Whiff Pong

I have never seriously contemplated the origins of Table Tennis.

That could mean, amongst  a number of things that;

1) My life is just full of other things which prevent me from musing on the origins of that and other pastimes or
2) I obliterate from my mind all sports that I am not good at, and
3) It is not important.

I just assumed, given their world domination of it, that table tennis was an invention of the Peoples Republic of China as a clever means of keeping their citizens grounded and healthy.

I have of course played it although there is to me quite a negative connotation. This is down to the fact that the only time that I have had access to proper table tennis equipment has been in  rented property whilst on holiday. By definition, you do not want to be indoors in any semblance of decent English seasonal weather and so you only resort to an indoor sport if the climate is wet and inhospitable. Many damp July to August hours have under such circumstances been spent in cold, damp outbuildings such as a converted garage, store shed or draughty barn engaged in an inter-family table tennis competition.

I could therefore be forgiven for being dumbfounded in stumbling across this Blue Heritage Plaque whilst walking through the North Yorkshire town of Selby.

David Foster was a local businessman who made his money in dairy products and cheese. Originally from Hull, he had moved to Selby in 1885 living in the town centre in a well to do townhouse on Micklegate where now a weekly market is held. As well as being in trade he was also a staunch Wesleyan Methodist and an officer in the local Liberal Association at a time when Selby and district was steadfastly Conservative. His claim to be the inventor of table tennis derives from his registering of UK Patent no 11037 on July 15th 1890. Although there were table tennis games predating this they were mostly theme based on,for example ,playing cards, balloons and paddles and even tiddly winks . New York based company J H Singer in 1884 had brought out a board and dice game followed in 1887 by the founder of Parker Brothers with another derivation.

The uniqueness  of Foster's invention was that it was an  “apparatus relating to imitating known games such as lawn tennis, football and cricket to be played on a normal table”.

It was therefore a determined effort to create indoor versions of several games.

The set included elegant strung racquets of scaled down size from the outdoor lawn tennis type , a cloth covered rubber ball, a small wooden perimeter fence and elaborate side nets to catch any stray balls or wayward shots.

The 1890 Patent

The game was intended to grace the parlours and dining rooms of middle class and upper class homes as it included the advice that ‘Gentlemen may remove jackets and bow ties to play and ladies are advised not to wear bustles’. Whilst a prototype will have followed the Patent ,the International Table Tennis Museum in the United States has found a second surviving boxed set of Foster's game, suggesting that it was not just a one-off, but actually made it into commercial production.

At the turn of the century ,indoor games were evidently the next best thing in the recreation and leisure market as the idea for ‘table tennis’ occurred to 4 other games inventors in Britain and the United States around the turn of the 1890s, all of whom separately designed indoor tennis games.

Table Patent by Standen 1894      

These games went under various titles, such as ping pong, pom pom, whiff waff and Gossima.

Whilst the pastime became hugely popular in the 1890s, the emergence from America of the fragile white celluloid ball along with the modern style of bat gave rise to a ping pong craze in the early part of the 20th century. Table tennis, remarkably, did not become an Olympic Sport until 1988.

Foster had however pioneered the forerunner of the modern game of table tennis. Obviously his true vocation was not in cheese and butter sales in that he further patented, from 1891, a new method for football, a travel table for games, a sandwich board and various bits of railway equipment including something called a fog detonator.

Source. Selby Civic Society