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Most English people immediately
think of France when they hear of petanque (or
Boules as it is often known in this country)
and, indeed, the word comes from two Provençal
words (‘pieds tanques’) which mean ‘feet tied
together’.
The usual image conjured up is
one of some animated Gauloise-smoking and
beret-wearing Frenchman totally engrossed in a
strange game involving metal balls being played
on a warm summer’s evening under the plane trees
lining the dusty central square of a southern
French town.
In a sense this is perfectly
justified, since the modern game of petanque in
fact owes its origins to the accidental
modification of an earlier Provencal ball game,
which took place in a small town near Marseilles
in 1910.
However, games involving larger
balls being thrown at a ‘jack’ (or a much
smaller one being used as a target) go back well
into history. For example, two balls and a jack
were found in the sarcophagus of a Fifty-Second
Century B.C. Egyptian prince and different forms
of the game are believed to have been known to
both the Greeks and Romans, although they
probably used much larger stones in their
rolling matches in order to build up the
strength and fitness of their gymnasts and
soldiers. It may well, of course, have been the
Roman legionaries who first introduced a game of
this kind into the Provence area of France.
The game continued to grow in
popularity up to and during the Middle Ages and
to such an extent that the French King Charles V
tried to ban it altogether as it was having such
an adverse effect on the training of his
soldiers. There was, however, such a reaction to
this edict that he had to modify his original
ban and content himself with merely restricting
the game a great deal.
In England Edward III similarly
had to introduce measures limiting the amount of
time that his soldiers could spend playing the
game.
In fact, in its early history the
game does appear to have been particularly
popular with soldiers and sailors alike.
Obviously stones that were used for fitness
training or for aiming practice in moments of
idle pleasure could also be used as weapons and
the ability to aim well has long been a basic
military skill.
Quite naturally, therefore,
soldiers and sailors of the seventeenth century
and later, improvised games with those bow-shot
cannon balls which, being much the same size as
a cricket ball, could be held comfortably in the
hand and thrown over short distances both
accurately and without too much effort.
It was more than probably a game
of this kind that Sir Francis Drake was playing
when news of the Spanish Armada’s arrival was
brought to him. Plymouth Hoe was not at the time
the manicured green velvet lawn that some erring
artists have mistakenly depicted, but simply an
expanse of the kind of bare, stony soil which is
still one of the best surfaces on which petanque
can be played.
As history records, Drake knew in
any case that the prevailing on-shore wind and
low tide would not allow his waiting fleet to
set sail for several hours and so he decided to
go ashore for a leisurely game on the Hoe. The
calming effect on his apprehensive sailors of
this coolly calculated decision must have been
considerable and his reassuring gesture was only
slightly marred by his failing to win the game
with his very last boule.
The attraction of using iron
cannon balls for this kind of game was that not
only were they readily available, but they would
be conveniently stacked up in an emplacement
already levelled for the rows of cannons. They
obviously had to be quite uniform in size and
weight and would therefore make play between
rivals fairer. They were too heavy either to hit
with a bat or racket or to catch, but must have
made the same kind of uniquely satisfying noise
when a direct hit was made by one cannonball on
another.
Bored or besieged fighting men
must have been grateful for the game’s ability
to while away the hours in such an agreeable and
engrossing manner and, in view of their obvious
obsession with the game, it is hardly surprising
that many of the terms used in petanque have a
military flavour about them.
For example, a ‘pointeur’, which
is the name given by the French to a player who
specialises in the accurate placing of his or
her boules near to the jack (or cochonnet), was
originally the person who aimed the cannon, and
the ‘tireur’, who in petanque is the player who
specialises in trying to knock an opponent’s
boules out of scoring positions, used to be the
man who pulled the lanyard which fired the gun.
In the present day English game
of petanque, it is quite usual for ‘pointeur’ to
be anglicized to ‘pointer’ and for ‘tireur’ to
be translated as ‘shooter’, ‘hitter’ or even
‘bomber’.
The game that Drake’s sangfroid
made so famous was probably played on a much
bigger pitch than present day petanque and in
France there are still three quite distinct
games all played with different kinds of boules
and on different pitches or terrains.
In addition to petanque, there
are La Lyonnaise and Jeu Provencal. The former,
which is played with much heavier boules the
size of small melons, involves an energetic
running throw of between 12.5 and 17.5 metres
onto a ‘frame’ with specially marked out scoring
areas.
Jeu Provençal, a slightly less
demanding version of the same game, which was
obviously more suited to the warmer summers of
Provence, emerged during the latter half of the
nineteenth century. This uses smaller boules,
but the distance for them to be thrown was
lengthened to between 15 and 21 metres.
Petanque itself was yet another
development which came about because a certain
Ernest Pitiot took compassion one day in 1910 on
one of his friends called Jules Le Noir, whose
encroaching chronic rheumatism was preventing
him from playing the Jeu Provencal for which he
had formerly been so renowned in the area. The
frustrated Jules, unable to join in the
competition taking place that day in La Ciotat,
was amusing himself on the sidelines by playing
with some boules over a mere three metres or so.
His friend, Ernest, joined in and
between them they soon devised a new game with
which even the handicapped Jules could cope.
Other spectators soon became interested in their
game and wanted to try it for themselves. It
quickly became popular and eventually a
competition match was played according to the
newly drawn-up rules. Under these the throwing
distance was lengthened to six metres.
Initially the old wooden Jeu
Provençal boules with flat-headed nails hammered
in all over their surface were used but in 1930
Jean Blanc a mechanic from St Bonnet Le Chateau,
invented a way of making steel boules from two
hemispheres joined together. These were first
sold in the ironmonger’s shop in the village,
which is why even today often the best place to
buy boules in France is still in the local
‘quincaillerie’ and why the J B Boules factory
is situated in St Bonnet Le Chateau.
In a remarkably short time the
game spread to all parts of France and it
adopted as its official name the expression that
had originally made fun of its most obvious
basic difference from Jeu Provencal. This was
the fact that a player in the new game threw his
boules while standing still with both feet
together in the throwing circle. Hence, as we
have already seen ‘pieds tanques’ or, by erosion
over the years, ‘petanque’.
The other big difference between
the new game and the Jeu Provencal from which it
originated is that it was immediately much more
universal in appeal and for that reason it has
continued to spread rapidly all over the world.
France no longer dominates
petanque, as the results of the World
Championships over the last few years indicate
and countries as far apart and as different as
America. North Africa and China are now
witnessing, like the United Kingdom, a
tremendous growth of interest in the game.
The earliest club in this country
(England) was founded in the mid-sixties at
Chingford in Essex, but it was the spontaneous
founding of many clubs in the early seventies in
areas like Hampshire and Kent. which are closest
to the Channel ports, that eventually led to the
founding of the British Petanque Association in
1974.
The fact that the World
Championships were staged in Southampton in 1979
is both a tribute to the organising efficiency
of the BPA and an indication of how quickly the
game had taken hold in the country.
t is now played at public houses,
leisure centres, sports clubs, etc., all over
the country and the BPA has had to divide itself
into regions in order to cope with the
increasingly large number of people who return
each year from their holidays in France wanting
to try for themselves the obviously totally
engrossing game which they have stopped to watch
on town squares, boulevards, campsites and
beaches from Boulogne to Biarritz. |
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