The Prehistory of
Hashing
Tom Brown's Schooldays
By Herb “Square Root” Wills
The good old American sport of
baseball has this wonderful origin story involving
Abner Doubleday and rural New York. Historians don't
agree on much, but every sports historian agrees that
the Abner Doubleday story is totally false, a
fabrication of Al Spaulding. Spaulding, you see,
hated the fact that baseball had evolved out of the
British game of rounders, so he contrived to have a
new history of the game invented that left England
out of the picture.
Hashing has an origin story
much like the Doubleday fable, with the difference
that it is mostly true. In short, Simon Gispert, a
British expatriate living in Malaysia, founded the
club devoted to hare-and-hounds running in Kuala
Lumpur during 1938. The club was called the Hash
House Harriers.
Now, the facts of this story
are well documented, and some of the original Hash
House Harriers are still alive and attest to the
veracity of the tale. However, I claim that all that
Gispert and his friends invented was the name
“Hash House Harriers”, so the origin is no
origin at all. The practice of hare-and-hounds
running prior to 1938 is not that different from
Hashing; Hashing varies more from place to place
today than it does from hare-and-hounds runs of the
previous century. To demonstrate this, let's look at
a description of a hare-and-hounds run. Looking for
the first such run is futile, but one well-known
record takes us back to the 1830's.
Tom Brown's
Schooldays is a particularly tiresome
classic written by Thomas Hughes in 1857 about the
life of a schoolboy at Rugby School in England. The
story takes place during the 1830's, when Hughes
himself attended Rugby. Hashers who are not really
into stories about sadism among pubescent males at an
all-boys school will not find much entertainment in
this novel, except possibly for the account of
“Big Side Hare-and-Hounds”, Rugby's version
of the Hash. According to statements by Hughes, Big
Side Hare-and-Hounds was an actual institution at
Rugby, so this isn't jut fiction – this is a
glimpse at what it was like following trail in the
1930's.
As the scene opens, a group of
schoolboys is “tearing up old newspapers,
copybooks, and magazines into small pieces, with
which they were filling four large canvas bags.”
This is “scent” for the Hares. The use of
paper is not unusual; even today many Hashes use
paper rather than flour.
“Which run is
it?” said Tadpole.
“Oh, the Barby run I
hear,” answered the other, “nine miles
at least, and hard ground; no chance of getting
in at the finish, unless you're a first rate
scud.”
“Well, I'm going to
have a try,” said Tadpole; “it's the
last run of the half, and if a fellow gets in at
the end, Big Side stands ale and bread and
cheese, and a bowl of punch; and the Cock's such
a famous place for ale.”
Strangely enough, the Hounds
know where the run is. Specifically, they know that
they are going to be running around Barby Church and
finishing at the Cock Tavern. Unlike most modern
hashers, they are going to follow the trail anyway
– it's part of the rules. However, note the
object of the run: beer and food. This hasn't
changed. However, you “get in at the end”
and earn your munchies, it isn't enough just to
finish, as seen in this account of the actual run.
Then the hounds clustered
around Thorne, who explained shortly,
“They're to have six minutes law. We run
into the Cock, and everyone who comes within a
quarter of an hour of the hares'll be counted, if
he's been round Barby Church. Then came a
minute's pause or so, and then the watches are
pocketed, and the pack is led through the gateway
into the field which the hares had first crossed.
Here they break into a trot, scattering over the
field to find the first traces of the scent which
the hares throw out as they go along.
The old hounds make
straight for the likely points, and in a minute a
cry of “Forward” comes from one of
them, and the whole pack quickening their pace
makes for the spot, while the boy who hit the
scent first, and the two or three nearest to him,
are over the first fence, and making play along
the hedgerow in the long grass field beyond. The
rest of the pack rush at the gap already made and
scramble through, jostling one another.
“Forward” again,
before they are half through; the pace quickens
into a sharp run, the tail hounds are straining
to get up with the lucky leaders. They are
gallant hares, and the scent lies thick right
across another meadow and into a ploughed field,
where the pace begins to tell; then over a good
wattle with a ditch on the other side, and down a
large pasture studded with old thorns, which
slopes down to the first brook; the great
Leicestshire sheep charge away across the field
as the pack comes racing down the slope.
The brook is a small one,
and the scent lies right ahead up the opposite
slope, and as thick as ever; not a turn or a
check to favor the tail hounds, who strain on,
now trailing in a long line, many a youngster
beginning to drag his legs and feel his heart
beat like a hammer, and the bad plucked ones
thinking that after all it isn't worth while to
keep up.
Well, fifteen minutes after the
Hares or don't drink is pretty stiff, but even today
if you come in DFL (Dead Fucking Last) the FRBs may
have drained the keg before you get there. And
there's a little more structure than most Hashes, and
the hounds yell “Forward!” instead of
“On-On!” There aren't any women, but
neither were there any in the original Hash House
Harriers. And there is a trail, shiggy, checks, and
most everything we expect at a Hash. Unfortunately,
we never get to see the early Victorian equivalent of
an On-In because Tom Brown gets lost out on trail.
They had sorry wankers back in those days too.
Several historians feel that
the hare-and-hounds passage in Hughes' book inspired
the formation of later clubs in England.
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