But it ends too soon. Nelly Bell collects them and puts them on a train to Grahamstown, where the Jesuit brothers of St Aidan’s College are waiting to carry on where their mother has left off.
21. Second-generation bridge
‘IT HAS BEEN estimated,’ Rex Mackey writes, ‘by an eminent authority, who had obviously nothing better to do, that the normal bridge session involves the average player in four hundred borderline decisions, one in three of which he will make incorrectly. This entails an incidence of 133.3 recurring critical strictures per partner per session, which is exactly the figure most conscientious workers in this field will arrive at, particularly in regard to the recurring part.’
He says this by way of introduction to the group of men who created the ‘Acol’ system of playing bridge. A decade after Harold Vanderbilt invented the game, and once Culbertson had successfully marketed it, huge confusion reigned in the actual playing of it. ‘Bridge players of that era fell into two categories. They were either converts from Auction, or else had been taught Contract by players whose knowledge of the basic principles was sketchy. In either case their plight was an unhappy one.’ Both Mackey and Alan Truscott catalogue many hands that would nowadays embarrass an average player but which were then bid and played by experts, Culbertson included. ‘Further evidence is supplied by the spate of books inflicted on the defenceless public at this period, each advocating what its author euphemistically described as his “system”.’ Misunderstandings, both in social and tournament play, were rife. Howlers were commonplace. Disasters occurred both in declarer play and in the bidding, and the results were either horrifying or diverting, depending on whether ‘one was the victim or the beneficiary’. This early incompetence may have had one inadvertent side-effect. Bridge became associated with the kind of repartee of which my father was particularly fond. When, at a major tournament, a competitor asked a kibitzer how he should have played a particular hand, for example, the reply was short and to the point, though not necessarily helpful: ‘Under an assumed name.’
Something had to be done. Such was Culbertson’s dominance in the United States that it is not surprising that innovation had to come from elsewhere. In England, ‘the fundamentals of the game were even more imperfectly assimilated’ than in the United States. But the popularity of the game was comparable. To that extent the ‘invasion from the West’ had triumphed. From its springboard in New York, bridge has become a game played all over the world. It spread quickly throughout Europe. The war would make it global as soldiers played it wherever they were sent.
But it was in London in 1938 and 1939 that a small group of men began to think seriously about the game and how it might be made better and more comprehensible. The best known and the acknowledged leader was Maurice Harrison-Gray, who had been a despatch rider during the First World War. He was ‘tall, bald, mustachioed and impressive,’ says Alan Truscott. Harrison-Gray, like Harold Vanderbilt, was a multi-talented man. As well as one of the leading bridge players and writers of his generation, he was also one of the country’s leading lepidopterists.
Harrison-Gray met the second of the group at the Acol Club in London (named after the street in which the club had its premises). This was S.J. (‘Skid’) Simon.
They couldn’t have been more different. One magazine at the time characterised them as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Where Harrison-Gray was tall, urbane and patrician, Simon was ‘short, unkempt, with saturnine features, pulpy flesh and a shock of black hair above a loose, sensual mouth’. He spoke appalling English, and (in common with many Russians) never knowingly used the definite article. He had a similar aversion to pronouns. John Clay recalls that a ‘typical sentence would run: “Bid impeccable spade; butt in, two-H; partner, Free Cluck (three clubs). Pass. Self, what? Self, free die (three diamonds).”’
And yet he wrote English beautifully. Why You Lose at Bridge, which from 1946 onwards served as my father’s bridge bible, was voted in a recent survey of American Contract Bridge League members the ‘best bridge book ever’, and is written in the clearest and most impeccable prose. The same applies to his columns for Punch magazine and the twelve comic novels he co-authored with Caryl Brahms.
Two other men were at this time playing at the Acol Club. One was Iain MacLeod who was later lost to the game when he took up a much less respectable career as a Member of Parliament and Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was widely tipped to be a future prime minister before his untimely death in 1970 at the age of fifty-three. And there was Jack Marx, with whom Simon would debate the essentials of what would become known as ‘Acol’ late into the night. ‘Simon may be described as the synthesist who propounded the theories, and Marx as the analyst who broke them down into their essential parts,’ says Rex Mackey.
There was much to Acol that was technical, but what set it apart from the theories that Culbertson and his generation proposed was that it contained a better understanding of the nature of the partnership. It was about ‘a state of mind’. Skid Simon elaborated on this in various places. ‘The Acol System,’ he wrote, ‘has often been described as an attitude of mind. It is never easy to explain an attitude, but I feel I must have a stab at explaining this one ... The Acol attitude has realised that bidding is not an exact science, but a scientific estimation of mathematical probabilities. It has also realised that the probabilities to be estimated include the probable actions of opponents who regrettably happen to be present, and that the entire language for estimating is limited to thirty-eight bids and that that is not nearly enough to paint a complete picture of the hand most of the time or even part of the time.’ And he iterates the view that MacLeod was to repeat some years later: ‘There are two objectives in bridge. The first is to make the best of your cards, the second is to prevent the enemy making the best of theirs.’
Dad believed in Acol’s famous dictum: ‘Bid what you think you can make.’ Don’t think you have to be fancy for the sake of it. If you want to be in game, bid game. If you think a slam might be on, bid a slam. It shuts the opponents up and gets you where you want to be. Do it! And, when in doubt, bid one more, especially in a competitive auction where there is as much to be gained from keeping your opponents out of their best contract as there is to be got from being in yours.
In the United States, a new generation of experts was coming to contract bridge. Charles Goren first got into bridge because of a young woman who hosted a bridge party in Montreal in 1923. He later graduated in law and when he went home to Philadelphia, he bought Milton Work’s Auction Bridge (the same volume that predicted auction bridge was embarking on an ‘extended period of stability’). In 1936, Goren stopped practising law and turned his attention full-time to bridge. He moved from being Work’s ‘technical assistant’, which meant that he wrote many of the columns that appeared worldwide under Work’s byline, to having his own column. His writing was fresh and new and soon attracted followers. Then he published his first bridge book, Winning Bridge Made Easy. Initially, it was thought to have little chance of being a big seller because Culbertson’s domination in bridge was complete. If it wasn’t Culbertson, it wasn’t bridge, went the thinking. But Goren had something more to offer, not least that his approach, like that of the Acol group in London, was blessed with a refreshing clarity and simplicity. In particular, he took Work’s point count, which had hitherto been used mainly for valuing no trump hands, and extended it to all suit contracts. Point Count Bidding at Contract Bridge was priced at only $1 and quickly became a bestseller. It converted the American (and world) bridge public from Culbertson’s ‘honour tricks’ to the point count. The book sold well and, on the day it was published, Goren gave up his law practice. Bridge and bridge writing were now earning him three or four times as much as he ever made from the law. And, as Culbertson’s interest took him into politics, Goren soon became the dominant bridge writer. By the early 1940s, he had more columns in more newspapers than Culbertson.
But you make an impact in the bridge world not only by
writing books, but also by winning tournaments. Goren formed a long-lasting and highly successful partnership with Helen Sobel. Together, they won virtually everything in sight and Goren soon found himself at the head of the American Contract Bridge League masterpoint table, a position he was to hold, uninterrupted, from 1944 until 1962. He was perfectly placed to cash in on the worldwide bridge boom that followed the end of the Second World War. Contract Bridge Complete and New Contract Bridge Complete won him followers all over the world and his name soon became synonymous with bridge, just as Culbertson’s had been in the 1930s. He was sometimes called Mr Bridge and in 1958 even appeared on the cover of Time magazine. At the height of his fame, 34 million people were reading his weekly bridge column.
The Acol group had less success and less worldwide impact, but what was appealing about Goren was also appealing about their approach to the game: keep it simple. Make it easy for your partner and hard for your opponents.
In any case, they had to wait for the end of the war before they could gain international tournament success. While bridge in the United States continued pretty much as usual during the war, in Europe there was an obvious hiatus. Iain MacLeod had been on the verge of qualifying to represent Britain in the European championships of 1939 when a brief illness eliminated him from the selection process. It was several years before he played tournament bridge again, for he enlisted in the British Army as soon as the war began, and spent the next six years in uniform. There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that early on in the war an intelligence officer found a note which caused alarm. It read ‘Ax, Kxxx, Qxxx, KQx’, and the officer, who did not play bridge, immediately suspected a conspiracy. He approached MacLeod who ‘immediately recognised it as a bridge hand he had scribbled down and thrown away – and not as a plot to overthrow the monarchy’. MacLeod was part of the Planning Staff for the D-Day invasions and was one of the men who landed in Normandy on D-Day itself. At the end of the war, ‘the Acol group went into action. England won three straight European titles, with Harrison-Gray as the playing captain, the only successful playing captain in bridge history. Simon was his partner in 1948 and 1949, but an early death removed him from the scene.’ He was replaced by Jack Marx in 1950. By this time, Iain MacLeod had been elected to Parliament as the Conservative member for the London constituency of Enfield. With bridge and politics making increasing demands on his time, something had to give. He became non-playing captain of the British bridge team that went to the European Championships in Venice in 1951, but later that year was appointed to Churchill’s cabinet when the Conservatives ousted Labour from office. MacLeod was the youngest man to hold the office of Minister of Health. He had to give up playing international bridge, although he still found time to publish his textbook, Bridge is an Easy Game. ‘There’s a copy in the library at Number 10 Downing Street,’ John Clay writes, ‘which bears MacLeod’s inscription on the flyleaf: “This is the only book in this place that is certain to profit its reader”.’
In Bridge is an Easy Game, MacLeod summarises the Acol approach to bidding:
The Acol System has two main objectives:
To make bidding easy for your partner
To make bidding difficult for your opponent
The rest was detail. Bind your friends to you with hoops of steel; reject the rest.
Even while in government, MacLeod continued to play bridge, if not for his country then at least for money. Both in his bridge and in his politics, Iain MacLeod was a model for my father. MacLeod was only a few years older, but the gap was of the order of which heroes are formed. Terence Reese wrote of him that his outstanding characteristic was ‘a dynamic aggression. He is always on the attack. Of all the players I have ever known he most exactly mirrors his character in his bridge – in both there is a pugnacity that seems reckless but which is, in fact, founded upon a profound knowledge – sometimes self-knowledge – and justified self-confidence.’
22. A brief war
WHAT STRIKES ME now as curious about Dad is that he only ever found that self-belief at the bridge table. Away from it, he shrank, not completely but noticeably. At the table – his precious ‘square yard of freedom’ – the certainties he experienced matched the certainties he expected. Away from it, this was anything but the case. Away from the table, life is fractured, unpredictable, various. He is not in control. Greater and darker forces have severed him from his family and tossed him adrift on a turbulent sea. And, even though he bobs successfully on the unstable waters, he begins to hate the absence of control.
Still, at least he is ‘good’ at school. His parents, he is sure, will be pleased. From an early age, they have drummed into him the importance of ‘excellence’. It becomes a catchphrase of theirs and later of his, and one he is apt in later life to aim at his children. ‘Make with the excellence,’ he says, in such a way that we genuinely believe it doesn’t matter much at what – as long as it is something.
At the end of 1943, he leaves school (in South Africa the school year and the calendar year coincide) having matriculated with distinction. He is top of his class and the top student in the Cape Province. He wins a scholarship to the University of the Witwatersrand where he has decided to study Chemical Engineering. He is not sad to leave school. He says goodbye to his brothers and moves to Johannesburg where he takes a room in one of the student residences. The big city delights him; there are libraries and dances, bridge clubs and music. There are women, with whom he has always been shy, but who are often quick to fall for his sly humour – he is a master of the semi-ironic aside – and his elegant, if leggy, dancing. And they like the fact that whatever subject they’re studying seems easy to him, for he is exceptionally bright. He plays bridge with friends. He doesn’t neglect his studies, nor does he take them too seriously. He is young, but he is tall and good-looking and these are times when cities like Johannesburg are wide open for young men with initiative and ideas, brains and confidence.
And yet university is a disappointment. For all the social whirl of Johannesburg in wartime, he still feels terribly alone. George is still at St Aidan’s. Robin, the nearest he has to a peer, is mildly asthmatic and has been sent to a different school near Pietersburg in the Highveld. Dad hasn’t seen his parents since 1940. The letters home are a chore. The letters from home feel like a litany of complaint. And he is short of money; a scholarship will only take him so far.
He also, I suspect, feels he has yet to prove himself. He has not yet fully made the transition from being a boy to being a man. In the absence of a father, he will have to find his own rite of passage. There are girlfriends, of course, but that is not quite what he has in mind. And there is politics – but he has never been that interested in politics. Rather, he has – despite the great rift – taken from his parents a narrow conservative politics. He believes in family. He is instinctively a libertarian, but he craves law and order. Later in life, he will approve of Mrs Thatcher, while despising her strident tones and her relish for the fight. He despises tardiness and sloth; he distrusts the masses. He might quote Auden – but only selectively.
And always the loud angry crowd
Very angry and very loud
Law Is We,
And always the soft idiot softly Me.
He prefers the soft idiot to the loud and angry crowd, but he wants more than anything to belong – to anyone, to anything – and perhaps it is with this in mind that in January 1945 he makes his way to a recruiting office and enlists in the South African Army. He becomes an artilleryman in the Sixth South African Armoured Brigade. By March, he is in North Africa; by April, he is part of the Allied forces, mopping up resistance in the valleys of northern Italy. He spends his days some distance behind the lines, as he (I suspect disingenuously) puts it, ‘lobbing shells at people I never saw’ and playing bridge. He learns to smoke a pipe, a habit which will stay with him until he dies, a habit, indeed, which may be said to have killed him. The familiar towns are captured and subdued, one by one. Monte Sole, Bologna, Pa
dua, Milan.
I remember, some years later, I told him about a trip a friend and I made in the Apennines when we made our way on foot and over the course of several days from Bologna to Lucca and then on to Florence. Somewhere on the baby slopes of Monte Cimone, we came across a farmer beside a pockmarked wall, and got into conversation. This was 1990, some forty-five years after the events in question, but the farmer described in astonishing detail how as a young boy he had hidden and watched as German troops shot his father, his uncle and two brothers against the wall which, even now, he preserved in their memory. As he spoke, he traced the contours of the wall with his hand, and his fingers found their way from one hole to the next as they must have done many, many times over the intervening years. I remember also how Dad’s eyes clouded when I told him this story, and how he let his head fall forward and sat there very still, and for several minutes thereafter said nothing at all.
When, finally, he emerged from the reverie into which my story had plunged him, it was to ask only whether we’d enjoyed the walk, which was his version, as I well knew, of doubling for takeout, which I did by moving the conversation on to other records I have read of soldiers playing bridge.
Vulnerable in Hearts Page 15