'The Luftwaffe created plenty of space in the city that is ideal for a game': How the game of boules is taking over Britain

In the early 1960s, adverts for pétanque sets began to appear in British newspapers. Invariably, the accompanying illustration featured a scene in which men in berets and striped Breton shirts played beneath plain trees with the outline of the Eiffel Tower somewhere in the distance.

This was hardly surprising. After all, to the average British citizen, the steely clank of the pétanque boules was as evocative of la France profonde as the scent of black tobacco or the sound of intellectuals arguing about philosophy on prime-time television. It appears, however, that the prevailing view of pétanque as a Gallic interloper into our national sporting life, the crusty Camembert baguette to the cucumber sandwiches of lawn bowls, may be misguided.

‘I’d certainly take the view that the game Sir Francis Drake was playing in Plymouth Hoe had more in common with boules than bowls,’ wagers Bob Rumble, president of the Great Western Region Pétanque England and one of the organisers of the Sherston Boules Festival in Wiltshire, which will begin — to the ringing of church bells — for the 40th time this summer.

The fact that some form of boules — invented, according to Herodotus, by the Lydians (modern-day Turkey) as a means of distracting themselves during times of famine — has been played in the British Isles for thousands of years cannot be disputed. The Romans contested a game in which stone balls were hurled towards a smaller ball. The legionaries took this game with them, spreading it throughout Europe in much the same way English sailors would football.

For centuries, the term boules and bowls were interchangeable and, like the Romans, British players used spheres of stone or later, iron. Contemporary illustrations of Sir Francis Drake’s famous game bear out Rumble’s view. They suggest that the match was played with cannon balls on a gravel surface, a few even show the great seafarer lobbing the ball rather than rolling it. It is a notion confirmed by The Book of Games compiled by Francis Willughby in about 1660, which describes a game called ‘boules’ played ‘upon very smooth allies of gravel’. This form of the game, rather than the one played on grass, was, in Willughby’s opinion, ‘more generally used than any other [form of bowls] in England’.

That this should have been the case is not surprising. What we know today as lawn bowls was simply beyond the pocket of most people. It required a green that was flat and upon which the grass was cut short — an expensive business when it had to be done by skilled men with scythes. The woods with their in-built bias (invented in 1522 by Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk) were costly. Furthermore, in 1541, the King — blaming the deplorable state of English archery on the ‘customable usage’ of bowls — banned tradesmen, craftsmen, journeymen and the like from playing the game. The aristocracy could continue, however, which was lucky, because His Majesty was himself a keen player, albeit with a cannonball. Amazingly, this Tudor prohibition remained in place until it was repealed in 1845. For more than 300 years, any member of the working class playing bowls or boules was effectively an outlaw.

Henry VIII was not the first English monarch to take a dim view of boules (Edward III, fearful that the manly pursuit of archery was being undermined, ordered the prohibition of all ‘stone, wood and iron throwing under penalty of imprisonment’), nor would he be the last. In 1618, James I issued his Declaration of Sports listing all permissible pastimes — such as archery, dancing, leaping and vaulting — alongside those which were evidently to the detriment of the common good. The latter included bull-baiting, bear-baiting and, of course, boules.

Pétanque itself is a relatively recent evolution of the game. ‘It developed from a much more strenuous game, jeu provençal, in which the players run up and hurl a ball weighing about a kilo at a jack some 30 metres away,’ Rumble explains. ‘One of the greatest players was a man from La Ciotat near Marseille known as Jules Lenoir. Unfortunately, by about 1906, he had developed such severe rheumatism that he was confined to a wheel-chair. However, his friend, Ernest Pitiot, invented a shorter form of the game with lighter boules so that he could continue to play, which Lenoir participated in when sitting in his chair. To make the competition fair, the other players competed with their feet tied together. In French that’s pieds tanqué — hence the name pétanque.’

The new game, suitable for all ages and both sexes, spread throughout France and, by the 1920s, British newspapers were reporting on tournaments ‘that draw 4,000 competitors and offer prizes totalling £1,000’. The first gravel terrains de pétanque in England were laid in private gardens in the 1930s by players who had adopted the game when holidaying on the French Riviera. By the late 1950s, sports shops across Britain were selling pétanque sets. One set, available at Harrods, featured ‘gold coloured’ balls and, according to The Tatler, could ‘even [be used] in a cobbled London mews’.

In post-war Britain, the fact that pétanque required no specially prepared ground was a distinct virtue. As one keen player in Liverpool told the local Press: ‘The Luftwaffe created plenty of space in the city that is ideal for a game.’ In Sheffield’s weekly sports newspaper The Green ’Un in 1963, a writer suggested pétanque as an ideal solution to the problems of maintaining greens that had been afflicting local bowls clubs. ‘Any rough surface will do, so you can dispense with lawn sprinklers, mats and all that,’ the writer commented, adding that he himself was a dab hand at pétanque having completed a bomb-aiming course during his RAF National Service.

From then on, things moved almost as rapidly in Britain as they had across the Channel. The first pétanque terrain established in an English pub was in Braintree, Essex, at the start of the Swinging Sixties. In June 1964, the inaugural All-England Pétanque Championships was held in Cobham, Surrey. The ease of squeezing a pétanque strip into a corner of the car park saw the game boom in British pubs in the 1970s and, by 1978, the national championships were attracting more than 150 club entries.

The competition was so well organised that, in 1979, the 15th edition of the world championships was held in Southampton, Hampshire. It attracted entrants from 17 nations and was sponsored — inevitably, perhaps — by Pernod. England’s top team at the time was based in Norfolk Square near Paddington, although, as The Field pointed out, the fact that its three players were Patrick Tavignot, Jean-Marc Constantin and Peter Schmid, indicated that ‘the game still belongs to the continent’.

Despite the British ladies pétanque team doing well on the European circuit in recent years, that may remain the case. Although that is hardly the point. About 40,000 people in Britain play boules regularly, most of them in pub teams. The Sherston Boules Festival, on July 4 this year, sees the high street of the Wiltshire village closed off to traffic, the tarmac covered with sharp sand and more than 600 players competing. ‘It’s a lovely social occasion, played in good spirits and it brings a great deal of happiness,’ says Rumble.

And that surely is the point of any game — whether British or French.