tales from the Hills". It eloquently expresses the evolution of sporting opportunities for women - archery to croquet to lawn tennis - as the nineteenth century progressed. Archery was the first sport to be heavily promoted for women and in which they could compete alongside men. It was strongly encouraged by Queen Victoria. Croquet became popular from the 1860s and it, too, allowed women to compete alongside men, a situation which many enthusiastically accepted:
"Caroline and Annie Cheviot were ladylike, nice-looking girls; but when they found no croquet mallets in the garden, they seemed at a loss what life had to offer at Stoneborough!" (from "The Trial" by Charlotte Yonge (1864)).

Answer: The Chronicles of Barsetshire

The most famous book in the series is "Barchester Towers", published in 1857. The others are "The Warden" (1855); "Doctor Thorne" (1858); "Framley Parsonage" (1861); "The Small House at Allington" (1864) and "The Last Chronicle of Barset" (1867). Croquet was, indeed, an up and coming sport in 1864.

The first set of rules was drawn up in 1856 and the All England Croquet Club was founded in 1868.

Answer: Little Women

Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" was published in 1868 and shows how quickly croquet crossed the Atlantic and become a popular pastime in America. The book also includes perhaps the first literary account of an Anglo-American croquet encounter and of cheating at the game.

Answer: Leo Tolstoy

"Anna Karenina" was a serial novel and its instalments appeared between 1873 and 1877. Croquet was just as popular in Russia as it was in Britain or America. It features in the plays of Anton Chekov ("Ivanov" and "The Seagull"); the novels of Vladimir Nabokov ("Pnin" and "Ada or Ador"); the absurdism of Daniil Kharms ("The Old Woman"); and the poetry of Anna Akhmatovara:

"I've written down the words
that I've not dared to speak.
My body's strangely dumb.
Dully my head beats.

The horn cries have died.
The heart's still confused.
On the croquet lawn, light
autumn snowflakes fused.

Let the last leaves rustle!
Let last thoughts torment!
I don't wish to trouble
those used to happiness.

I forgive those lips, eyes
of yours, their cruel jest...
oh, tomorrow we'll ride
that first wintry sledge.

Drawing-room candles will glow
more tenderly in the day.
Of conservatory roses
I'll bring a whole bouquet".

(from the poem "Obman" by Anna Akhmatovara (1910) translated by A. S. Kline)

Answer: George Eliot

"Daniel Deronda" was published in 1876. The irony is that, far from being the "game of the future", croquet was already being undermined by the up-and-coming sport of lawn tennis. Rules for this new rival had been patented in Britain in 1873; the first American court was laid in 1874; and the first Wimbledon championships took place in 1877. Croquet's heyday had come and gone.

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Anne Evans whose other works include "The Mill on the Floss", "Silas Marner" and "Middlemarch". One of the distinctive characteristics of "Daniel Deronda" is its pro-Zionist leanings. At the close of the novel, the eponymous hero departs for Israel seeking to restore its status as a nation-state.

Answer: The Go-Between

L.P Hartley's "The Go Between" was published in 1953. The movie version was released in 1970 with Alan Bates and Julie Christie in the lead roles. The young Leo was played by Dominic Guard. Curiously, given that one of the book's central themes is the mental scarring that befalls Leo, Guard went on to become a psychotherapist.

The novel's opening line is: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there". That seems to sum up the portrayal of croquet in much later twentieth century British literature. It comes to represent a lost world of class and elitism despite the fact that, at one time, crowds would mass to watch matches.

When Leo finds Marian and tries to fulfill his errand, the ensuing dialogue becomes farcical:
"'Hugh asked me to tell you ---' I began.
'I asked you to tell me?'
'No, not you. Hugh.'
'Not you, you,' She repeated. 'I can't understand a word you say. Is it a game?'
'No,' I said wretchedly, for it seemed I was fated to mispronounce Hugh's name. 'Hugh, you know, Hugh.'
'Yes, of course I know myself,' she said, apparently more confused than ever."

Answer: The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" was published in 1939 and won him the Pulitzer prize. Steinbeck also used the game of roque - a variant of croquet - in his novel "Sweet Thursday" (1954) as a metaphor for those seemingly petty things that cause rifts between one community and another. In the town of Pacific Grove, all is not well:

"Roque is a complicated kind of croquet, with narrow wickets and short-handled mallets. You play off the sidelines, like billiards. Very complicated, it is. They say it develops character. In a local sport there must be competition and a prize. In Pacific Grove a cup was given every year for the winning team on the roque courts. You wouldn't think a thing like that would work up much heat, particularly since most of the contestants were over seventy. But it did. One of the teams was called the Blues and the other the Greens. The old men wore little skullcaps and striped blazers in their team colors.

Well, it wasn't more than two years before all hell broke loose. The Blues would practice in the court right alongside the Greens but they wouldn't speak to them. And then it got into the families of the teams. You were a Blue family or a Green family. Finally the feeling spread outside the family. You were a partisan of the Blues or a partisan of the Greens. It got so that the Greens tried to discourage intermarriage with the Blues, and vice versa. Pretty soon it reached into politics, so that a Green wouldn't think of voting for a Blue. It split the church right down the middle. The Blues and the Greens wouldn't sit on the same side. They made plans to build separate churches.

Of course everything got really hot at tournament time. Things were very touchy. Those old men brought a passion to the game you wouldn't believe. Why, two octogenarians would walk away into the woods and you'd find them locked in mortal combat. They even developed secret languages so that each wouldn't know what the other was talking about.

Well, things got so hot and feeling ran so high that the county had to take notice of it. A Blue got his house burned down and then a Green was found clubbed to death with a roque mallet in the woods. A roque mallet is short-handled and heavy and can be a very deadly weapon. The old men got to carrying mallets tied to their wrists by thongs, like battle-axes. They didn't go any place without them. There wasn't any crime each didn't charge the other with, including things they'd outgrown and couldn't have done if they'd wanted to. The Blues wouldn't trade in Green stores. The whole town was a mess"

(from "The Great Roque War", chapter 8 of "Sweet Thursday" by John Steinbeck).

Answer: The Shining

"The Shining" was published in 1977 and centres around Jack Torrance and the horrors unleashed when he and his family move into the Overlook hotel. A movie version, famously starring Jack Nicholson, followed in 1980.

Roque plays more than a peripheral part in the story as a roque mallet is used by Jack as a weapon. The detail, though, about croquet (American) evolving from roque (British) is completely the wrong way round. The sport of roque was developed in America from croquet which had originated in Britain.

Answer: Philip K. Dick

"The Minority Report" is the most famous of these short stories and was made into a 2002 movie starring Tom Cruise. Other Dick writings to be filmed include "A Scanner Darkly" and the stories "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (which became "Total Recall") and "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" ("Blade Runner").

Science fiction and croquet don't sound like they ought to go together but all four of those listed have included croquet in their writings. H. G. Wells published the novella "The Croquet Player" in 1936, whilst both Clarke and Matheson have references to croquet in their short stories:

"Then we turned our minds to competitive sports, but found that, for obvious reasons, outdoor activities were somewhat restricted. Games like croquet or bowls would have been practical had we had the equipment; but football and cricket were definitely out. In that gravity even a football would go half a mile if it were given a good kick - and a cricket ball would never be seen again." (from "The Other Side of the Sky" by Arthur C. Clarke)

"He limped slowly past the silent steel tower, which was an oil burner; past the huge red serpent, which was a nozzleless garden hose clumsily coiled on the floor, past the wide cushion whose case was covered with flower designs; past the immense orange structure, which was a stack of two wooden lawn chairs; past the great croquet mallets hanging in their racks. One of the wickets from the croquet set had been stuck in a groove on the top lawn chair. It was what the man, in his flight, had grabbed for and missed. And the tanklike cans were used paint cans, and the spider was a black widow." (from "The Incredible Shrinking Man" by Richard Matheson)