Notes & Queries - 3rd August 2021 - Which sport gives you the best all-round skill set?

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My response to this week's Guardian Notes & Queries column was found to be in breach of community guidelines. The most logical reason for this would be an aside in which the narrator asks a friend whether his wife is still beating him. 

I regard this, not as a slight, but as an overall improvement in attitude from The Guardian. I recall, several years ago, reading an opinion piece in the paper's Sunday incarnation, The Observer, where the writer played down the impact of casual violence by women against men and confessed to having been "slap happy" herself on occasions.

[archive: https://archive.is/UBRi3]

Which sport gives you the best all-round skill set?

Peter Bedward delivered the toast at his firstborn daughter's wedding with a blackened right eye and with his bottom lip swollen like a rotten orange.

I had seen him sporting similar injuries before. They are common among inexperienced librarians who, having failed to properly assess the weight of a large volume, while getting it down from a high shelf, end up with some part of the spine slamming into their face, sometimes with great speed and force. Given that the spines of some older books are reinforced with lead, it should come as no surprise that a blow of this nature can result in this kind of dramatic bruising.

Peter is Head Librarian at Mockler College and should have put such beginners errors behind him, especially since he is an accredited instructor in the Newitt Slide and the Deakin Lift – the paired techniques which have been developed to assist curators in removing and then replacing heavy books from shelves. To spare him any professional embarrassment, at the reception I broached the subject of his injuries by discretely asking whether Helen, his wife, had been beating him again. (Helen is a gentle soul who cannot bring herself to swat flies or put down poison for ants.)

“If anything it's worse than that,” said Peter. Compulsively he ran his tongue along the swollen ridge of his ruptured lower lip. “It's taken almost 100 years, but Dandy Toss has finally made its way into vaulted halls of Mockler. We can't stop playing it. If you think that I look bad then you should see Bill Margerison [discoverer of the Margerisaurus].”

As anyone who has consulted volume one of Docketts' Encyclopedia of Bar-room Pasttimes and Whimsies will already know, Dandy Toss is a tavern game with origins in Ireland. It spread with the tides of itinerant labourers to cities in England and America, and became well established in East-London and in parts of New York.

A regular patron of a public house would purchase a large tun barrel of brandy for himself, which would be stored in the cellar of the establishment. When he had finished the keg it would be brought up and hauled over the bar where it would be stood upright in the centre of the room. The owner of the barrel was then permitted to climb on top and address the room from their improvised pulpit on the subject of their choice. The standard of the speeches given varied in eloquence from place to place, but seldom rose above an airing of grievances that often degenerated into brawls.

One evening, in 1901, three patrons of The Skylark Inn, in Poplar, finished their barrels within minutes of one another. Perched on the empty kegs their hurled insults were replaced by physical objects that were handed to them by members of the crowd, as they each attempted to knock the others down, so that the last man standing could deliver his speech uninterrupted.

In that insalubrious moment of chaos, the sport of Dandy Toss was born. In time, the improvised weapons that were used to knock rival orators off their train of thought and off of their perches, were replaced by weighted beanbags, that were stuffed with birdshot and embroidered with the mock coat of arms of the competitors.

Following a game of Dandy Toss, the empty barrels were rolled home by their new owners. The Manhattan-based actor, John Gandy, had seventeen cluttering the rooms of his rambling East Village apartment.

In Limehouse, the landlord of The Wyndham Sail, William Weeks, began collecting Dandy Toss barrels. He later transformed one of the pub's back rooms into a theatre, incorporating a stage made from the upright barrels clustered together, with the actors stepping nimbly from tun to tun. After the building burned down in 1934, the Wyndham Theatre was constructed on the site.

The incarnation of Dandy Toss that had taken root within the baroque architecture of Mockler College was predictably higher brow than its taproom counterpart. Competitors would attempt to deliver lectures while hurling missiles at their academic peers and dodging any that came their way.

“It's a cross between boxing, shot put and gymnastics, combined with improvising a PhD thesis, while you channel your inner ham actor,” said Peter ruefully. “The entire faculty's hooked on it.”

He glanced around the hall where the reception was being held.

“I am sure Rebecca isn't pleased with me. I heard her fretting about the wedding photos earlier. I told her I had an accident in the garden.”

“Does Helen know?” I enquired.

“I am not sure how one broaches this kind of thing,” he mused. “She raised an eyebrow when I purchased a heavy tweed jacket. You know, last night was worth it just to wipe the smile off John Medland's face. He has an antique, cast-iron stapler on his desk that I have been longing to throw at him. A well-placed beanbag stuffed with buckshot is almost as good.”

Peter went on to make some further unflattering remarks about John Medland, which I will omit as they require citations.

I hope this is of help.