How squash developed from a prisoners’ racket and ball game

This edited article about squash originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 784 published on 22nd January 1976.

The Belvidere racket ground at Pentonville

In a single year nearly one and a quarter million lawn tennis rackets are sold in Britain and almost a million people play squash.

It is strange to reflect that two of the most popular racket sports today were being played for the first time about 100 years ago, and that the two games which started them both off – real tennis and rackets – now number their players in hundreds.

If you or your family owned a racket at the beginning of the 19th century you would most certainly have been one of the members of the wealthy upper-class. Your game would have been tennis, the ancient version played in an indoor walled court with many hazards both sides of the net.

This was the time when England was split by a wide social gap between the upper and working classes. The poor did not enjoy the opportunity to play tennis, and even when alternative versions of the game were played on lawns, this was usually in the gardens of big, private houses.

Rather ironically, the poverty of the time led to the introduction of the first major rival to tennis – the game of rackets – which, legend has it, was first played in the Fleet Debtors’ Prison, not far from St. Paul’s in London.

Those unfortunate enough to run up large debts were thrown into this type of prison, where there was obviously a little more freedom than some of the other penal institutions around at this time.

Charles Dickens, whose baker spent some time in prison for his debts, described what the original court looked like in “The Pickwick Papers”, a painting by Rowlandson (1807) also showed the scene as prisoners, time on their hands while relatives sought the money to get them out, made good use of the walls of the prison to devise their own ball game.

Thus rackets, which later was to give us squash, was born. The game spread in various directions. First to Harrow School, then courts were built behind major taverns. One of the earliest recorded title matches took place just off London’s Pentonville Road in 1839.

Played in an enclosed walled court, rackets is thought to be the fastest ball game in the world, with the possible exception of pelota. The big difference from its younger off-shoot squash is the hard, solid ball which shoots off the walls at speeds of up to 200 miles per hour.

Today, as well as being the fastest ball game played, rackets is probably the most exclusive with just seven courts in the USA and 16 in England, mainly confined to the public schools. In Britain only two new courts – at Haileybury (1908) and Harrow (1965) have been built this century, which explains why squash has roared ahead in popularity.

A lot of research had to go into building Harrow’s second racket court because the plastering of the walls demanded a special mix of concrete to withstand the battering it would have to take. One company held the details of the highly-secret process and it was only after a great deal of searching that the patent was found in New York library.

Because of the expense and careful preparation of a court, rackets was never destined to be a sport for the masses. Instead it produced another alternative racket sport, played with a softer, slower ball – hence “squash rackets”, or squash.

Both squash and badminton, so called because it was first played at the Duke of Beaufort’s Gloucestershire estate, first appeared at about the same time in the middle of the 19th century. Although both became popular with the services, and through them reached India and the Far East, neither took off quite as quickly as Major Walter Wingfield’s new lawn tennis game ‘Sphairistike’.

Within a year of him getting the patent in 1874, a committee had been formed to draw up rules for lawn tennis. At about the same time, the All England Croquet Club at Wimbledon, in an effort to attract more members, decided to add lawn tennis to its activities. It was not long before Wimbledon and lawn tennis became as synonymous as Lord’s and the game of cricket.

There was just one more bat and ball game to come – table tennis. The success of lawn tennis prompted a number of manufacturers to market a game that could be played on a table.

The trouble was too many people had the same idea and many rival groups sprang up with different rules. Ping-pong, the most popular of the early versions, took a little time to sort out its internal problems but once it had taken a hold it became one of the first sports to accept the open category type of player.

It can now claim to be among the most popular sports in the world, along with soccer, mainly because China and Russia alone have some six million active table tennis players.

Times have changed from the days when only the rich played with racket and ball!