There exists no certain evidence to tell us when bridge was first played in England. All that we know, with any degree of certainty, is that in the autumn of 1894 the game was introduced to the Portland Club by Lord Brougham, on his return from Cairo; and, according io M. Henri de Gizaquet in his "L'Art de Gagner an Bridge," it had been played in Paris in the previous year, writes George F. Hervey in the "Field."
For over 160 years whist had been the fashionable game (Lord Folkestone had introduced it to society about 1728), and under the guidance of "Cavendish," Clay, and Pole, it had reached its pinnacle as a social relaxation in the two decades following 1800. But in the early eighties Trist had introduced a whole sheaf of "American Leads," convention had been piled on convention, Pelion on Ossa, and the general public, unable to understand the mysteries of double, treble, and the rub, against a single:
x points," had, for ten years at least, been crying out for simplicity. Hence it need occasion no surprise to learn that whist retired to the servants' hall, from which it had sprung, almost from the very day that Lord Brougham introduced bridge. There was, in fact, no transitory period.
Mr. William Dalton, who was present on that historic occasion, has recorded the event in the notion Bridge Magazine" (later the "Bridge Magazine") of September, 1927:—
^I remember that afternoon perfectly," he writes I walked into the card-room at the Portland for the usual rubber of whist, and found four men playing a strange game. I naturally asked what was happening, and was told that they were trying a new game which Lord Brougham had brought from Cairo, and which he described as the best card game ever invented."
"I played in the second rubber, and we all agreed with Lord Brougham's description of the game, so much so that, from that day onwards, bridge superseded whist at the Portland Club.
"Very soon the Turf Club took it up. and after that it spread like wildfire, not only to other clubs, but also to the general public."
Although bridge was not introduced to London until 1894, it was certainly known in England much earlier. The Encyclopedia Britannica (ninth edition) informs us that the game was introduced into England in the year 1880. No authority is given for the statement, but in 1886 ihere was published in London a pamphlet entitled "Biritch (Russian Whist)," and Mr. Dalton writes "The Greeks have always been a card-playing nation, and my friend, Mr, Scaramanga, tells me that he well remembers his father playing Bridge regularly in the early eighties with a small coterie of Greek gentlemen living at Manchester."
And, indeed, bridge may have been played in England even earlier; for the present writer's grandfather, who died in 1870, was a keen card player and a member of the Greek coterie to which Mr. Dalton refers.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.