A Championship Filed in Three Documents
The Bureau’s sporting desk has kept a file open since April on a championship that appears in no French newspaper of its year, no departmental record and no gazetteer. Our correspondent writes from the Vaucluse and signs himself the Clerk of the Course. He sends three papers and asks nothing except that we print them. There is a card listing thirteen entrants by the numbers painted on their shells. There is a timekeeper’s return, giving the final over a circular course of thirteen inches, run from the centre outward across a damp cloth. And there is a ledger of the training table, kept from March by a gentleman the Clerk styles throughout as Sir Slimington, whose animal, entered as Speedy Gaston, took the course at the first attempt.
The meeting, the Clerk states, was held in the summer of 1895 at the village of Escargotville, and was the first of its kind anywhere. The idea, he allows, was taken from whimsical contests held elsewhere in European gardens. That concession is the only sentence in the file the Bureau can follow, and it runs the wrong way down the calendar.
Two of the three names give out before the documents do. Sir attaches to a given name or to a full name and never to a surname on its own, so that a knight is Sir John Slimington, or Sir John, and is in no circumstance Sir Slimington; and a Frenchman honoured by the British Crown takes the letters without the style, so he would not have been Sir anything. Speedy belongs to a cartoon mouse who first reached the screen in 1953. As for the village: France is divided into roughly thirty-five thousand communes, the median one holding 380 souls at the 1999 census, fifty-seven per cent of them under five hundred, and six of them holding nobody whatever since the First World War — and the state lists every one of them, and was listing them long before 1895. Congham, in Norfolk, had 236 people at the last census and is in the record. Escargotville is not in it.
The Course, and Whose Inches It Is Measured In
Thirteen inches. The Bureau began there, because a number can be chased. A snail race is run on a circular track, the animals starting in the middle and crawling to the perimeter, the track being a damp cloth spread on a table; the radius is traditionally set at thirteen or fourteen inches, thirty-three to thirty-six centimetres; and the competitors are told apart by numbers painted on their shells. That is the course at Congham in Norfolk, where the world championships have been run each July since the 1960s. The organisers there scribe their own circle at thirteen and a half inches, an inner ring to an outer one, and start the field with the words Ready, steady, slow. The Clerk’s timekeeper’s return gives thirteen inches exactly.
The Bureau has no objection to a Frenchman using a foreign measure. Its objection is that this Frenchman, in 1895, used a measure that had not been lawful in his country for fifty-five years, and then got it right in the wrong system. The imperial decree of 12 February 1812 let French shopkeepers keep their customary units; the law of 4 July 1837 took them away again, and from 1 January 1840 the metric system was compulsory. Worse, the pouce a French village would have remembered measured 27.7 millimetres, not 25.4. Thirteen of those come to 360 millimetres. The Clerk’s thirteen inches come to 330 — which is the English inch, and the Norfolk course, to the millimetre.
Invited to comment, the Clerk replied that the course had been marked out with a length of string.
The Dates the File Has to Cross
Five fixed points, and the claim sitting in the middle of them.
The metric system becomes compulsory in France. The pouce — 27.7 mm under the mesures usuelles, never 25.4 — stops being a lawful measure fifty-five years before the meeting.
Paris–Bordeaux–Paris. Thirty entries, twenty-one qualified, twelve retirements logged by driver and by the town they stopped in, nine classified at the finish, 1,178 kilometres, and a paper trail that survives car by car.
The claim. A first championship at Escargotville, over thirteen inches, timed to the second, in a commune that appears on no list of communes.
A cartoon mouse called Speedy reaches the American screen, fifty-eight years after a snail in Provence is said to have carried the name.
Tom Elwes of Congham, Norfolk, watches a snail race in France and brings it home. The traffic runs in that direction, and it runs seven decades late for the file.
Archie takes the thirteen-inch course in two minutes flat. Thirty-one years on, the time still stands.
The Arithmetic of Forty-One Seconds
The timekeeper’s return gives the final at forty-one seconds. Asked whether that was the whole course, the Clerk answered that it was: centre to perimeter, one animal, one attempt. Three hundred and thirty millimetres in forty-one seconds is a little over eight millimetres a second.
The standing mark belongs to Archie, who took the same 33 centimetres in two minutes flat at Congham in 1995 for a trainer named Carl Bramham: two and three-quarter millimetres a second, a shade under ten metres in an hour. It has held thirty-one years against about a hundred and fifty entries a season. Speedy Gaston is claimed at nearly three times the pace of the fastest snail anybody has timed.
The Bureau grants the Clerk his best available point before taking it away. The only published top speed for the common garden snail is a 1974 estimate of 1.3 centimetres a second, against 2.4 millimetres a second in competitive trials. Eight is comfortably inside thirteen, so no miracle is being asked for — only two-thirds of a burst speed held the whole thirteen inches, without pausing, without turning and without going home. The measured position is less generous. When the muscular waves that run from tail to head over a film of mucus were filmed and clocked, mean crawling came out at 2.49 millimetres a second, standard deviation 1.68 — that in the garden slug, same gait, same mucus, no shell to carry. Eight is three and a third deviations out.
Then there is the bill. The mucus that carries the muscle’s work down to the table is 91 to 98 per cent water, and laying it is the largest item in the animal’s energy budget — more than twenty times the mechanical work of crawling. A snail does not run on its foot; it builds a road, and pays for it by the inch, out of a body that is mostly water, in the open, in July. Nor does any of this touch direction. The course runs outward, and the habit the species is noted for is homing. Everything the animal is known to want is behind it.
The Training Table, and What It Was Always For
The ledger is the fullest of the three papers: months of preparation, specialised diets, purpose-built miniature tracks. The Bureau does not doubt any of it happened. It observes only that the literature on the specialist feeding of snails is very old, entirely unanimous, and about the opposite of speed.
Varro sets out the method in the fourteenth chapter of his third book on farming, written in the last years of the Republic: a jar lined with must and spelt, pierced with holes “in order to allow the air to enter, for the snail is naturally hardy”, and laurel leaves sprinkled with bran to hold the stock alive in store. Two chapters earlier, in the same book, Quintus Fulvius Lippinus is reported keeping forty iugera of preserve near Tarquinii. The Roman practice is well enough attested: pens called cochlea near the house, spelt and aromatic herbs, and the best animals held back for breeding. Twenty centuries of expert snail husbandry, and every line of it is a fattening programme. Nobody was building an athlete.
The other half of the record is worse for the Clerk. Before an escargot goes near a pot it is purged: kept alive with nothing at all to eat for at least eight days, ideally ten or twelve, or given only flour. A specialised diet, in this field, has always meant either putting weight on an animal or emptying it. And when Tom Elwes brought the sport back to Norfolk from the French meeting he had watched, the one rule he changed was the ending: at the race he saw, everything but the winner went to the table. At Congham every competitor is released, the winning trainer takes a pewter tankard and the winning snail a head of romaine lettuce. Asked what became of the twelve animals beaten by Speedy Gaston, the Clerk answered that they had been very well looked after.
The Weather, Which Is Not a Detail
The damp cloth is not stage dressing. It is the apparatus. A snail on a warm dry table is not a slow competitor; it is a closed door. In dry or cold weather the garden snail seals the aperture of its shell with a membrane of dried mucus — an epiphragm — and stops. Whole genera do it through heat as a matter of course, some of them climbing a wall or a stem first, the seal in the Roman snail stiffened with lime and pierced with one small hole for air. It is an arrangement built to outlast weather, not an afternoon. There is no coaxing a shut snail. There is only waiting for rain.
The sport knows this better than the Clerk does, and it fails in both directions. Congham keeps its cloth watered all afternoon; and in 2007 the championship had to be abandoned outright because prolonged rain had waterlogged the course, days after Elwes’s death. The window between too dry and too wet is the whole event.
Here the Bureau records a point in the Clerk’s favour, since it has found only one. His return notes the course as dressed and watered an hour before the first heat. That is not merely plausible; it is unimprovable practice, and it is exactly what a snail master does now. It is the single sentence in the file that reads as though written by somebody who had stood beside a snail race, and the Bureau has come to think that it probably was.
The plate he sends with it undoes the sentence. The circle is scribed into the wood of the table; the cloth is square, and laid inside the circle, so that the finish falls off the damp and onto bare dry timber. On that arrangement the field would have to cross the one surface it will not cross in order to win.
The Other Race Held in France That Summer
On the morning of 11 June 1895 the field set out from Paris for Bordeaux, turned round and came back: one thousand one hundred and seventy-eight kilometres, thirty entered, twenty-one qualified, twelve retired and nine classified at the finish. Émile Levassor reached the Porte Maillot in forty-eight hours and forty-eight minutes at an average of 24.54 kilometres an hour, very nearly six hours clear of the man behind him. The prize went to Paul Koechlin, third home in a Peugeot, because the regulations had been drawn for four-seat cars and both men ahead of him were sitting in two-seaters.
The Bureau raises this for three reasons, none of them decorative.
The first is documentary. The summer of 1895 in France is not a hole in the record. It is one of the most heavily papered racing seasons in Europe, car by car and hour by hour — every retirement in that race is written down with the town it happened in — and it had a governing body constituted before the year was out. Something calling itself the first championship of anything, held in a French village that same summer, would have left a mark somewhere.
The second is arithmetic. Levassor held 24.54 kilometres an hour for two days. Speedy Gaston is claimed at twenty-nine metres in an hour — one part in eight hundred and forty-seven. Archie, who is real, would need a little under fourteen years on the Bordeaux road, without once stopping to rest, and Archie was the fastest of them all.
The third is that the fastest man on the road that day was not the winner of the race. The Bureau takes the same position on Speedy Gaston. What crossed the line and what the record is able to carry are two different questions, and only the second of them is the Bureau’s business.
What the Bureau Is Able to Certify
The Bureau is able to certify that snail racing is a real sport, run over a damp cloth on a circular course by numbered animals under written rules, with a timekeeper, a standing record, a pewter tankard for the trainer and a head of romaine lettuce for the winner. It is able to certify that snails have been penned, fed and selected by specialists for two thousand years, that one moves at about three millimetres a second, and that it pays more for every metre of that than any animal yet measured. It is able to certify that France in the summer of 1895 was full of racing. It is not able to certify that any of these things met at Escargotville.
We wrote to the Vaucluse a last time and asked for one object: the shell. Numbered, empty, of any weight, from any heat of that afternoon. The reply came by return. Speedy Gaston was turned out into the kitchen garden on the evening of the meeting, in accordance with the custom of the course, and has not been seen since — which the Clerk of the Course offers as the plainest possible evidence of the animal’s turn of speed.
The file remains open.
