Happy April Fools Day! Who’s having an April 1st party? What do you mean, you’ve never heard of it?
Here’s Sid G. Hedges’ ideas from The Home Entertainer for such a party. “You must be careful, however, that all the guests are congenial and chosen carefully”, as this is not a party for those who take themselves particularly seriously. It’s a practical joke made into a party, really – motor horns under the front door mat, rubber coat pegs so your coat falls on the floor, serving fake food and luring your guests down dark corridors strewn with balloons and bells.
The games suggested are idiot-themed – “Dunderheads”, where people and professions are all mixed up and you have to identify them correctly, and “Hat Dance”, where you “Fit two players with dunces’ hats, and let them see who can first knock off the other’s.” I’m not sure if you have to use your hat to knock off the other hat like rutting idiot stags, or if you can just punch it off instead. A thought – did people used to actually manufacture dunce’s hats?
From Sid G. Hedges’ The Home Entertainer comes today’s game – “Rhubarb Charades”.
It’s quite an involved version of charades, where one team picks a famous person (in their example it’s Hitler) and then chooses further famous people whose names start with each letter of the original name. The team has to act out all the people in order, imitating them by only using the word “rhubarb”. It’s a nice idea but your impersonation skills would have to be pretty decent for the other team to not get fed up by the time you finally got to the main character.
It would be a good game for “Whose Line is it Anyway?” though. The Home Entertainer, 1934
I haven’t got a book scan for this post, but this is a top game for any fellow word-lovers out there.
When we were little, one night a week me and my brother went round to my Grandad and Nan’s house for tea. We played games all night long, while eating crunchy spaghetti (Nan’s rather unintentional speciality) and cherry cake. Our favourite were Up Jenkyns,Yahtzee and Ghosts.
Ghosts is a game of two halves – it’s starts off as a spelling game and then subtly turns into a fun and annoying exercise in sabotage. I’m sure there’s a million different rules of the game out there, but this is how we played it:
You need at least three people for this game, but four to six people is probably ideal. We played it as a spoken word game, but you could also write it down, which would be easier way to keep track of the letters. Everyone begins the game with three lives. One person chooses a letter to start and then everyone takes turns to add a letter onto the growing word. The aim is not to be the one to complete a word, and if you do, you lose a life.
You do need to agree a minimum word limit – we had the rule that three-letter words didn’t count as it would be pretty hard to avoid completing three-letter words all the time. You also need to have a word in mind when you add your letter as if the next person thinks you’re bluffing they can challenge you to state your word. If you can give them a valid word the challenger loses a life, if you can’t, you lose the life.
What tends to happen is that you’re thinking of a longer word, and you end up making a shorter word by accident – say, you’ve just added a “d” to SAN because you’re thinking of “sandwich” but, bad luck, you’ve completed “sand” instead.
So far, so straightforward.
The fun bit is when someone loses their three lives. In a lesser game, that would be it, the end of your go. But in Ghosts, the logical consequence of losing your lives is that you turn into a ghost. And, as a ghost, all players must pretend you don’t exist. If the ghost manages to get another person to talk to them, the player immediately loses all their remaining lives and becomes a ghost themself. The last non-ghost left is the winner.
I quite liked becoming a ghost in order to perfect the techniques of getting people to talk to you by accident. The best way is just to sit quietly for a while until they forget about you, wait until the rest of the players are concentrating on a tricky set of letters and then say something innocuous like “Does anyone want a drink?” or “It’s getting dark, shall I stick the light on?”.
Can’t wait to teach it to my kids when they’re good enough at spelling – although as they’re currently 5 and 1, I have a bit of a while to go….
Blimey, I love the game but a look at all the more expert ways to play hurts my head:
“Superghost (also known as Lexicant or Llano) is played by choosing either the beginning or end of the growing word fragment and adding a letter there. For example, given the fragment ERA, a player might offer BERA or ERAD.
Superduperghost is played by deciding whether to reverse the letters of the word fragment before adding a letter to the fragment’s beginning or end. For example, given the fragment ERA, a player might offer BERA, ERAD, NARE, or AREN. This variant was first broadly adopted at the 1978 World Science Fiction Convention in Phoenix, Arizona.
Xghost (sometimes also known as Superduperghost or Llama) is played by adding a letter anywhere in the growing word fragment, including between letters. For example, given the fragment ERA, a player might offer BERA, ERAD, EBRA, or ERMA. This version was invented by Daniel Asimov around 1970.”
The Radio 4 show “I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue” (which I had the pleasure of seeing live in Liverpool a few weeks ago) has its own version, called “Cheddar Gorge” in which you add whole words onto a growing sentence, and having to avoid ending the sentence. Here it is (any excuse to have a look at the divine Graeme Garden) –
Oh, look at this beauty! It’s The Home Entertainer by Sid G. Hedges, the author of my first 1930s book purchase many years ago, The Universal Book of Hobbies and Handicrafts. The chapter on self defence in that book is just the best – https://skittishlibrary.co.uk/dirty-rotters/
So when I saw this I had to get it. It’s a book full of party ideas, entertaining tips and games. And I do love a vintage game (especially on a Friday). But! Incredibly, the book arrived still in the original packaging it was posted out in, in 1935. Wow, wow, wow, as my baby daughter likes saying (although she pretty much exclusively says it while looking at light fittings). The address it was posted to was number 27 1/2, which is a bit odd.
The Home Entertainer box, 1935
The Home Entertainer, 1935
So, here’s the first Friday Fun in ages. A game called “Winking”. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible to describe something as delightfully sexist, and yet that is how I find myself thinking of this.
The Home Entertainer, 1935
(Nb – my friend Neil has just pointed out that the men and women swap places in this game after one round, which I completely missed. So, there we go, not sexist anyway.)
Happy Families, old-school style, is a fascinating game – mainly because of the tradition of depicting the families in Victorian caricature, all big heads and semi-human appearance. For this reason, I was equally intrigued and unnerved by the card game as a child.
For the princely sum of 99p on Ebay, I purchased this lovely Chad Valley Games pack from 1910. In pretty good condition for a pack of cards over 100 years old.
Happy Families game box, 1910Happy Families card game, 1910
Here’s the rules: Happy Families rules, 1910
If you’re a comedy fan like me, a fun game with Happy Families is to decide which League of Gentleman would play each role, if Happy Families was a film (please do this, Mark Gatiss).
So for example, deffo Steve Pemberton for the terrifying Mr Drug the Doctor and Mr Blonde the Barber. Reece Shearsmith for Master Groats the Grocer’s Son and Master Putty the Painter’s Son (and Mrs Putty too), and Mark Gatiss for Mrs Howler the Singer’s wife and Mr Clamp the Carpenter. You’re allowed Jeremy Dyson.
However, I am having trouble imagining anyone but Michael Palin as Mr ‘Arris the Aristocrat. This is a good pun, ‘Arris being the first part of Aristocrat and also a slang word for arse. I love the tortured way this became Cockney rhyming slang – arse was firstly “bottle and glass”, then just “bottle”, which, via a new rhyme, became “Aristotle” and then “Aris”.
Anyway, here are the families. Creepy, aren’t they? Look at the cold, dead eyes of Master Bull, the Butcher’s Son.
Some Friday No Fun today. It’s not just swearing that was a no-no in the 1930s. Here are some card, dice and wheel games that were designated illegal way back in the midsts of time. They are “Ace of Hearts”, “Faro” (or “Pharoah”), “Bassett”, “Hazard”, “Passage” and “Roly-Poly”.
Illegal games, The Weekend Book, 1938
All the games have hundreds of years of provenance. “Passage” (also known as “Passe-dix”) was an ancient dice game and “Ace of Hearts” and “Roly-Poly” formed elements of what is now “Roulette”.
The card game “Faro” was once the most widely played gambling game in England. My 1950 edition of game bible “Hoyle’s Games” says it is “rarely met with in the domestic circle…..chiefly, it may be said, because the game has for long been in pretty bad odour through the large sums of money that may be lost at it and through the almost unlimited opportunities that are afforded to (and often taken by) an unscrupulous banker to “fleece the lambs”. It is a pity; because Faro, when honestly played, is one of the best of all the banking games.” “Bassett” was a variation of this.
“Hazard” was a dice game mentioned in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”, with rather complicated rules – http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_(game). Not a million miles from the League of Gentlemen’s wonderful Go Johnny Go Go Go Go:
A judge’s ruling upheld their illegality in 1935, as well as all card games that were not based on pure skill (therefore meaning all card games would technically be illegal according to this judgement, as there is always the element of chance with cards).
The Universal Book of Hobbies and Handicrafts, 1935
Today’s fun is an indoor game for those who own a number of lemons and, trickier, multiple walking sticks. Having tried this myself, I can only concur with the statement “Until you have tried to poke a lemon along in this fashion, you have no idea how unruly a thing it may be.”
The Universal Book of Hobbies and Handicrafts, 1935
“Jogging the Lemon – This is an amusing race game, for which a fairly large room is needed with a clear floor. Any number can take part. Each competitor holds a walking stick, and with the point of this he must jog a lemon up the room and back again. No hitting is allowed. Until you have tried to poke a lemon along in this fashion, you have no idea how unruly a thing it may be.”
This is a game for the more robust personality. In the wrong crowd, this is not so much a way to break the ice at parties, as a way to crash into a bloody great iceberg. The kind of game they’d make everyone play in the Big Brother house if they wanted to cause murder.
In short, a vengeful god demands sacrifices and a piece of paper is passed round the group who have to mark on it who they would sacrifice first, and that person has to leave the room. This continues until there are only two people left, and this is where it gets slightly confusing. The instructions say to call out the name of the person least worthy to survive, but if there’s only two left then I’m not sure how it would work. Unless the we’re-not-worthy sacrificed in the hall outside are the ones shouting…?
Head Slap, Universal Book of Hobbies and Handicrafts
A fairly self-explanatory game of how to box your opponents ears here, although it’s not as easy as it sounds. I love the Janet and John style illustration.
From The Universal Book of Hobbies and Handicrafts, 1935 (Sid G. Hedges).
Head Slap, Universal Book of Hobbies and Handicrafts
A game this Friday from the 1938 Weekend Book. A game created by H G Wells, no less. And what did one of the most inventive literary minds of all time call this game? Yes, “Ball Game”. You will need a barn….
Ball Game, Weekend Book, 1938
Nb. See also the cheeky water game “Kissing at the bottom of the sea”.
