History Notes (5) ... A puzzle from the past

In History Notes (4) we recorded that in the 4 years following the 1935 World Championships the ETTA had recruited 45,000 additional players into our clubs. From this we imagined that the ETTA must have had well over 50,000 members before the war began in 1939.

But during the war years table tennis had a pretty thin time. In many areas it simply shut down, in others it just managed to hang on by its fingertips. But in 1945/46, after the fighting had stopped, table tennis was able to start picking up the pieces.

Most league players hadn't played for 6 years, and many never returned to the game. There must have been almost no players under 21, and on top of that there were practical difficulties.

An editorial in TTR (July 1947) laments ... If people think that the black market has kept its grimy paws off table tennis, they are quite mistaken. Listen to this. At a London club, recently, we happened to see a player with a cardboard box containing table tennis balls ... " a hundred of 'em" said the owner of the box, ...

The article went on to express outrage that the box had been purchased from a certain famous star, at a 75% price mark-up, while ordinary folk cannot even get a couple of "spheres" for practice purposes.

Then in a letter, published in TTR in January 1948, H. E. Betts (Hon. Sec. Norwich TTL) writes about the difficulties they faced when looking to stage "events" ... Our problems at the moment are due to the lack of suitable halls owing to the destruction caused by the heavy blitzing of Norwich during the war.

In the light of all this we wondered how many of the 50,000+ ETTA members had returned to the sport after the war. In the Spring 1948 issue of TTR, Tom Blunn (later, I believe, to become ETTA treasurer) reviews the ETTA accounts for the previous year and gives a clue ... The cost of administration cannot be said to be excessive and works out at a little over a penny per month for each affiliated player.

Looking through the figures we found that the cost of administration had been approximately 1,749 and we did a quick calculation ... Number of players = 1749 * 100 / 12 = 14,575 approximately. Unfortunately we felt sure that this figure "must" be far too low, although we couldn't initially see why.

If you can see why, and if you would care to send your explanation and the corrected answer to History@cardifftt.org.uk ... we will acknowledge the first correct answer in our next History Notes article.