GAMES: WILLY CLINGANreviews Thank You, Partner: The History of Bridge in IrelandBy Seamus Dowling Liberties Press, pp413. €29.99
THE WRITER Colm Tóibín reckons that playing bridge is probably one of the best ways of training to be as intelligent as possible. Along the way, he believes, it will also help you to become cunning and imaginative, teach you to use your memory, and show you when to be daring and when to be cautious.
And those of us who have played competitively, even at a low level, know that it also teaches the need for tolerance, patience and acceptance. Some say that playing bridge together is the ultimate test of a marital relationship. A friend in Cork remembers his otherwise devoted parents returning home from bridge, walking on opposite sides of the road on nights when things had not gone well.
Marriage partnerships seem to be particularly threatened when the wife is a better player than the husband, although one of the great imponderables in bridge is why a disproportionate number of the top players are men. That’s as true in Ireland as in any other country where the game is played.
However, one of the greatest Irish players of all time is 97-year-old Ruth Giddings from Dublin. She wrapped up the president’s prize at the Regent, Dublin’s blue-chip bridge club on Waterloo Road, in her 96th year. Many people think that she could still make the Irish international women’s team, writes Seamus Dowling in his major history of Irish bridge, Thank You, Partner. Colm Tóibín, who contributes the foreword, played himself, but the star player in his family was his late brother Niall.
Good players remember hands they played years earlier, and some of their best moments are reconstructed in the book. But as a largely unsuccessful player in the 1980s, it’s the smoke-filled rooms which stick most in my mind.
Some players were in their element. Joe MacHale, best known to people outside bridge as the powerful secretary-bursar of University College Dublin for many years, frequently used his cigar to effect.
“Management of cigar smoke was as much a part of his strategy as his handling of the cards,” Dowling writes. MacHale gave up smoking later in life and lived to a fine old age after an extraordinarily successful bridge career. He won his first Irish major title in 1953 and took his last one 51 years later in 2004, at the age of 82.
Giddings and MacHale were formidable competitors, but gracious opponents, in a game where some of the best players have lacked sufficient social skills or good manners to acknowledge opponents sitting down at their table.
Away from this hothouse stuff, however, there is a club bridge structure which fulfils a role akin to the GAA in providing an outlet for competition and friendship for tens of thousands of players. People head out to parish halls, community centres, golf clubs, hotels and pubs every night of the week to play the game competitively.
Some good players are a bit sniffy about the standard of play in many clubs, but the best Irish players are very good indeed.
Bridge knows no age limits – many clubs have players in their 80s, and the comparative cheapness of the night out is probably a great encouragement to older players on smaller, fixed incomes. Certainly, a lot of older people play and a surprising number have died at the table, including Billy Kelso, one of Northern Ireland’s best-known officials for many years.
It’s not a bad way to go, even if, as allegedly happened in one club, someone reaches over your body to look at the cards still gripped in your fingers and remarks that you had overbid and would never have made the contract.
One older player, Warren Buffett, widely admired as one of the United States’ most successful investors, reckons that “bridge is such a sensational game that I wouldn’t mind being in jail if I had three cellmates who were decent players and who were willing to keep the game going 24 hours a day.”
The game caught on quickly in Ireland early in the last century as it went through a number of format changes in the UK and the US. The Irish Times was quick to recognise it and introduced a fortnightly bridge puzzle in 1923 with the very generous prize of two guineas for solving it – given that the paper cost two old pence in those days, the equivalent amount today would be more than €400.
Retired British army personnel, from captains to brigadiers general, won regularly, obviously finding it a handy supplement to their pensions.
The competition was a great success for six years, but ended when it turned out that the man setting the puzzles was pinching them from other publications without any regard for copyright. A short apology appeared on July 20th, 1929 and the column ceased.
Seamus Dowling is one of the nicest men in Irish bridge – a pleasure to play with, or against – and a good enough player to have won five national championships. His meticulously researched book traces the administrative development of Irish bridge and highlights the careers of many of our best players.
With its 23 pages of footnotes and 108 pages of appendices listing championship winners, international teams and so on, it’s the ultimate reference book for bridge players, but also a glimpse into another side of Irish life for everyone else.
Willy Clingan is a Managing Editor of The Irish Timesand an occasional bridge player