TTH May 2025

TABLE TENNIS HISTORY May 2025

Welcome to the sixth issue of Table Tennis History.

Something for everyone? We aim to make each issue a broad mix. The earliest years of our sport are covered, along with the middle and late eras.

It’s great if some articles provoke serious thought, but we also embrace the playfulness of what is, after all, a game. Whereas some readers want straight-up history, collectors of vintage artifacts enjoy connecting with tangible evidence. We want to include all nations of the world, but of course we must follow where table tennis history --- and the accessibility of that history --- takes us. In any case, this publication aspires to offer plenty of what we all love --- the beauty and fascination of our sport.

This issue’s cover represents China’s bound onto the international table tennis scene in the 1950s. Success in the sport boosted the pride of that country’s people, just as it had done for the Japanese earlier in the decade, as they put disheartening pasts behind them.

Grateful thanks go to not one, not two, but THREE of my old New York friends for contributing articles to this issue. In years past I had the privilege of losing matches to all three. Beating me is not a prerequisite for article contribution. And your ideas and comments are always welcome.

You can reach us through our TT History website. Swaythling Club International makes past issues available on its Publications page.

Steve Grant 2

CONTENTS Cover: Rong Guotuan, 1959 world champion

The Importance of Rong Guotuan 5

China’s Sports --- The Magazine 9 The Chinese Visit England, 1965

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: Updates, Elaborations, Corrections, Part Six 13 Our History in Posters 20 The Versatile Lilli Palmer 24 Global Spread of Ping Pong, 1900-02 25 Boer War Ping Pong 26

Champions Take Leeds 28

Rally with Mally 32

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PING PONG MOTEL 34

Where Have the Choppers Gone? 36

The New 1922 Game 38

An Art Form, Not a Dance Routine 41

Ordish or Woolley or ??? 42

Reaction to the Boris Johnson Cover-Girl Revelation 44

Such a Nice Game Back Cover 4

The Importance of Rong Guotuan The 1959 world singles champion was a 21-year-old from Hong Kong, representing China. I had never given much thought to Rong Guotuan (1937-1968). Sure, he was significant as the first Chinese to win a world title in table tennis, or in any sport for that matter. But his playing career was soon overshadowed by Zhuang Zedong, who won the next three singles world championships. Rong (from a distance) somehow seemed an unsubstantial ghost, coming out of nowhere and then more or less disappearing.

I was very mistaken.

Rong was important in three ways: 1) As a player; 2) As an exemplar; 3) As a victim.

Double Happiness --- Importance as a Player Hong Kong was a bad place to be in the early 1940s, so Rong’s father moved the family to his hometown in Guangdong province when Rong was 4. Things didn’t work out there either, so it was back to Hong Kong when Rong was 12. He grew up in poverty, sometimes malnourished, with little schooling. But he took advantage of any opportunities he could find.

He was largely self-taught in table tennis and became one of Hong Kong’s top players in the 1950s. Here is his entry card to a tournament when he was 16, with translation:

Then politics intervened. Rong was an obvious choice for Hong Kong’s national team in 1956-57 but they passed him by, apparently because of his communist associations --- for example, his father’s workers’ union and Rong’s entry in a 1955 tournament celebrating the 6th anniversary of the founding of Red China.

So when China extended a hand to join mainland table tennis in 1957, Rong envisioned the start of a new, exciting life. And it was. China’s doctors cured his tuberculosis. He won the national singles championship in October 1958. At age 21, having conquered China, could he conquer the world? Give him until age 23, Rong proclaimed: He promised to train hard and win the world championship in 1961.

Table tennis was one of the ten sports featured in China’s "Ten-Year Guidelines for Sports Development" promulgated by the State General Sports Administration in 1958. By winning the world championship in 1959, Rong met the program goal nine years ahead of schedule.

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Photos from the1959 Worlds, when Rong beat Ferenc Sido of Hungary in the final -19, 12, 15, 14:

Sido, Rong, Ogimura, Miles

From Victim to Victor --- Importance as an Exemplar Since the 1800s, China had often been known as “The Sick Man of Asia,” an unfortunate appellation used even by its own citizens. Multiple war losses and occupations humiliated the country. Opium smokers and frail physiques were common published images, even within China. Left, from a 1929 book, shows a frail man saying: “I not only get sick from having a weak body; I also suffer bullying and humiliation.” The muscular man replies: “Model yourself on my body and who will dare bully or humiliate you?”

Mao in 1917 called for a build-up of both the country’s physique and individual physiques through athletics programs. China had already been working on exactly that, even in the Qing Dynasty, but progress was slow. At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, China sent over 200 athletes but came away with no medals.

Bruce Lee disapproved of the "sick man" term...then disproved it.

In 1959, after the Chinese women beat the strong English team in Corbillon Cup competition, one English columnist wrote, “Whoever reckoned on Chinese sports stars?” And that was BEFORE the men’s singles event.

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Rong’s win put the Chinese in the position of victor, no longer victim. The news was huge and spread across China in every medium. Mao and Zhou Enlai congratulated Rong in person (below) and also feted his three teammates who had reached the quarterfinals of men’s singles. Premier Zhou said the two great events of 1959 were Rong's victory and the 10th anniversary of the founding of New China. They therefore named the first table tennis ball produced in China "Double Happiness," a brand name still in use today.

This winner psychology was infectious, inspiring players coming up through the ranks. Chief among them was Zhuang Zedong. China won the Swaythling Cup for the first time in 1961, as Zhuang, Rong, Li Furong, Wang Chuanyao and Xu Yinsheng ended Japan’s five-in-a-row dominance.

In 1963 Rong began service as a coach and in 1964 was named captain of China’s women’s team. Success came quickly when the women won the Corbillon Cup for the first time ever in 1965 (below), ending Japan’s four-in-a-row dominance.

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The following is from an editorial in People’s Daily on September 11, 1965:

From Victor to Victim --- Importance as a Victim Mao took credit for the table tennis success. But then the Cultural Revolution turned everything on its head. Revisionist capitalists had infected Communism --- that was the new theme. In table tennis, for example, the Swaythling Cup was named after a bourgeois lord. Sport should be for the masses, not for the aggrandizement of elite athletes. China did not participate in the 1967 and 1969 world championships.

The story of Communism is best told as a history of cruelty than as a history of ideas. Table tennis stars and their coaches became targets. Zhuang Zedong came under investigation and was arrested in 1968. He and other top players and coaches, including Rong, were subjected to physical and psychological tortures. In April 1968 Fu Qifang, a 1957 team member, committed suicide. In May 1968 Jiang Yongning, a 1956-59 team member, committed suicide.

In June 1968, Rong committed suicide, leaving behind a wife (right) and two-year-old daughter. That’s when Zhou Enlai finally realized that the movement had gone too far. He declared that elite athletes must be protected and kept away from struggle sessions. Zhuang and others were set free. Table tennis training began again in 1969-70.

Recognition and Legacy In 1978, the National Sports Commission restored Rong Guotuan's reputation and held a memorial service. In 1984, Rong was named one of the outstanding athletes in the 35 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China. In 2009 he was selected as one of the top 100 people who have moved China since 1949. In September 2019, Rong was named "The Most Beautiful Struggler.” In 2024 his family hometown celebrated the 65th anniversary of Rong’s 1959 world title with a special exhibition.

At left is the Rong Guotuan statue in front of one of the schools named after him.

"When I was a child,” said Ma Long, “I heard the story of Rong Guotuan's battle. My heart surged and it inspired me to fight for victory."

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China’s Sports: The Magazine For this issue’s cover, we co-opted the cover of China’s Sports magazine from right after Rong Guotuan’s 1959 world championship. This English-language periodical was part of the Chinese diplomacy/propaganda program, which included magazines such as China Pictorial and China Reconstructs that are still being published today in multiple languages.

Well before the famous 1971 Ping Pong Diplomacy, China put considerable effort into sports diplomacy.

That included sending Its table tennis teams on exhibition trips abroad. In the 1950s, when China was Little Brother to the Soviet Union, it prioritized sports travel to socialist bloc countries. In the ‘60s, when the Soviets were more of a foe, the emphasis switched to Third World nations. For example, China sent its top male and female table tennis players to African countries in 1962-63, while also contributing coaches and equipment, along with copies of China’s Sports.

The photo at right is from that magazine, 1962 no. 4.

Sun Meiying, Khadidjata Diallo of Guinea, Hu Keming

An editorial appeared in People’s Daily, September 11, 1965, under the headline “Hold High the Red Banner of Mao Tse-tung’s thinkings; strive for still greater developments in sports and physical culture.” It began:

Table tennis coverage in China’s Sports grew as the 1959 world championships approached:

1958 No. 2 A) China’s new Great Leap Forward plan includes a call to action to hit the top levels of the world’s major sports in ten years. Wang Chuan-yao, the table tennis champion, believes China has a massive reserve of promising players. China will soon emerge among the top ranks, he predicts. Wang, who uses sponge, has set himself the goal of overtaking Japanese rivals.

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B) The Chinese TTA voted to restrict paddle thickness to 10 mm for one-sided and 15 mm for two-sided. They want the ITTF to reach a compromise on sponge that will allow all nations to remain in the ITTF.

1958 No. 6

1959 No. 1 Descriptions of 11 Chinese players heading to Dortmund for the world championships in a long article with photos. Of the eight penholders, seven are attackers and one a defender. By contrast, all three shakehand players are defenders.

Eight men: Wang Chuan-yao (penhold attacker, photo at right), Jung Kuo-tuan (Rong Guotuan, penhold attacker), Chiang Yung-ning (Jiang Yongning, penhold defender), Chuang Chia-fu (Zhuang Jiafu, shakehand defender), Hsu Ying-sheng (Xu Yinsheng, penhold attacker), Yang JuiHua (Yang Ruihua, penhold attacker), Li Jen-su (shakehand defender), Hu Ping-chuan (Hu Bingquan, penhold attacker).

Three women (below, left to right): Yeh Pei-chun (Ye Peiqiong, shakehand defender), Sun Mei-ying (penhold attacker), Chiu Chung-hui (Qiu Zhonghui, penhold attacker).

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One example of a player profile in the 1959 No. 1. Some profiles were longer.

1959 No. 2 A) Report on the just-completed world championships.

The first page and much of the second praises China’s results, including of course Rong’s singles championship. Then the report moves on to: “Two other Socialist countries which put up outstanding performances were Hungary and Czechoslavakia.” We get the details of those results, and also: “Pleuse of the German Democratic Republic beat Johnny Leach, a veteran player from England.”

Only after all that do we learn that, oh by the way, Japan won the Swaythling Cup, the Corbillon Cup and almost all the individual events. BUT we should note that Japan had only one man in the singles semifinals. Meanwhile, many of the “western countries showed signs of weakening.” Pages 3 and 4 were devoted to an evaluation of playing styles around the world. “Power table tennis” is growing and “pure defense” is on the way out.

B) Three-page article --- “A Road of Hard Battles” --- detailing each of Rong’s seven matches en route to the singles gold.

C) Short essay by the president of the Chinese TTA summarizing results, crediting the motherland and looking to the future.

D) Short essay by Rong himself: “I have won the much coveted singles title and I owe my success to the solicitude of the Party and the whole people. I am very young both in age and technique. So I still have a lot more to learn ... [Credits the motherland and teammates.] ... My success makes it all the more necessary for me to avoid conceit and swelled-headedness.

Furthermore, I will keep on with hard training and learning so that I can win together with my compatriots still more and greater honours for our motherland.”

With the coming of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, sports delegation visits came to a halt, as did elite athlete training. Publication of China’s Sports magazine was suspended until the 1970s.

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The Chinese Visit England, 1965 Members of the world champion men’s and women’s teams toured England in May 1965. The Chinese men included the gold, silver and bronze singles medalists at the worlds three weeks earlier in Yugoslavia --- Zhuang Zedong, Li Furong and Zhou Lansun. The two women’s team representatives were Li Henan and Liang Lizhen.

At all three stops --- London, Birmingham and Manchester --the Chinese swept the boards 9-0. Here are the known results, along with two items from the Daily Mirror.

(Notes: Some Birmingham matches finished too late to make the newspaper ... It seems a fourth tour stop was planned for Cardiff, Wales, with Bryan Merrett taking the place of Chester Barnes, but the event was cancelled ... Johnny Leach was non-playing captain for England.)

Zhou Lansun versus Chester Barnes

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101 ISSUES Updates, Elaborations, Corrections Part Six, Issues 76 thru 84 We continue our analysis of the 101 issues of Table Tennis Collector/Table Tennis History Journal. Those issues can be viewed at https://www.ittf.com/history/documents/journals/.

Issue 76 ***Pages 1 and 3. Discusses a “St. Bride’s Cup” awarded to Victor Barna of Hungary.

Does not mention that this is a half-size replica given for winning the world men’s singles championship three times consecutively or four times in total. The other players who have accomplished this are Richard Bergmann in 1950, Zhuang Zedong in 1965 and Ma Long in 2019. Barna later wrote, “I was glad to have a copy in case I someday had to relinquish the original.” The TTC article incorrectly states that Barna received this after winning his third title in 1933; it was actually after winning his fourth title (and third consecutive) in 1934.

Issue 76 ***Page 4. Shows a poster promoting an unidentified Victor Barna exhibition match. We tracked it down to a 1965 event in Bermuda, captured in the photo at right, when Barna was 53. Three months later, Richard Bergmann and his exhibition partner Dal-Joon Lee appeared at the same Bermuda venue.

A newspaper article overdid the advance buildup by saying that DJ Lee “is rated number one in the world and is a sure favourite to capture the world crown...” Only one person could have written that press release: Bergmann, impish promoter extraordinaire.

Issue 76 ***Page 39. Shows an inscribed painting given to Victor Barna on January 6, 1950, by the Irish TTA. Not mentioned is that Barna won the Ulster Open that day.

Issue 78 ***Page 14. Tab-Ten, a new form of table tennis, is discussed in Issues 14, 78 and 94.

We present a fresh perspective on page 38 of this issue.

Issue 78 ***Page 15. A short bio of German player Lilli Peiser tells how she became the actress Lilli Palmer (left), wife of actor Rex Harrison.

We add to the story on page 24.

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Issue 78 ***Page 27. Our colleague Hans-Peter Trautmann of Germany showed two postcards in TT Collector 33 and 78, each from Czech team member Antonin Malecek to his parents. The mailings were timely, right after each of the first two world championships, the December 1926 in London and the January 1928 in Stockholm.

Hans-Peter translated the 1926 card, written when Malecek was only 17:

Malecek and Mechlovits, 1926, London

The 1928 Stockholm card (below) was briefer. Our translation: “Greetings from across the sea.

Today we are going to Berlin, where we will be staying for a few days. I’ll write when I arrive.” The signatures are hard to read but seem to be his teammates Bedřich Nikodém, Erwin Fleischmann and Kurt Heller. No match results, but perhaps he had mentioned them in an earlier postcard.

The team was 3-5, an improvement over their 1-5 record in 1926. Malecek only equaled his personal 1926 team results of 7-11. But he could boast of scoring his team’s only two points against Hungary with wins over world champion Zoltan Mechlovits and Sandor Glancz. In the singles event, he made the round of 16 by beating Charlie Bull of England, and also made the round of 16 in doubles.

Malecek continued to improve. At the 1929 Worlds he went 13-5 in Swaythling matches to lead his team to a 5-4 record. He again made the round of 16 in both singles and doubles. Three months later he won the English Open in a field that included world champion Fred Perry.

In 1930 Malecek won 16 of his 20 matches to lead the Czechs to a bronze medal at the worlds.

In 1931 future world singles champion Stanislav Kolar joined the squad and they took the silver medal, with Malecek going 11-6. In 1932, it was the glory of gold in Prague when the Czechs finally dethroned Hungary. Malecek himself had a losing record, though he did make the quarterfinals of mixed doubles with Marie Kettnerova. And a week later, he and Kolar won English Open doubles. But his world championships career was now over.

Issue 79 ***Page 37. Shows an ad for the new W.A. Curnock table tennis equipment.

William Anderton Curnock (1847-1917) was a real estate surveyor, agent and lender. When the ping pong craze struck London, he saw a new sideline opportunity, inventing an improved racket. (It wasn’t his first invention; in 1893, he patented a “tap for measuring liquid.”) The wood

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or celluloid hitting face would avoid the loud noise of the vellum banjo-head bats and also better maintain its physical integrity. Plus, holes in the hitting surface would allow the striker to add spin to the ball.

In July 1901 he sought a craftsman in the London Chronicle:

By September he was advertising the new bat, named Moorgate after his street address. It appears he was just across the street from the first-ever table tennis club, the renowned Cavendish at 40 Moorgate. The club’s racquet racket may well have inspired his invention.

In November, The Referee published words of praise:

... which Curnock then quoted in the next Illustrated Sporting: Call Curnock a leader, because wood bats soon proliferated.

Years later, always on the lookout for the latest new thing, Curnock at age 65 went into the motion picture business. At left is a 1912 article from the West London Observer.

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Issue 81 ***Page 6. Shocking headline concerns previously unknown table tennis ties of English politician Boris Johnson.

This article triggered a strong family reaction, as revealed on page 44.

Issue 81 ***Page 11. “An Inside View of Classic Table Tennis,” a planned four-part series by Don Varian (USA), starts with a 10page article on hand-made Mac Crossen blades. Part 2 in Issue 82, four pages of more Mac Crossen and a brief introduction to Hock bats, opens with this:

More on Hock was promised in Part 3. Inexplicably, Parts 3 and 4 never appeared. This was a shame because the author was the acquirer of the Hock business and its archives, of which Parts 1 and 2 gave only a glimpse.

Marty Reisman called the Hock bat the Stradivarius of table tennis. Bernie Hock’s life (19121999) is nicely covered by his U.S. Table Tennis Hall of Fame profile at https://ustthof.projecttabletennis.com/profiles/bernard-hock/ .

We can add these photos from 1937, 1953 and 1959:

Bernie Hock, unidentified, Jimmy McClure

At the end of Part 1, Don Varian writes that he has no record of what happened to the Mac Crossens after the early 1940s, except that the bat company was sold in 1957. Cleon Bailey Mac Crossen (1887-1963) retired to California after 30 years as a Milwaukee court reporter. In the 1950s, his son Don (1920-2008) continued playing table tennis tournaments but played even more golf tournaments. Don’s older brother Jack also played both sports. In the 1930s, their mother Marie was president of the Milwaukee Women’s Golf Association, while father C.B. was president of the Milwaukee TT Association. Photo at left shows C.B. and his wife after they won the men’s and women’s divisions at a 1933 golf tournament.

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At the late date of 1970, it’s surprising to see this ad for both Hock and Mac Crossen bats by a small sporting goods chain.

Issue 81 ***Page 34. Introduction of a series that shows evidence that ping pong had reached 56 countries by the end of 1902. See page 25 for the three new nations since added to the list.

Issue 81 ***Page 39. Shows the April 1902 English beverage ad at left.

Update: At right is the bottle and the label, on which is printed, under “PING,” a trademark number that dates registration to January 1902.

Issue 81 ***Page 40. An ad offering ping pong brooches demonstrates the early popularity of the game in Wales:

A few years ago, a Welsh seller offered the brooches or pins shown below on eBay. To an inquiry he responded: “The items were sourced from a house clearance in Caernarfon, North Wales (where your local town hall got its slate roof from!) The homeowner was a personal friend and a lovely gentleman who had a difficult life that left him a bit of a recluse and a collector.

He was the third generation to live in the house and it was packed to the rafters with stuff.” Caernarfon is just an hour’s drive from the Dolgellau ad location, so the Ping Pong brooches may well be those offered at that store. The handle style and mother-of-pearl faces (left) clearly denoted Ping Pong battledores, as contrasted with the tennis brooch at right from the same set.

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Issue 81 ***Page 47. An intriguing photo of a large 1902 English tournament sparks our story on page 28 of this issue.

Issue 81 ***Page 70. Shows an English exhibition program from a 1965 Chinese tour of England. See page 12 for the results.

Issue 83 ***Page 6. Shows soldiers playing ping pong on the South African veldt. See page 26 for more Boer War table tennis.

Issue 83 ***Page 14. Announces the discovery of an 1888 Christmas catalog that reveals the maker (E.I. Horsman) and the look of Parlor Tennis, in which the player hits small variously colored rubber balls into a basket net. Update: Below is a trade card promoting the game, using the same action drawing. (The printer misspelled A.G. Spalding as “N.G. Spalding.”)

The game sold rather well, especially in the Midwest and Northeast of the U.S. As late as 1894, Montgomery Ward & Co. offered it in its mail-order catalog (right), but with the number of balls reduced from 24 to 12.

People were undoubtedly playing this game in icy 1891 Massachusetts, where James Naismith was seeking an indoor sport for his students. The concept of propelling a ball into a basket parallel to the floor could well have inspired his invention of basketball.

Issue 83 ***Page 48. A circa-1901 set by T. Ordish & Co. of London shares the cover design of the Woolley & Co. set shown in Issue 84. On page 42, we explore the identity of the actual game maker.

Issue 83 ***Page 56. A 1960s postcard pictures the Ping Pong Motel. For more on that motel and other Ping Pong lodgings, see page 34.

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Issue 83 ***Page 60. Shows two Chinese posters from the 1960s/70s. Here they are again, but this time with English translations. Issue 87, pages 33-40, has many more Chinese table tennis posters.

Everyone is achieving great results and breaking records, striving to participate in the National Games!

Guangdong Provincial Academic and Technical College National Games Preparatory Committee.

Silver ball conveys friendship.

Long live the unity of the world’s people!

Issue 84 ***Page 24. Our Colombian colleague Jorge Arango displays two images from Feb. 1902 and labels them pirated, below. (The center ad is from Finland, not Sweden, though in the Swedish language.) More likely, these retailers were simply using the drawing provided by the manufacturer. That would be F.H. Ayres, which used the image in April 1901, below right.

But here is an actual pirate: “Harry” (his last name may have been Shuttleworth) liked the drawing so much that he copied it onto the postcard below, sent from Ormskirk, England, near Liverpool, to Mrs. John McCarthy in neighboring Aughton in October 1901.

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Our History in Posters

by Will Shortz (USA) Years ago most major national and international table tennis tournaments had posters for display in public places to attract spectators. I've been collecting graphic art of this sort for some time.

The oldest example in my collection is an ad used on the London Underground (right) to publicize the 1937 English Open, the most prestigious tournament of the era, outside of the World Championship itself. This tournament was a good one for the Americans. Ruth Aarons won Women’s Singles and took Mixed Doubles with Buddy Blattner. Sol Schiff and Abe Berenbaum won Men's Doubles. Jimmy McClure made the Men’s Singles final, where he lost 3-1 to the legendary Viktor Barna of Hungary.

Two years ago on eBay I saw an old table tennis poster offered by a dealer in Paris. I managed to track him down, and over the course of 12 months I purchased a total of 40 posters from him. Notable ones included World Championships in Stockholm (1957), Prague (1963), Ljubljana (1965), Munich (1969), Calcutta (1975), and Chiba, China (1991), each of which I show below.

Stockholm 1957

Prague 1963

Ljubljana 1965

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Munich 1969, two different posters

Calcutta 1975

Chiba 1991

Other posters include: First European Championships (Budapest, 1958)

First World University Games (Hannover, Germany, 1973)

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1992 Olympics Barcelona, the second Olympics to hold table tennis as an event

Last fall I selected two dozen of my favorite posters — chosen for their appealing graphics, their significance as events, or both. Igor Annopolsky, a professional framer who belongs to my table tennis club in New York, framed them. And now they hang along one long wall at the club. Anyone who visits the Westchester Table Tennis Center can see them.

I asked the Paris dealer, Michaël Bordat, how he acquired the posters. He replied: These posters all come from the collection of a Bulgarian poster collector named Rusi Russev. He was a sports teacher and part of or close to the Bulgarian Olympics Committee. As such, he would travel with the national teams and try to get as many posters as he could from all the places and events he visited. He would also ask other people he knew who traveled to sports events to bring him back posters.

After more than 50 years of collecting and then at the end of his life, when I met him, Rusi had several thousand posters in his collection, from all sports, all over the world. I was fortunate enough to buy his collection, and I have been working on finding new owners for these fabulous posters ever since.

Rusi passed away in 2019, but he would be happy to know that his table tennis posters are displayed and appreciated.

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European Youth Championships

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The Versatile Lilli Palmer She was a junior German table tennis champion who played in the world championships. She was also a lifelong leading actress of stage and screen. In later years, Lilli Palmer (1914-1986) was a painter, novelist and television host, too. Our philatelist colleague Hans-Peter Trautmann of Germany wrote an interesting bio of her in TT Collector 78. We can enlarge upon it: Her name was Lilli Peiser when she lost to the great world champion Maria Mednyanszky in the round of 16 at the 1930 Berlin worlds, scoring a respectable 18, 15, 19. She was only 15 years old. Lilli later said that she traced her physical prowess to being raised at a boys’ school. “I was European junior table tennis champion,” she said in a 1984 interview. “It’s nothing much if you play with boys all the time.” There was no “European” title at the time, so she meant German. It wasn’t intended as an exaggeration. She never liked referring to herself as German or even mentioning the country.

During the war, she told people she was from Vienna, probably at the encouragement of her film studio.

This photo, taken right before the 1930 worlds, shows Lilli fourth from the left. Next to her, German player Mona Ruster looks at the camera.

Drama classes soon led to a budding career in German theater, following in her mother’s footsteps. But the Nazis were making life difficult for Jews. She moved her career to Paris in 1933, where she sang at the Moulin-Rouge, and then to London.

There, ITTF president Ivor Montagu came back into her life, this time as a producer of Alfred Hitchcock’s Secret Agent (1936), one of Lilli’s first films. These two photos are from her fun scenes with actor Peter Lorre. By now she had changed her name from Peiser to Palmer.

Table tennis entered into another of her acting roles. That was in The Gentle Sex (1943), about seven women training together in the British military. She played a Czech refugee who was good at table tennis. The screen shots below are from about the 21-minute mark in the film. Both this and the above-mentioned 1936 film can be seen in full on YouTube. Over the next 40 years Palmer played many more roles on stage and screen, some with her husband Rex Harrison.

Palmer said she wanted to be remembered simply as a person who led an interesting life.

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TT Collector 81 listed all known countries where Ping Pong had arrived by the end of 1902. The first page of the article is shown below. We have since been able to add three more countries: Bahamas, Trinidad and Barbados. But the list is surely still not complete, so please contact us if you have evidence for any unlisted nation.

Below is newspaper evidence for the three Caribbean additions.

Bahamas, Feb. 15, 1902:

Trinidad, May 18, 1902

Barbados, Jan. 18, 1902

Trinidad, May 21, 1902; set descriptions point to Curnock, of London.

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Boer War Ping Pong The Graphic, November 23, 1901

Daily Graphic, December 23, 1901

From a photo album dated February 1902, but perhaps pre-dating the album by a few months:

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From TT Collector 81:

At left is a scene at the prisoner-of-war camp in Bermuda, from the cover of The Graphic, May 24, 1902.

Ping Pong was also played at the POW camps in India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and probably Saint Helena.

On his way to peace talks in Pretoria in April 1902, Boer General Louis Botha stopped at a British outpost, where he asked the commander about ping pong. Botha had never seen it played, and he and his staff wanted to learn.

Upon arrival in Pretoria, the Boer officials made numerous purchases of ordinary items. Optimists interpreted this, especially the acquisition of ping pong sets, as evidence that the Boers were ready to end hostilities and return to farm life.

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Champions Take Leeds

The scene above, published in TT Collector 81, shows the opening night of the first big table tennis tournament in Leeds, in the north of England. It was February 1902. The city was excited about the two-evening event, which drew a large turnout of both players and spectators, proceeds to benefit the South African War Local Relief Fund.

Victoria Hall, part of the Leeds Town Hall, was much more impressive than that image portrays. At right is a fuller look on a different occasion. This 1850s municipal palace broke new ground in English city halls. The soaring space lent a dignity to the ping pong that might otherwise have been lacking. Concerts and other performances still entertain audiences there today. At the far end is the largest organ of its kind in Europe.

To shoot the above photo, the cameraman stood in front of the organ. Each of the 12 tables is accompanied by a tall sign with details of that match. The poster at the rear reads “Latest Table Tennis Requisites!” but it’s hard to interpret the store name.

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At this lobbers’ paradise, with few if any lobbers, players pause for the camera. We can see numbers on the backs of two of them. Those who instead face the camera are temporarily blinded by the flash. One spectator complained to the local newspaper that the loud bang of the flash explosion loosened decades of dust from the ceiling, He added, “A number of ladies must have had their smart costumes ruined.” But that was not ceiling dust. It was undoubtedly the magnesium flash powder itself, which formed a high smoky cloud that quickly materialized on people’s heads.

At the bottom of the photo, nearest the photographer, sat the orchestra, identifiable by their sheet music (right). “An excellent selection of music was provided throughout the proceedings,” according to one reporter. Did their program include any of the popular new “Ping Pong” songs?

The Yorkshire Post reported that the entrants “comprised 17 married ladies, 31 unmarried damsels, and 120 boys, youths, and men of middle age. Several hundred other people--parents, cousins, and cynics --- paid for admission to see them make sport, and left the hall with varied impressions. Those capable of appreciating the scientific inwardness of the game, and those, who, benighted, had yet an eye for attitudes graceful and otherwise, voted the tournament interesting. On the other hand, there were a few serious-minded persons who, unable to discover either skill or humour in the game, thought the display bewildering, confusing, and monotonous.”

The article continued:

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On the male side, “one of the cleverest was a little Wakefield boy --aged 13 --- in an Eton jacket, a big turn-down white collar, and a black and yellow tie ... Playing with a wood racquet, with velvet on one side, he is as sharp as an eagle, and after enticing his opponent round the corner of the table, he will suddenly drop a return over the net on the opposite side. More than one of his rivals unconsciously scrambled over the table to “get at it” but before the process of sprawling had been completed the ball had vanished ... “

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Another reporter was unimpressed by the general skill level:

The women’s winner was Miss L. Dixon of Leeds, who used a cork-covered wood bat. “Vellum racquets I discarded some time ago,” she said. The men’s winner was H.L. Creer of York, shown below, an all-around athlete preparing for a career in accountancy. (He also became Sheriff of York in the 1930s.)

Dixon and Creer each played a conservative style.

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Rally with Mally That’s what some players did at the Leeds tournament described on the preceding pages. One account said the ladies who made it to the final rounds favored “the large parchment variety known as bull-dog racquets.” That referred to bats made by J.R. Mally & Co., such as the one at right.

The 1902 ad below shows that they came in several varieties, including the Biting Bull Dog and the Bull Dog Screwer. But the two Leeds winners, as noted, used wood bats, and Mally offered those, too.

When it’s time to pick up the balls, don’t get your suspenders all in a twist. Mally has the solution:

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Other Mally racquets.

Left: Cane Right: Hardwood

Joseph Robert Mally (1857-1920) was in various lines of business over the years.

He took out many patents. One was for an amusement ride featured at Crystal Palace, the Waltzing Tops, similar to today’s Spinning Teacups. Mally became best known, though, for his billiards tables.

In 1911, Mally’s building collapsed (below). His billiards showroom was at street level, and his family resided one floor up. Everyone, including a customer, escaped unharmed, thanks to a warning from the very old building’s creaks and groans. A court held that the people dismantling the neighboring building were responsible for monetary damages. Mally later opened a public billiards parlor.

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PING PONG MOTEL

TT Collector 83 showed this postcard of a motel. We looked up the history. The motel opened in 1964 and thrived until 1980, when new owners changed the name to Aladdin. It was near the Kennedy Space Center on the east coast of Florida. We don’t know how it got its name, but here are two Ping Pong Motel facts: 1) The 1969 table tennis Missileland Open had its headquarters at this motel. The tournament itself, at the nearby civic center, was won by U.S. team member John Tannehill, 17, over Joe Sokoloff, one week after Neil Armstrong’s moon walk.

2) From a random blog post: My dad gifted me his Apollo Launch Press Badge. Turns out he would watch the launches with freaking Arthur C. Clarke as well as a bunch of other big name scifi/fantasy legends. Afterwards they would rent out the Ping Pong Motel and party the night away.

Photos show freaking Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008), the 1968 author/ screenwriter of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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Today you can try the Ping Pong Hotel in Sao Paulo (left) or Hotel Ping Ping near Rome (right), though neither appears to have a ping pong table.

In 2011 the city of Huainan, China, planned a new Olympic Park:

Closer view of the Ping Pong Hotel concept, 150 meters high

Sadly, only the large stadium was built:

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Where Have the Choppers Gone?

by A.J. Scott (USA) I have been closely following the ITTF women’s rankings for the past 10 years or so, during which the number of pips-out/anti-spin players in the top 100 has been hovering just north or south of 25. A decade ago, the majority of these 25 or so women were choppers. Now, only a few are. What happened? The change to the 40+ ball happened...

In 2017, with the new ball, I used to hit with a chopper who found he was losing his edge. He couldn’t get the same amount of spin on the ball. And when returning loops, he was seeing the ball dip much more: Back from the table, he was flat-out missing the ball altogether. So he morphed into a new type of defender --- a chopblocker. He switched to long pips on the backhand and inverted rubber on the forehand. Instead of always backing off the table and chopping, he stayed close and punched, flipped, blocked, or chopblocked with the long pips. He started winning again.

Joo Sae-hyuk of South Korea (left), whom some regard as the greatest chopper of all time, practically proclaimed the death of the defensive game when the 40+ arrived. In a recent video, he advised choppers to play with inverted on both sides and use more offense. Very few top male choppers remain today. The best are Wang Yang of Slovakia and Ruwen Filus of Germany, while Luka Mladenovic of Luxembourg is the top chopblocker. Lower-ranked Aida Satoshi of Japan is a doubleinverted player who loops and chops on both wings.

But back to the women’s game: Chopblockers have come to the fore.

Since summer 2023, chopblockers have defeated five of the top six women on the Chinese National Team --- Qian Tianyi, Chen Xingtong, Wang Yidi, Wang Manyu, and even the longtime world's no. 1, Sun Yingsha.

Sun lost to Ayhika Mukherjee of India at the World Team Championships in February 2024 (above) and then lost to Kim Kum-yong of North Korea (left) at the Asian Championships in October. Kim then took out Miwa Harimoto of Japan to win that title for the first time ever for North Korea.

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The top four Indian women are chopblockers --Sreeja Akula, Manika Batra, Ayhika Mukherjee and Yashaswini Ghorpade. At the 2024 Olympics, Akula and Batra were the first-ever players from India to make the women's singles round of 16.

Sabine Winter of Germany (left), worldranked 51, recently swapped out her backhand inverted for anti-spin and became the only European chopblocker among the top 100 women. In February she beat world No. 14 Sofia Polcanova of Austria, 3-1.

Meanwhile, at the World University Games last year, Kyoka Idesawa of Japan (right), with long pips on the backhand and short pips on the forehand, took out the Chinese players Qian Tianyi, He Zhuojia and Wang Xiaotong. In November she took down Chen Yi and again Wang Xiaotong, in spectacular fashion.

The Chinese men have had trouble with chopblockers, too. At a February WTT event, Amirreza Abbasi of Malta (by way of Iran), shown at left, scored a big 3-1 upset over the No. 7 Chinese man, Xue Fei, world rank 38. The score of the last game was 11-3! The Chinese need to develop a top chopblocker, if only to have that style around to train against.

Where have all the choppers gone? I would say they're mostly still here. They're just playing closer to the table now. And the recent successes of these chopblockers will persuade even more up-and-coming players to adopt that style.

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Tab-Ten, the New 1922 Game Frederick Wiliiam Last (1892-1951) was a top tennis player and coach, pictured at right on the cover of his 1920 book. He wrote that table tennis is great practice for tennis. Mr. Last elaborated in his regular tennis column for London’s Pall Mall Gazette in January 1920. Tennis has entered a boom, he said.

Now, in the winter off season, he advised that players could improve their game by taking up the “defunct” game of Ping Pong, as Americans have done. But the Americans, he observed, have added a new twist --- allowing volleying. Last is all in favor of this and even adds another change --- marking out a miniature tennis court on the table, the better to follow tennis rules exactly and hone skills for the outdoor game.

David H.E. King, 36, also of London, grabbed the ball and ran with it. He added still one more twist: Make the table size exactly proportional to a tennis court. A scale of 1 to 9 made King’s court 8 ½ feet by 4 feet, vs. the broader 9 x 5 of table tennis. He called the game Tab-Ten and in 1922 threw all his energy behind it. His new company, David H.E. King Ltd., offered Tab-Ten “table lawn tennis” equipment, with a remarkably large array of racquet and other choices. (In 1923 he sold Tab-Ten tennis equipment, too, as well as a Tab-Ten model-making lathe, unrelated to sports.)

In 1924, though, King called it quits. Tab-Ten must have been a failure of product, not a failure of promotion, because King tirelessly marketed his awkward game --- awkward to use and awkward to sell. His promotions included: 1) Enlisting Mr. Last to write a 32-page Tab-Ten booklet with a playing guide and numerous photos of celebrities demonstrating, several of which you can see in TT Collector 94.

2) Exhibitions by celebrities and others at various English and Welsh locations. The photo below left, from Last’s booklet, shows comedic actress Bea Lillie. Much later, after she moved to America’s Broadway, Bea did an exhibition for Parker Brothers Ping Pong, below right, unrelated to Tab-Ten (with tennis star Bill Tilden and actor Junior Durkin.) In

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June 1922 Tab-Ten was featured at the opening-day festivities of London’s United Ex-Servicemen Club. The resulting game photos of generals and an MP were thereafter used repeatedly in marketing. At another exhibition, right, Mr. Last plays and bowtied Mr. King umpires.

3) Offering prizes to anyone who could beat the Tab-Ten representative, sometimes meaning King himself.

4) Buying many newspaper ads, which called Tab-Ten “England’s New National Game” (left) or promised an upcoming world championship that never arrived.

5) Forming an association, starting Tab-Ten clubs and holding at least one tournament.

6) Partnering with the Daily Express to give away sets to anyone placing a classified ad in the paper.

7) Offering a £100 reward (right) for information leading to a successful lawsuit against any Tab-Ten imitator. Ping Pong (Jaques/Hamley/Parker) had good reason to post warnings to fight off imitators. Tab-Ten? Not so much. But it was a reasonable publicity stunt.

8) Pretending Tab-Ten had reached Africa by using a 20-year-old photo of ping pong (left).

Meanwhile, Tab-Ten had competition from other new games. A Tab-Ten demonstrator, tennis coach Cecil Sprey-Smith, strayed from the fold by doing exhibitions of Volley-Shuttle, a game for lawn or table:

Another new 1922 British game, Deflecto:

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David Hendrik Edgar King (1885-1969), enterprising and always full of business ideas, was the son of a solicitor. His great-uncle was the artist John Linnell; King’s prized possessions included paintings by Linnell and engravings by Linnell’s famous friend William Blake.

Here’s a timeline of King’s activity: 1908 (age 23): Elected a member of City of London Tradesmen’s Club. Closed his business, King Brothers Ltd., exporters.

1912-1913 (age 27): Founding organizer of Patchwork tournaments in London, Southampton and Bournemouth. This was a puzzle game King invented, involving pictures, scissors and pasting, seen at left in action.

March 1913: Fought to a draw at a chess simultaneous exhibition by the German international master Eduard Lasker (distant cousin of the world champion Lasker).

1914 (age 29): Director of Dean and Sons, publishers of interactive, moveable and popup books for children.

War Years: Served as a seaman in the Navy. Organized a local branch of the Vegetable Products Committee in 1918 to contribute vegetables to the Navy.

1919 (age 34): Founded The Catholic Society, a social and good-works organization.

1922-24 (age 38): Tab-Ten. 1923: Bought a Tunbridge ware business (inlaid woodwork) but sold it a year later.

May 1924: Court orders the winding-up of David H.E. King Ltd. 1926: Creditors received back less than 1% of their outlay.

1924-30 (age 39-45): Employed in publicity/marketing by National Paper Mills. Became well known as a “Made in Britain” promoter/speaker/writer. He may have adopted those ideas from Joseph Chamberlain (1836-1914), the British statesman for whom King said he once worked.

1928-29: First Catholic to serve on the High Wycombe Town Council (right).

1931 (age 46): Acquired a large land parcel, but his announced plan to construct 1,250 houses did not come to fruition.

1939 (age 54): Owned Winter Garden Club, a restaurant/hotel in Kingston, London.

A police raid put him out of business; King pleaded guilty to operating illegal gambling and providing alcohol, music and dancing without a license.

1949-54 (age 64-69): Served on the Babbacombe town council.

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An Art Form, Not a Dance Routine

by Marcus Allison (USA) The first time I met the late great George Braithwaite, the USA team member originally from Guyana, he said, “Are you from Jamaica? You serve and play like a Jamaican.” I was intrigued by the statement. Indeed, in other sports like basketball and boxing, I've heard similar comments about participants possessing styles particular to geographic regions. In Chinese martial arts movies, for instance, rival fighters often state they have trained in the martial arts from different parts of the country, and therefore their kick or punch is technically different.

The first time I saw Quadri Aruna (below) --- even before knowing who he was or where he came from --- his playing style reminded me of Atanda Musa, whose prime time was 30 years earlier! I said to myself, “Is this guy from Nigeria?” Lo and behold, he is.

Playing the game is much like acquiring new words in your vocabulary, or your regional accent. You are subject to the environment that you inhabit.

But is this changing, and for the worse? We now live in an era where information from one part of the world is easily relayed to another. Styles and techniques that were characteristic of one region are easily transferrable simply by going to YouTube.

To say that a way of executing a shot started in one place is difficult because of the speed at which information travels. The source of that information is everywhere -- and nowhere all at the same time.

I was watching a match between Aruna and Tomokazu Harimoto, and the commentator was talking about Aruna's playing style being “less formal” and “not technically sound.” It made me bristle a bit. Table tennis is an art form, not a dance routine. It's not like critiquing platform diving, where there's a “perfect” way of accomplishing an act. The objective is simply to win, within the rules of the game. The manner in which you play is part of what makes the game interesting. Table tennis is akin to preparing eggs: There are many ways to do it.

Not enough effort is expended to explore regional differences. Jamaicans have been “serving like a Jamaican” long before they knew what a “tomahawk” was (a term potentially offensive to Native Americans). We were doing “banana shots” long ago, but if you called it that while we were doing it, you might end up in a fight. Terminology like “chiquita” or “strawberry” homogenizes the game. It strips techniques of their regional distinctiveness and attempts to place their origins in the hands of some “flavor of the moment” player.

Alexis Lebrun of France has been gaining traction for a forehand serve I've seen described as --- oy --- a “windshield wiper” or even a “lollipop.” No one tries to connect the plausible history of that serve to anyone in the past. It's as if it never existed before. Meanwhile, Danny Seemiller must be yelling from this side of the pond, “What the hell?! That's MY serve!” He was the first person I saw doing it, at an invitational tournament in Jamaica when I was 7 or 8. It's a serve I still use. It's not a “windshield wiper”! It's a Seemiller serve, until we are better able to place its origin.

Bananas, chiquitas, strawberries, lollipops? Gimme a break. History is important, folks.

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Ordish or Woolley or ???

From TT Collector 83, we learn that this set is an Ordish & Co.:

In TTC 84 we find this Woolley & Co. set with the same lid design:

This is a different Ordish set and accompanying description in TTC 31:

Description says there is “no doubt” that the stamp inside the lid, “Thornton & Co. Ltd. Belfast,” is simply the store that happened to sell the set. We also learn that the rubber grips would not have been original to the set. Is this certain? So the buyer afterwards found or hand-crafted rubber grips that exactly fit these racquets? Thornton was first and foremost in the rubber fabrication business. Is it possible that Thornton itself made the grips? And even designed and made most of the set equipment?

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At left is one of Thornton’s ads in a Belfast newspaper, December 1901.

Note the phrases “Indiarubber Manufacturers” and “Trade Supplied.”

So were Ordish and Woolley truly the makers of these three sets, including two sets with nearly identical lids, one

by Ordish and the other by Woolley?

It is more believable that Ordish and Woolley were simply the publishers and wholesalers. At their core, those two firms were always printers/publishers/stationers. For example, Woolley was best known for its playing cards, such as the 1863 version at right.

This is an Ordish ad from 1879: Remember Glevum Games, owned by the Roberts brothers, whose first big hit was Piladex in 1890? (See our January 2024 issue.) Ordish was the publisher, as labeled on the Piladex box lid below. It turns out that Woolley also published and wholesaled games for those Roberts brothers. C.W. Faulkner was yet another company that published for the Roberts, and it separately published a parlour tennis set in 1901.

Notes: After Thomas Ordish died in 1899 at age 78, the business was carried on by his sons and other family members for many years. The Woolley founder had died in the 1850s, but the business continued until 1904, when it was bought by Darling & Son Ltd.

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If you were a reader of Table Tennis Collector 81 in 2017, you will never forget this stunning headline:

Boris was Boris Johnson, former London Mayor and soon to be Prime Minister. After publication, editor Chuck Hoey sent the article to Johnson, which drew an email from Johnson’s aunt: My brother Stanley has forwarded on to me the email you recently sent to my nephew Boris containing Steve Grant’s article on our French grandmother Marie-Louise playing table tennis (and tennis) with her sister Yvonne. I am absolutely thrilled to have this. I had seen the photo of them both playing together in the dining room in an old scrapbook of my grandfather’s [below], but without knowing where it came from. The other photos I have never seen, so it is great to have them. Many thanks for thinking of us. [She then asks for original photos for their archive, and continues...] I am copying this to Steve as well, so he knows of my request. If he is the person you refer to in ‘one of our researchers’, many thanks for his diligence.

My thanks again. We were all brought up playing table tennis, but not on the dining room table, and not as well as my grandmother!

With best wishes, Birdie Fully two years later came this email from Boris’s sister: Dear Steve You don't know me but I am Alexander Boris de Pfeffel's sister Rachel - a fanatical table tennis player and tennis player...

I am also a journalist and trying to hoover up as much detail about Yvonne and Marie-Louise de Pfeffel as I can find...perhaps for a piece for the Times (I saw your piece, where was it published?

What a hoot!) ... with this follow-up: Dear Steve Thanks for replying - I am now commissioned by the Times to do a piece about my greatgrandmother and great aunt, the Original Williams sisters ... Long shot, but do you have the original sources for your ping pong piece and ANYTHING more about the de Pfeffels and tennis (the editor of the Times is a tennis fanatic) to hand you could send me?

I will obviously credit your book HUGE. [This uncommon usage of “HUGE,” it turns out, meant that the article would mention neither Steve nor his book Ping Pong Fever, which by the way is available wherever fine books are sold.]

Birdie - the keeper of the flame - is in mid-move but I am going to make the pilgrimage to the family "archive" in Sussex when she is more settled next week I hope.

Rachel Johnson (sister of Boris)

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Three months later, the following appeared in The Times, a British newspaper:

Rachel Johnson: My ancestors, ping-pong pioneers Never mind my family’s royal ties. I’m descended from whiff-whaff champions Rachel Johnson Monday June 24 2019, 12.01am BST, The Times

Rachel Johnson, in her tennis kit, and her ancestor Yvonne de Pfeffel BEN GURR FOR THE TIMES

The shock family news arrived by email from an American with the unimprovable name of Chuck Hoey. Chuck Hoey, honorary curator, the International Table Tennis Federation museum, and editor, The Table Tennis Collector, to give him his full designation.

It had been sent to my brother Boris (because, I presume, he had told the world as London mayor that whiff-whaff was coming home during the London 2012 Olympics). My father circulated it to the family with a three-word email saying: “Isn’t this great?”

“Dear Sir, One of my researchers has prepared an article for the next edition of my magazine, The Table Tennis Collector, which may be of interest to you,” Hoey’s letter began. This was already promising. I play table tennis and tennis — but not in my wildest fantasies could I have imagined how gratifying this random communication was going to turn out to be, suggesting that sporting enthusiasm, if not ability, is hereditary; like blond hair, close-set eyes and big noses.

“It concerns some ancestors of yours from 1902, and they have both a table tennis and a tennis connection! [Hoey’s exclamation mark]. The article includes some photos . . .”

OK, let us pause at that cliffhanger.

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This was already news to me. The BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? crack team of researchers had patiently untangled my paternal grandmother’s side of the family with a nit comb. The genealogists, archivists and researchers had established a royal connection on the wrong side of the blanket to George II via my half-French paternal grandmother, born Irene Yvonne Eileen Williams in Versailles. [She means Yvonne Irene, not Irene Yvonne.]

The ancestors in question were Granny’s mother, my great-grandmother, Marie-Louise de Pfeffel, and her sister, Yvonne, known as Tante Yvonne. I knew very little about them apart from what I had read in Granny’s memoir and heard from my father, aunts and uncles. They were aristocratic . . . they grew up in fine style in a mansion in Versailles . . . they both became a bit “vague” in their sixties (that was how we referred to age-related dementia in the old days) but were full of pep.

Johnson’s great-grandmother Marie-Louise de Pfeffel What the BBC team had not uncovered — and Hoey’s mag had — was that at the beginning of the last century my great-great-grandmother and great-greataunt [a mistake on both: Rachel means great, not great-great] were pioneering champions of the table-tennis table and tennis court at the beginning of the ladies’ game in both sports.

Imagine my rapture. This was far more exciting than discovering — thanks to WDYTYA? — that they were daughters of a German baron and the fivetimes great-granddaughters of a fat Hanoverian monarch. The descendants of royal love children are two a penny, but that they were colossi of ping pong and tennis, when ladies wore stays and long skirts and hats to play, was something special for me to savour, especially since it has taken more than another century for women’s sport to begin to compete with men’s for attention (my husband moans that there’s a rule that rugby and football commentators “have to be female” — and it’s taken until 2019 for the women’s football World Cup to be shown on the BBC).

“Shocking revelation!! Boris is tied to French Cover Girls, Paris Champs, and a Dining Table”, the article Hoey sent was headlined, thus proving that even harmless specialist-hobby publications have irrepressible tabloid tendencies. “These two Parisian-born girls looked at a dining table and saw the opportunity to become table-tennis champions, perhaps even the first ever French champs,” the article revealed.

In 1902, as a French newspaper called L’Univers reported, the first ping-pong tournament to be played in Paris was held at the headquarters of the Tennis Club de Paris in the Boulevard Exelmans. “There were a good many entries for the tournament, which resulted in some excellent play, and a victory for Mlle Yvonne de Pfeffel,” L’Univers noted, as well as reporting that the top tennis players in France were “among the party”, including the Mlles de Pfeffel and Adine Masson,

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then the top-seeded woman’s player in France, who was placed third in the tournament after Marie-Louise and Yvonne de Pfeffel.

After that, the teenage sister act became something of a sensation; the demoiselles de Pfeffel were on the cover of magazines. One called Femina shows them playing ping pong across an oval mahogany dining table in their house, the Pavillon du Barry. Inside, the photographs record their triumph: Yvonne is “gagnante de championnat de ‘Ping Pong’ [the sport still so new that it attracts inverted commas] recemment disputé au Tennis-Club de Paris”.

Music was composed in their honour, to wit the Ping-Pong Valse pour Piano by WK Hamilton, which showed a drawing of the de Pfeffel sisters playing ping pong on the cover of the sheet music.

Their achievements on the tennis court, in flowing white skirts and high-necked white blouses, plimsolls and wide-brimmed hats, were, if it is possible to imagine, even more distinguished.

Yvonne won the French Open (now Roland-Garros) for two years running in the mixed doubles with the top seed, Max Decugis (1905 and 1906). She was also in the French ladies’ final in 1905, but lost.

Marie-Louise, my grandmother’s mother, played in the Wimbledon championships in 1904, but didn’t have the same success on grass as her sister did on clay. She was knocked out in the second round or so (but then, there were only two rounds to the final, as opposed to four rounds for the gentlemen), but still.

As Janet Baylis, the assistant librarian of the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum, confirmed, Hoey was right to be excited about his revelation. “They were players of a very high level,” she said as she showed me entries concerning my female ancestors in leather-bound journals called things like Lawn Tennis and Badminton or Lawn Tennis and Croquet.

They might not have had to house their silverware in a separate shed, as the matchless Venus and Serena siblings do, but as far as I’m concerned Marie-Louise and Yvonne were racket-sport pioneers, the original Williams sisters of their day.

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(1935)