Jean

Brockham Whist Drive

Peter Baker

Leigh Whist Drive

For over 150 years this quintessentialy English game was regarded by the whole of the western world as the summit of social and intellectual recreation.

Whist goes back to a Tudor game called Trump, or Ruff, a relative of Triomphe and the ancestor of Ecarté.

Shakespeare's contemporaries regarded it as a rude ale-house pastime and under the Stuarts it was dubbed Whisk and Swabbers, a rather down-putting piece of word play on Ruff and Honours.

Its reputation as a childrens' game was underlined by Charles Cotton's reluctance to describe it in The Compleat Gamester (1674) on the grounds that 'Every Child almost of Eight years old hath a competent knowledge in that recreation'.

But in 1728 a circle of businessman, headed by Lord Folkestone, who hob-nobbed at the Crown Coffee-house in Bedford Row, began to apply logic and precision to its deceptively simple structure and to develop ways of playing the game systematically.

One of their acquaintance was an elderly gentleman called Edmond Hoyle, who started teaching it to well-to-do people in their homes and eventually published his tutoring notes as a Short Treatise on Whist in 1742.

So successful was this publication that it made both Hoyle a household name and Whist the game of the elite until its eclipse by Bridge in the 1890s.

Since then it is still widely pursued in communal Whist drives and remains a popular family game.