And to-day I'm so excited that I feel inclined to scream,
But a certain sense of modesty prevails;
For this very afternoon I am to play against a team
That will be composed of eligible males.
Though I do not care two pins
Which side loses, or which wins,
I may get some introductions if I hit 'em on the shins.

Winter sports in Switzerland make their début in Punch in 1895 in an article on tobogganing dated "Canton des Grisons." Mention is made of curling, "bandy" and figure-skating, but nothing is said of ski-ing, which though practised as a sport in Norway from 1860, did not reach Switzerland till the end of the century. Another foreign importation, this time from Japan, was ju-jitsu, to the value of which Punch pays a dubious tribute in 1899 in a burlesque interview with a burglar on whom a householder had ineffectually tried the new art of self-defence. In the same mood are the farcical suggestions for dealing with various awkward situations in 1905, and the overthrow of a butler by a page-boy, to the petrifaction of the servants' hall. There was a recrudescence of roller-skating in 1909 which Punch deals with in pictures, prose and verse. The inexpert and self-protective lover sings, after Ben Jonson: —

Rink with me only with thine eyes,
And do not clutch my frame;
Clasp yonder expert's hand instead,
And I'll not press my claim.

The Tyranny of Ping-pong

There are many allusions to "Rinkomania," but not nearly so many as to Ping-Pong, which attained the proportions of a pestilence in 1901, 1902 and 1903. Punch began by calling it a "ghastly game," but kept in close touch with its progress until the tyranny was overpast. He gives us pictures of ping-pong in the kitchen; of people searching beneath the table and in corners for missing balls; a sketch of a ping-pong tournament, with local champions and devotees of all ages and callings.

In his "Cry of the Children" the younger generation lift up their voices in protest: —

We shall never know what peace is till we land upon that shore
Where the fathers cease from pinging and the mothers pong no more.

In 1902 the Table Tennis Gazette issued its first number, and Punch speculates on the contents: —

Here you may learn if it is true
That Tosher's got his Ping-Pong Blue.

The epidemic abated in 1903, and in "The Lost Golfer" Punch has some excellent chaff (after Browning) of the "parlour hero," his mind temporarily unhinged by a "piffulent game." The verses begin "Just for a celluloid pilule he left us," and end with the anticipation that the "lost golfer" will yet return to his old haunts: —

Back for the Medal Day, back for our foursomes,
Back from the tables' diminishing throng;
Back from the infantile ceaseless half-volley,
Back from the lunatic lure of Ping-Pong.

Ping-pong departed, to be revived in 1920, but another and equally devastating craze ran its course in 1907, when "Diabolo" – the old "Devil-on-two-sticks" – was the ruling passion of the hour. It was honoured with a cartoon showing John Redmond playing the "Divil of a Game," the reel being "Leadership," and numerous illustrations are devoted to the progress of the mania. Punch affected to have discovered a new disease, "Diabolo Neck," which he compares and contrasts with "the Cheek of the Devil," and records the observation of an ill-tempered old gentleman, as he watched some performers "diabolizing" in Kensington Gardens: "A month or so ago that sort of thing was only being done in our Asylums."

First Thruster (guiltily conscious of having rather pressed on hounds): "Now we're goin' to catch it; that's the master comin', isn't it?"

Second Thruster (his host): "It's all right. We've got two masters. That's the one that supplies the money; the other supplies the language."

The vogue of Bridge dates from the last years of the old century. According to the veracious Daily Mail, in 1899 a Cambridge Professor was earning handsome fees by giving instruction in the game to members of the University, and Punch embroiders the text according to his wont. In 1901 Punch's cartoon "Discarded" shows Fashion, in her fool's cap, accosting "Mr. Bridge": "Come along, Partner! That dear old Mister Whist is such a bore! He is so vieux jeu!" Bridge figures as a gallant and picturesque cavalier, while Whist is a sour-visaged old pedant. Punch was not always of one mind about the triumphant new-comer, but he cordially echoed the sentiments of the Morning Post when that journal asserted that Bridge made for the abolition of the drawing-room ballad and the drawing-room ballad-monger; and it gave him abundant scope for comment and parody, e.g. his perversion of Longfellow's lines into "I played on at Bridge at midnight." Bridge, however, had not always a monopoly of attraction even in the days when its tyranny was at its height. In 1902 we encounter the tragedy of the four men driven to the nursery to play Bridge because "they are playing Ping-Pong in the dining-room, and 'Fives' in the billiard-room, Jack's trying to imitate Dan Leno in the drawing-room, Dick's got that infernal gramophone of his going in the hall, and they are laying supper in the smoking-room."

Hunting and Prize-fighting

It is a relief to turn from these mostly futile indoor pastimes to the robuster sports of the chase, the turf and the prize-ring. Punch was fortunate in this period in having at his command, in Mr. Armour, an artist who restored the hunting pictures to a higher level of draughtsmanship than they had ever reached before. This implies no disparagement of the incomparable geniality of Leech's drawings, which in that respect have never been equalled, unless by Randolph Caldecott. But for the correct drawing of hounds, horses and riders, and for the discreet handling of the hunting landscape, Mr. Armour's equipment is above reproach. References to the turf in the early years of this period are mostly connected with Lord Rosebery. His success in winning the Derby with Ladas in 1894 lends point to the "highly improbable anticipation" of Punch's artist in which the Premier, in parson's garb, announces his conversion to the tenets of the Nonconformist conscience. In September of the same year we have the wail of a "disgusted backer" over the defeat of the favourite in the St. Leger: —

Ladas, Ladas,
Go along with you, do.
I'm now stone-broke
All on account of you.
It wasn't a lucky Leger;
I wish I'd been a hedger,
Though you did look sweet
Before defeat! —
But I've thoroughly done with you.

In a more serious vein of irony Punch, in 1906, muses on the popularity of the turf and ends with this reflection: —

Is it not odd that hitherto no poet
Has thought to mention how, with lord and serf,
Whether they plunge thereon, or rest below it,
There is no equaliser like the Turf?
Whatso our claim,
The starting price is one, and Death the same.

The problem of the future of the horse exercises Punch in 1911. Mr. Morrow's suggestions are always original, if fantastic, but he is on safe ground when he declares that the horse could always be of use in pageants. Motor-cars in ceremonial processions remind one of nothing so much as huge beetles.

The great revival of boxing came at the end of the period, but in 1908 there is an amusing reference to Jack Johnson who, after defeating Tommy Burns, had become very unpopular in New South Wales, but, according to the Daily Mail, found consolation for adverse criticism in reading Shakespeare, Milton and Bunyan. The statement was not thrown away on Punch, who, while welcoming the evidence that Jack Johnson was able to keep his temper sweet, observed that it would be sweeter still to know what Shakespeare, Milton and Bunyan thought of his devotion. On the eve of the War, as I have noted in the first chapter, the man in the street was thinking a good deal more about Carpentier than the Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand.