Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author’s Introduction (Full text, truncated₁)

1. One often hears sportsmen say that they knew when the time was right to retire. During 2012, I became convinced that it was right for me to cease full-time work when I reached the age of 60. I gave my employer a year’s notice of my intentions and left at the end of 2013, a couple of weeks after my 60th birthday.
2. I had long been interested in the history of bridge and envisaged my retirement project as encompassing research in this field. The game’s history is hardly virgin territory but it is fair to say that the published works are of uneven quality.
3. When an author lists five members of a bridge team, whilst omitting reference to the sixth, it does not fill the reader with confidence; when the same author, in discussing a significant deal from the match in question, states that no slam was makeable, ignoring the fact that the slam was both cold and bid at the other table, his failing is glaring.
4. Similarly, an author who, perpetuating the error of a previous writer, misstates the first name of a player shows that he could not be bothered to carry out proper research. Finally, when an author states that a player took part in six European Championships, but elsewhere names him as being a member of nine teams, his carelessness is apparent to all. As someone who spent his working life having to pay attention to detail, I found avoidable errors of this sort deeply frustrating.
5. Accordingly, I thought that it was time to put the record straight, and to produce an authoritative work detailing the history of bridge. It did not take me long to realise that this was an impossibly ambitious undertaking and that the resources available to me, not to mention the limits of my own enthusiasm, meant that it would need to be scaled back.
6. I therefore decided to concentrate on the history of tournament bridge in England. It was when I started my research that I realised that I was far too late - the people who could have helped me fill gaps in the documentary trail were dead. The era which was of particular interest to me (1925-1945) was the one where the position was most acute: virtually all the contemporary records had disappeared, very possibly pulped during World War II, and all that was left was the first minute book of the English Bridge Union (only a bit-part player in the tournament world prior to the War), and even this was incomplete.
7. I concluded that, at least so far as the period up to 1945 was concerned, I would need to compile a work which included an unwonted degree of speculation and imaginative reconstruction. This was quite some distance removed from what I had first envisaged and would be significantly more taxing. I therefore decided to limit my endeavours to this period with the possibility of the post-War period being covered subsequently.
8. To a large extent, the history that I have written is focused on personalities, Buller, Culbertson, Ingram, Kempson, Lederer, Manning-Foster, Phillips and Vanderbilt prominent among them. I make no apology for this: I never had the opportunity of meeting any of them but feel that I now know them better.
9. In Design for Bidding, the late S J “Skid” Simon commented, à propos Nico Gardener’s suggestion that it was best to play Acol two bids in first, second and fourth positions, but weak two bids in third seat:
   “Owing to my habit of not really settling down to think about any chapter until I have settled down to writing it, I can’t tell you yet.”
10. Similarly, whilst in no whit claiming to be of Simon’s calibre as a writer, I am unable to promise that a further work will follow. What follows may turn out to be simply the first part of a far more comprehensive project, or it may stand alone. And if further instalments do follow, I will at least be able to comment on some of the dramatis personae by reference to my personal knowledge of them.
11. [snip]