History of Fives
The story of Fives, from handball against English church walls to a game played across six continents today, in 11 milestones.
Key milestones
17th century and earlier: Before the formal court, the church wall
Fives belongs to a much older English tradition of handball played against walls. Church and chapel walls served as ready-made courts long before anyone drew up rules or built a proper court. Vestry records from a Dorset village in 1751 complained of parishioners playing "fives" in the churchyard; a brochure for the Warminster court records it as having been built before 1787. The name "fives" itself has been in use since the seventeenth century. The game was improvised and widespread, and nobody organised it. That may be why it lasted.
1694-95: Chapel steps give the game its shape
At Eton, boys already had the habit of playing handball in the bays between the chapel buttresses. When a new flight of steps was added at the chapel's north door in 1694-95, one of those bays was transformed: suddenly there were two levels, a projecting buttress, and irregular rebounding surfaces built into the architecture. Players adapted the game to the new obstacles. That quirky geometry (the step, the buttress, the uneven bay) became the template for every Fives court built since. The chapel wall had turned into the world's first Fives court.
1823: Beverley Grammar School builds before Eton does
The game had begun to spread beyond Eton by the 1820s. In 1823, an old Etonian headmaster at Beverley Grammar School in Yorkshire had a court built that was later described as "of the Eton type", complete with the usual divisions, buttresses and ledges. This predates even the first purpose-built courts at Eton itself, and stands as the earliest confirmed evidence that a recognisably Eton-shaped Fives court was being constructed outside its birthplace.
1840-47: The game gets its first proper home
By 1840, the improvised chapel-bay courts had given way to something more deliberate. A subscription was raised to build regular courts, and in 1847 a set of Fives courts was constructed on the Eton back road, the first purpose-built courts at the school itself. Eton College's own archive describes these as the first replica walls built to formalize the shape of the original chapel court. The school was now prepared to invest in what had begun as an accident of architecture.
Mid-1860s: Harrow, Charterhouse, and the start of a school circuit
Once purpose-built courts existed, the game could travel. Harrow was the first major school to adopt them, building its own Eton-style courts in the mid-1860s, and hosting the first recorded match between schools on 12 February 1885, when Eton made the journey north for what became the founding fixture of inter-school Fives. Within two decades, courts had appeared at Charterhouse, Highgate and Westminster, and the game had the beginnings of a circuit.
1877: Rules for a game that can travel
Until 1877 the game had no written rules: just shared convention and local habit. That year, A. C. Ainger and a group of friends drew up and published the first formal rules for Fives, turning decades of improvised custom into written rules that any school could argue over and adopt. They are the direct ancestor of the Laws that govern the game today.
1890s: Cambridge builds a dozen courts in a decade
The game established itself at Oxford and Cambridge over several decades. During the 1890s alone, more than a dozen courts were built across Cambridge colleges, a remarkable concentration of investment for a game less than fifty years old in its formal version. Courts followed at Caius, Magdalene, and others. Oxford's club was founded in 1925 and the first Varsity match was played in 1928. The universities gave Fives a second home and a generation of players who went on to found clubs and organise competitions, and eventually to run the national body.
1920s: An Old Cholmeleian takes the game to Nigeria
In the 1920s, Sidney Hogben (S. J. Hogben), an Old Cholmeleian educated at Highgate School, was serving as a colonial civil servant in northern Nigeria. He brought Fives with him, and the game took root in a way that surprised everyone, including the EFA. By the 1960s it had spread across several northern towns. Eton College reported in 2011 that the sport still drew large crowds in Nigeria, nearly a century after Hogben first arrived. A photo album he created during his years there, between 1921 and 1933, survives in EFA centenary materials as a rare record of the game's early years in a new country.
1924-25: A governing body and a flagship cup
The game had been growing for sixty years without a formal national body. That changed in late 1923, when the first organising meetings were held, and on 24 October 1924 the Eton Fives Association was formally established. Within a year, Lord Kinnaird had donated the challenge cup that still bears his name, first played for in 1925 and contested every year since. The Kinnaird Cup became the sport's defining competition, a pairs title with a century of dynasties and upsets behind it.
1931: One set of laws for every club
Ainger's 1877 rules had done their job, but local variations had crept in over half a century of school-by-school adoption. In March 1931, the EFA published a unified set of Laws, drawn up in consultation with all the schools playing the game, that replaced Ainger's original and eliminated the inconsistencies. For the first time, a player moving from Harrow to Cambridge to a club court in Switzerland could expect to play the same game by the same rules. Switzerland already had courts of its own: three at Zuoz College, built in the 1920s, with more to follow in Zurich and elsewhere. One set of Laws now covered a game already played in more than one country.
1984 to now: Opening up: women's Fives, public courts, new schools
The final decades of the twentieth century brought the game its broadest base yet. In 1984, the first Ladies Championship was held, won by Krystyna Vargas, who went on to take the title four years running. Mixed doubles followed in 1985. In 2003, Westway Sports Centre in London opened four courts to the public: the first courts in Britain fully accessible to anyone. Today there are around forty centres across England and Wales and around thirty tournaments a year, and in 2024 new courts opened at Holyport College, the first school new to the game to build courts in at least seventy years. The game is still growing.
Sources and further reading
- Dale Vargas and Peter Knowles, A History of Eton Fives
- A History of Eton Fives, 2013 supplement
- A History of Eton College, Victorian edition
- Eton College Collections, archive catalogue
- D. G. Egerton, Eton and Rugby Fives, 1934
- Eton Fives Association, archive and centenary materials
- S. J. Hogben, photograph album, 1921 to 1933