295: No Such Thing As A 200m Baguette

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Explore Solitaire, trilogy, halo, and bezel settings, or design a custom ring that tells your love story.

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Your ring, your way.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Boston.

my name is Dan Shriver and I am sitting here with Anna Jaczynski Andrew Hunt and Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go

starting with fact number one and that is my fact number.

Dan, just before you start, fact number one,

we actually we played a little bit of the Stars and Stripes theme tune.

Theme tune, the Stars and Stripes theme tune.

As I believe you call it.

Okay, the national anthem.

Alright.

We actually got sent a fact before the show on this subject by Gadget Gav who said that if in Boston if you start singing or playing the national anthem, you have to then go on with it all the way to the end on pain of a $100 fine.

So if you wouldn't mind just

as far as I know the lyrics.

Great theme tune though guys, honestly.

Okay, it is time for fact number one and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that the first criminal in Boston to be sent to the stocks was the man who'd actually built the stocks.

And he was found guilty of overcharging for the building of those stocks.

This is a wonderful fact.

This was back in 1639, and it was a guy called Edward Palmer.

And it's exactly as the fact is on the tin.

It's a guy who did the labor.

And when he went to invoice, he invoiced for £1,

13 shillings and 7 pence.

And they thought that was unacceptable.

So immediately, once it was opened, he was the first person charged.

He got fined £5 as well.

So he got fined three times more than he charged for them.

Yeah, and so he had to go and be put in the stocks for it was an hour.

So just a quick humiliation and then a serious amount of money to earn.

At least he hadn't been charged to build, you know, a guillotine or something.

Yes, he must have been grateful for that.

Look, was he, did he make actual stocks or a pillory?

Because there's been a lot of confusion about this for 500 years.

So they were stocks, I believe they were stocks.

They were stocks, okay, because a pillory was the one where, I think you sort of get taught in primary school there what stocks are, where you shove your arms through two holes and you shove your head through a hole, like when you're taking those comical photos with cardboard cutouts.

And that was actually a pillory, whereas stocks is more like you just had your ankles often strapped to the ground or something, didn't you?

Yeah, it's just you put your feet in.

Or you just put your feet in, yeah.

And the idea is that, as well as being a humiliation, the public will see what you look like, so they walk past and go, that's a bad guy.

But actually, small boys would walk past and tickle the feet of people in the the stocks.

Oh, really?

That's pretty brave, because the people in there are criminals.

That's in your neighbourhood.

That's true.

And they're probably out in an hour.

But the thing is, is like it was for quite minor things, usually, the stocks.

So in England, for instance, it would be for petty thieves, for unruly servants, for hedge-tearers.

Don't know what a hedge terror is, yeah.

Gamblers, drunkards, ballad singers.

Seems harsh.

Yeah, and any kind of travelling musicians.

They were way harsh.

I mean,

there were minor crimes, but they were policed quite heavily.

So there is a great book called Curious Punishments of Bygone Days, which is published in the late 19th century, and it's got all kinds of now hilarious stories of

quite a repressive sounding time.

So again, in Boston, there was a man called Captain Kemble, who was a sailor, and

he got done for publicly kissing his wife on a Sunday

after returning from three years at sea.

No, thank you.

Now, his punishment, I think I've mistyped it.

I have written punishment was three years in the stock.

I think it was three hours.

Imagine if he was in for three years and then came out and then kissed his wife again.

They're like, sorry.

Yeah, because sometimes the things people threw at you in the stocks were even worse than having your feet tickled.

I'm very confused that you think that was a bad thing to do, is tickle the feet of someone passing by, because often you've got dead animals thrown at you.

A dead cat was a good one.

In fact, I think there was a quote from someone at the time who said,

like, if someone's in the stocks, you walk past the marketplace of an evening, and someone's in the stocks, you think, brilliant, and a dead cat is a treat if you can spot one of them, and a live cat, an even greater treat.

But that book is incredible, actually.

So there are a few other good tales of bygone punishments in this book, written in 1886.

And another one is about a, it tells of a man in Moscow, actually, in the 17th century, who'd published a pamphlet about people's liberty, said that people should be free, and so he'd got in a locked job of saying that.

And so he was sentenced to three days of being tied to a scaffold and forced to literally eat his words.

So they got his pamphlet.

It's actually very clever.

They got his pamphlet and they tore it up and they fed it to him.

And there was an eyewitness account that said they'd serve him one page at a time and when it got to a stage where it looked like he might actually be incredibly ill, they'd wait until the next day and then keep serving it up.

So they didn't cook it at all.

It's actually a misconception you can get food poisoning from raw pamphlets.

But thank goodness Russia is now a paragon of liberty.

Also in Boston, we were talking about Boston stuff.

In 1679 there was a Frenchman who was suspected of setting a fire in Boston and he was ordered to go to the pillory and have both his ears cut off

for suspected arson.

That's amazing.

But you have quite a there's quite a lot of history isn't there in Boston, especially compared to the rest of America.

Because Dan and I were walking through Cambridge yesterday and

Dan pointed to a quite new looking building and he said, you know what?

I can't believe that building building was built in 1588

and I said no Dan that that is the street number of that house

I really I was suspicious I was like this this brickwork looks weird yeah the next one was built in 1590 and 1592

whipping whipping was a thing

just to drag us back to the topic at hand

there was one this was obviously whipping was absolutely huge, major league punishment, very big back then.

So in one case of whipping, the man carrying it out was a church official called the church beadle and he wasn't he wasn't doing a very good job of it.

He was so light-handed that the sheriff, who was watching the whipping, the punishment take place, grabbed the whip from him, whipped the offenders, but not before he had whipped the beadle himself for being bad at whipping.

That was an offence at the time.

Well, I actually read about that story as well.

So, what had happened was the beadle was almost pretending to whip him, and he had like some red ink in his hand, and he kind of went like that, and then he would smear the red ink so he looked like he'd been like whipped on the back when he hadn't really.

I think the guy might have paid him some money to do that.

And then, like you say, the constable then started whipping the beadle.

But then a lady came and started beating up the constable.

So you had four people attacking each other in an awful, violent conga.

It's weird, isn't it?

I was looking into the police force here, so this fact was 1639 and it was in 1630 that the sort of foundations of the first ever American police force came about.

So it was a night watch and so on and it was only in the 1800s, 1833 that it sort of became officially Boston police.

But am I right in saying police badges have 1630 written on them?

We have no idea in this audience.

Very law-abiding audience.

Very law-abiding audience.

No one wants to admit to anything.

No, but so yeah, so they had that.

and what I found this really fun fact about them.

In 1903 the Boston Police Force got the first ever police car of anywhere in America, but no one knew how to drive it.

So they had to hire a chauffeur

who would take them to all the crime spots.

The whole transport system with the Boston police, a couple years ago, they added to their fleet a ice cream truck.

It's a part of an ice cream truck which is run by the the police.

What for?

They think it's sort of if they go around, you know, maybe if the criminal doesn't want to come out because they're wearing a criminal.

Oh, shoot.

They're not luring criminals out with Mr.

Whippies.

That doesn't make any sense.

Because you just have a queue of small child, small child, small child, massive criminal.

And then presumably it's someone in a policeman's hat and badge cack-handedly trying to scoop some ice cream out.

Holy ice cream.

Pretty.

I don't need your pity, plants.

We're gonna have to move on fairly soon-ish to our next fact.

Just a thing about putting people in the stock, specifically in Boston and in New England.

They just got way more into it than the English have been, so they brought it over from England when they came.

And then, because they were all Puritan and everything, they added a whole bunch bunch of other crimes basically.

So, in Britain and in England, then usually you went in the stocks if you stole something.

But in Boston, it really did tend to be that you'd if you blasphemed, then you always got it.

If again, if you publicly kissed your wife,

then you got it.

If you're an adulterer, you got it.

And we used to have that in Britain, you'd have a big A branded on you.

So sometimes you'd be in the stocks, and if you'd been found guilty of adultery, then you'd have a big A that was branded on you, and you'd have to wear it on your sort of shirt, and you'd have to wear that A for say a year.

And then everyone knows you're an adulterer.

Which I don't know if that's a punishment for a certain type of person.

But

that's what Alvin the Chipmunk had on his book.

Yeah.

He was a terrible husband.

He was a terrible, terrible husband.

They don't bring that storyline into it much, though.

But we know.

We know.

But anyway, the Americans added up all the other letters.

So they went through the alphabet.

So you got a B if you were blasphemous.

You got a D for drunkenness, not allowed to be drunk ever.

You got an I for incest, very bad, not into that.

And they sort of did.

Wow.

They completed the alphabet with all the various different crimes.

They must have struggled a bit with X and Z.

They had to get away from the Z.

Xenophobe, zebra theft.

From Australia to San Francisco, Cullen Jewelry brings timeless craftsmanship and modern lab-grown diamond engagement rings to the U.S.

Explore Solitaire, Trilogy, Halo, and Bezel settings, or design a custom ring that tells your love story.

With expert guidance, a lifetime warranty, and a talented team of in-house jewelers behind every piece, your perfect ring is made with meaning.

Visit our new Union Street showroom or explore the range at cullenjewelry.com.

Your ring, your way.

From Australia to San Francisco, Cullen Jewelry brings timeless craftsmanship and modern grown diamond engagement rings to the US.

Explore solitaire, trilogy, halo, and bezel settings, or design a custom piece that tells your love story.

With expert guidance, a lifetime warranty, and a talented team of in-house jewels behind every piece, your perfect ring is made with meaning.

Visit our Union Street showroom or explore the range at colinjewelry.com.

Your ring your way.

It is time for bat number two, and that is Andy.

My fact is that five of the main types of French baguette are called flute, fisselle, Viennese, salmentine and bastard.

So

I like the way you said that half with a French accent and half not.

This was from a great article in the Financial Times about the best baguette in Paris competition, which is called Le Grand Prix de la baguette.

Really?

It's really called that.

And

these are just some of the types they have.

And it's an amazing competition.

It's held at the National Syndicate des Boulangeres.

And there are so many entries for the competition every year.

They get hundreds of entries.

Over a thousand members of the public apply to judge because you get a kind of citizen judge on the panel.

And the winner, it's mostly a prestige thing.

So you get 4,000 euros, you get a small-ish cash prize, but you also win the right to provide the president's baguettes for a year.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

It's very prestigious.

I think though, that that's quite a lot of pressure on the president.

I feel like Macron every day, because it's every day, isn't it?

You make your first baguette in the morning, and it gets immediately, you know, a police car sort of takes it to the

chauffeur, yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Takes it to the palace, and poor Emmanuel is probably going, another fucking baguette.

Oh, God.

But do you think every morning he has to make a show?

Oh, my God, there's your best baguette yet.

I'm not sure they're that good either, because I was reading that, I know, that's me.

I was reading that as part of this Grand Prix, the first sort of hoop you have to jump through is it has to be the correct length.

And I think it's correct, length and weight.

And there are 200 entrants, and 100 of them fail

at the length and weight section.

It does feel like there's a communication problem with the rules.

They have to be exactly between 55 centimeters and 70 centimeters, right?

Yeah, which is quite a large margin of error.

Yeah, and the weight has to be between 250 grams and 300 grams.

What impossible precision is this?

But like traditional French baguettes, like in the 19th century, they were like eight meters long, weren't they?

Like eight.

No, eight feet long.

Eight feet.

But you would get them, like they were bigger than hu the bigger than humans are.

Wow.

Definitely.

Bigger than French humans, certainly.

In fairness to the French, there's not many nationalities where everyone's told that ain't fucked.

I didn't know that we got at the French for being short.

You're thinking Napoleon, aren't you?

Yeah, yeah.

And we've said before that Napoleon was above average height for a French when he was taller than Nelson.

It didn't work on a number of levels, did it?

Well,

speaking of Napoleon, actually, there is a theory, which I should just say at the very top is not true.

but

he was nine feet tall.

There is a theory that the baguette was invented by Napoleon's bakers and they were invented so that soldiers could put them down their legs while marching.

And then, whenever they got to wherever they were marching to, then they could pull them out and eat them.

Oh, right.

I have to say, you've added an unnecessarily sexual dimension to this theory.

He's hung like a baguette.

I've got a bit of a yeast infection down there.

Hey, this is a cool thing.

So in France, baguette is not just used to refer to sticks of bread, but for example, like chopsticks are baguette chinoise.

Chinoise?

Sure.

Chinoise.

No, but my favorite one is that a wand is baguette magique.

And so in the Harry Potter books,

He's always pulling out his baguette magique.

It does sound a bit Napoleonic, doesn't it?

There's an expression in French to lead by the baguette.

And that is because a baguette is also a baton.

So it's like walking with a marching band you lead with your baguette.

It can be a ramrod.

It can be a type of diamond cut.

What's funny about ramrod, Boston?

It's an old war of independence, Joe.

They've certainly adapted to the word to a huge number of meanings, given it's only been around for a century.

Well, it is a much smaller language than the English language.

It genuinely is small.

There are fewer words.

This is not just another Nepali.

People are short.

The words are short.

And the word precedes the bread.

Yes.

In fact, it comes from the Latin word baculum, which meant staff.

And a baculum, as some of you know, is a penis bone in,

you know, warruses and chimpanzees, and lots of animals have penis bones.

I love the way that you said, and a baculum is, and then a few people in the audience went, penis, hello.

Like it's your catchphrase or something.

It's like a really weird pantomime.

I understand you don't have pantomimes here.

Bro, it doesn't make sense.

Oh, yes, you do, you do.

Stunning.

There's another theory about where it came from, where the word came from, which is that it was invented just over 100 years ago when the Paris Metro was being dug, the Paris Underground system, because apparently workers were carrying big loaves of bread to work and they needed to bring knives with them to cut it.

And they used to keep getting into constant knife battles.

And so

apparently the builders were tasked with finding a baker who could give them some bread that didn't require a knife.

And I don't know what kind of battle you can get into with a little button.

Actually, a bread knife could be quite dodgy, couldn't it?

If you get it on the serrated edge, definitely.

I'm not sure Frenchman, they look enormous, those knives, don't they?

Yeah,

it is weird.

They were not named in print until 1920.

So it is, there were sort of long breads before, but there is a load of bread legislation in France at the moment.

So in 1993, even as recently as that, they passed a bread decree because they were worried about deterioration of quality of bread.

And so now you can get two very different kinds of loaf.

I say very different.

They are both stick French breads.

But

one of them is a baguette tradition française, which is the very

significant national historical one.

And you have to make that on the premises.

You can only use about three ingredients.

It's really precise.

You can't put extra additives or toppings or anything.

And the alternative is just a baguette.

Did you explain why they're called bastards?

I didn't, actually.

So

they're mostly named after their shape.

So the flute is thin, the fisselle is very thin,

the bastard is fat.

So...

I think the idea is that it's kind of halfway between a long, thick one and a short, stubby one.

And so it's like

two things cobbled together, so it's like a bastard in that way.

And is that where we get you fat bastard?

You found that.

I don't think it is.

To be investigated.

It's a shame that's not in the Harry Potter books.

Harry pulled out his bastard.

Yeah, exactly.

There's some more bread legislation in France, which is very weird, and it changed recently, actually.

So there was this widespread panic in 2015, four years ago, because they dropped a law that has existed since 1790, which is basically when the government ruled that everyone across France had to have access to baguettes at all times of the year, every day, day and night.

And so it required half of Paris's bakeries to take holiday in August and the other half to take holiday in July to ensure that suddenly there wasn't a bit of a dearth of bakers and people couldn't get their bread in the morning.

And that has remained until 2015.

So bakers are in this position where, you know, if 50% are already on holiday on the 2nd of July, they're not allowed to take a holiday for a month.

And they were finally told these laws were relaxed and they were finally told, okay, you can go on holiday when you like, on the condition that you have to put up in your window, I think you have to put up a sign saying where the nearest baker is that is still there

selling baguette.

And there was panic.

Did anything happen?

Did they all run out of bread and stuff?

All of France starved to death.

Can you guys guess?

Just give me a guess of the longest, the length of the longest baguette ever made.

I would have said probably around 10 feet.

10 feet, okay.

Any advance?

200 meters.

Well, this has got to be impressive now, Andy.

Well, it's not, because Dan's completely ruined it.

It was an amazingly long bread until Dan said 200 meters.

It was a pathetic 122 meters long,

which is literally half of what Dan said.

No, don't clap a bread that long.

That's rubbish.

Oh,

you absolute saboteur.

I I had all sorts of extra stuff about this weird bread.

I know what you're all thinking.

How do you make a bread that's 122 meters long?

Do you get one that's 200 meters long and cut it in half?

You do not have to do it.

Anyway,

no, we do not.

No, you absolute baguette.

I will not have that.

You know, after you finish talking about this, I'm going to tell you it's wrong anyway.

Aha,

wow, okay, well let me do can I please tell you first?

Because oh my god, it was in 2015, it was at the Milan World Expo, there were 60 bakers involved and how did they make it 122 meters long?

They made a portable oven which slid all the way along.

That is impressive.

How much was that?

And then they cut it in two and they spread Nutella all the way along it because Nutella was sponsoring this attempt.

Anyway, now.

That's true, they did do that, but that's not the longest bugger ever.

Oh,

the record was broken this year, I'm afraid.

Yeah.

How long?

Was it five million miles?

It wasn't actually.

It was 133 meters, and it was done to raise money for the Italian Red Cross, who you've just ridiculed by

your ridiculous guess.

Sorry.

I'm very sorry.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Chaczynski.

My fact this week is that Whitney Houston's record label once sent a cease and desist letter to Saddam Hussein

asking him to please stop using the song I Will Always Love You as part of his political campaign.

And yes, it's risky to kick off with a Saddam Hussein fact in the America tour, but this

was a song that he used.

This was in 2002, and he was running for president against

nobody.

And

it was sort of leaked in the Western media that he'd been using as a political campaign song this Arabic version, which was basically a knock-off version, exactly sort of verbatim and exactly the same nuances and sounds as Whitney Houston's song, I Will Always Love You.

And so her record company, Arista Records, got in touch and said, please stop doing that.

And surprisingly enough, I don't think he took a blind bit of notice.

But yeah, how weird is that?

He did very well in that election.

He got genuinely 100% of the vote.

Because there's normally, I was reading an article about how dictators like to pitch it.

You know,

are you modest?

Do you just get 90?

Do you go all in and you get 100?

Or do you sort of say around 95?

Actually, in the course of this, I found out

the most impressive result of all time in any election, and that was in 1927 in Liberia.

In the country at the time, there were fewer than 15,000 registered voters.

The winner, Charles King, won 243,000 votes.

Turnout was 1,680%.

And he was given a Guinness World Record for fraud.

And so that song, of course, made famous by Whitney Houston, but actually Dolly Parton originally.

And she made an absolute fortune on the song from when Whitney Houston released it.

But then they asked her about this thing with Saddam Hussein, and she said, I was surprised as anyone, but it's too serious an issue to comment on.

Not for us, guys.

Saddam Hussein

was

arsehole, I think we can all agree.

But in 1980, he was given the keys to the city of Detroit.

This was when he was still, you know, very much in the good books of the USA, and he had made a big donation to a Detroit church.

And

I read an article about it which said that he still had them, you know, even to the end.

But other key holders...

They weren't on him right at the end.

I mean, you know.

He's not trying to get into his bunker going, fucking Detroit keys.

No.

But

other people who are key holders to the city of Detroit include Santa Claus,

Stevie Wonder

and Elmo.

What a group quota that would be.

We should

at some point I think we should move away from Saddam Hussein.

Yeah.

So just something about campaign songs.

America does a very good line in cool campaign songs for your presidential campaigns.

It's almost the highlight of your presidential campaigns.

But

I like Bob Dole.

So do you know what Bob Dole chose in 1996 when he ran against Clinton?

So he used the song Soul Man, as in written by Isaac Hayes, David Porter in the 60s, a big kind of civil rights anthem, Isaac Hayes, who was the voice of Chef in South Park as well.

So this big civil rights African-American anthem and he used it but he changed the lyrics to dolman.

Incredible.

And not only this, I can't believe he did this, it was performed by Sam and Dave, like a duo who sang it, and Sam actually re-recorded it.

How ignominious is that with the lyrics dole man?

And then he so he changed the lyrics, he sung it a bit, then the writers got in touch and said, we really don't endorse you at all.

You're nothing to do with the song, please go away.

And also, it didn't work at all anyway, because it sounded either like dull man or sold man

when he sung it.

They do like the puns, don't they?

In the campaign slogans, there's been loads of good ones.

Oh, well, good.

So Ulysses S.

Grant said Grant as another term.

Thomas E.

Dewey, when he was up against Roosevelt, said Dewey or don't we?

And did he did he did he win?

No.

Thomas.

Hetton.

Yeah, he famously was the president of America.

No, of course he didn't win.

There was Alfred Landon who was up against FDR and he said, let's make it a Landon slide.

Nice.

Very good.

Yeah.

It's funny because all these people were on the losing side, weren't they?

Okay, here's someone who's on the winning side, Franklin Pierce.

He said, we poked you in 44, we shall pierce you in 52.

Wow.

And then.

It really was another time, wasn't it?

And then, four years later, James Buchanan came in and he said, We poked him in 1944, we pierced him in 52, and we'll buck him in 56.

Amazing.

There was another one, so Stephen Douglas, another famous US president, not.

So he ran against Lincoln and he had a song written, or he wrote a song, which I don't know what the tune was, but it was about kind of how

people were always going on about how Lincoln was this kind of saint.

It was like, Tell us how great he is, how he seeks his closet every night to kneel and pray.

Any lie you tell, we'll swallow, swallow any kind of mixture.

But oh, don't, we beg and pray you, don't, for God's sake, show his picture because he was so ugly.

Oh, really?

I know, right?

And now we think of him as quite a noble-looking character, but apparently, back in the day,

he was eight feet tall.

Only with the hat, then.

Yeah, you don't know what happened.

When you take the hat off, it might have been a really tall farm.

He could fit an entire Frenchman under that hat.

That is the thing.

George W.

Bush, he relied on Tom Petty's single I Won't Back Down during his 2000 campaign.

He then got a cease and desist letter from Tom Petty and immediately backed out.

Amazing.

I have to say,

there's a good sort of argument that you should not get into politics, because when you do, you just find out that all your heroes hate you.

Well, it's really so this is the thing.

So

there are all these stories about musicians complaining, but basically, if you're playing at a venue which has a a public music license, you can play their songs, basically.

So I mean, this happens lots and lots.

And we should say, so people who have d asked Donald Trump to stop using their song or declined his, you know, said please, please, don't play that, have included Neil Young, R.E.M., Twisted Sister, Adele, Elton John, The Rolling Stones, Queen, George, dead George Harrison's estate,

Dead Pavarotti's estate,

Stephen Tyler of Aerosmith, Dead Prince's estate, Pharrell, Rihanna, Guns and Roses, and Neil Young again.

I'm interested that Neil Young is the one who they went back to twice.

Do you think he was the one they thought?

Okay, who was sort of like the least against us?

We're going to have to move on to our final fact very shortly.

On political songs.

So when America first became independent,

they kind of took God Save the Queen or God Save the King and they just added their own lyrics.

So they had God Save Great Washington, God Save the 13 States, God Save America, but it was all to the same tune as God Save the King until they stuck on their theme tune that they have now.

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Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that in 1898, a Boston magazine described the game of croquet as a source of slumbering depravity,

a veritable Frankenstein monster of recreation.

And we've got a lot of depraved people in tonight.

So basically, when, like, croquet was quite an elitist sport in the UK, and then it came over to America and everyone started playing it.

It became like a game that everyone loved to play.

Like, the whole country played it.

And it was really thought to be quite depraved.

And there are a few reasons for this.

One reason was people were like gambling on it a little bit.

But another reason is because men and women played together.

And often when women would play their shots.

Boston, are you still that Puritan?

We're all going immediately into the stocks after tonight's show.

So women would deliberately shorten their dresses to play more comfortably.

As they played a sh

I know

as they played a shot, they might lift a skirt and show a bit of ankle.

Wow!

This article, it is amazing.

Like, it's so fervent that it all, like, it, you know,

you sort of think, my god, is this person serious?

It's really...

So the article that I read it in, sorry, it is, it's in JSTOR, and it's by a historian called John Sterngass, and it's called Cheating Gender Roles and the 19th Century Croquet Craze.

Oh, nice.

So the and also the other thing was, croquet, it is a devious game because you get the...

No, it is.

It is.

You know, there's a lot of

sort of mucking around you can do with your opponent's piece.

It's like basically chess, but you can move the other guy's bishop.

Like, it's mean.

And

it's so nothing like chess.

It is unbelievably like chess.

It is unbelievably like chess.

It's not.

I will go to the wall for this.

There is a lot of tactical play.

I read somewhere saying it's a bit like chess, and I thought, what kind of idiot

would make that impact?

You've been reading my blog, I'm very glad.

But have you ever played chess with Andy where he comes with a mallet and just smashes a bar?

It does provoke, it's so frustrating if you're losing at croquet because your opponent just uses your ball to get their ball all the way around the course.

And this article that you were quoting, the 1898 one, it said, it is not long before every honorable feeling, every dictate of morality has become obliterated.

In place of our refined and upright people are two pairs of gruesome moral monstrosities.

The poison of croquet eats deeper and deeper into their souls.

I know.

It's really good.

It's good stuff.

So Milton Bradley who made these croquet sets, they had the rules and one of the first rules in capital letters was keep your temper.

The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin called it the destroyer of lifelong friendships and a ruiner of happy homes.

The International Herald Tribune reported that a woman testified during a separation hearing that her husband refused to speak to her for days after she questioned whether his ball had really gone through the hoop.

Amazing.

Mike.

Okay, first of all, why on earth did that get to court in the first place?

I read that.

It was like the judge said that this, who's going to court because their husband didn't speak to them.

It feels like there were underlying issues in that relationship, as it does.

No, but my friend, back in England, she broke up with her boyfriend over a game of croquet.

Really?

Really?

And I was part of that game, and I have to say, I was the one who went, that guy's got to go.

Because he was horrific in this game.

He did exactly what Andy was saying.

He was playing chess.

That doesn't mean anything.

Unless he was literally holding a chess board and playing chess while playing croquet.

But you think several moves ahead?

You're you know.

Fairly.

I only think the most controversial thing about it, so croquet was kind of a feminist moment.

And the reason it was so controversial, largely, was because it was the first game ever that women had played, and majoritarily.

So every croquet set had on the front of it a picture of a woman playing croquet.

And this was crazy.

Between 1860 and 1890, you know, women weren't allowed to barely leave the house.

If they rode a bike, they were in trouble.

And they were all playing croquet.

And not only that, but it turns out they were all heinous cheats.

And so this

really pissed people off.

So there was this big theme that women were terrible cheaters in all games.

There was, I think, added to the official rules of croquet when they were codified was this manual that said, Don't cheat.

We are aware the young ladies are fond of cheating because, in quotes, it is such fun and they think the men like it.

Well, there are very good ways you can cheat if you're a lady playing croquet.

So, if because ladies at the time wore very long and often hooped skirts, which come out quite far, so it's the work of a moment to just walk over to your ball, just stand on top of it, no one can see because the skirt's on the ground all the way around, kick it over a bit into position, and then suddenly you're lined up for the next shot.

That's very cool.

It was an Olympic sport at one point, wasn't it?

What was that, sorry?

It was an Olympic sport for one year.

Yeah, 1900.

1900, it was.

In France.

In France.

Yeah.

They could barely move the balls.

It was like the borrowers.

Yeah, no, but the French did really well in it, didn't they?

No, they were the only people.

It was a bit of a Saddam Hussein moment.

They were the only people who took part and they won all the medals.

Sorry,

the next Olympics, the 1904 Olympics, croquet was kicked out, but then the American version of croquet, which is called Roque, was then done at the 1904 Olympics, and it was purely Americans who played it and won all the medals there as well.

Yeah, well done, you guys.

But

I think this is my favorite fact about what we found for this fact is that Roque, so roke is the American version, the way they got the name rogue, it was invented by a guy called Samuel Crosby.

He was from New York, and this was in 1899, and he came to it by removing the C from the front of the word and the T at the end of the word,

and that's it.

Wow.

If you read rogue websites, that's like the legendary story of...

Yes, it's R-O-Q-U-E.

Well, you know the reason why it was dropped from the 1900 Olympics?

It's because one person turned up to watch it.

Yes.

There was one spectator and there were seven players.

Yeah,

it was an English guy who was living in Nice and he came all the way over from Nice to Paris to watch the first matches.

He didn't even watch the final.

And the reason that the French won it and the French were the only people who took part is because there was a group of croquet players who lived in Paris and they didn't want any foreigners playing at all.

And so they made it so all the games took place over like three or four months, and so no one could afford to stay in Paris for that whole time.

And so, it was only people who lived there who could play it.

Yeah, sneaky.

So, you'd encourage us cheating.

Actually, sorry, can I just say in that Olympics?

So, there weren't that many spectators in any of the sports, really.

Apart from in the discus, there was quite a few because it was in the Bois de Boulogne, so a lot of locals were there.

But the 1896 discus champion who came to the 1900 Olympics, he managed to dispatch his discus into the crowd on all three throws.

Is that extra points or a bonus prize?

Do you guys know who invented croquet?

No,

no.

It was a guy, well, his name's quite controversial, which is why I raise it, but it was a guy called Walter Thomas Jones Whitmore.

He was an English guy, and I've actually invented it in Charselton House, which I've been to in England.

It's a lovely place.

I've played croquet on the lawn.

It's just that kind of life I lead.

But he was called, so he was called Walter Thomas Jones Whitmore, but he was born Walter Thomas Whitmore Jones.

The reason he changed his name, which he did in 1867, was because his best friend was called Willie Dickens.

And they used to go for walks together down Regent Street.

And he got really sick of Willie Dickens making a joke every time they passed the drapery Dickens and Jones at Regent Street and going, oh, it's you and me, mate.

Look, it's you and me, Dickens and Jones.

So he's like, fuck it, I'm going to drop the surname Jones.

Wow, wow, that's amazing.

That's pessy.

It's very petty.

We should talk a bit about modern croquet, because croquet is really exciting today

because

they've, guys, it is, it is.

Thank you.

Andy's actually an official commentator back home in the UK.

It's amazing commentary.

Ooh, what a great chess movie he's just made there.

There's a new game in town, and it's called Golf Croquet, and it's got much less of the chess, actually.

It's much more, it's a speed and a speed game, basically.

It's a back camon.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The champion, the American champion, is called Ben Rothman.

Actually, Egypt is one of the best countries in the world at Golf Croquet.

They clean up.

They win all the awards, men's and women's.

They're really, really good at it.

Anyway, the American champion, Ben Rothman, was profiled by the San Francisco Chronicle and the entire interview read as basically one long sick burn on him.

So it started off, Ben Rothman is the champion of the world and practically no one knows it.

And they do a series of vox pops over the course of the interview with people who are saying, yeah, I've never heard of him,

a few feet away from where he is practicing his game.

So, and the article ends, at Lake Merritt, the parade of passers-by who had no idea they were in the presence of greatness continued.

Croquet doesn't do anything for me, said Alex Pineda, who was walking by the croquet ground, with his dog, Dominic, for who croquet did nothing either.

It just ends with the line, I think it's cool that he's world champion.

Thanks for telling me.

I still don't care about croquet.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening, Boston.

You've been amazing.

Goodbye!

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