The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws

by Margaret Drabble

  Zagathay, or Uzbeck, is one of the great parts of Tartary, and its people are warlike but cruel. Most rich in droves of Cattel and have little more knowledge than their Beasts. Pagan or Mahomitan. In Tartary desert are people living in houses built on wheels which they remove in great numbers to the terror of their neighbours.

  Colin Thubron, a writer who knows these regions well, tells me that Zagathay must be what we know as Jagathai, a name given to Central Asia between the death of Genghis Khan and the rise of Tamerlane. It is unlikely that Henry Winstanley, a Suffolk man, had much first-hand knowledge of the kingdoms he so colourfully describes, but Thubron says his information is surprisingly accurate. And Winstanley was not a parlour traveller. He took his love of topography to extremes. He is best remembered for having designed the first lighthouse on the Eddystone Rock off Plymouth, erected in 1700, which he saw through various designs and revisions, and which has been credited with saving much shipping. But this invention cost him his life; he was on the lighthouse, seeing to repairs, when it was destroyed in a storm on 26 November 1703, and he perished with it.

  XVI

  The invention of geography cards for the young King Louis in 1644 connects the goose game of the Medici court with the invention of the jigsaw and the game of Belisha. The earliest ancestor of Belisha was a French game, derived from the goose game. Le Jeu du Monde of 1645, based on a mutation of Le Jeu de l'Oie, was designed by the infant king's geographer, Pierre du Val. This was a game in which chance still ruled, but as you played you could learn the names (though not the relative locations) of the countries as you moved your counter round the track of the world; each numbered space was occupied by a small map. Du Val followed this ingenious invention with Le Jeu de France pour les Dames (1652), based on a traditional draughts board, in which the white squares were white, but the black squares were replaced by maps of the regions of France.

  The concept of learning geography through play can thus claim to have originated in France, and some historians have wondered why it took so long to reach England, which was already full of cartography. Beautifully coloured maps were treasured in cabinets and hung as furnishings and tapestries in halls, galleries, studies and libraries. Artists portrayed landowners and explorers standing before backgrounds of maps, or surveying maps importantly spread upon tables. It would seem a short step to the kind of geographical table game that had been devised in France in the 1640s, but in fact the earliest known English version dates from a century later, from 1759. This, however, when it at last arrived, was very different from its predecessors.

  The new game was called A Journey Through Europe, or the Play of Geography. It was designed by John Jefferys, teacher of geography, writing and arithmetic, and marketed by Carington Bowles, a well-known publisher of maps and prints based in St Paul's Churchyard. It was a track game, but in the form of a map, not a spiral. It was mounted on canvas, and could be folded and stored in a case like a real travelling map. The player twirled a flat-sided top called a 'teetotum' to obtain a number, and then advanced or retreated his counter accordingly, as in the goose game. The spaces here were embellished not with rustic images but with useful nuggets of topical patriotic information, such as: 'He who rests at 28 at Hanover shall by order of Ye King of Great Britain who is Elector, be conducted to No 54 at Gibraltar to visit his countrymen who keep garrison there,' or 'He who rests at No 48 at Rome for kissing ye Pope's toe shall be banished for his folly to No 4 in the cold island of Iceland and there miss three turns.' The winner was the first to reach London, 'the first city in Europe'.

  The immense success of this new game was imitated over the next few decades in innumerable designs and variations, some combining the principles of the goose game with the format of the new tour of Europe, and introducing a variety of edifying elements to assuage the consciences of players.

  F. R. B. Whitehouse, for many years chairman and managing director of the Chad Valley company, published in 1951 an illustrated book titled The Table Games of Georgian and Victorian Days, which gives an excellent account of the development of board games, while somewhat arbitrarily subdividing them into 'Instructional' games, games of 'Moral Improvement', and 'Games of Amusement'. Under the second heading, Whitehouse describes such items as The New Game of Human Life (1790), The Mirror of Truth (1811), and Virtue Rewarded and Vice Punished (1818), all of which provide a strong element of exhortation, ranging from lessons in civic duty to warnings about what happens to naughty children.

  The pious moral content is in many cases offset, however, by the beauty of the design of the board, which must have added much to the pleasure of play. The New Game of Human Life, for example, published by John Wallis and Elizabeth Newbery in 1790, takes the player spirally through various imaginatively illustrated stages of life from infancy through manhood and the prime of life to sedate middle age, old age, decrepitude and dotage. The instructions for this game specifically advocated the use of a teetotum rather than dice. The New Game of Human Life was, of course, a game of chance, but the less this aspect was emphasized to its players the better. By this stage in history, we needed excuses for enjoying ourselves.

  Many examples of these games survive in county museums and toy museums, each mirroring the ethics, dress and sometimes the historical events of the period in which it was designed. A tale like Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress lent itself readily to pictorial representation, and the staging posts of the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair and Doubting Castle became as familiar to players as the counties and castles of England. Many children firmly believed that these were real places. Such family board games are re-created to this day by publishers and toy manufacturers, and new and topical variants are on the market every Christmas.

  The Chad Valley catalogue for 1954 advertises a board game called Dan Dare's Race in Space, as well as Muffin the Mule jigsaws and drawing slates, and any catalogue for any year offers a similar snapshot of the new, the traditional and the adapted. The impressive display in Robert Opie's Museum of Advertising and Packaging, now in Notting Hill, tracks the way in which trends in advertising and historical events are reflected through board games and jigsaws based on the days of Empire and two world wars, on movies and TV shows, on the launch of the sputnik and the space race. There is even a Twiggy Dress-the-doll Model Dress Book. Dress-the-doll books have a surprisingly long history.

  (Opie saves these ephemera with a purpose: 'Whilst families tend to save mementoes from special occasions, it struck me that little was being done to keep the everyday material. When the thousands of pieces of this social history are assembled into some giant jig-saw, the result illustrates the remarkable journey we have all come through.')

  The early board games designed for pure amusement betray their frivolity in their titles: Funnyshire Fox Chase, Royal Race Course, Comic Steeplechase, Waddling Frog. It was an old edition of the Funnyshire Fox Chase that first attracted Major Whitehouse to his pet subject. He advertised for information about similar games, and realized from the nature of the sparse replies he received that he had found a wider but less well-trodden field than he had thought. 'Not knowing what may turn up next adds tremendously to the interest of collecting these old games,' he sweetly and innocently wrote. I picture him as a pleasant, silver-haired, country gentleman, a kind father and an indulgent grandfather, who loved to show his grandchildren his valuable collection. I wrote to Chad Valley to find out what had happened to him, but no answer came, perhaps because Chad Valley, once toymaker to the queen, has been swallowed up by Woolworths, which itself is about to disappear. I did not pursue him further, for I did not wish to be disappointed. He might have been cast in the Alison Uttley mould.

  In his history, Major Whitehouse confined himself primarily to canvas or linen-mounted games published between 1750 and 1850, but in his tenth chapter he briefly mentioned jigsaw puzzles, which he said were 'not games in the strict sense of the word'. In a foreword to the 1971 reprint we are told (by the then Vice-Chairman of Chad Valley, R. Swinburne-J
ohnson) that a book on the history of jigsaw puzzles by Linda Hannas would shortly appear as a companion volume to Whitehouse's own work.

  And with the jigsaw puzzle, an entirely new form was born.

  XVII

  The first jigsaw puzzles took the form of 'dissected maps' and the earliest of these were credited to John Spilsbury (1739–1769). Spilsbury was an engraver, printmaker and cartographer, and as a young man he was apprenticed to cartographer Thomas Jefferys (c.1719–1771) of St Martin's Lane, who, like his namesake John Jefferys, became involved in manufacturing a geographical race game. (The two Jefferys may or may not have been related, but they must have known one another; this was a small world.) Thomas Jefferys, despite an appointment as cartographer royal to George III in 1760 and a successful career as a publisher of maps of the Americas, was declared bankrupt in 1766, the very year that his pupil Spilsbury is said to have hit upon the concept of the jigsaw.

  Spilsbury's idea was dazzlingly simple. He mounted maps on thin mahogany board and cut them along country or county boundaries with a fine marquetry saw, then boxed them up for children to reassemble. In retrospect, it seems astonishing that nobody had hit on this concept before. (And perhaps somebody had.)

  These puzzles seem to have been specifically designed and sold as an amusing educational aid for children, and it is no coincidence that they arrived on the market during the extraordinary boom in child-oriented products that marked the second half of the eighteenth century. For those trying to follow the prescriptions of Locke and Rousseau, they fitted the bill exactly. They pleased parents and publishers alike, and children may well have enjoyed them as much as I did when young.

  I first read of John Spilsbury in the pioneering work of jigsaw-puzzle scholarship by Linda Hannas, The English Jigsaw-Puzzle 1760–1890, which, as we have seen, Major Whitehouse had announced as forthcoming in his book on board games. This book, published in 1972, was the starting point of my historical quest. Linda Hannas was the first writer to devote a whole book to the art and history of the jigsaw, and she dedicated many years to her subject, gathering together a fine private collection of puzzles, which was sold through Sotheby's on 27 July 1984. She died in October 2004, not long before I read her book, though it took me a long time to discover this, and I kept hoping I might be able to meet her and talk to her about her obsession. I would have liked to have asked her more about what attracted her to the subject, how she became a collector, what collecting meant to her, what first attracted her to jigsaws, whether she continued to enjoy assembling them. But I came just too late, my letters went unanswered and, anyway, even had I written in time she might well not have wanted to see me. Experts may be possessive about their material and do not always welcome the interest of others, as I have found to my cost. They do not want newcomers peering at their treasures.

  Linda Hannas (née Morris) was the London-born English wife of Torgrim Hannas, a Norwegian resistance fighter, intelligence officer, bibliophile, scholar and antiquarian book dealer who presented his library of Scandinavian linguistic literature to the British Library in 1984, the same year that his wife sold her jigsaws. (He died in 1998.) Antiquarian book dealers are collectors by trade and inclination. I was for years involved with a dealer who specialized in literary periodicals, and I learned from him the value of completing the set, the excitement of finding the missing number. I never knew whether I was deeply bored by this activity, or whether I found it, as he did, of compelling interest. On the whole, I think boredom prevailed, and to this day I don't really like reading periodicals, but his company shed a certain glamour on them. He was a glamorous figure, despite his dusty trade.

  Ah, the brief, illicit hours I spent with this too-much-married man, faithfully and faithlessly, amidst the book stacks, in dark basements and leaking warehouses! (This sounds like a scenario from a story by Edith Wharton or Anita Brookner, but it wasn't quite like that, for we were both in our thirties, and between us we had too many children. This is one of the reasons why our stolen basement hours were brief. We were conscientious parents and we had to get back to pick up the children from school.) For his sake, I still keep my eyes open for odd copies of The Dial, or Horizon, or Encounter, or The Nineteenth Century and After, or Granta, or delta, where one might hope to find the first publications of D. H. Lawrence or Angus Wilson or Sylvia Plath or Ted Hughes or Peter Redgrove. It is too late, as my friend died years ago, and I don't know what to do with these items when I spot them. But I keep looking. It is a habit. I was pleased to be able to recognize the first appearance of Hardy's famous Titanic poem, 'Convergence of the Twain', in a periodical in my husband's archive. I feel it ought to be worth a few bob.

  Mrs Hannas's decision to part with her slowly acquired collection, a good twenty years before her death, must have been hard to make, and probably indicated a greater family dispersal. Even less dedicated scholars than she find it hard to part with their jigsaws. Attics and storerooms are full of old puzzles, often deplored by spouses and derided by children, taking up space, gathering dust, waiting for a query from someone like me, who wants to know why they are still there and what they represent. After dinner parties, late at night, out they come, for my admiration. I am sorry I did not meet Mrs Hannas.

  Linda Hannas's study, which provides a checklist of more than five hundred items, is a landmark in the story of children's games. Her commentary is excellent, her illustrations alluring, her detailed descriptions vivid, and her detective work impressive. Her account of how she managed to establish the identity of an elusive family business of early puzzle manufacturers, the Barfoots, deserves a wider readership; she tracked them down through their distinctive trademark of a swag of roses. I pursued, not very methodically, some of the museum items she lists, and often found the originals, preserved in old cardboard boxes and entwined with old string, to be dismayingly duller than their photographic reproductions, which often lend a gloss to objects that are in reality stained and defective. This made me admire her perseverance the more.

  An exhibition at the Museum of London in 1968 (then in its former home in Kensington) called Two Hundred Years of Jigsaw Puzzles displayed many of her discoveries and attracted some interest. A boom in 'pastimes' objects, Victoriana and heritage decor was on its way; Laura Ashley's first shop opened in the same year in South Kensington, and shortly afterwards, in the winter of 1971–2, an exhibition of biscuit tins from 1868 to 1939 at the Victoria and Albert Museum proved popular, drawing on a similar mixture of nostalgia and curiosity. Michael J. Franklin, the biscuit tin expert, typically gives tips about prices as well as information about manufacturers and artists in his 1979 book, The Art of Decorative Packaging.The boom continued, and the first of what was to be a successful chain of shops called Past Times, providing replica heritage objects of some sophistication, opened in Oxford in 1986. These shops also, of course, sell jigsaws.

  Linda Hannas's 1972 study was not, however, merely an essay in nostalgia and a stimulus to the collecting habit. It was of interest to professionals as well as amateurs, and soon after its publication her observations were beginning to make their way into the mainstream of essays and bibliographies. The historian J. H. Plumb in his article on 'Children in Eighteenth-Century England' (Past and Present, May 1975) was one of the first to cite her work at some length, and two years later Lawrence Stone in The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (1977) mentioned dissected maps in the context of Enlightenment educational theory and practice (although he does not credit Hannas by name). Raphael Samuel, in Theatres of Memory (1994), a work that provides an excellent and surprisingly sympathetic analysis of the Laura-Ashley, old-postcard, Teas-with-Hovis, retrochic phenomenon, draws on and praises her discoveries in his discussion of playing cards featuring monarchs, and jigsaw puzzles featuring chronological tables of English history.

  Many scholars have now followed in the footsteps of Hannas, exploring the history of jigsaw puzzles and the allied terrain of children's books, movable books, flap books, fl
ick books, dress-the-doll books, harlequinades, peep-shows, pin-prick pictures and other ephemera. (Canadian writer Jill Shefrin, for some twenty years associated with the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books in Toronto, made herself an expert in this field and contributed much new scholarship.) John Spilsbury's name is now familiar to anybody interested in this esoteric area of knowledge. A prize awarded by the American Association of Game and Puzzle Collectors (AGPC) is named after him, and he was the answer to a question on University Challenge on 27 November 2006, when he scored a point for the team who guessed him correctly. He has a short entry in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, where his life appears under the same heading as that of his older brother Jonathan, also an engraver.

  Both had appeared (in a group entry, along with Jonathan's daughter Maria, a successful artist) in the original DNB, but no mention is made there of dissected maps. The new entry, in contrast, gives John full credit for his invention and cites Linda Hannas as a source. Maria Spilsbury, not surprisingly, now has a long entry of her own: she is credited with a gift for large crowd scenes, painting cottages and cottage children, pastoral and nursery scenes in crowded canvases, many of which favoured the kind of images that later became (and have remained) popular with jigsawpuzzle manufacturers, though she has not yet, as far as I know, been awarded the accolade of jigsaw reproduction.