TOURNAMENT BRIDGE in ENGLAND 1925-1945 Richard Fleet
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TOURNAMENT BRIDGE IN ENGLAND 1925-1945 Richard Fleet 0 Acknowledgements I gratefully acknowledge the help and advice that I have received from various officers, employees and members of the English Bridge Union, in particular Jeremy Dhondy, without whose persistent reminders this work might never have seen the light of day, Wolf Klewe and Peter Stockdale. Some of the material in this book has previously been published in Bridge Magazine. They have kindly given permission for reproduction both of this and of the photographs which appear. Finally, I owe a great debt to my wife, Debbie. Not only did she have to put up with my concentrating on this project to the virtual exclusion of everything else, she also had the thankless task of proofreading the draft manuscript, a task which she performed with characteristic dedication. Richard Fleet Sidmouth November 2016 © Richard James Fleet 2016 1 Contents Introduction 3 1. Pre-history 5 2. Mr Vanderbilt takes a cruise 13 3. For the fun of the thing 19 4. Colonel Buller’s suggestion 31 5. Major matches 39 6. Hubert makes a move 61 7. Three new bodies 71 8. Business as usual 80 9. The Gold Cup and Camrose series 92 10. And finally 111 Appendix: Pre-War international performances 112 Index of principal characters 122 2 Introduction One often hears sportsmen say that they knew when the time was right to retire. During 2012, I became convinced that it was right for me to cease full-time work when I reached the age of 60. I gave my employer a year’s notice of my intentions and left at the end of 2013, a couple of weeks after my 60th birthday. I had long been interested in the history of bridge and envisaged my retirement project as encompassing research in this field. The game’s history is hardly virgin territory but it is fair to say that the published works are of uneven quality. When an author lists five members of a bridge team, whilst omitting reference to the sixth, it does not fill the reader with confidence; when the same author, in discussing a significant deal from the match in question, states that no slam was makeable, ignoring the fact that the slam was both cold and bid at the other table, his failing is glaring. Similarly, an author who, perpetuating the error of a previous writer, misstates the first name of a player shows that he could not be bothered to carry out proper research. Finally, when an author states that a player took part in six European Championships, but elsewhere names him as being a member of nine teams, his carelessness is apparent to all. As someone who spent his working life having to pay attention to detail, I found avoidable errors of this sort deeply frustrating. Accordingly, I thought that it was time to put the record straight, and to produce an authoritative work detailing the history of bridge. It did not take me long to realise that this was an impossibly ambitious undertaking and that the resources available to me, not to mention the limits of my own enthusiasm, meant that it would need to be scaled back. I therefore decided to concentrate on the history of tournament bridge in England. It was when I started my research that I realised that I was far too late - the people who could have helped me fill gaps in the documentary trail were dead. The era which was of particular interest to me (1925-1945) was the one where the position was most acute: virtually all the contemporary records had disappeared, very possibly pulped during World War II, and all that was left was the first minute book of the English Bridge Union (only a bit-part player in the tournament world prior to the War), and even this was incomplete. I concluded that, at least so far as the period up to 1945 was concerned, I would need to compile a work which included an unwonted degree of speculation and imaginative reconstruction. This was quite some distance removed from what I had first envisaged and would be significantly more taxing. I therefore decided to limit my endeavours to this period with the possibility of the post-War period being covered subsequently. To a large extent, the history that I have written is focused on personalities, Buller, Culbertson, Ingram, Kempson, Lederer, Manning-Foster, Phillips and Vanderbilt prominent among them. I make no apology for this: I never had the opportunity of meeting any of them but feel that I now know them better. 3 In Design for Bidding, the late S J “Skid” Simon commented, à propos Nico Gardener’s suggestion that it was best to play Acol two bids in first, second and fourth positions, but weak two bids in third seat: “Owing to my habit of not really about settling down to think about any chapter until I have settled down to writing it, I can’t tell you yet.” Similarly, whilst in no whit claiming to be of Simon’s calibre as a writer, I am unable to promise that a further work will follow. What follows may turn out to be simply the first part of a far more comprehensive project, or it may stand alone. And if further instalments do follow, I will at least be able to comment on some of the dramatis personae by reference to my personal knowledge of them. There are several hands included in this book. I have assumed that the reader is sufficiently familiar with bridge diagrams not to need telling that North is the top hand in the diagram with East the one on the right. For convenience, I have used some abbreviations, though the full form is used when the term first appears: ABM Auction Bridge Magazine (later Bridge Magazine) BBL British Bridge League BBW British Bridge World BGB Bridge Great Britain BM Bridge Magazine CBJ Contract Bridge Journal DBCB Duplicate Bridge Control Board EBU English Bridge Union EMP European Match Point IBL International Bridge League IFS Irish Free State L&HC London and Home Counties Contract Bridge Association NBA National Bridge Association NIBU Northern Ireland Bridge Union SBU Scottish Bridge Union TBA Tournament Bridge Association VP Victory Point WBA Welsh Bridge Association 4 Chapter 1 Prehistory It may seem eccentric to begin a book on the history of tournament bridge with a chapter which, to a large extent, concerns neither bridge - that is the current game of contract bridge - nor tournaments. But I think it important to put our game into context: although not preserved in aspic, contract bridge has been in substance unchanged since it came into being in 1925, and the changes since the mid-1930s have all been quite minor. Our story begins during the late 1870s. At this time, Whist was the fashionable game both here and abroad. It was the successor to a number of earlier games based upon the principles of trick taking and trumping, for example Triumph, and Ruff and Honours. Whist had been predominant for some 150 years and a considerable literature had grown up around it, starting with Edmund Hoyle’s seminal work A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist (1742). During the second half of the nineteenth century, Whist developed along scientific lines. For example, Dr William Pole wrote The Theory of the Modern Scientific Game of Whist in 1864, a work so successful that it was updated and reissued many times. The hand set out below caused a sensation at the time. It was included by James Clay in A Treatise on the Game, coincidentally also published in 1864, and was apparently solved (at double dummy - that is with sight of all four hands) by a famous Viennese player. The object is to make thirteen tricks with clubs as trumps and North on lead: at first sight, there are only eleven available and, even after the passage of 150 years, it takes a good player to work out how to do it. ♠ A Q ♥ 2 ♦ A Q 7 6 4 3 ♣ A K Q 3 ♠ 9 8 7 5 4 2 ♠ K 6 ♥ 8 4 ♥ 10 9 7 6 5 ♦ K 9 ♦ J 10 8 ♣ J 10 9 ♣ 8 6 5 ♠ J 10 3 ♥ A K Q J 3 ♦ 5 2 ♣ 7 4 2 West is the dealer and so (playing Whist) North has the opening lead. He decides to draw trumps and the key play arises at trick four: he needs to play a fourth round of the suit (obviously, this play is only tenable with sight of all four hands). East is now squeezed (though the term did not then exist) in three suits: if he discards a spade or a diamond, he concedes two tricks so he has to discard a heart, though this only delays the inevitable, the squeeze 5 becoming progressive. North now cashes the ace of spades (the Vienna Coup unblocking play) and plays a heart: on the fifth round of hearts, East is squeezed in spades and diamonds. It should be noted that, should an aggressive bridge-playing North arrive at a club (or no- trump) grand slam, a heart lead from East ruins the communications for the squeeze and limits declarer to twelve tricks. Twelve tricks can always be made in clubs, diamonds, hearts and no-trumps, though the slam in hearts must be played by North (unlikely!) since a spade lead is fatal if South is the declarer. The scientific approach was a mixed blessing. In the Preface to the fifth edition of his book, Pole was clear that flexibility was needed: “It is indeed essential that the foundation of all good play should be systematic knowledge; but it is not pretended that the rules are to be considered as inflexible … many cases are mentioned in which strict play should be departed from.” However laudable the intention, the effect was precisely as might have been envisaged.