King of gamesmen Damian Thompson hails Stephen Potter, who died 50 years ago
Damian Thompson hails Stephen Potter, inventor of gamesmanship: the art of winning at games – and in life – without cheating
It is 50 years since the death of Stephen Potter on 2nd December 1969. The name will be familiar to many readers of The Oldie, but you would have to be nearly 90 to remember his heyday in the 1950s. In those days, he was very famous: his books Gamesmanship (1947) and its companions, Lifemanship (1950), One-upmanship (1952) and Supermanship (1958), were devoured as voraciously in America as in Britain. They even spawned an earnest fan club in Tokyo.
Alas, by the time he died, aged 69, Potter had faded into the wallpaper. Postwar English whimsy was hard to sell in an era of satire and smut; acceptable only if you sent yourself up, as Frank Muir did.
And that wasn’t Stephen Potter’s style. There are no publicity shots of him mugging for the cameras; just photos of a balding chap in sensible specs wearing a suit that has been expertly tailored not to draw attention to itself.
Yet his impish smile hints at the truth: Potter was a mischief-maker of genius who provided his readers with the tools for creating social havoc.
He wrote Gamesmanship by candlelight during the big freeze of 1947; he was a BBC scriptwriter and a coal shortage had forced his radio programmes off the air. Its subtitle was The art of winning games without actually cheating. This art consisted of ‘ploys’ – little tricks to put your more skilful opponent off his game.
The rules of gamesmanship forbade unsporting behaviour such as whistling or fidgeting while your golfing partner played. But it was not unsporting to do so while you yourself swung at the ball. Potter recommended whistling the same phrase of classical music every time, being careful to get one note – ‘always the same note’ – maddeningly wrong.
Gamesmanship cited research by an army of imaginary ‘gamesmen’. Its mockacademic style came naturally to Potter. In an earlier career he had published papers on Coleridge and taught English literature at Birkbeck College, where he befriended ego-tripping philosopher C E M Joad, star of the BBC’S Brains Trust.
One day, they were playing tennis against two younger men who were winning easily. Then Joad, master of the preening put-down, made an unexpected fuss about whether a ball was in or out. It was so obviously out that their opponents became disconcerted and lost.
This gave Potter the idea for Gamesmanship, which sold hugely. The fad for adding the suffix ‘-manship’ to nouns caught on. Adlai Stevenson, a Potter fan, coined the term ‘brinkmanship’ to describe the foreign policy of John Foster Dulles, the US Secretary of State.
As a boy, I found copies of Gamesmanship and Lifemanship in my grandmother’s house. The former didn’t appeal, since I take pig-headed pride in not knowing the rules of a single sport. But Lifemanship is irresistible, and has aged far better than the overtly subversive humour of the Pythons.
Here Potter applies the principles of gamesmanship to everyday life on his own rungs of the social ladder, the hazardous stretch between the Rotary Club and the minor gentry. He was educated at Westminster and Oxford, but his father had been an insurance agent and there was no family money. From this precarious perch, he studied the wrong-footing techniques of aspiring gents and dons and gave them a surreal twist.
The gambits in Lifemanship and One-upmanship (pictured) are designed to puncture the other fellow’s confidence – but so ingeniously that he can’t work out how he lost the upper hand. One celebrated ploy deals with show-offs parading specialist knowledge. It doesn’t matter whether the topic is Brazilian bond markets, tribal rivalries among the Inuit or the Thirty Years’ War. Just toss in the meaningless qualification ‘…but not in the South’. That will stem the flow.
Potter’s genial tone can’t quite conceal the faint cruelty of his best ploys. You can unnerve a man on the verge of middle age by saying, ‘You’re looking very fit and young.’ To a definitely older man ‘and his still older wife’, you express pleasure that she’s ‘still moving briskly about’.
Genius. But good advice? Potter’s ploys are dangerously close to what we now call passive aggression. However adroit your manoeuvres, if you practise them often enough you’ll eventually be crossed off guest lists. Also, there are some situations for which no ploy will suffice, as C E M Joad discovered when he was caught fare-dodging on a train and the BBC ostentatiously dropped him.
I used to know a virtuoso ‘lifeman’, a travel writer called Algernon. He scored a triumph against a social-climbing Irishwoman who pestered him for a dinner-party invitation – and found herself sitting next to his cleaning lady. But Algernon didn’t know when to stop. I once heard a gay friend of his complain that he couldn’t shake off a cold. ‘Not an opportunistic infection, I hope,’ came the reply. (This was when AIDS was almost invariably fatal.) Nowadays Algernon just comes across as old and rude.
None of which detracts from the pleasure of reading Stephen Potter. His son Julian recalled that he was ‘truly sporting’ and never employed his own gambits. Was this most convivial of humorists playing a gentle trick on his own mean-spirited readers?