Fives 

 

 

Prior Park College has a magnificent, historically important set of Fives Courts. Yet you’d be amazed how few people know of their existence, let alone architectural importance. They were built on the grandest scale (they outshine anything at Oxford or Cambridge, Eton or Winchester) by Bishop Baines when Prior Park College was founded in the confident expectation that the game of Fives would remain forever as popular as it was then in the great schools of England. He was wrong. The game of Fives (like squash but with gloves) was to collapse in national popularity at the end of the 1800s. Tennis (with affordable racquets to hit the ball) took over.  Fives rapidly declined from universal popularity to marginal interest. Soon, Prior Park’s magnificent Fives Courts were abandoned, derelict, listed but unused.

Until now...

A ‘Fives Revival’ is underway, with one of our Courts already back in action for the first time in over 140 years. Modern Fives has evolved. Today most Fives is played as a singles or doubles game on indoor courts much the same sort of size as squash courts (increasingly, it’s played in squash courts). Our Fives Courts hark back to a lost, ancient style of play; there is something medieval and indeed continental about their atmosphere. Here in Bath, surprisingly, is the type of massive masonry one might expect to find in a Spanish monastery or French Cathedral. You can read historical accounts of old games of Fives being played with more people than the modern game – up to 4-a-side, but no one does that anymore, because, well, there isn’t anywhere viable to do it.  Except for Prior Park College.

So, we had a go. The size of the Courts easily accommodated the size of the teams; in fact, it produced a wonderfully fast and engaging match for the crowd of spectators watching on a hot summer afternoon, with some very exciting and extended rallies, and lots of scope for cunning tactics and devious strategies. I’d like to think the ghosts of our past student Fives players (names and dates carved as graffiti on the grand colonnade at the back of the Court stretch back to the 1800s) roused themselves on hearing a Fives ball on leather glove once more reverberate around the Old Ball Courts, and approved of the traditional team kit of whites-and-ties for the ‘Fives Revival’ at the College! The winning Team (15-4) was Roche House Quinquies floreat (May it flourish fivefold).

 Mr Watkinson - Trim