For over 1,000 years man has invented and enjoyed a variety of games played by hitting a ball with either a closed fist - as in fives or bunch of fingers - or with some form of bat or racket. Around the year 1148 the French played le Paume, meaning ìthe palm of the hand, which developed into Jeu de Paume, Real Tennis, Royal Tennis or, if you play the sport, simply Tennis. At sometime in the early 19th century this obsession with rackets and balls spawned another variety of the sport in the unlikely birthplace of the Fleet Prison in London. The prisoners in ìThe Fleetî, mainly debtors, took their exercise by hitting a ball against walls, of which there were many, with rackets and so started the game of Rackets. Rackets progressed, by some strange route, to Harrow and other select English schools about 1820 and it was from this source that our own sport of Squash, or Squash Rackets, developed.
Squash was invented in Harrow school around 1830, when the pupils discovered that a punctured Rackets ball, which "squashed" on impact with the wall, produced a game with a greater variety of shots and required much more effort on the part of the players, who could not simply wait for the ball to bounce back to them as with Rackets. The variant proved popular and in 1864 the first four Squash courts were constructed at the school and Squash was officially founded as a sport in its own right.
