Playing Cribbage

Harry Pearson on a swaggering cavalier's card game that was streets ahead of its time

A soldier, poet and intimate of Charles I, Sir John Suckling was tall, fair-haired and handsome. A man of taste and bravado, when he pondered his place in history the swaggering cavalier probably hoped to be remembered for one of his love ballads, liberally stuffed with double entendres, or perhaps for an act of derring-do on some foreign battlefield. But it was not to be. Suckling’s poetry is a footnote; his military career, such as it was, an uncomfortable comedy. Sir John did achieve immortality, however. His memory is invoked whenever anyone uses the phrases ‘level-pegging’, ‘left in the lurch’ or ‘streets ahead’, or speaks of being ‘bilked’ in a deal; because, shortly after he was knighted in 1631, Sir John Suckling invented the card game cribbage, and it is cribbage that has bequeathed to us these everyday expressions.

Today cribbage is considered the fusty old relation of bridge and poker, a game played in pubs by elderly men of bucolic appearance pickled by a lifetime of outdoor work and pints of cask ale. It’s little wonder that in the world’s longest running soap opera, BBC radio’s everyday story of country folk The Archers, the game is the province of aged rustics. Indeed one of them, farm labourer Bert Fry, died (literally ‘pegged out’) after a game in The Bull in 2021.

Cribbage did not always have such a dowdy image. Sir John Suckling was a gallivanting playboy who had his portrait painted by Anthony van Dyck. According to John Aubrey, he was ‘the gallant of his time and the greatest gamester’, although also a man ‘no shopkeeper would trust with sixpence’. They were wise not to. Sir John won over £20,000 (worth about £4 million today) playing cribbage with marked cards against gentlemen who had foolishly invited him into their country homes. True to form he quickly lost it all, along with the fortune he’d inherited from his father, a prominent Norfolk landowner. Even the sight of his sisters weeping as they watched their fortune dwindle could not deter him.

Destitute and exiled to France after a bungled attempt to spring the Earl of Stafford from the Tower of London, Sir John – Aubrey records – developed blood poisoning after a thief drove a nail into his foot. It ‘killed him miserably with vomiting’. At least poor Bert Fry passed away peacefully over a pint of bitter.

While other seventeenth-century card games such as Bone Ace, Queen Nazareen and French Ruff faded into obscurity, cribbage became ever more popular after Sir John’s death. The game he had invented appealed to people high and low. It was played in palaces, inns and houses of ill repute, by lords and commoners, peasants and priests.

Cribbage has few rules, but endless subtleties and permutations. The scoring patterns are so complex that just thinking about them is likely to make a novice giddy. Put simply, the objective is to be first to score the target number of points (usually 61 or 121) by playing card combinations. The points are marked on the cribbage board (usually made of a hardwood, such as mahogany), using pegs (generally made from bone), placed into holes (the same board was at one time often used to keep the score in darts). The rows of holes (grouped in fives) are known as streets, hence ‘streets ahead’ and ‘level-pegging’. The area behind the start line is the ‘lurch’, so if you are so comprehensively beaten that your pegs are still there when your opponent ‘pegs out’, you are ‘left in the lurch’.

‘Bilking’ is a form of cheating. In cribbage, the Jack or Knave is referred to as ‘His Nibs’, while a player who fails to extract the maximum amount of points from his hand is a ‘Muggins’. It’s hard to think of any game that has given the English language more words and expressions than cribbage. Thankfully ‘cribbage-faced’, denoting somebody badly scarred by smallpox, is no longer in common usage.

The game’s popularity stretched over the centuries. One of the 20 card games described in Charles Cotton’s 1674 book The Compleat Gamester, it is portrayed in the satirical sketches of eighteenth-century cartoonist Thomas Rowlandson and crops up in the Victorian novels of Anthony Trollope and Rudyard Kipling. Jane Austen was a keen player, and in Mansfield Park Fanny Price plays cribbage with her aunt, Lady Bertram, ‘till bedtime’. American Ambrose Bierce was less enthusiastic: in The Devil’s Dictionary, he defines cribbage as ‘A substitute for conversation among those to whom nature has denied ideas’.

Undoubtedly the writer who did most to bolster cribbage’s popularity was Charles Dickens. The great Victorian novelist was an expert player himself (one of his cribbage boards sold at auction in 2009 for $7,500), and the game features in Oliver Twist, The Mystery of Edwin Drood and most notably in The Old Curiosity Shop, in which the eccentric Richard Swiveller teaches it to the raggedy little girl he names The Marchioness.

By the start of the twentieth century, cribbage was Britain’s national card game, and such an integral part of life that when the 1968 Gaming Act was introduced, proscribing gambling in pubs, cribbage was not included. For nearly forty years it was the only card game you could play for money (‘small stakes only’) in a British pub without the landlord requiring a special licence. In 2005 poker was awarded the same status.

Because it could be played in a confined space by two players, cribbage was particularly popular with sailors. Admiral Lord Nelson played games on a delicate board carved from bone with Admiral John Quilliam before the Battle of Trafalgar. British seamen spread the game around the world. It garnered a huge following in the USA, where the naval traditions of the game were continued by American submariners during World War Two.

One of the most celebrated cribbage games in history took place on USS Wahoo in April 1943, when the submarine was deep inside Japanese territory and the crew were filled with nervous tension. Commanding Officer Dudley Morton and Executive Officer Richard O’Kane sat down to play with the sailors watching on. To everyone’s amazement, O’Kane was soon dealt a ‘perfect 29’ hand. The odds of getting such a set of cards are 216,580 to 1. The crew took it as an omen. The mood lifted. The next day they sank two enemy ships. O’Kane took the lucky cribbage board with him when he was given command of USS Tang. When that submarine sank, he was one of only nine survivors. The cribbage board was with him. Since his death, O’Kane’s cribbage board has been carried on the senior fast-attack submarine in the US Pacific fleet, a symbol of naval tradition and a good luck charm. That hapless warrior Sir John Suckling would surely have approved.