Pall Mall, a 17th Century Pallamaglio Alley

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Pall Mall, SW1, is a Monopoly board-famous street in the City of Westminster, connecting Trafalgar Square with the St James’s area of the city. These days it’s a prime commercial hub of London, home to investment banks, big-end-of-town financiers, “Big Petroleum”,  etc. Back in the 19th century it was the place for “Gentlemen’s clubs”– and they had staying power, the Reform Club, the Athenaeum Club, the Travellers Club and the Royal Automobile Club are all still there. 

 

Pall Mall, SW1 ⇪

Credit: Oxyman / A4 Pall Mall 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A4_Pall_Mall_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1011774.jpg

Long before the Gents’ clubs Pall Mall was a sporting ground for aristocratic gentlemen, more correctly it was called an ‘alley’ for the playing of pall mall⟦A⟧, made popular by Charles II who played pall-mall in the St James’s alley in the 1660s, hence the street’s name. Pall mall had other associations for the ‘Restored’  King Charles, his mistress the actress Nell Gwyn resided at № 79 Pall Mall. 

The game itself first reached British shores earlier however, probably imported from France via Scotland...reportedly Mary, Queen of Scots played pall mall in East Lothian in 1566. It’s uncertain if the game originated in France— where it was called paille-maille —or in Italy—where it was called pallamaglio (literally “ball mallet”). The equipment comprises a heavy wooden mallet (similar to a croquet mallet but with a curved head) and a boxwood ball possibly some six inches in circumference. The idea of the game is to strike the “round bowle” with the mallet and propel it through a ring suspended in the air (also described variously as an “iron hoop” or “a high arch of iron”) located at the end of an alley (which is variable in length)⟦B⟧. Pall mall was thus sort of like “croquet with elevation”, in fact pallamaglio seems to have been a precursor of croquet⟦C⟧ . The  winner apparently is the player who ’aces’ the target in the fewest number of attempts, cf, golf (’Pall-mall’, Topend Sports, www.topendsports.com; To Coin a Phrase: A Dictionary of Origins, Edwin Radford (edited and revised by Alan Smith), 1974).

The lawn game of royals became as extinct as the dodo long before the modern era, however in 2009 there was a nostalgic albeit momentary revival of pall mall held “in the shadow of Buckingham Palace” as part of the promotion of the “Story of London” festival (‘Pall Mall – The story of an iconic London address’, Kate Dean, 116 Pall Mall, 04-Mar-2019, www.116pallmall.com).

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Footnote: Polysemic extension The adverb “pell mell”—meaning to rush headlong in a disorderly or reckless and hurried fashion—derives from the “indiscriminate vigour” of the sport’s players (Radford)

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 ⟦A⟧ the mall was a field for playing, by extension the term came to be used for any long, open grassy area where people walked or played (‘Pall mall balls and mallets’, http://mall history.org)

⟦B⟧ the alley is commonly depicted as a lawn court, although the premier diarist of Charles II’s reign Samuel Pepys described the ‘Pellmell” (as he called it) surface as comprising “hard sand...dressed with powdered cockle shells”

⟦C⟧ contemporary drawings and paintings of pall mall showing two distinct types of target for players—the raised ring appended to a post and an inverted u-shaped iron hoop which is much closer to modern croquet—suggest there were two versions of the game