THE ANCIENT GAME OF DARTS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 69, 18 October 1940, Page 16

THE ANCIENT GAME OF DARTS

MONG the accounts arriving daily of the indifference and good-humour of the English under the Nazi air raids, it is not surprising to find the game of darts surviving the Luftwaffe as sturdily as the game of bowls survived the Armada. The average Englishman feels as lonely without his dart board and attendant projectiles as a Chinese coolie without his chopsticks. War pictures recently arrived from England have shown many a touching scene of allegiance to the old pastime -including one Hogarthian view of rustics playing darts outside a pub when German raiders had practically demolished the interior of the place. The great mass of toiling AngloSaxons have always spurned the complicated life. Most Englishmen have an ordered routine-the office, tea at home and an hour or two with the wife and kids, then "the local." Here the dart board is solemnly suspended in the bar,

and the darts laid reverently by, ready for the sacred rites to begin. Darts history is long and venerable, its origin obscured in the mists of antiquity. It may have begun when humanity found it necessary to devise some system of deciding who should pay for the next round of mead. It was strongly in vogue in the days when Robin Hood played Will Scarlet a swift one-o’-one on the clouts at Nottingham Fair. There are no doubt some who will question the tradition of skill and utility in the game. Yet how many a Crusader with Richard must have given a cry of frank delight as an arrow pinned a Saracen neatly in the fifty! Tradition enough! As for its utility: what about that happy play on words when the Tired Business Man ’phones home to say he has been detained by a board meeting. Does his gentle spouse ever guess the exact nature of the board involved?

DARTIMEUS