The forgotten story of...SportA monster ball, human skittles and ‘clever’ horses featured in a punishing game that captivated the King and bamboozled his subjects in the early 1900s
A search of the patents registered in the second half of the 19th century by Moses G Crane of Massachusetts reveals a man who was never short of ideas. There is an egg-beater, an ice-cream freezer, a method of making pliers, a restyled bicycle, an electro-mechanical gong and a gun-barrel scraper. There are also several versions of and adjustments to his most lasting contribution to society, the fire alarm, the success of which provided him with enough money to pursue one of his more far-fetched flights of fancy.
Crane had three sons who played football at Harvard, but he was not a fan of the sport. Apparently he believed that “to the average person without a college education it is incomprehensible, dull, cruel”, and he was particularly irritated at how hard it was to follow the progress of a small brown ball on a crowded, and often quite brown, field. And so Crane donned his thinking cap. “If the ball were only made large,” he said, “yes, large enough so that a player on one side could not see who was on the other, you would then have a chance to interest spectators in watching the whole game and in introducing much merriment, as well as skill.” In 1894 he found someone who could make his monster ball, at a cost – for materials alone – of some $175, about $4,500 in today’s money, and after several months of experimentation his son Edwin produced some rules. Pushball was born.
The following year it was mentioned for the first time in the British press, with several papers carrying news of the new “Yankee invention”. “The new game has some of the essential features of football, but possesses many original points,” they wrote. “The ball itself is a great curiosity. It can be moved with very slight pressure – indeed, a good wind will send it rolling across the field at a lively rate.” The only thing stopping the game spreading in popularity was the somewhat limiting fact that there was only one ball in existence. But like Crane himself, some people saw the absence of something as an opportunity. EV Hanegan, a British entrepreneur, read about the sport, thought it might just catch on in his homeland, and started planning.
“Pushball is a game for giants. Such a game as the gods on Olympus might have played without great loss of dignity,” Hanegan wrote. “In Connecticut, where the game found its first popularity, they despise parlour games, and when the monster push-ball was invented the strenuous athletes found it just the thing to give them the real exercise that they hungered for in games, and they hailed push-ball with acclamations. Now the game is one of the joys of life to the youth of New England.”
Eight years after its invention, pushball arrived in Britain. On 23 August 1902 it was played in public for the first time, in front of 4,004 curious souls at Headingley and using a 6ft ball constructed from the hides of nine horses, which took two and a half hours to inflate using a specially-modified pump. In brief, the game involved two teams of eight men trying to shove a giant ball over their opponents’ goal-line, with bonus points for getting it between the goalposts (the crossbar having been removed for practical reasons). Hanegan distributed leaflets among the crowd, suggesting that “league and rugby clubs will play this game throughout the summer months, thus keeping their players in the pink of condition”.
Reviews were mixed. The Yorkshire Post said it “has many features of interest” and that though it “is not as exciting as football, because the ball cannot be moved so quickly, there is nevertheless a fair scope for science and skill”. The Leeds Mercury, however, was sceptical. “The game was described in the leaflets as ‘exciting, laughable, skilful and entertaining’. Now that, of course, is how they view it in the land of ‘tall orders’. In this country we should put it a little less glowingly. It is not so attractive as cricket, so varied and surprising as football, nor so fatuous as ping-pong. But it has something of all these qualities, though chiefly it is notable for lack of incident.” The reviewer admitted that when a team managed to bear the ball above them towards their opponents’ goal “it was pretty to watch” and “the crowd cheered, delighted”, but concluded that though “once in a season pushball might do, the Americans have nothing to teach us in outdoor games”.
From there the giant ball went on a nationwide tour, taking in Hull, Halifax, Middlesbrough, Newcastle, Sheffield, Glasgow and Cork, and attracting thousands of people on each occasion. “If the ball comes into antagonism with a player, which it does pretty often in the course of a game, the individual concerned has substantial cause to remember the encounter,” noted the Hull Daily Mail. “The ball bounces, but not as much as the players opposed to it. It appeared to be possessed with the idea that the game was that of nine-pins, and that its mission on earth was to skittle the greatest possible number of artistes helter-skelter, head over heels, in the least possible time. It was no uncommon thing to see it upset three or four at a sweep.” But they, too, were sceptical of the game’s merits. “There appears to be little scope for individual skill, and intelligence is not greatly in demand,” they concluded. “From a spectator’s standpoint it is often laughable, but slow and clumsy.”
Gradually however it found national attention. At the end of August the Daily Mail wrote about a game that “seems to combine science and hard work – extremely hard work – more effectively than any game yet designed”. The Guardian noted that “to play the game properly and to be able to keep up with the pace, which is necessarily fast, a player must be capable of a good deal of physical endurance”. One of the men who had played at Headingley told the Yorkshire evening post that “I had much rather play Association football. Pushball may be all right for the spectators, but it is terrifically hard work for the players.”
That September the national tour concluded with a showpiece finale in London, on the Crystal Palace pitch that hosted the FA Cup final. “Pushball describes itself exactly: two teams take a ball and push it. Obviously that side which is the most pushful wins,” wrote the Guardian. “It is part of the game that certain members of a team should lie down in front of the ball when it is being pushed towards their goal – an action which is partly sacrificial and partly defiant, as though they, like heroes of melodrama, proclaimed, ‘only over our prostrate forms shall you accomplish your base desires’. On Saturday most of the spectators came to scoff and saw no reason for a more amiable attitude.”
There was some confusion when the game was played in New York for the first time, on Thanksgiving Day 1902, and local newspapers described it as “the new English game”, leading others back in Britain to wonder if they had been in some way hoaxed. The New York debut did not go at all well: the organisers failed to locate a pushball, so on the eve of the tournament asked a local shoemaker to create one. This they did, on the same field on which it was to be played with the following afternoon, sewing leather into an approximate sphere and stuffing it with hay. Having done so, however, they found it was too big to fit through the gate and back out of the field, so it had to be left there overnight. Inevitably, rain fell. The following day the 50lb ball had soaked up so much water it weighed more like 500lb, and “after the first half the contestants became so tired that the contest was called a draw”.
Soon a cunning method of making the sport less physically taxing was discovered: playing pushball on horses. In 1904 Edward VII took in a match, and the Guardian described “a game likely to create as strong an interest in his subjects as it did with the King, who rose from his seat and followed the movements with visible enthusiasm”. The Times, in their report on the same event, wrote that there was “no longer any room for doubt that the pushball on horseback is not only the success of the Military tournament, but also the beginning of a game which is likely to be taken up widely. It is intensely amusing to watch; the horses get more clever at it every day.”
Mounted pushball became a staple of military tournaments for a while, joining such disciplines as lemon-cutting (using swords to slice through fruit set on poles while galloping), tent-pegging (riders with lances gallop down a field attempting to spear pegs and carry them away), the balaclava melee (mounted soldiers trying to knock plumes from each other’s helmets) dummy-thrusting (the bayoneting of stuffed dummies) and the deliciously offensive Cleaving the Turk’s Head (slashing at stuffed balloons on poles). Further variations were attempted, including skate pushball, motor pushball – propelling the ball using modified cars – and aviation pushball, which sadly did not involve aeroplanes, but was instead a kind of cross between polo, pushball, volleyball and tennis, and at least as confusing as it sounds.
Eventually the cavalry was canned, and interest in the game deflated. Pushball fell back into obscurity, receiving increasingly irregular mentions in the Guardian until the early 1930s. Perhaps it was simply too taxing, and too dangerous. One of its final appearances in this paper came in 1927, when the Duke of York joined in a game while visiting a holiday camp in New Romney. “The Duke was among those who were bowled over now and again,” we reported. “He took it good-humouredly, and at the close of the play was taken to hospital to have a slight injury on his elbow treated. His secretary also underwent treatment to a slight injury to his knee.”
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