A File From Harrogate, and a Cause That Arrives Late

A faded sepia photograph of an empty roped arena: a small cloth-covered table carrying a lidded teapot, three cups and a serving dish, one chair on each side, and rows of spectators in hats silhouetted against a low sun.
“The ground, one hour after the final.” — the Honorary Secretary’s photograph, dated 1912. It is the only picture in the file with no duel in it, and he offers it as the best evidence he holds.

The Bureau’s sporting desk has kept a file open since November on a competition that no British governing body has ever registered. Our correspondent writes from Harrogate and signs himself Honorary Secretary, pro tempore, of the Tiffin Association. He sent four things and asked for nothing except that we print them. There is a rule book, described on its own cover as the third edition of 1899. There is a fixture card for the 1912 season listing eleven meetings, the last of them marked abandoned. There is a photograph of an empty roped ground, taken, he says, an hour after the final. And there is a letter from Charles Beaumont, one of the two finalists, in a hand the correspondent describes as unsteady and attributes to the occasion.

The sport is set out in one sentence and the Bureau does not propose to improve on it. Two competitors sit facing each other, each with a cup of piping hot tea and a biscuit of their own choosing. Each dunks. Each waits. Whoever carries the softened biscuit to the mouth last, and eats it without losing any of it, has won.

The Bureau has no quarrel with that. It is a workable contest, and men have staked money on very much worse. Its quarrel is with the fourth paragraph of the covering letter, which gives the cause of death as the coming of the First World War, and then states that the sport had all but disappeared by 1912. The war began on 28 July 1914. Taking the correspondent’s own two dates at their most generous — the last day of 1912, the first day of the war — the file offers a cause that arrives nineteen months after its effect.

The Rule Book, and the Biscuit Nobody Had Baked

A man in a black frock coat and tall silk hat and a woman in a pale green gown and straw hat sit across a small round table raising rose-painted teacups; a plate stacked with plain round biscuits stands in the foreground and white marquees fill the background.
“The ration, as the Articles require it.” — the correspondent, on the biscuits at the front of the plate. They are plain rounds with nothing stamped on them, which is the one detail in the file that fits 1899.

The rule book is four pages and its rules are good ones. The tea shall be tea and nothing else. The Tiffin Master shall pour for both parties from the same pot. On the command to dunk, each duellist immerses to a count of three. A biscuit eaten cleanly is a clean nom; one that breaks onto the cloth or the lap is a splat; one that breaks into the cup is a splosh, and a splosh is the heavier disgrace. Rule the Fourth is the short one: the biscuit shall be the malted milk, and no other.

The Bureau notes, without drawing a conclusion, that this is to the word the rule set of a parlour game played today at steampunk gatherings, presided over by a Tiffin Master who pours for each dueller and invites the contestants to choose their weapon, whose world championship is held at Lincoln over the August bank holiday. It further declines to date the word nom, and merely records that it appears nowhere else in a document whose author calls a table a board.

Rule the Fourth is the difficulty. The malted milk was first produced by Elkes Biscuits of Uttoxeter in 1924, and is commonly stamped to this day with two milk churns and a cow. An Association writing in 1899 has therefore made compulsory a biscuit that nobody would bake for another twenty-five years, and has died of a war twelve years before the first one came out of the oven. What was actually to hand was the rich tea, developed in Yorkshire in the nineteenth century for the upper classes as a light thing between full meals, and plain enough that dunking is what it is for. Invited to consider that the rule might once have read otherwise, the correspondent replied that the Articles have never been amended in their history, and that this is the Association’s chief pride.

The Arithmetic of a Dunk

A man in a brown suit and a woman in a cream lace gown sit on either side of a small lace-covered table on a clipped lawn, each lifting a biscuit to the mouth, watched by a semicircle of standing and seated Victorian spectators holding teacups.
“The nom, taken together.” — plate from the file. Both biscuits are already clear of the cup, which is the moment at which a wet biscuit is carrying the most and is supported by the least.

A biscuit is a porous solid, and tea does not soak into it so much as climb it. That climb is described by the Lucas–Washburn equation, published by Edward Wight Washburn in 1921 three years after Richard Lucas had reached substantially the same result: the distance the liquid has travelled goes as the square root of the surface tension, the pore radius, the time and the cosine of the contact angle, all divided by twice the viscosity. Two of those terms decide this sport.

The first is time, under a square root. Wetted depth does not accumulate evenly; it accumulates on a curve that flattens under the competitor holding his nerve. The first three seconds of a dunk buy exactly as much soaked biscuit as the next nine seconds do, and after that the trade gets worse. A contest whose entire drama is the willingness to leave it in one moment longer is scored on the one arithmetic that pays least for exactly that.

The second is viscosity, and it sits in the denominator. Hot water is markedly thinner than cold, and thin liquid climbs faster; the surface tension in the numerator falls with heat as well, but nothing like as steeply. The rule requiring the tea to be piping hot is therefore not a flourish of gentility. It is the clause that guarantees the shortest possible duel.

The failure itself does not happen in the cup. In the cup the wet end is held up by the liquid it is standing in. It happens in the lift, where the softened lower half turns into a cantilever carrying the dry upper half across a table. In 1998 Len Fisher, a physicist at Bristol, was engaged by McVities to do the sum properly; he took the Ig Nobel Prize for Physics for it in 1999, and reported that a dunked biscuit yields about ten times the flavour of a dry one. What the correspondent’s file calls the perilous journey to the mouth is a beam failing in bending, and the Bureau records that the file has this part exactly right.

What a Duelling Code Actually Looks Like

A woman in a cream dress and an enormous flowered hat leans in from the left towards a man in a grey coat and top hat on the right; both hold teacups raised at the same height across a small round table, and a tall plume of steam rises between them.
“Ground is taken.” — the correspondent’s note on this plate. Under the code he is invoking, taking ground is the point past which no apology can be received.

The Association’s four pages are set against a real document without much trouble. The Code Duello was drawn up and settled at the Clonmel Summer Assizes of 1777 by gentlemen-delegates of Tipperary, Galway, Sligo, Mayo and Roscommon, and it runs to twenty-five rules. The first of them puts the first apology on the first offence, however much worse the retort may have been. The seventh shuts the door on apology altogether once the parties have taken ground, without an exchange of fires. They are the rules of men who expected the arrangement to end badly and wanted the last exit clearly marked.

The twenty-second is the one the Bureau would draw the correspondent’s attention to. Any wound sufficient to agitate the nerves and necessarily make the hand shake ends the business for that day. In a duel with pistols that is mercy, and it is also common sense, since a shaking hand cannot be aimed. In a duel with biscuits it is the whole event. The only wound available at that table is to the nerves, the shaking hand is not grounds for stopping, and the Association has built a sport whose single decisive faculty is the one the older code treats as a disqualifying injury.

There is a second difficulty behind the first. By 1840 duelling in Britain had already collapsed, and it was public opinion rather than any statute that finished it. The last fatal duel between Englishmen was fought in 1845 at Browndown near Gosport; the last known fatal duel anywhere on English soil was fought in 1852 near Englefield Green, and both men in it were French. Two Victorian aristocrats settling a disagreement over tea in the decades after that were not inventing a sport. They were holding a séance.

The Half of the Equipment With a War Behind It

A woman in a green gown and a straw hat trimmed with pink roses and a man in a grey suit and a very tall top hat sit at a round wooden table crowded with eight or more painted teacups and two gilt pots; he holds a thin cigarette between his lips.
“Refreshment for the duellists between rounds.” — the Honorary Secretary. There are more cups on that table than there are hands at it to hold them.

The correspondent describes the tea as the harmless half of the equipment. The Bureau sets down what was in the cup. Tea reached England as a coffeehouse curiosity, sold by Thomas Garway as leaf and as drink in 1657, presented to Charles II by the East India Company in 1660 in a quantity of two pounds and two ounces, and made fashionable from 1662 by Catherine of Braganza. It then carried a duty of 119 per cent until the Commutation Act of 1784 cut it to 12.5, and while that duty stood, something in the region of seven and a half million pounds of tea a year came ashore paying nothing at all.

The same leaf ran the other business of the century. Parliament passed the Tea Act on 10 May 1773, refunding the East India Company its duty at home while leaving the threepenny Townshend duty standing in the colonies; on 16 December, 342 chests holding 92,616 pounds of tea and valued at £9,659 went over the sides of the Dartmouth, the Beaver and the Eleanor. Britain paid China in silver for its tea because Chinese buyers wanted little that Britain made, closed the gap by counter-trading in opium, and fought the war that followed from 4 September 1839 to 29 August 1842, ending it with the Treaty of Nanking and the cession of Hong Kong. Meanwhile Assam was taken up: Robert Bruce came upon the plant in 1823 among the Singpho, who were already brewing it, the first batch reached London in 1838 and was auctioned in January 1839, and by 1888 Indian tea had passed Chinese in the country’s imports.

Even the gentlest story in the whole business will not sit still. Anna, Duchess of Bedford is credited with inventing afternoon tea in about 1840, having asked for tea, bread and butter and cake to be brought up in the long gap before a dinner that kept getting later; the claim is contested and cannot be verified. It does at least name a woman, a household and a decade. The Bureau raises none of this to be solemn. It raises it because the file treats the cup as furniture.

The Dates the File Has to Get Past

Everything on this rail except 1899 and 1912 is attested somewhere outside the correspondent’s envelope.

1657

Thomas Garway sells tea in London, by the leaf and by the cup.

1773

The Tea Act has royal assent on 10 May; on 16 December, 342 chests go into Boston harbour.

1777

The Code Duello is settled at the Clonmel Summer Assizes — twenty-five rules, five counties.

1784

The Commutation Act cuts the duty on tea from 119 per cent to 12.5.

1839

The first Assam is auctioned in London in January; the war over the tea trade opens in September.

1852

The last known fatal duel on English soil, near Englefield Green.

1899

The date printed on the cover of the correspondent’s Articles.

1912

The sport is said to have all but disappeared.

1914

On 28 July the war that is said to have ended it begins.

1924

Elkes of Uttoxeter bake the first malted milk — the only biscuit the Articles allow.

1998

A physicist at Bristol measures what a dunked biscuit actually does.

The Finalists Reply, and Reply Together

An oil-painted view across a great lawn in front of a large country house: dozens of white-clothed tables with a seated pair at each, marquees along both sides and a dense crowd of hatted spectators ringing the whole ground.
“The last championship, from the terrace.” — the correspondent. He gives the attendance as eleven thousand, and his own fixture card gives the meeting as abandoned.

Both finalists are living, and both agreed to answer. What arrived was one letter, on one sheet, over both signatures, replying to every question the Bureau had put — including the questions that ask them to disagree with each other. The Bureau put this to them and was told that the Association discourages separate statements, on the grounds that a duel is a single event and not two of them. It has printed the exchange as received, and notes only that the panel below concerns a contest between two people who have declined, throughout, to be two people.

Portrait of Charles Beaumont & Eleanor Ashford

Charles Beaumont & Eleanor Ashford

Finalists · The Last Tiffin, 1912

Replying jointly, over one signature, as they have to every question the Bureau has put since November.

The Bureau

You are described in the file as the last two duellists to take ground. Which of you won?

Charles Beaumont & Eleanor Ashford

The Tiffin Master recorded a double clean nom and referred the match to the Association, where it rests. We have never found that unsatisfactory. A duel from which both parties walk away fed is a duel that has been conducted properly.

The Bureau

Rule the Fourth requires a malted milk biscuit. The malted milk was first baked at Uttoxeter in 1924.

Charles Beaumont & Eleanor Ashford

We are aware of the Uttoxeter claim. The Association has always held that Elkes were the first to sell one, which is a narrower thing than being the first to bake one. Our own supply came from a man in Ripon and did not carry a cow on it.

The Bureau

Your Association gives the war as the reason the sport ended. The war began in July 1914.

Charles Beaumont & Eleanor Ashford

It did. We had two seasons’ notice of it and the Association is not in the habit of waiting to be told a thing twice. You will find that the men who stopped playing in 1912 were very largely the men who went in 1914. We arrived at the conclusion early, which is not the same as arriving at it wrongly.

The Bureau

The Articles use the words nom, splat and splosh, and are dated 1899.

Charles Beaumont & Eleanor Ashford

They are terms of art. A splat is on the cloth, a splosh is in the cup, and both are scored against you, the splosh more heavily because it spoils the tea as well. If the words strike you as modern that is a question of taste and not of record. Nobody has ever proposed a better word than splosh.

The Bureau

Bristol established in 1998 that a biscuit takes up tea by capillary action, and that the wetted depth grows only as the square root of the time. Did the Association know this?

Charles Beaumont & Eleanor Ashford

Not in those words. Every duellist knows that the first three seconds cost you more than the next nine, which is precisely why the Tiffin Master counts to three and not to twelve. The gentlemen at Bristol have put a name to the thing our steward already had a whistle for.

The Bureau

The Articles require the tea to be piping hot. Hot tea is thinner than cold and climbs the biscuit faster. You have written a clause that shortens your own contest.

Charles Beaumont & Eleanor Ashford

We have written the clause that makes it a contest. Cold tea will hold a biscuit up all afternoon. There is no sport whatever in a thing that cannot fail, and no honour in surviving it.

The Bureau

Duelling in England was finished by the 1840s. The last fatal encounter on English soil was in 1852.

Charles Beaumont & Eleanor Ashford

Yes. That is rather the point. Two gentlemen of our acquaintance observed that the country had given up its duels and kept every one of its grievances, and proposed to restore the form without the injury. Ours is the only duel in the history of these islands from which every participant has walked away, and we are asked to account for ourselves as though that were the failing.

The Bureau

We have asked three times for the minute book, the cup, or one photograph in which a duel is actually in progress.

Charles Beaumont & Eleanor Ashford

The minute book went to Ripon with the biscuits. The cup was drunk from and returned to the family that lent it, as the Articles require. As to the photographs, you have the one taken after the final, which shows the ground exactly as it was left. We do not photograph a man mid-nom. It is not done.

What the Bureau Is Able to Certify

A painted scene looking down a long grass avenue between tall hedges towards a distant mansion, lined on both sides by long white-clothed tables of seated tea drinkers and a vast crowd, with a woman in black and a man in a frock coat standing at a small table in the centre foreground beside a dark urn.
“The presentation.” — the correspondent, on the two figures at the centre. He has not said which of them is holding the trophy, and neither have they.

The Bureau is able to certify that biscuits are porous, that tea climbs into them by capillary action, that the climb is described by an equation of 1921 and was measured in a biscuit in 1998, and that a dunked biscuit really does give up something like ten times the flavour of a dry one. It can certify that English gentlemen once kept a duelling code of twenty-five rules, and that one of those rules stops the business for the day the moment a hand begins to shake. It can certify that a competition of very nearly this shape is played today, under a Tiffin Master, at Lincoln, over the August bank holiday. It is not able to certify that any of it was happening on a lawn in 1899, or stopped happening in 1912, or was ended by a war that had not yet begun.

We wrote once more to Harrogate and asked for one thing only: a date for the eleventh meeting on the 1912 fixture card, the one marked abandoned. The reply came inside the week. The meeting was abandoned; a thing that did not take place cannot be given a date; and the Association does not keep records of what it did not do. The Honorary Secretary adds that he hopes this settles it.

The Bureau has entered the file, in the correspondent’s own vocabulary, as a splosh.

Plates: the Harrogate File

The remainder of the Honorary Secretary’s plates, printed as received. The Bureau vouches for none of them.

A man in a dark pinstriped suit and top hat raises a cup towards a woman in a mint green dress and a deep red hat trimmed with roses who holds a gloved hand to her mouth; a large plume of steam hangs above them and a crowd of hatted onlookers watches from behind a rail.
“A clean nom, taken at the third count.” — the correspondent. Her hand is at her mouth and the biscuit is nowhere in the frame.
A man in a navy frock coat and top hat reaches for a rose-painted teapot while a woman in a green gown and cream hat raises a two-handled cup; a tall column of steam rises from the pot and a clipped hedge runs the width of the picture behind them.
“The Tiffin Master pours for both.” — Rule the Second. There is no third person anywhere in the picture.
A man in a black frock coat and a very tall top hat holds a cup in white gloves opposite a woman in a brown and wine-red dress and a black feathered hat who holds a small teapot in one hand and a cup in the other; white marquees and a crowd stand behind them.
“Both cups charged from the same pot.” — the Articles. She is holding the pot, and she is one of the two duelling.
A man in a navy coat and top hat lifts a teacup with a spoon at his lips while a woman in a pale green gown and a broad cream hat raises her own cup; a tall vertical plume of steam climbs from the teapot on the lace-covered table between them.
“Stirring is permitted; sweetening is not.” — the correspondent, quoting a rule that is not in the book he sent us.
A man in a navy coat and top hat sips from a cup held in white gloves while a woman in a green puff-sleeved dress and an enormous feathered and flowered hat gestures towards him; a plate of round biscuits, several of them dark-topped, sits on the table between them.
“Only the malted milk will serve.” — Rule the Fourth. Several of the biscuits on that plate are chocolate ones.
A woman in a cream gown and an enormous ruffled pink hat holds out a blue-and-white cup towards a man in a navy tailcoat and top hat who is holding a cigar; a blue-and-white teapot stands on the white cloth between them under a large tree.
“Between rounds, the gentlemen were permitted to withdraw.” — the correspondent. This gentleman has not withdrawn.
A woman in a sage green dress and a straw hat trimmed with roses raises a blue-and-white cup opposite a man in a grey suit and top hat; three separate plumes of steam rise behind them and a plate of round biscuits sits on the white table between them.
“Piping hot, as the Articles insist.” — three plumes, one table. The clause that makes the contest is the clause that ends it soonest.
A woman in a brown jacket with white ruffles and a hat trimmed with a purple rose and white plumes passes a steaming cup across to a man in a grey suit and top hat with a cigarette holder between his lips; several painted cups stand on a green cloth.
“No duellist may pour for an opponent.” — the Articles, third edition. She is pouring for her opponent.
A man in a grey suit and top hat takes a short wooden tube from the gloved hand of a woman in a green gown and a large pink feathered hat; a single biscuit lies on a plate beside a teapot and two cups on the white cloth between them.
“The measure, passed to the challenged party.” — the correspondent, on the object changing hands. He has declined four times to say what it measures.