The Curious History of Fildinski
The card game Bezique was first popularised in Britain in 1862. By the end of 1869 it had become a runaway sensation with another nine editions of a popular box set produced in the following year by the well-known London games publisher Charles Goodall under the name of ‘Camden’. It was at this point that something rather interesting happened.
In 1870 another London firm Thomas De La Rue produced a new Bezique box set under the name of ‘Cavendish’, which was the pen-name of a famous authority on Whist whose real name was Henry Jones.
Henry Jones (1831 -1899) - 'Cavendish'
The novelty of this new edition was that it included rules for a significant and unfamiliar variant of the game known variously as ‘Polish Bezique’ or as ‘Fildinski’. The box set included separate rules and player guides for both games, along with a supplementary booklet about both games written by Cavendish. The new ‘Polish Bezique’ received an enthusiastic reception from the British public, and was described as “being much superior in the opinion of many authorities”. A claim uncritically repeated to this day.
There are several problems with this account of ‘Fildinski’ however. The first is that no-one seemed to be quite certain how to spell it. The eminent Encyclopaedia Britannica misprinted the name as ‘Fildniski’ in several editions, an error perpetuated by a number of other sources as well. The second problem is that ‘Fildinski’ is not a meaningful word in Polish, nor in any other related language.
New card games are not infrequently named after cities or provinces where they first became popular, e.g Boston, Michigan, Chicago, Klondyke, Yukon, etc. The problem is that there appears to be nowhere in the world named Fildinski. Nor does it exist as a proper name of a distinguished figure that could have become attached to a popular card game in the way that Napoleon (Nap) did.
More worryingly, I can find no trace of Fildinski or Polish Bezique being mentioned or played anywhere else in the world before 1870, when ‘Cavendish’ proudly introduced it to the world as a new discovery. The very earliest reference I can find is an acquisition record in the British Library - shelfmark Mic.A. 11518(4) for the printed rules of ‘Royal Besique’ by ‘Fildinski’. The record which is dated to 1870 has a curator’s notation indicating that it had been entered into the collection “Presumably for Copyright”.
At this point i will say outright that Fildinski is most likely a made-up name for a variation that was invented by Cavendish himself. There was no ‘Polish Bezique’ in existence before he created it out of thin air and lent his name to the deception in order to create a new commercial opportunity for Thomas De La Rue the publishers and himself.
Why did Cavendish not simply take the credit for inventing this new version of Bezique himself, and dispense with this ludicrous rigmarole of creating a cod-attribution for it? There are two possible answers. The first is that Henry Jones (1831-1899) was in real life a distinguished doctor and MRCS (like his father before him). Apart from writing about Whist and Billiards, he was also a keen Croquet player and a committee member of the All England Croquet Club at Wimbeldon. In 1875 Henry Jones made the radical suggestion that one of the club’s Croquet lawns should be set aside for playing Lawn Tennis - a suggestion which led two years later in 1877 to the first inaugural Wimbledon Lawn Tennis tournament. So he was a serious man with a professional sense of gravitas, who preferred to maintain a certain distance between his public persona as a writer on popular card games, and his professional career as a doctor.
A second reason might be that Bezique for all it’s new-found popularity in the respectable drawing-rooms of Victorian Britain actually had some distinctly louche and unsavoury associations. It was a game that had originally become popular among the courtesans of the theatrical demi-monde in Paris. It was also played as a high stakes gambling game in the racier salons and up-market bordellos patronised by Edward the Prince of Wales, and his younger brother Alfred The Duke of Edinburgh during their playboy escapades in Paris. Alfred was in fact the member of the royal family who first lent his name to Bezique and helped popularise it in Britain from 1866 onwards. Henry Jones as a morally conservative and high-minded member of the establishment may well have chosen to insulate himself from these associations with some extra care.
In general, ‘Cavendish’ was invariably an interpreter of games, rather than an innovator. In his writings on Whist for example, he always sought to codify and document best practice, rather than to reinvent it. I can well imagine that he probably found Bezique to be illogical, flippant, and not much to his taste when it first became popular in Britain. You can see Henry Jones sitting in his card clubs playing through hands of Bezique and wondering how the game could possibly be improved, and put on a more logical footing for serious-minded players like himself. At some point he probably conceived of a radical inversion of the rules of Bezique whereby declarations were to be made from cards already won in tricks, rather than from cards in your hand that were waiting to be played to tricks. The problem was how to promote this new invention ? My suggestion is that Henry Jones and his publisher hit on the idea of inventing an entirely specious name and precedent for it, and voilà ! ‘Fildinski’ aka ‘Polish Bezique' was born.
Fildinski is even less commonly played nowadays than Bezique, even by connoisseurs and historians. In all honesty it feels like a completely different game from Bezique when you attempt to play it, and it can only have been the reputation of Cavendish that persuaded players of his era otherwise. Conceiveably the publisher Thomas De La Rue wanted to bring Cavendish on board for the 1870 edition of their new Bezique box-set because he was the most pre-eminent writer on Whist and Piquet at that time. Perhaps Henry Jones only agreed to lend the authority of his pen-name ‘Cavendish’ to this project on the proviso that he was to be allowed to smuggle his own new invention ‘Fildinski’ into the package. And the quid-pro-quo agreed on was that it would be passed off as an established variation from Poland ? That at least seems to be the best explanation available to me now.
Thomas De La Rue Box Set "Bezique And Polish Bezique" with notes by Cavendish c.1870.
