Thank you very much for that. And in fact, it covers most of what I want to say.
So it takes a lot of pressure off me.
And I wanted to talk about the wonderful toys and games and the Butlins collections and how they can be useful as well as interesting.
But they did ask me to say first a bit about collecting and about myself.
Apparently a lot of times collections come from people who've passed on or bit past it and they perhaps thought didn't apply to me for some reason.
And now I've got a little poker here.
About me. Yes, I did grow up in, I suppose, the 1950s, a little bit of the late 1940s,
and there wasn't much television and there wasn't much to be bought and the ration cards.
I can't even I don't want to go on about me, but I, I can remember we lived on the East Coast in view of the sea,
and I can remember these German bombs, bombs coming over and V ones and they had little noise and I could hear them from my bedroom.
And when the noise stopped, you knew that they were going to drop down and there would be an explosion.
It didn't particularly traumatise me, but, you know, that's where I grew up.
I grew up with a love of the sea and a view of the sea.
Family activities in the evenings.
Aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters would gather round and they quite like playing board games they always had done.
In the days before the war. My father got brothers and they like playing bridge, sort of family bridge competitively, a bit competitively,
and the aunts and uncles would pay for play for a penny, a point bit of fun, and the children were roped in to play at bridge as make up numbers.
So we got the impression that games were fun and entertaining and social activity between friends and relations.
A love of games and boats and collecting, I think.
Probably you're born to be a collector. You know, I collect almost anything, and it's a passion.
And it started when I was a child sailing up the river and there was a a little beach where you could land.
It was mostly mud, but this beach washed against a sandy cliff and items were washed out to the cliff.
There were little fossils, shells and shark's teeth and things like that.
And I collected the shark's teeth and put them into little boxes as a sort of pre teenager and took them up to the local Natural History Museum,
talked to the curator who was quite interested because what the sea washed into little sections I could find quite quickly.
It took him years and years to find them at to dig. So he liked what I was collecting.
And I found even as a child, if you got some knowledge about the tiny subject and became knowledgeable, you got respect.
And it was a lesson I learned about collecting the fun of finding something new and exciting on the beach.
And oh, that's a wonderful thing. I haven't seen one of those. And then learning about it.
So collecting generally and why old toys and games?
Well, as I said, we used to enjoy playing old things, but in the fifties you went to the toy shop or you looked in the games cupboard at home.
I think there was just a game of Ludo, a game of snakes and ladders, maybe a chess set, maybe a draft set and not much else.
Yeah, welfare families, perhaps a game of Monopoly. But, you know, there wasn't much.
But if you went to see Grandma, she'd get something out of a drawer that was made before the war.
And it was always better made and much more interesting than the old stuff, than the new stuff.
So I started when I finished school looking out for these things and they could be found without spending much money.
And like with the fossils, I soon found that I knew more about the games I was collecting and buying from a dealer than the dealer did.
You know something? Sometimes antique book dealers would put a few games on a shelf, didn't know much about them,
and then I would chat to them and sometimes I'd keep them by for me. So that's how I came into our games.
And what does the collection reflect now?
It's in a way, it's the largest one in the country of the type that I was collecting, but I didn't intend it to be completely comprehensive.
It still reflects, to some extent my personal interests.
You know, I enjoy a joke and a laugh and I love the sea maritime things.
So it helps to know that I've collected things that I like rather than trying to be sort of scientific about it.
When I was deciding to add things to the collection, I'd think about it initially when I was young and starting.
Is it beautifully made? You know, I collected poetry books and for the wrong reasons.
I like them if they are beautifully bound, you know. And the games I would like them if they were beautifully made, a wonderful chess piece,
nicely carved or something, turned out of hardwood, a wonderfully illustrated print or something.
Towards the end didn't matter so much, and I was much more interested in whether it shone a light on social history or whether it made you think.
And then, as I knew more about them, is it rare? Is it unusual?
Does it fill a gap? Does it add to knowledge? But always, not least, you know, is it fun and does it make you laugh or smile?
Here's a first picture of a game called UPS and Downs in India.
On a serious point, this is one that made me think page 59 of Space 59 shows magic lantern slides being used to display.
This board game was made by the Church Missionary Society, and it's slightly intended to send a message to people.
And here's the message. You know, using it can help you spread your message.
And this is 100 years ago. And then here's another message.
Look. 57. Opposition turned out to village.
Here's a well-meaning Westerner who thinks he knows better.
And here's the locals saying, no, thank you. You know, it made me think about what's going on in the world today.
And here's an utterly wonderful image already in the bottle in this one.
And it's in the Johnson collection and it's games like this.
And the Johnson that one reason why I put my collection alongside them, because I had it together.
You know, it makes a wonderful hole for research. But his knapping the nihilist a hundred years ago, you know, with his dynamite and his gun.
And it made me smile. The cartoon, if you like, slightly propaganda of what a horrible terrorist looked like at the time.
And it reminded me also, if you know about the siege of Sydney Street Worth looking up, and it's almost exactly what happened in Paris recently,
100 years ago, you know, there were thousands of police and soldiers involved and an artillery gun brought up.
And they're trying to find this Peter, the painter. And they fired into the flat.
The flat was burnt out. The found the charred bodies, the mysterious Peter, the painter, had disappeared and was never found.
So history goes round and looking at old games and learning what happened in the past seriously can help you can improve your perspective,
I think, on what's going on today. Now back to the categories in the collection.
Everybody keeps talking about it or it's easy to talk about it as a collection of boardgames, and I'm keen to emphasise that it isn't just boardgames.
So here are a few things that are in it.
Of course there are board games and they mean usually strategy games like a chess or a race game like Ludo or Snakes and Ladders.
But there's, of course, card games, as you've seen, and dominoes, which are a kind of card, but usually a title double ended.
There's dexterity games which are involve activity like shove ha'penny or Jenga.
There's word games. I've given an example. Scrabble. Question and answer games.
I suppose Trivial Pursuit, party games, charades and Pictionary.
Things you do in a group. Games of pure chance like a lotto.
No strategy. Not really a race. Jigsaws and puzzles.
These are things you can do by yourself without an opponent as teaching toys like an alphabet pastime, like a scrapbook equipment counters and dice.
And then, not least, there's a lot of books and catalogues and trade lists which had two knowledge of the subject.
And I would just say that if you want to know more,
because this is a very brief talk and until one day all the things here that in the Bodleian are available to view,
you can view the 1500 items that I've given and an extra thousand besides and an existing website which you'll see at the bottom of this slide.
Games sport dot org UK and that comprises before 1750.
It's mainly facsimile, it is facsimiles because the items are very rare and from 1750 to 1830 of the early stuff,
the majority is a colleague of mine who's collected a wonderful collection of very early printed games.
My stuff mostly starts around about 1800.
And you'll see from 1830 to 1870, there's a 400 items.
70 next 40 years, 650 next, 40 years, 500 last 40 years, 700 right up to 1990 or 2000.
So it's quite a good spread over a 200 year old period of items to look at.
And you can see them, you can click on the database and I'll talk more about it at the end.
Now. I'm going to show you a few more pictures and just starting with some examples of the different types I mentioned.
This is an example of the most common a race game. It's a board game, which is a race with a start and a finish.
And if you don't watch dad's army air P is air raid precautions.
And this game came out by Robert's brothers, I think I was told just recently that been found in a catalogue from 1939.
So it's before the air raids really started. And that's why at 32, the chap's wearing a gas mask, because I think experience and the first war,
we were frightened of gas bombs being dropped and all the children were issued with gas masks.
And I can remember having one. But earlier, this is what you'd call an abstract strategy game.
It's a game that's been around in Northern Europe for a thousand years, Fox and Geese.
And it's very nice if you sometimes come across a board like this and you think it's a solitaire board.
If it's got these diagonal cross lines on, it won't be solitaire.
It's Fox and Geese. And so an abstract strategy board.
Very nice to find one dated from 1813. That's quite unusual.
Here's an example of a puzzle. This is a little homemade puzzle.
But, you know, it took my fancy. It says, take the red ribbon off the green without removing the buttons.
And the buttons don't go through that hole at the bottom. So you can see immediately.
It's a bit tricky. Nicely made. Somebody has taken trouble at home to make something as an entertainment, you know, sort of thing.
I like. Games, equipment.
These are used sometimes instead of dice to totems.
I think we normally call them different kinds, different periods.
The ones with H and P on, incidentally, are for playing a game of chance called Put and Take, which some of you may remember.
This is educational toy actually an alphabet on the reverse of these,
but they've got a R word on the front with the same capital letter and you can talk about the picture.
So it's a little educational toy, very nice and quite hard to find if you're on a modest budget collecting.
But I was lucky to pick these ones up. Here's an example of a word game firm called Salus.
And again, what I really liked when I collected this one and added it was the picture
underneath slid of the children around a table as a family playing the game.
The youngest child having to stand on something so she can reach.
And underneath is a picture of either a mother or a governess showing something educating a young girl.
This is an example of a trade list in for important information.
J Buckland. John Buckland was what was called a toy maker as opposed to a printer and bookbinder.
He was a toy maker in London working from about, I think 1800 to about 1825, 1830.
And here at the bottom of a game of Bell and Hammer, he's printed his list of games.
Um, Peninsula, I've seen Peninsula.
It's the Iberian Peninsula on a board, the board game.
And it follows Wellington's campaign. The. Siege.
I think siege is a version of Fox and Geese, and there's one called Bonaparte's Flight.
New games, mathematical recreation. That must be interesting.
Lucha. Petty chess run. Tribute.
Royal tribute. Caricature. Lottery. That's obviously just a game of fun.
So these are games. I'm just saying I haven't found.
I don't know of a copy anywhere with wonderful to find them, but here's a list of them.
And if it wasn't for the list, we wouldn't know they existed. So the list is important on its own.
Uh, dexterity games I've collected.
And you might say, What's that? Well, to my definition, it's anything that requires physical activity.
And this particular little race game with printed yachts is managed by tweaking the string rather than by throwing a dice.
So it's a dexterity game in my categories. And finally, the types.
This is called a party game where everybody in the party has a little card to fill in.
But you could equally well call it a word game because everybody is trying to
make up the maximum number of words out of the letters in Oxford or Cambridge.
And again, I chose this one personally because I loved the artwork on the bobsled, you know, nine 1930s artwork.
Very, very nice to me. Now I can slow down slightly, I think can just take you on a quick tour on a chronological, chronological basis.
1672. 1950. Going to start with.
Some cards which are not in my collection, and they're not here.
They're actually in the Museum of Childhood in Edinburgh, but they do illustrate the subject quite well.
And we did go up to Edinburgh.
We were lucky to be shown around what they'd got in their boxes at the back because normally you wouldn't know they were there.
And to be allowed to take some pictures and here's a pack of cards which came out in the late 17th century.
So it's pretty early for English printed games, and they are what I would call morality cards because there's advice given underneath the picture.
And you'll see the first one shown is gaming and revelling.
And the bit of advice, number one is such gaming ought to be a board where in which sleepers and covetous covetousness with idleness is only learnt.
So it's nice. And then the next one that happens to be shown.
I don't know whether this is tongue in cheek or serious advice at the time, but it did really make me smile.
But I'm sure it would make some people cross a sceptre is one thing and a ladle is another.
Number two, the one I worried about.
The the more a woman looks in her glass, the less she looks after her house.
And and at the end, again,
if you think about it it's quite a serious message wishes and would is a no good householders so the you know obviously that's nice
the messages be content with what you've got and here is a less interesting game but it's the earliest English printed race game.
It came out I think on the continent, perhaps in Venice around the middle of the 16th century,
and it was copyrighted in England around the middle of the 17th century.
A game of goose. And it's a straightforward anticlockwise spiral finishing of square number, I think 63.
What's the earliest thing that I collected? Well, I've been able to date these little games counters.
The coronet at the top is a no coronet. And the arms are partly the arms of the Middleton family.
And the Earl was made into a duke around 1725.
So we know these don't date from much after 1725.
So that's the earliest thing I've been able to date that I've actually picked up.
The earliest printed game is this dissected puzzle, sometimes called jigsaws, but the jigsaw wasn't invented until later.
But these are designed to teach children initially geography and then other things, and you put them together and learn where the counties go.
And this little one has got very nice cartouches it's by a print.
According to publisher Robert Sayer, an estate of 1771.
Quite soon after, jigsaws were invented, all dissected puzzles first came out in England, I think in about 1766.
Travellers Companion to the post roads of England and Wales and the post roads were the equipment of the motorways because they were the major routes,
perhaps maintained at government expense. And at the top there's a little picture of the post and the chap racing along with a little
post box strapped on the saddle behind him and three people behind who are perhaps the guards.
And at the bottom is a little post van chasing along drawn by four horses.
So it's nice. Um, rights and wrongs.
This is a similar anticlockwise spiral from probably the end of the 18th century.
The new game of emulation. A parent's advice and love of virtue.
Little games equipment. Here are some little fish. Nicely made.
You know, you can get all sorts of fish. And these are some of the nicer ones that I found.
And you only find the fish with English games. And I wondered why.
And I asked a Frenchman, and he looked very condescending at me.
And he said, Who? He said, You English. You never bother learning foreign languages.
He said, The French word for a counter is fish. A new English thought it meant fish.
So I was put in my place. And anyway, that was a nice little story.
And these are educational AIDS.
This is progress of the dairy produced by a firm called Wallace.
Around again, the turn of the 18th century, designed to stimulate conversation and to teach children live about where butter and cheese comes from.
And there are eight cards in six and eight should be eight.
And I've got seven in this set, but it's a very rare set and I haven't seen another set anywhere.
And what's interesting is at the back, there's little tags fixed on with with some kind of sealing wax.
And you can stand the cards up and have a discussion with the governess or with somebody about them.
Here's a similar dissected puzzle from maybe ten or 20 years later showing not butter and cheese,
but how a plum pudding is assembled and bringing in the raisins or plums, harvesting the grain.
And you've got a little grocers shop and a baker's shop. And I really like the picture at the bottom of the family having the plum pudding.
And the infant is on grandma's lap and the younger child is on a highchair and the two slightly older children have to stand.
That interested me because they're not big enough to sit on a proper grown up chair.
Here's some boys playing marbles about that time, maybe 18, 20.
Here's some girls playing battle door and shuttlecock a time of early badminton again about that time.
The word battle door, incidentally, can also mean an alphabet on a back shaped piece of card or whatever.
So it's an educational toy as well, which is why they say on the rhyme underneath in Painted Battle,
those who tries to learn the letter as well, like shuttlecock, she quickly flies and soon will read and spell games.
It's called this little booklet Games of Holy Day Recreations and makes you realise where the word holiday comes from.
These are amusements, really light hearted fortune telling cards.
Maybe 18, ten or so. I'm showing several things of this sort of period.
But I like them. And they give you an indication of what young men and young ladies found as fun at that time.
And you can read on these. I think you if a lady was asked to pick a card and you would read her fortune.
You would have the ladies card in your hand and read the answers. And the same with the gentleman.
So, for example, on the gentlemen's card, you pick a card and you'll be asked what your wife, where you might meet your wife the first time.
And on one card it says in a pastry shop. And then and then another question is, what are you going to be doing the first time you meet her?
And the answer there is perhaps smiling to show her teeth.
You know, obviously you'd have a bit of a laugh.
And the boys, you know, they'd be asked, well, yes, lady would say, What?
What's your husband going to be doing when you meet him?
And two answers there are either bragging about his courage or offending all the company, you know?
Yes. And what are you going to do after you get married?
Well, you know, if you're lucky, it says love home, be it ever so homely,
you know, which is the same message as on that earlier card I was talking about.
If you're unlucky, it says be very suspicious, you know, so it's quite nice.
And here again, not valuable, but interesting.
They made handmade little cards. These are slightly later, but obviously, you know, the same amusement.
And one of the questions the gentleman asked her at the last one is, do you prefer the ladies to the bottle?
And, you know, what do you say if you're lucky?
It says that requires a little consideration.
But maybe if are even luckier, it says one kiss, and I'll tell you.
And here, you know, some maybe a little girl or some teenager who knows and has made a scrapbook very,
very carefully, lined the print and mounted it in an artistic way.
And she's put in little or I assume it's a little valentines that she's been given and
somebody cut out these tiny little bits of paper and written rhymes and arrows on it.
You know, huge amount of care and trouble to impress a young lady, perhaps,
and a valentine and a scrapbook, which obviously, you know, it isn't just casual.
It's something that she's been very careful to assemble. And these are a bit similar.
And a bit later they've got silk hedges and they're again made as compensation card.
So a governess perhaps would get out or perhaps the child would first make these
carefully and then they'd be got out and a conversation could be started with them.
Party game one you're familiar with in a little booklet called Parlour Amusements.
I loved my love with an A because he's amiable.
I'll send him to Andover and so on. So obviously you're having, as you go round to think of nouns starting with the same letter.
And if you can't eventually think of another one because they've all been had, you pay a forfeit.
And here are the children at the party of playing or what's called crying the forfeits.
A little bit later, I think, around 1860.
Illustrated by an illustrator, J.W. Barfoot, produced by a games maker called Ogilvy,
the same game as a card game called Bows and Bells, which is in the collection.
Uh, same. Yes. These are the printed cards that go with it.
Hate my love with an M because she's melancholy.
So I took her to Manchester, but I did give her macaroons and mushrooms and made the same firm little bit earlier.
David Ogilvy had produced good and bad passions again, designed little bit of a message how children are expected to behave.
And I love these cards. You know this one here.
Sorry. Let me. Uh, the obstinacy.
That's irritability. That's right. That's obstinacy. Selfishness, quarrelsome meanness and negligence, of course, is letting the pig out.
So, you know, this is a illustrator called Madeley, who's done lovely, humorous illustrations around that time.
This is produced in 1814. The one I showed you before is about 1850.
Going on to the 1890s. Little bit of discussion at the moment about where snakes and ladders originated from.
And it's generally accepted that in the temples in India there are wall hangings showing that you can climb a ladder
towards heaven and you can slide down a slate snake if you misbehave and have further to climb back up again.
So snakes and ladders with little pictures of children doing good and bad things came from India.
But this particular board doesn't have any good and bad things on it, just the snakes and ladders.
And it is, in fact, the earliest dated English snakes.
And that is I think it's registered in about 1892 by a firm called Heirs.
And it's interesting to me that they had a game that was out ten or 20 or 30 years before that called the game of the Snail.
And here's a version of their game with the snail.
It's the same anticlockwise spiral, but it's also got the promotions and demotions that you've got on their Snakes and ladders board.
So you could argue, if you are interested at all,
that snakes and ladders didn't entirely come from the Indian game, it also derived from the English game of snail.
That's my theory.
Anyway, talking about where games came from, Boris Johnson is very, very keen on saying that with for office the origin of table tennis,
not ping pong and his with all of that I found this one has got some celluloid balls in it,
but I'm not completely sure it should because the name with implies a sort of a lightweight ball.
And the rules here say this is a game played with a lightweight ball.
It's. More or less contemporary with table tennis origins.
But what's interesting to me here is it says, oh, ten years earlier than this, another game came out,
but it was played with a rubber ball and it didn't catch on because the rubber ball kept knocking over the ornaments in the dining room.
But so, you know, now you could say, well, table tennis perhaps had its origins in an earlier game.
This one made me smile. Another version of indoor tennis.
The idea of playing tennis in an armchair, you know. Well, I like the graphics.
And just the general idea of that one has.
Yes, what I would call a penny game, just as they have penny toys, they had penny games.
You could buy them for a penny. Little children would buy them themselves down the toy shop instead of waiting for Christmas.
And the pieces came in a little matchbox and literally a matchbox.
So this one would have in some little travellers and a dice and maybe some instructions,
and there would be a cheaply made cardboard board that go with it.
This one is called the top knee tube, because obviously the underground must have cost tuppence,
I suppose, and the tram driver and the bus driver still got their whips.
The tube drivers got a flat cap. And I'm not an I'm not a knowledgeable on transport matters,
but the underground train or the tube must have, I suppose, at that time had a steam train on it.
And I can't imagine quite how that worked. But somebody will one day tell me the little printed board that went with that game,
it was superseded about ten years later by this one, which is called tram versus bus.
And here down the bottom, you can see it's now a terminus of the Electric Tramway Company and the bus is now the Roseberry Motor Bus Co.
So times have moved on. Moving on to the First World War.
Sky Pirates is a puzzle where you try and get to the Zeppelin without falling down a hole.
And it's just a reminder that at the beginning of the First World War, we had these certainly on the East Coast where I lived.
Great big things appearing in the air above the villages and dropping tin cans full of smouldering debris onto this thatched roof, causing mayhem.
This may be the first time that English peace and quiet had been interrupted since the Norman conquest.
You know, literally there was terror in the villages. And it wasn't until we managed scientists over here managed to invent an exploding
bullet that we found that the multiple gas bags inside the Zeppelin could be set,
set off in a chain reaction. And one of them was brought down, and then they very quickly stopped coming.
It made me think about, you know, modern times and guided missiles and how battleships are perhaps becoming obsolete.
But anyway, beginning of the First World War and reflection on the times.
And if you think now modern pain is people sitting on their sofas,
looking at their iPads or the children listening to their headphones, well, here it is 100 years ago.
You know, I love this picture of a board game cover, the wireless game, and a little bit of amusement for the 19.
1920s. This one is called flirtation. An interesting board game for a number of reasons, but the board itself is here.
I've not seen it anywhere else. It's around the edge of the box and Charlie and the soldier slide along as they're moving.
And the object, of course, is to get as close as possible to the young lady.
Flirtation. A bit more serious at the beginning of the Second World War, GHQ general headquarters.
And here you've got the British flags and the French flags and the Nazi flags and the war game imagining what the war's going to be like.
And the imagination was, of course, that we'd pretty soon go over into Germany and get to Berlin, and that would be the end of it.
But it didn't work out quite like that.
Now, more or less, at the end of pictures and up to 1950 now this is probably one of the earliest space race games.
And what's nice about this is it actually got a moving screen, which Morris introduces the idea of computer games and television screens.
And you move the screen round by twiddling little wooden knobs you can see at the top and bottom and it moves along.
So this is Astron latest game by Waddington around 1950.
These are the same people that brought out over in England Monopoly and the GHQ game that I showed you.
So after 1950, I haven't got many pictures to show you.
Mainly because some of the games are under copyright. There are in total 700 items on the website in this period.
Um, and my collection, as you've been told, includes some a nice collection of 1970 strategy games.
And I wasn't initially interested in this period from 1950 onwards,
but when I got this collection of strategy games that Eileen Scott had collected and must have been well over 100 of them,
I realised they were important. And I also,
when I saw it in England at that time we were the leading country inventing new strategy games and there's some quite good stuff amongst them.
So I collect them as a group or kept them back as a group. And the other big group, as you've been told, was a local museum, said to me in 1992,
would I run a major exhibition of board games and run for about three months?
And all the schoolchildren came to take part and it was very, very successful.
But all the makers in England for that particular year sent me examples to be proud to be producing this,
and I got 100 board games from just that one year and I realised that was a very important snapshot of that particular time.
So that again had to be kept. And having had those two collections, I could fill the gaps a little bit,
but choosing games that I found interesting and that perhaps my family had enjoyed.
And you know, like when my family grew up, we really enjoyed playing here and taught us, which is a lovely board game invented by David Pilot.
You might still be able to buy it, but you can certainly still get it on the Internet.
And there were lots of other games. You know, Formula One was a nice race game and whatever your favourite ones are, you can still find them.
They're not hard to get hold of. But I have included some as just examples in the collection to bring the collection up to date.
Now, you may think this is all very light hearted and just a bit of fun.
So I did go back to these cards I showed you at the beginning with morals.
Um, and I can finish was just, well, not quite finished, but I can show you one or two of these morals about this is gaming.
This is sports and pastimes, I think. Number one, mirth with thy labour sometimes put in use or here it says there.
But I think it means use that better than most thy labour India.
And underneath this course, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
But it's still interesting, you know, in 76, 70 or whenever, 350 years ago,
when you think everybody was Puritan or whatever, they did actually value recreation and play.
It's just not commonly understood that.
And finally, unlike number four, when the short winter days yield no delights and harmless gain or game or to it cards,
the nights may pass the tedious hours away in mirth and to our drooping spirits give new birth.
So, you know, there you are. That's summing up what I'm trying to give you a message about.
And as I said, if you want to see more until all the images that are available at the Bodleian, you can go to this website.
I've mentioned you select examples and you can just enter a name if you want to find a particular name or a maker.
Or you can just browse by clicking by date or by alpha, and then you can see I think they let you see 30 items a page and you can browse through.
Starting, you know, in 1650 and getting right up to 2000.
But I would just say as a word of caution that the information about makers is incomplete.
It's my next project for the next two years is making it a bit more complete.
Um. Why and where? Well, of course, I think these games are a reflection of British culture.
And I think particularly here, we're lucky that we've never had an invasion.
We've got lots of material that hasn't been destroyed. We've had an empire that brought in stuff from abroad.
We've been interested in rules of part of the British character is writing rules and making sure people stick to them.
We've got words in our culture like fair play, play the game.
What fun. It's an important part of our culture.
That's not commonly publicised very much.
Not much studied. It's sort of. It's a bit light-hearted, but it's very important.
I think it's now I think fortunately going to be a national resource at the Bodleian in conjunction with what the Bodleian had already got,
the wonderful games already there, and the Johnson collection, the wonderful children's literature and the Hope collection,
and some quite important copyright deposits of rules of games.
A Bodleian being a copyright library. So I don't know if I have more or less filled my time.
I can take one or two questions if anybody wants.