Why you should never offer to be 'it' in a prewar playground game of baste the bear

Jump to: navigation, search

Do you recall playing Egg Hat at school? Or were you the unlucky monkey in Sling the Monkey? With games consoles and DVDs taking over from playground games to entertain youngsters, Anton Rippon casts his mind back to an earlier time and the street and schoolyard games he remembers playing in his childhood.

FANCY Chevy, Tierce or Egg Hat? Or how about Sling the Monkey, Baste the Bear, or even King Caesar?

The chances are that, if you were born after the Second World War, the names will mean nothing to you.

For they represent some of that rapidly disappearing English folk art: the children’s playground game.

There was a time when the nation’s youngsters involved themselves in a wonderful world of competitive but home-spun games and, if today’s children have replaced these carefully thought-out pastimes with PlayStations and computer games, for hundreds of years they were a part of every child’s day, handed down, almost unchanged, from generation to generation.

The games played in the streets, and later playgrounds, of Britain over the centuries formed part of our heritage.

The majority featured some sort of chase, harking back to the days of hunting. Some tested children’s skills; some were just downright cruel.

Baste the Bear, for instance, involved the “bear” having a piece of string tied around his waist while his keeper held the other end and had to protect him from a circle of boys who aimed blows at him, using knotted handkerchiefs or pieces of rope.

In Sling the Monkey, the unfortunate “monkey” was slightly better off in that he was given a knotted handkerchief with which to defend himself. The drawback was that he was usually suspended by a rope around his shoulders and swung from the stout branch of a tree, back and forth amidst his assailants. It was apparently harmless fun back then; today, it would probably provoke outrage among parents.

King Caesar – or as he was sometimes more appropriately called, King Seizer – was the boy elected to stand in the middle of the playground with half the school at one end and half at the other.

At a given signal, they had to run to cross each other’s baseline while the “king” attempted to catch them. Once caught, you became a “King’s Man” and had to help catch other boys. No-one could return to their home base once they had left it and you were deemed caught if you were held for at least 10 seconds. The losers were the team who had all their men caught first.

In Chevy, the teams, equally divided, went behind their respective bases until one boy ran to the middle and shouted: “Chevy.” He then had to make his ground before he was touched by a boy from the other side. If he was caught, he was taken prisoner. If not, it would be the turn of the would-be kidnapper to regain his place before being caught. Again, the game went on until one side had all been taken prisoner.

Many games were a variation of leapfrog. In Fly the Garter, the “back” was made by a boy with his foot against a mark on the ground. The others jumped over him once and then he moved 12 inches from the mark and they tried to clear both the back and the mark. The game continued with the back getting further away from the mark until all but one boy was eliminated by failing to clear. The last one was declared the winner.

Egg Hat began with all the boys placing their caps in a circle and one boy pitching a ball into a hat. The hat’s owner would then seize the ball and try to hit one of the rapidly disappearing circle. If he missed, he was out. If not, then the boy he had hit was eliminated. The game went on until there was only one boy remaining.

Some games appeared to have no real conclusion. One such was Tierce. In this, the players stood two deep in a circle, with a “rover” in the middle. Another boy dodged around the outside of the circle until he found “three in a row”, whereupon he changed places with the rover.

There were games that were distant cousins of cricket, like Tip Cat, and a curious north of England version called Knurr and Spell. These all involved guessing the distance in boots’ lengths that the ball had been hit by the batsman, who was not allowed to move out of a small circle drawn on the ground.

Whips and tops had their day, and one game, called Peg in the Ring, involved spinning your top so that it knocked an already spinning top out of a chalk circle.

Spinning tops appear to have been frowned upon at one time. The Boy’s Own comic for November 12, 1887, reports that “at one school, three boys have been given 400 lines each for playing whip-top”.

Hoops, too, provided great fun and, at one time, seem to have caught the imagination like the skateboarding craze of the late 20th century. At the end of the previous century, “Hoop holidays” were held on village commons all over the country.

In later years, marbles and cigarette cards took over. When tobacco companies began promoting their products with picture cards, children would flick them over the pavement. If their card landed on top of another, they claimed it as their own. When cards ceased to be issued, cigarette cartons themselves were used, and the game continued under the simple name of Fag Packets.

Today’s children are a consumer market in their own right. Computers, game consoles and the rich vein of merchandising mined from blockbuster children’s films hold centre stage. Even Follow My Leader, Piggy in the Middle, and Tick-a-Nick have become casualties in a fast-fading part of our national heritage.

what Links Here

This article is from the Derby Evening Telegraph and is reproduced online here.