Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

The worst has befallen! The Fascists have nerved themselves for one great resounding, crushing effort against the despised Jews. To show that now, at long last, they really and truly mean business, they have solemnly resolved that – they shan’t play ping-pong with us! The thunderbolt fell in Leeds. The Yorkshire Fascist Table Tennis Club forged it. One of its most cherished principles was that never would it wield a racket in company with a Jew. It could never rise to the full majesty of the game, or do justice to its own mighty prowess in such harassing circumstances. So when it discovered that the Leeds Table Tennis League, of which it was a member, had so outraged its most sacred feelings as to arrange a fixture for it with the local Judeans, it downed rackets and resigned! Here, then, is the antisemitic cult revealed in all the nakedness of its miserable, puny, witless and humorous self. “If Judea won’t perish then, at any rate, it shan’t ping-pong with us”! Hitlerism has struck one grand blow against the dominance of the accursed Jew. Ping-pong shall be Judenrein, and the world be saved. Sir Oswald Mosley must feel a proud man this day, and Hitler has some consolation for his nasty setback in Germany. He may not be Chancellor, but at least he can boast that no Leeds Fascist crosses rackets with a Jew!

Comment

Comment

Full text found in the Jewish Press for 6 January 1933, hence my ignorance of the JC’s title. Via Stuart J. Rawnsley’s Ph.D. thesis, which quotes from the JC on the anti-Jewish disturbances in Manchester in February 1933, by which time the anti-Semitic intent of both the high and the low in the B.U.F. was clearly established:

Jewish shopkeepers have found their premises plastered with inflammatory incitements such as “Down with the Jews” and “Perish the Jews.” Offensive notices are reported to have been posted on the walls and railings of a local synagogue and chalked on the pavements, with the swastika decoration. Moreover, a brick has been thrown through the window of a house where a woman was lying seriously ill, while a piece of paving brick, hurled with great force through the window of the Talmud Torah, had labels attached bearing attacks on the League of Nations as “a plot for world control of Jews,” on the Peace Conference as a “Jews Conference” and on Jews in general as controllers of politics, purveyors of “sensual films,” “tamperers with white girls” and the cause of all the national troubles in Ireland, India, Egypt and even China (Rawnsley 1981).

I haven’t found anything on the corresponding attacks in Leeds, and the 1917 anti-Semitic rioting in Leeds isn’t widely acknowledged.

The Observer quotes the Auschwitz story and the following anecdote of an Ehrlich rally from Dick Miles’s Spongers Seldom Chisel, which I haven’t seen:

The first point lasted two hours and 12 minutes. Ehrlich had his special, outsized ‘chiseling bat’. He was determined to wear Farcas down at the very beginning of the game. He pushed and pushed and after 70 minutes the score was still 0-0, but Farcas ‘had shrivelled with every return and now looked like a hunchbacked robot’. Ehrlich himself was suffering. ‘The extra weight of his chiseling bat had begun to tire his arm’, so he ‘deftly switched his bat and continued the point left-handed’. But there was a problem with the umpire. After 85 minutes his neck had locked, and a replacement had to be called in.

‘The arena began to empty. Ehrlich didn’t care. To keep him relaxed, he had a chessboard put on a table near the sideline and would whisper his moves to the Polish team captain. Meanwhile the ball “had crossed the net more than twelve thousand times,” according to the Chiseler King. But after two hours, Farcas’s arm began to freeze. And he lost the first point.

‘Twenty minutes into the second point, a member of Ehrlich’s team reached into his equipment bag “and pulled out a knife, a long loaf of bread and a two-foot Polish sausage”. Thinking that the Poles “were prepared for a winter siege,” Farcas started to attack. When Ehrlich returned the ball twice, Farcas, in a fit, “sent the ball and bat together sailing wildly over the King’s head” and “ran screaming from the court”. ‘In response to Ehrlich’s long point, the ITTF decided to “invigorate” the sport of ping-pong. It decreed that a game had to stop after 20 minutes, the victory going to whoever was ahead.’

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Original

The worst has befallen! The Fascists have nerved themselves for one great resounding, crushing effort against the despised Jews. To show that now, at long last, they really and truly mean business, they have solemnly resolved that – they shan’t play ping-pong with us! The thunderbolt fell in Leeds. The Yorkshire Fascist Table Tennis Club forged it. One of its most cherished principles was that never would it wield a racket in company with a Jew. It could never rise to the full majesty of the game, or do justice to its own mighty prowess in such harassing circumstances. So when it discovered that the Leeds Table Tennis League, of which it was a member, had so outraged its most sacred feelings as to arrange a fixture for it with the local “Judeans,” it downed “rackets” and resigned! Here, then, is the anti-Semitic cult revealed in all the nakedness of its miserable, puny, witless and humorous self. “If ‘Judea’ won’t ‘perish’ then, at any rate, it shan’t ping-pong with us”! Hitlerism has struck one grand blow against the dominance of the accursed Jew. Ping-pong shall be Juden-rein, and the world be saved. Sir Oswald Mosley must feel a proud man this day, and Hitler has some consolation for his nasty set-back in Germany. He may not be Chancellor, but at least he can boast that no Leeds Fascist crosses rackets with a Jew! For our part, we do not take the childish tomfoolery of these Fascists seriously. Having exposed the footling antics of their movement so effectively, we even think they have deserved well of us. Besides, if they have de-Judaised table tennis, we Jews have, at any rate, the compensation of a real tennis champion in our German co-religionist, Prenn. So we can dismiss these gallant sportsmen and red revolutionaries with the good humoured admonition: “Well done, ye good and faithful Jew-baiters. Now run away and play ping pong, all by yourselves! … And, by the way, whatever you do, be careful not to enter for the premier Table Tennis trophy – the Swaythling Cup! For not only was this trophy presented by a Jew, but it has actually been won by a 100 per cent Jewish Hungarian team, including even the officials!” Oh dear, dear, what is a poor, simple-minded Fascist to do!

386 words.

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• 1931 World Table Tennis Championships – Men’s team (1) ·
• 1936 World Table Tennis Championships (1) ·
• Adolf Hitler (1) ·
• Alojzy Ehrlich (1) ·
• Amateur sports (4) ·
• Antisemitism (6) ·
• Auschwitz concentration camp (1) ·
• British Union of Fascists (1) ·
• British fascism (1) ·
• China (1) ·
• Daniel Prenn (1) ·
• Egypt (1) ·
• Fascism (1) ·
• Germany (25) ·
• Great Depression (1) ·
• Hungary (3) ·
• India (6) ·
• Ireland (24) ·
• Jews (12) ·
• Lausanne Conference of 1932 (1) ·
• 📌Leeds (235) ·
• Mosley, Oswald (1) ·
• Nationalism (1) ·
• Nazi Party (1) ·
• November 1932 German federal election (1) ·
• Racism (7) ·
• Table tennis (1) ·
• Talmud Torah (1) ·
• Tennis (1) ·
• The Jewish Chronicle (2) ·
• Treaty of Versailles (2) ·
• West Riding of Yorkshire (147) ·
• World Table Tennis Championships (1) ·

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