Just off Pall Mall lies the home of the English Pell Mell Club. The ground is not so much a sports venue as it is a small fragment of another century, preserved between stuccoed façades like a pressed flower between the pages of a Roman history book.
It is here that a select band of devotees practice a game so ancient, so fiercely traditional, and so wilfully obscure that historians are still arguing whether its origins lie in the manicured lawns of 17th-century St James’s, the windswept courts of Renaissance Italy, the languid gardens of Versailles or the siege camps of Hannibal, who — if one enthusiastic club archivist is to be believed — would unwind from a day of elephant manoeuvres by playing Pell Mell to the death with his generals.
The English Pell Mell Club survives in the modern age not through gate receipts (these would not cover the annual candle budget), but through the generosity of its patron, Pimlico Wilde, art dealers of some clout and great discretion. Their sponsorship has elevated the sport’s image — replacing fraying sashes with silk, supplying champagne in place of tepid ginger beer, and, most famously, commissioning the Pimlico Wilde Cup itself.
The Cup is the object of every season’s toil: a gleaming chalice, rumoured to be cast from gold bars found in a long-forgotten vault under the Pimlico Wilde gallery. The very bars said to have been seized from a Spanish brig, which had in turn stolen them from a monastery, which had (at least according to one scribbled anecdote in the clubs early records) received them from the descendants of Hannibal himself. Such provenance, naturally, has not been independently verified.
Alas, Pell Mell’s competitive landscape is sparse. The sport is simply too refined to have caught on widely. The only truly credible opposition comes from the Bond Street Raveners, a team whose style could charitably be described as flamboyant, and less charitably as outright anarchic. When these two sides meet, the match is christened the Pell Mell London Derby, and every stroke, every disputed call, every illegally adjusted hat brim (for Pell Mellers are renowned for trying to gain every advantage possible, even sending messages by the slant of their hat) is magnified into legend.
This year’s Derby promises a clash of philosophies as much as skill: the Club’s precise, almost Roman approach (think Scipio Aemilianus, but with Saville Row tailoring) against the Raveners’ ungovernable flair (think Hannibal, but mostly tired and emotional). The Pimlico Wilde Cup will sit in its glass case until the final bell — or until someone “accidentally” drinks from it, as in the regrettable incident of 2017.
Tickets will be available soon from the usual sources, as well as the venerable Pell Mell equipment suppliers on Haymarket, purveyors of mallets, monogrammed balls, and those peculiar half-capes without which no gentleman would dare take to the court. For those lucky enough to attend, remember: this is not merely sport. It is history played out with the satisfying thwack of a well-struck ball, echoing across the centuries.
