Mark Adolph - Growing Up With Subbuteo: My Father Invented the Worlds Greatest Game

Published by SportsBooks Ltd

Copyright: Mark Adolph
October 2006

This ebook edition first published in 2011

The right of Mark Adolph to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

ISBN 9781907524196

Cover by Kath Northam

Dedicated to my father
Peter Arthur Adolph
7th December 1916
to 17th March 1994

With thanks to: Anthony Adolph, my cousin, author, broadcaster and genealogist; Richard Watt for being such a magnificent opponent in the early days; David Ward for his encouragement and ideas; Chris and Ingrid Tarrant for their advice on finding a publisher; Tony Crook at Bristol Cars for his painstaking research into his archives; Microsoft 3D Pinball for getting me to sit at my computer in the first place!

Also to Ian Woods and Rachel Craven at Hasbro UK for the use of the Subbuteo logo; Michael (Mick) Hill for his advice and ornithological expertise; Richard Payne for allowing me access to his Subbuteo knowledge.

Finally, to my wife Nikki, my daughter Lauren and my son Tom for their love, support, belief and encouragement and being there to kick me when I need it most!

MOST PEOPLE IN the civilised world have heard of Subbuteo. That is not an immodest claim. It is one of those words which for some reason seems to permeate the subconscious mind and become lodged there for ever. It might be known by somebody who knows of someone who owns a Subbuteo set, but has never indulged in playing the game themselves or someone who from a very early age spent all their spare time kneeling on the floor flicking little plastic men at a plastic football. If they are lucky, they might even have been playing on a table, thus avoiding sore knees, backache and having players snapped off at the ankles due to someones misplaced body part while crawling around on the floor. Every single one of these people always seems to have very fond memories of Subbuteo, be it friendly, or sometimes not so friendly, squabbles over a disallowed goal during their recreation of a real-life cup final, or when Accrington Stanley beat Brazil 5-0. These anecdotes are endless and everyone has a story to tell.

I, too, have a story to tell, for it was my late father, Peter Arthur Adolph, who invented the game of Subbuteo in 1947, some nine years before I was born. I am not claiming, in any shape or form, that he was the first person to bring about the concept of table football. Of course he was not. He did, however, invent, conceive, originate, devise whichever word you think is appropriate the phenomenon known to everyone worldwide as Subbuteo, a name synonymous with a specific genre of table top football.

It had been Dads intention to write his own very personal experiences of his life with Subbuteo, which he liked to call his memoirs rather than commit himself to the rather formidable intention of writing a book. It is his collection of photos, handwritten notes, press cuttings, which he intended to use for his writing but which sadly he never got round to, which now sits in front of me in a plain buff-coloured folder with the word Memoirs written on the front in his own highly distinctive handwriting. I am now using it as the basis and inspiration for this book. Over the years, many of Dads friends and acquaintances had told him that he should put his experiences down in writing, but the reply was always along the lines of Who would be really interested? Since his death in 1994, I have found out that the answer to that question is emphatic: many, many people across the world who have had Subbuteo in their lives, and still have to this day, are interested.

A few years ago, I had a sitting with a clairvoyant who told me, among other things, that she felt very strongly that I had a book in me waiting to come out, and that, on the back of this book, a lot of foreign travel would be involved. I have to say that I am not totally cynical about clairvoyance and suchlike, but it is not beyond the realms of possibility that everyone has the capacity to write a book about something, so when the book in me was touched upon, I took it to be too much of a generalisation. I wondered what on earth my book could possibly be about, and promptly dismissed the notion altogether. It was only a few years later, when I started to get phone calls from complete strangers wanting information for Subbuteo websites, and collectors of Subbuteo needing my opinion of the value of certain rare teams and accessories, that I realised that interest in Subbuteo was still as strong as it ever was. I have even received a phone call at well past midnight from a gentleman from Middlesbrough informing me that he had recently purchased an old Subbuteo set at a car-boot sale for fifty pence, and did I happen to know what the true value might be? I am always happy to try to help in these situations, but being disturbed at that ungodly hour was really a bit much! I politely informed him that without actually seeing the set in question it was rather difficult to give a valuation, but assured him that at fifty pence he had, without doubt, bought an absolute bargain. So it was that I decided it might be a good idea to write a book, from my own very unique perspective, about Subbuteo and my father, and give a glimpse of what life was like behind the scenes of the worlds best-known and much-loved table football game.

From the moment I realised it was my duty, and indeed honour, to write this book, I decided from the outset to give an accurate account, and not to write it through rose-tinted spectacles, not to soften any hard edges. I am sure that you, the reader, would not wish that. You want to hear it straight. And you will, I promise you.

A common assumption, voiced by numerous people over the years, is that it must have been an ideal period for me as a youngster, and indeed for my parents, to have been surrounded and totally involved in the whole Subbuteo thing. This was not necessarily the case. Yes, there was an abundance of money around, but money does not guarantee that everything is rosy. This is real life after all. There was a lot going on under the surface that was not apparent to the casual observer. In hindsight, I am surprised that I turned out to be the reasonably normal and well-balanced individual that I am, although some may refute that statement! Of course, the good times counterbalanced the not so good, and I saw and did many things as a young boy which, were it not for Subbuteo and the lifestyle it generated, I would not have experienced. For that I owe my dad a huge debt of gratitude.

At this stage of an introduction I should tell the story of how the name Subbuteo came about. It is a question that is constantly asked of me, and rightly so, as it is quite an unusual name. The question of its origin has been raised a few times on various television and radio programmes, once on the panel game QI, hosted by the comedian, author and all-round sharp wit Stephen Fry, and also on Radio 2 with Steve Wright in a section he likes to call Factoids. I also recall a few newspaper articles and trivia books alluding to the origins of this extraordinary word, but I have to say, and I admit to being extremely petty here, the pronunciation always seems to rub me up the wrong way.