Bowlywicket: The Provenance of a New England Street GameAuthor(s): Alan PowersSource: Folklore, Vol. 93, No. 2 (1982), pp. 164-165Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1259936 .

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Folklore vol. 93:ii, 1982 164

Bowlywicket: The Provenance of a New England Street Game

ALAN POWERS

ON a grey day, the granite mills and myriad churches of Fall River, Massachusetts, blend with the three-storey tenements and the sky. An aroma like pommes frites sweeps the interstate highway from the Frito-Lay potato chip factory that has taken over one of the textile mills. At one point in recent history, the mayor and most of the city council were all undertakers. It is hard to be proud of the past in the city of Lizzie Borden, the notorious heroine of the well-known American street rhyme, 'Lizzie Borden took an axe/ And gave her mother forty whacks;/ When she saw what she had done,/ She gave her father forty-one.'

Yet as a writing teacher at their community college, I found that the city students had a cultural advantage over their suburban classmates. They retained certain oral continuities that their classmates' parents had chosen to abandon. One of these appeared in their papers answering my inevitable first-week assignment about games they played as children. They told me of 'Bowly-wicket,' or 'Bowlawicket.'

You play with tin cans, broomsticks, and a 'pinky'-a small rubber dimestore ball. The pinky, the most expensive and only bought item of equipment, was often the object of an intense recovery mission from the street drain. The two main ways of doing this were either bending the hook on a coathanger to act as a ladle such as one might use colouring Easter eggs, or by sticking gum on the end of a broomstick. The higher-technology coathanger route worked best in a drain with lots of water. Now back to the game ...

Three tin cans are stacked, one on top of two, at one end, and three more at the other end. Clearly, the street cannot have much traffic, and such streets are becoming rarer in Fall River. The batsman stands at one end and defends his pile of cans; the pitcher or bowler stands in back of the other tin cans. The pitcher's object is to knock over the cans; the batter tries to defend them, and also to hit the ball and run to the other pile of cans and back. That is one run.

If all this sounds very familiar, it did to me too. Wasn't this a version of cricket? And how did England colonize the children of Fall River, much less subdue so recalcitrant a tribe?

Iona and Peter Opie's encyclopaedic Children's Games in Street and Playground does not discuss cricket as a game passed on orally from child to child in England; however, in America cricket assumes an entirely different character, as well as the different form described above. My student informants were often in their twenties, and they recalled Bowlawicket with animation. It used to be played 'below the hill,' in the predomin- antly Portuguese neighbourhood. The most recent sighting of the game in play was last year near Lafayette Park, in a predominantly French neighbourhood. I am currently waiting for Spring, to photograph this apparently endangered species of play.

We know from T. R. Crosswell's 'The Amusements of Worcester School Children' (The Pedagogical Seminary, VI, 1898, 314-71) that four boys and one girl played cricket

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BOWLYWICKET 165

in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1896. Such a small number among the two thousand surveyed suggests that these may have been children of English immigrants; i.e., the game had not yet spread broadly and taken on the indigenous flavour I have described. William Newell's Games and Songs of American School Children (N.Y. and London, 1903) mentions the game 'Wicket,' which seems to have been the American name for the game played in Worcester, and, of course, Fall River.

Alice Morse Earle's Child Life in Colonial Days (MacMillan, 1899) quotes The Pretty Little Pocket Book, evidently from the seventeen-seventies, which lists among colonial children's games: chuck-farthing, kite-flying, marbles, blindman's buff, shuttlecock, I sent a letter to my love, stool-ball, base-ball, and cricket. Since the first codified rules for cricket appeared in the same decade that the Pocket Book appeared, the author may simply be keeping au courant, rather than witnessing any real popularity of the game among colonial American children.

A more likely explanation and a more recent provenance derive from the local history of Fall River, which embraced a large immigrant population in the last half of the last century. Many of these millworkers, especially the skilled weavers and loom repair men, came with their children from industrial centres of England, particularly Manchester. It seems very possible that these children brought with them, from one grey city to another, the desire to play Bowlawicket. They also brought an oral tradition, the rules.

Adult and suburban organizations like Little League, a nationwide network of baseball teams organized by parents for their children, have come to displace the childhood games that depend on local continuity, even lack of mobility, and on the past. Bowlawicket may be unique among such games in that it was once the opposite, a codified adult game; it is one relic of a childhood culture apparently independent of the adult world around it. It is also an oral remainder from a written original, one that has survived extraordinary changes in social group. There was no Bill of Lading for the importation of Bowlawicket, and the adults of that time may well have considered it a nuisance. Nor are there presently any cricket teams in Fall River.

Even oral tradition can no longer recall the cities of England whence Bowlawicket arose. In fact, the game is now played by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of later immigrations, particularly those from French Canada and Portuguese-speaking countries like Brazil.

But whether it came with the children of English immigrants of the last century, or whether it persisted, like blindman's buff, since the children of colonial days, Bowlawicket is evidence, as Alice Morse Earle said, that 'There are no more striking survivals of antiquity than the games and pastimes of children' (op. cit., p.342).

Department of History Brown University, Providence R.I., U.S.A.

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