Exclusive interview with author Edward Brooke-Hitching and review of his book about forgotten sports that were dangerous or absurd
Rating: 3 Stars
By Gabrielle Pantera
“A couple of years ago I was reading an 18th-century German book on hunting when I came across an image of aristocrats catapulting foxes into the air…fox tossing,” says Fox Tossing and other Forgotten and Dangerous Sports, Pastimes and Games author Edward Brooke-Hitching. “It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen, and I wondered what other strange sports had been forgotten about.”
Before our age of electronic games, people found entertainment in some strange ways. One sport that has made a surprising comeback is auto polo. That’s polo with cars instead of polo ponies. The TV series Top Gear demonstrated playing the sport, with the change of using a huge ball and the car bumpers as mallets. Polo using cars started in 1902, with one hand on the wheel and another out the window hanging onto a mallet. There are over 80 lost sports in the book, many crazy. The writing is engaging and the history inspiring. However, this book is not for kids. While it’s a great gift for a history buff, some of the sports are gruesome or dangerous.
The 1912 Olympics featured a type of wrestling called glima. The brutal game would permanently harm or kill opponents. Another abandoned Olympic sport is the French martial art of canne de combat, that is, men slashing each other viciously with thin chestnut canes. Kottobos is an ancient Greek game in which you sling the contents of a wine glass at a target with deadly accuracy. The book also features trivia, such as how many British prime ministers have fought a duel, the meaning of the word Velocipedestrianisticalistinarianologist (one who studies the study of cycling) and the best way to catch a porcupine using a small Algerian child.
“There were so many surprising discoveries,” says Brooke-Hitching. “Finding crazy sports like baseball with cannon, firework boxing, eel-pulling, auto polo and hot hasty pudding eating. I love the story of firework boxing because it took some real detective work to find. A fireworks factory of Victorian London used to wrap their employees in asbestos, strap incendiaries to their bodies, light them and force them to box each other on stage while the sparks whizzed around them. They called it Actors in Living Fire.”
Brooke-Hitching combed through libraries, newspaper archives and museums to find the material. “There is no other book on this subject. The sources range from the Icelandic sagas, Shakespeare, the Encyclopedia of Swearing to the fantastically titled 1869 book The Velocipede, How to Straddle a Saddle, Paddle and Skedaddle. I spent so much time at the British Library that I can perfectly imitate the noises of each air conditioning unit in the building.”
This is Brooke-Hitching’s first book. It has yet to be optioned for film or TV. “It’s a lot of fun to ask a bookseller if they have Fox Tossing and watch them giggle as they type it into the computer,” says Brooke-Hitching. “It’s an amazing experience to see your book on the shelves of a bookshop. I’m very excited about the various countries in which it’s being published.”
Charlie Campbell at Kingsford Campbell is Brooke-Hitching’s agent. “A nice man with the air of a musketeer, he liked an unpublished manuscript I’d written and asked if I had more ideas,” says Brooke-Hitching. “I pitched him Fox Tossing. Once I’d convinced him it was a real sport, off we went.”
Brooke-Hitching is currently writing a book on a related subject. “Even stranger characters doing crazier things,” says Brooke-Hitching.
“My father was a rare book dealer, and I grew up in a house that was wall-to-wall with books. He would always test us on bizarre trivia, and I suspect this book is a direct result of that,” says Brooke-Hitching who lives in London. He was born in the idyllic riverside village of Kintbury in Berkshire.
Fox Tossing: And Other Forgotten and Dangerous Sports, Pastimes, and Games by Edward Brooke-Hitching. Hardcover, 272 pages, Publisher: Touchstone (November 10, 2015), Language: English
ISBN: 978-1501115141 $24.00
