CARDS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 October 1940, Page 3

CARDS

KING, QUEEN AND KNAVE THEIR CURIOUS HISTORY. THE TOOLS OF SATAN. The highbrowed intellectuals ponder for hours over the chess board, the cold-blooded logicians study their draught boards, the frivolous folk like to hear the rattle of the dominoes, but all the world, rich and poor, young and old, friend and foe, plays at cards (writes “N.F.5.,” in the Melbourne “Age”). At chess, draughts, or billiards the better player almost invariably wins, and the defeated one rises from the bout with a feeling of inferiority. But at cards that artful jade Dame Fortune often comes to the assistance of the pool- player by giving him the better deal. Poker players have an axiom, “Mug’s luck.” The earliest record of card playing is in the famous Chinese dictionary, where it is written that in the year corresponding with our 1120 King Seum Ho paid some clever subject a large sum for inventing playing cards to amuse his numerous wives. Playing cards were brought to Europe by the Crusaders when they returned from their great adventure in Palestine. There is this -evidence in the writings of the Italian author Covelluzo of Viterbo. “In the year 1379 was brought to Viterbo the play of cards which comes from the land of the Saracens and is called Naib.” Today the Italian name for cards is Naibi. Cards came to England by way of France, bringing from that land the words Deuce and Trey, which are really Deux and Trois. When Henry VIII was king card playing was prevalent in England. The lappets on the sides of the faces and the gowns cut square at the necks of the queens on our present-day packs show the style of dress worn by the ladies of the Tudor period. , In the sixteenth century the cards used in England were all imported from the Continent. Shrewd Queen Elizabeth saw a means of getting revenue from this source, so she sold the right ,to import cards as a monopoly to a firm of London merchants. The result of this was that very soon cards were made in England, and by the time that James Stuart was firmly established on the throne most of them were manufactured at home. His Parliament put an Excise tax on every pack made. A red stamp was placed on the ace of spades of each pack to show that the tax had been paid. This tax was evaded by making packs without an ace of spades, but with a special card included to take its place. That explains why the ace of spades in the packs of today is different from its fellows. CARDS AND POLITICS. The court cards of the early English packs were king, knight (changed to queen in honour of Queen Elizabeth), and the knave, which is the same word as the present-day German word “knabe,” meaning “boy.” The Puritans of Oliver Cromwell looked on “the Painted Cartes” as the tools of Satan, and stern laws were passed to suppress their use. A pamphlet was published in London in 1642, while the civil war was dividing the people of England into two warring camps. It had this remarkable title: “The Bloudy Game of Cards, as it was played by the King of Hearts and the Rest of his Suite against the rest of the pack, shuffled at London, cut at Westminster, dealt at York, and played in the Open Field.”

When Charles the Second returned to the throne in 1660 he brought from the court of France many gambling card games that soon became popular among the aristocrats. The gaming houses were crowded and the stakes were high. Tradition says ' that the clever but unscrupulous Earl of Rochester- gambled away at the card table his own young and beautiful countess. The Parliament of Charles the Second, besides adding to our laws the very important Habeas Corpus Act, also fixed the prices at which packs of cards were to be sold in England. The best quality packs were to be sold for not more than 4d a pack, while for those of inferior texture the price must not exceed l|d per pack. At the court of Louis XIV of France card playing went on every night. When he lay on his death-bed the King requested that the nightly revels should not be interrupted when he died, “even if I am not there to join in.” The games played there were Bassette, Ombre, Trictrac, Reversi, and Piquet, of which only the last has survived. They were all simple games, depending for their fascination more on the element of luck than on the skill of the players.

Cardinal Mazarin was an intrepid and inveterate gambler. It is recorded that in one hour he managed to lose £13,500 at piquet, a game that many of the A.I.F. learnt in France and brought back to Australia.

THE ENGLISH GAMES. The only major game of purely English origin is cribbage, originally called cribbidge. It was invented about 1630 by Sir John Suckling, a witty Cavalier poet, who wrote a lyric “Why So Pale and Wan Fond Lover’” In the seventeenth century cribbage playing was encouraged in the public schools in order to improve the mathematics of pupils. The name of the plebeian game of euchre is a corruption of the older game of ecarte, which it resembles in some respects. Euchre came to England from Holland, as is shown by the names of the two principal cards in the euchre pack, the right and left bowers. The word “bower” is the Dutch word boer, meaning "a citizen.” “Trump” is a corruption of the word triumph, the early, name of whist, which for two centuries was considered the king of all card games. Dr Johnson, in his dictionary, defines whist as “a game of card's requiring close attention and silence. The word is derived from a demand for silence.” in 1680 a writer named Cotton, in his book “The Compleat Gamester,” wrote: “Whist is so well known in England that hardly a child of eight years but has a competent knowledge of the play.” For more than 200 years the dignified gentlemen of England met in their clubs and played their solemn rubbers of whist, often for guinea points. Various gambling games became fashionable for a period. Simple nap, so named in honour of Napoleon II of France; lively 100, the many varieties of poker, which came from the United States; childish but expensive baccarat, merry vingtun and other games of chance have had their vogue. But to the serious-minded a game of cards

meant a rubber of whist, always played with deliberation and decorum. In 1856 solo whist was introduced into England by a family of Dutch Jews. For 20 ’ years it was little known outside Jewish circles. Then suddenly it became so popular that it was played everywhere, even invading the sacrosanct portals of the great clubs. Its charm lies in the variety, the swiftness, the dramatic distribution, and, above all, the fact that each deck of cards completes a game. BIRTH OF BRIDGE. About 1893 a new game attracted much attention. Its name, bridge, was supposed to have come from a Russian word, but of that there is no evidence. In this early form of bridge, now almost forgotten, the dealer had the “say.” If his cards were too poor to make a declaration his partner was compelled to make a call. All the opposition ceftild do in the bidding was to double. It was not a bad game, but the grave whist players in their clubs sneered at the simplicity of playing cards with one hand exposed in the dummy. About the period of the Great War the game of auction bridge was invented. Who the genius was who created it has never been proved. The coming of auction bridge killed the once popular bridge and dealt the death-blow, to whist, sending both games to the limbo where rest for ever the games of hombre, trictrac, ecarte, and the many other games that amused the past generations. Finally arrived contract bridge. But that is another story.