Revisiting lawn, 12 years on

 The problem is that publishing is no longer a profession for gentlemen, or if you wish, for ladies. The industry is full of nervous nellies going me-too, gimme whatever sold last year. 

Now any wannabe author will say something sour about publishers who lack vision and gumption, but I've got runs on the board. I have published over 60 volumes in seven languages (I count USian as a separate language) and I have a stack of awards for doing beautiful books, but when my books go out of print, that's that as far as they're concerned, and when I want them to consider something completely different, they shriek and hide in the cupboard.

The book shown above went well with Pier 9 in 2009. It won no awards, but people liked it because it was different. In fact, just this year, I have had a number of media requests (a documentary is in the air, an interview with a major journal, requests for articles and students getting in touch to work on projects). It has proved to be a solid and workmanlike piece, but now it was hard to obtain.

Now because I have been dealing with cloth-eared lumps of anteaters' phlegm in various publishing houses, I have become a dab hand at knocking up book-length ideas into e-books, and more recently into print-on-demand, using the services of Amazon.

There are people out there who need my ideas, the benefit of my knowledge and research, and in a bit under five days, I have taken my old manuscript, edited it and written new bits, and redesigned it, using my own illustrations and photos that I took to use in the original book. 

It's now up there and running, $5 for the e-book (which has colour) and $20 for the book with pages that have no colour, unless you colour them in. The ideas and the words are the same, and here's a sample. The dinkus in the break shows Edwin Beard Budding, demonstrating his prototype lawnmower, in 1831. Read on, and try not to dream, tonight, of the horrors of grass sports before the mower came into use.

Go here for more information on the book.

And by the way, The Speed of Nearly Everything is almost complete as well. 

Sample: How civilisation died

Nobody set out to deprive us of our hard-won weekend leisure, to divert our conversations from philosophy, literature and science to anterior cruciate ligaments, groin injuries and all the Grand Guignol of sports played on lawn. It just happened — and the lawn mower done it, when it changed the sports.

In olden times, “sport” meant cockfights, bear-baiting, bare-knuckle fighting and public executions, to nominate just a few of the gentler pastimes of yore. Football, when it happened, was a barely subdued form of warfare, generally played between competing mobs of unspecified size, following Rafferty’s Rules over unmade and unmowed ground. Most sports were not played by gentlefolk or gentle folk.

In its early days, cricket could be brutal or even fatal. As we will see, in March of 1751, Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales, (the father of King George III), died of an internal abscess. This was caused by a blow from a cricket ball some months earlier. George III took the throne in 1760 when his grandfather died, thanks to a cricketing death that may have changed history, because the young king was probably too immature to deal with the American question.

Consider the fearsome (though perhaps mythical) tales of the fast bowler Brown of Brighton. Born in Stoughton in 1783, George Brown’s arm in the early 1800s was as thick as a normal man’s thigh. A professional, he played for Sussex and generally bowled to two long stops, one of whom always padded his chest with straw. Once, legend says, a nervous long stop held a coat out in a desperate attempt to halt a Brown delivery. The ball went through the coat and killed a dog on the other side.

For most people in the early 1800s, sport meant huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’. Robust team games were largely the province of muddied and bloodied oafs. Those were different days, but soon after Brown of Brighton died in 1857, many sports blossomed and acquired rules, officials, respectability and even a degree of social approval. Sport, in fact, became quite the vogue in the 1860s.

Grass and lawn had become popular, and so had events played out on lawn. The idea of lawn wasn’t new, and there had even been tennis-like games played on grassy surfaces in the time of Good Queen Bess, but these amusements simply hadn’t caught on with the mob. Something was going on in the late 1850s and early 1860s to make lawns more approachable, more acceptable for sport and leisure.

I thought I had found the answer when I was researching a history of the changes that happened around 1859, the year Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. Most of the heavy work for New York's Central Park was done in 1859, and then I read about a sheep being struck by lightning in London's Hyde Park in July, 1859. Remember the sheep for a moment, because we'll come back to it later on.

I recalled that Amsterdam's Vondelpark opened to the public in 1865, and I thought I had the link, that a fad for public parks in the 1860s must be behind the change in attitude. That notion died when I discovered that London's Hyde Park was there in Oliver Cromwell's time.

Grand folk had lawns at the start of the 1800s, others had grass or meadows. Stately homes, palaces and university colleges had been lawn places even longer, but now the new rich wanted lawn as well, though only the richest could afford them at first. George Washington’s deer trimmed his grass, but they were kept away from the house by a ha-ha, a fence concealed in a ditch. Closer in, skilled servants trimmed the deer-free grass with scythes, but even a skilled worker might slip with the scythe and produce uneven surfaces, unsuited to putting practice, lawn bowls or croquet.

Animals made smoother surfaces, but there was a drawback. Imagine the feelings of a footballer who was tackled and landed heavily face-planting into a fresh cowpat or the leavings of a scouring sheep. Imagine the anguish of the slips fieldsman, similarly sullied as he dived for a low ball, or the dismay of a lady seeing her hem becoming mired in it. Feel, if you will, with a tennis player, facing a serve that splashes through a fresh plop. No, the lawn was better admired at a distance, back when animals were in charge of trimming it.

This brings us to Edwin Budding, who, as we will see, modified and enlarged a cloth-trimming machine to mow grass. Budding’s patent expired in 1855, bringing in a golden period for cylinder mowers in Britain between about 1856 and 1863. The lawn mower changed our world forever, but lawn could only emerge when people’s properties offered enough space for lawn to fit. Californian and Australian gold funded a new and enlarged middle class, a mob with social ambitions.

So people acquired lawns, but because display for display’s sake was a bit undignified, they needed to be seen to be using their lawns. They needed croquet, lawn tennis, clock golf, lawn darts, lawn billiards, archery and other lawn amusements and games now lost to collective memory. But they were naturally competitive, these lawn-owners, or they would never have been lured onto the lawn treadmill.

So it is hardly surprising that sporting associations and sets of rules were swiftly created, and ground was set aside for tourneys and competitions for these lawn games, but this all came after the lawn mower revolution of the 1860s. In a related change, around 1860, all true Britons concluded that the best way of turning boys into men is through games with maximal violence and close contact with mud, sweat and grass to ready them for a life of blood, sweat and tears, shed for the glory of the British Empire. Croquet, a game of repressed viciousness and brutality, trained future imperial overlords in the art of one-sided diplomacy.

By the 1860s, lawn games were plentiful, but croquet seems to have been the domestic leader. It came to England from Ireland in the early 1850s (though a variant was played by Languedoc peasants in the 1300s). From England, it then transferred to both Australia and the USA and took off in the 1860s, once the lawns were good enough and safe to walk on. Soon the croquet lawn was considered an essential possession for the civilized English-speaking family.

In golf, the first British Open was played in 1860, and before long, the wild Scottish golf links, clinging on in salt-sprayed dunes had become the sedate golf course of the rest of the world. The first Melbourne Cup, still one of the great horse races in the world, was run in 1861. The Football Association was formed in Britain in 1863, though the first inter-club match of football, the game known to heathens as “soccer”, was played at the end of 1860. The Rugby Football Union was formed in 1870. None of this could have happened if the playing fields had still functioned as part-time sheep and cow paddocks.

Most popular spectator sports seem now to be those played on carefully prepared grassy fields, or on artful surrogates for turf. Almost all major team games began on blemished grass surfaces that we would now dismiss as cow paddocks (which they were!). Without the lawn mower and the tireless pursuit of smoother, truer playing surfaces, modern sports would not exert their hold on us. No scythe, no sickle, no herd of animals could deliver the greens, courts and fields that we now expect for our games.

I regret the passing of the flocks of sheep. I cannot consider the start of the luncheon interval in a cricket match without seeing in my mind’s eye, groundsmen opening the gates at the northern end to introduce a flock of sheep to give the outfield a quick trim, with perhaps a posse of sheepdogs guarding the wicket. Perhaps I have a perverse mind’s eye to dream of an ovine Oval, but it could easily have been like that. A modern Brown of Brighton might risk killing the odd recalcitrant sheep which refused to be ejected at the resumption of play. Stand at deep fine leg, sheep, and one snick could make you mutton, just like that!

By 1898, professional players had started dividing up the gate takings between them, sports journalists and writers were hard at it, making allegations of match fixing and other wickedness. There were already more watchers than players and the onlookers were scathed for their indolence, their drinking and their betting on what the critics saw as degraded ghosts of Roman gladiatorial contests. The phenomenon of the Golf Bore was noted, and the Golden Age of sport was over, declared the pundits.

Away from the playing fields, seedsmen, makers of lawn sprays, fertiliser, watering devices, weeding devices and other lawn-tending tools and impedimenta were conspiring to divert the leisure time and wallet of the sports-watcher or even the player to pursuing the impossible dream of the truly ideal lawn. In suburbia, those who could no longer compete on the playing fields struggled to produce the finest green swards.

As humanity greeted the 20th century, lawnsmanship emerged as the new sport for the non-sporting. Independent, democratic and anarchic grass was oppressed by the mower to make servile lawn. Francis Drake probably played bowls on a daisy-strewn camomile lawn, now it was played on manicured monocultures of a boringly uniform green.

While we weren’t looking, before Queen Victoria died, we lost the struggle to have a restful weekend of quiet enjoyment, absorbed in a good book and intelligent conversation. Civilisation-as-it-might-have-been was snuffed out, and the killer is easy to find. The means, opportunity and motivation are all there. The lawn mower done it!

The book on Darwin? That's another title that is in my sights for revival. Mr Darwin's incredible shrinking world is its name, and it is the only book I know of that discusses crude oil before oil wells; seahorse teeth; eating moles, lions and pumas; an opera written by Charles Dickens; getting relief on trains before they installed toilets; testing fireproof safes and treating diphtheria.

Publishing may no longer be a profession for gentlemen, but this gent is about to bust into it. There's an e-book from the publishers, but the dead-tree market is wide open.