the ground at a distance from each other; and the business of every
one of the players is to bowl a marble by a regular succession into
all the holes, which he who completes in the fewest bowls obtains the
victory." This primitive form of golf is played by Zulu adults with
great enthusiasm, and is still popular among the car-drivers of
Belfast. (4) "Boss out, or boss and span, also called hit and span,
wherein one bowls a marble to any distance that he pleases, which
serves as a mark for his antagonist to bowl at, whose business it is
to hit the marble first bowled, or lay his own near enough to it for
him to span the space between them and touch both marbles; in either
case he wins, if not, his marble remains where it lay and becomes a
mark for the first player, and so alternately until the game be won."
In rural parts of England this was known as a "going-to-school game,"
because it helped the players along the road.
Mr F. W. Hackwood states that, in the middle of the 19th century,
taverns in the Black Country had regular marble alleys, consisting of
a cement bed 20 ft. long by 12 ft. wide and 18 in. from the ground,
with a raised wooden rim to prevent the marbles from running off.
Players knelt down to shoot, and had to "knuckle down" fairly--i.e. to
place the knuckle of the shooting hand on the ground, so that the flip
of the thumb was not aided by a jerk of the wrist. The game was
usually ring-taw. But marbles is now obsolete in England as a game for
adults (_Old English Sports_, London, 1907).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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