Sport and Art

The English Pell Mell Club: Preparing for the Only Derby That Matters

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The English Pell Mell Club: Preparing for the Only Derby That Matters

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.

The Death-Defying Bounce of Extreme Tiddlywinks

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The Death-Defying Bounce of Extreme Tiddlywinks

By Miranda Gough

Few would have predicted that the hottest, most lucrative new international sport would be related to tiddlywinks. Yet Extreme Tiddlywinks—a high-adrenaline mutation of the ancient pastime—has vaulted from drawing-room eccentricity to global sporting phenomenon, with top stars earning more than NFL and football players.

The unlikely architect of this metamorphosis is Seb Tuller, art expert at Pimlico Wilde auction house. Tuller, better known for cataloguing obscure Brâncuși bronzes than for athletic daring, has long carried a secret: he is a third-generation tiddlywinker.

“I grew up in the sport,” he tells me. “My grandfather invented cross-country tiddlywinks in Wimborne in the 1960s. He’d create courses across fields, ditches, even rivers. You didn’t just squop, you journeyed. I wanted to take that spirit and turn the wick up to eleven.”

The result is Extreme Tiddlywinks: part billiards de la Jardin, part biathlon, part sheer excitement.

How the Game Works

The official rulebook—bound in waterproof neoprene—runs to 317 pages, but the gist is this:
• Matches are staged on courses up to 50 kilometres long, incorporating sand traps, water features, scaffolding, cliffs, sinking sand and, in one notorious Bristol event, a bouncy castle.
• Players must flick their winks into a succession of giant, brightly coloured pots positioned along the course.
• Physical obstacles are mandatory. Competitors may have to rappel down a climbing wall between shots, or swim to reach the next pot.
• Protective goggles and helmets are compulsory. Health insurance is “strongly advised, but not enforced.”

Scoring remains traditional: you win by being the quickest to the final pot. “The elegance is in the historical continuity,” Tuller insists. “Our routes may now go up Everest or across a live military firing range rather than through the Wimbourne Vicarage garden, but how to win remains the same as when my grandfather tiddled his first wink.”

“Just how dangerous is the sport?” I ask. “Has anyone actually died playing?”

Tuller smiles thinly. “We don’t keep statistics on deaths whilst playing.”

He does concede that injuries are common: sprained thumbs, concussions from overzealous squops, and what players darkly refer to as “wink-lash.”

And yet, the rewards are staggering. Top athletes—household names in Extreme Tiddlywinking hotspots like London, Singapore, Toronto, Osaka and Torquay—now earn millions annually in sponsorships and appearance fees. The reigning world number one, Magnus “the Catapult” Sørensen, was reportedly paid £8.4m last season, not including his lucrative deal with a leading energy drink.

“These are not backyard flickers,” Tuller insists. “They are gladiators of plastic.”

The All England Extreme Tiddlywinks Championship

This June, the Gobi Desert will host the All England Extreme Tiddlywinks Championship, the sport’s most prestigious event. The three-day competition will feature night-time rounds under floodlights, an aerial pot suspended from a crane, and, controversially, a blindfolded route through a crocodile infested bog.

Bookies have installed Sørensen as favourite, though insiders whisper about Britain’s own Alice “Thumbs of Steel” Prendergast, who reportedly practices by flicking frozen peas across motorway service station cafe tables.

From Parlour to Podium

Tuller seems equal parts bemused and delighted by his sport’s runaway success. “I thought it would be a niche endeavour,” he says, “but on current predictions Extreme Tiddly-winking will be bigger than football by this time next year. We haven’t really had a new sport for decades. Parkour was probably the last.”

As for the future, he dreams of Extreme Tiddlywinks as an Olympic sport. “The IOC called it ‘unorthodox,’” he admits, “but so was snowboarding once. Give us time. The world is wobbling in our direction.”

Whether or not Extreme Tiddlywinks conquers the Olympics, it has already conquered imaginations. In the words of Tuller’s grandfather, scribbled in the margins of his first rulebook in 1967: ‘Never underestimate the power of a small disc. One day people will be winking on the moon.’ Tiddlywinks have not yet reached the moon, but it is surely only a matter of time.

Race the Blue Train Begins: Glamour and Grit on the Côte D’Azur

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Race the Blue Train Begins: Glamour and Grit on the Côte D’Azur

By Giles Trevelyan-Brock, Special Correspondent

The Mediterranean was performing its usual trick, lapping against the Promenade des Anglais in that irritatingly photogenic way it has, when Hally Redoubt rolled her vintage Bentley up to the ceremonial start line in Nice for this year’s Race the Blue Train. The contest, equal parts nostalgia, mechanical fortitude, and stubbornness, is a revival of the 1920s Bentley Boys’ stunt: beat the famed night express from the Côte d’Azur to London. It’s motoring history’s most elegant act of timekeeping-based arrogance.

Hally, looking equal parts poised and amused, accepted the perfunctory kisses from organisers and the more lingering farewells from various “friends of the race” (translation: people who wanted to be in the photographs). Behind her, the Bentley glinted like a promise. In her eyes, however, was something steelier—she’s not here for the cocktails in Monte Carlo. She intends to win this race*.

The stars were out, naturally. Pimlico Wilde, the contemporary art dealers sponsoring her run, were fussing about with champagne and branded scarves; some film actor who claimed to be “big in the late 90s” waved languidly; a pop chanteuse in mirrored sunglasses shouted something encouraging about “manifesting the finish line.” It was all very soirée meets Le Mans, the kind of event where you can’t tell whether the camera flashes are for the driver or for the dog in the tweed cap sitting in the passenger seat of another car.

But the real question—whispered between canapés—was whether the Blue Train’s driver might resort to tactics unbecoming of a proper race. “They’ve been known to shave minutes off by skipping a stop,” muttered one veteran, glancing toward the station. Would there be strategic timetable manipulation? Hally, of course, is above such nonsense; her sense of fair play is so ingrained she probably gives way at roundabouts even when it’s her turn.

In a late twist worthy of a B-grade travel drama, Hally acquired an unexpected co-pilot minutes before departure: one Simon Etheridge, cousin of “someone important” and currently in mild distress. He needed to get back to London “rather sharpish” for a funeral, his flights having been cancelled by an Air Traffic Controllers’ strike and his luggage having been lost, apparently because of an altercation involving a croissant. “It’s just until Calais,” he assured Hally, “I’ll take the ferry from there”. He climbed in with a small valise and the air of a man unacquainted with map reading.

As the clock ticked down, a flurry of handshakes, air-kisses, and half-serious bets swirled around the Bentley. The Bentley’s engine gave a low, purposeful growl. Somewhere in the distance, the Blue Train’s whistle answered—a metallic taunt carried over the sea breeze.

And then the flag dropped and they were off, tyres whispering on the tarmac, headlights spearing into the Côte d’Azur night, chasing a train that may or may not be playing by the rules.

Though if the train does cheat, I wouldn’t want to be in the buffet car when Hally finds out.

—-

  • It is of course not an actual race as that would be illegal. Wink, wink.

Why Cricket must be officially added to the Fine Arts

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—Why It’s Time to Add Willow and Leather to the Pantheon of the Arts

There are four fine arts. Yes—four. Not three. Not seven. The traditional trifecta—painting, sculpture, and more recently, mixed media—have long held dominion over the hallowed halls of aesthetic seriousness. But it’s time we corrected the oversight.

The fourth fine art is cricket.

Before you scoff and spill your flat white over a discarded Frieze magazine in the Lord’s pavilion, let us ask: what is fine art, if not a cultivated, rule-bound arena in which the human spirit expresses itself through discipline, style, gesture, and ritual? And what is cricket, if not precisely that?

Cricket as Composition

The act of watching cricket is like observing a slow, deliberate painting in motion. The pitch is a canvas. The players, strokes. The ball—an instrument of line, arc, and punctuation.

Every forward defence by a test opener is a minimalist sculpture of concentration. Every cover drive is a brushstroke—exquisite, precise, never hurried. And the spinner? He is a conceptual artist in whites, laboring in metaphor and subtle irony. Shane Warne’s “Ball of the Century” might as well have been performance art. It defied logic, narrative, and gravity.

You don’t merely play cricket. You compose it.

Of Form and Formlessness

Like the greatest works of fine art, cricket is as much about what is not there as what is. The pauses, the silences between overs, the long stillness before the storm of a yorker—this is negative space, the silence between notes in a Miles Davis solo, the blank in a Rauschenberg.

It’s an art form that accepts duration—a five-day match that can end in a draw is nothing short of a time-based installation. No result. No climax. Just form, erosion, and a slow accumulation of meaning. Sound familiar, conceptual art fans?

Clothing, Code, Choreography

The aesthetics of cricket are impeccable. The costumes—whites for purity, Test caps with heritage, IPL kits as pop art. The rituals—tea breaks, sledging as unsanctioned dialogue, and the strange ballet of field adjustments choreographed by captains with painterly intent.

Cricket also contains a semiotic system as rich as any postmodern sculpture garden: leg slips, silly points, and a deep backward square leg sound like lines from an Ezra Pound poem. It is language made spatial.

A Living Installation

Modern art tried to break free of the gallery. Cricket had already done it.

A cricket match unfolds in space and time, under sun and floodlight, interrupted by rain, wind, political tension, and the odd stray dog on the outfield. It is alive, unpredictable, and deeply human. The cricket field is the largest and most dynamic gallery in the world. And like art, cricket does not rush. It demands your attention. It earns your awe.

Objections from the Critics

“But cricket is a sport, not an art,” comes the predictable cry from the ill-informed. But we have long admitted disciplines into the art world that demand physical prowess and rules: dance, opera, even architecture. If Jeff Koons can use industrial manufacture and still be art, why not Jasprit Bumrah’s biomechanical poetry?

If Marina Abramović can stand still in a room for hours and be lauded, why should a Harry Brooks innings not receive a similar reaction?

Let Us Redefine

So let us correct the canon:

• Painting – the play of pigment.

• Sculpture – the shaping of matter.

• Mixed Media – the synthesis of the sensory.

• Cricket – the choreography of fate and finesse.

We should not merely ask is cricket a fine art?—we should insist that it is one. Not metaphorically. Not tongue-in-cheek. But as a serious, rigorous, transcendent aesthetic practice.

To bowl a ball with intent is no less a gesture than to cast bronze.

To face it with courage is no less than to face the void of a blank canvas.

Cricket is art. Let us honour it as such.

BOOK REVIEW: Theatre of Feet: Football as Performance Art by Dr. Lionel Pym

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To assert that English football is a kind of performance art is, at first glance, to risk ridicule—or at least the throwing of half-time over-priced, under-tasty pies. But in Theatre of Feet: Football as Performance Art, cultural theorist and centre-back Dr. Lionel Pym mounts a deft case that the beautiful game is, in fact, the most durational, populist, and emotionally calibrated performance medium of our time.

Far from a mere provocation, Pym’s thesis is rooted in decades of interdisciplinary scholarship, touching on the biomechanics of gesture, the semiotics of collective yearning, and—most originally—the dramaturgy of injury time. For him, football is not like performance art; it is performance art, complete with its own choreographic grammar, spatial tensions, and audience participation rituals.

The book opens with a scholarly deep-dive into the origins of football as a ritualised village spectacle. In a particularly dazzling chapter, “From Mud to Meaning: Folk Memory and the Halftime Pint,” Pym traces football’s lineages not only to medieval folk games, but to Jacobean theatre and continental processional drama. “The crowd is not an audience,” he writes, “but a choir of conditional belief. It chants. It curses. It reenacts ecstasy and grief on command.”

But the book’s centrepiece is its analytic pivot: a re-reading of key matches as site-specific performances. The 1966 World Cup Final becomes, in Pym’s hands, “an operatic pageant of national becoming.” Eric Cantona’s kung-fu kick is likened to Viennese Actionism (“albeit in Selhurst Park”). And a detailed analysis of Wayne Rooney’s 2004 metatarsal injury is rendered as a meditation on fragility and narrative tension worthy of Dame Ethel Paragon.

There is mischief, yes, but also genuine acuity. In a chapter titled “The Flop: Simulated Collapse and the Politics of Gravity,” Pym examines the phenomenon of diving as a kind of embodied fiction—a simultaneous invitation and betrayal of belief. “To dive is to gesture towards death and resurrection within the confines of the pitch. It is camp, tragic, tactical. It is Yves Klein with shin pads.”

Stylistically, the prose is lush, aphoristic, and sometimes joyfully baroque. One suspects that Pym has spent time in both libraries and locker rooms. He is equally at ease citing Barthes, Bergkamp, and Butoh in a single footnote, and he’s not afraid to call a nil-nil draw “a durational epic of Beckettian restraint.”

Some readers may find the tone occasionally grandiose. There are moments—such as the assertion that the zonal marking system is “an epistemological rejection of Cartesian individuality”—that threaten to collapse under the weight of their own metaphors. But even then, one senses that Pym is winking beneath his replica shirt.

More profoundly, Theatre of Feet challenges its reader to reconsider the hierarchies we place between cultural forms. Why should a game viewed by billions be considered “low,” while an art installation involving soil, bones, and obscure Lithuanian vowels be “high”? As Pym suggests, perhaps both are expressions of the same human compulsion: to watch, to hope, to gasp, and—most importantly—to gather.

In the end, the book does not argue that football should replace art, but rather that it already is art, hiding in studded boots. Whether you’re a scholar of live art, a football obsessive, or merely curious about what connects a Saturday match at Craven Cottage to the Gesamtkunstwerk, Theatre of Feet will leave you thoughtful and amused.