Strange Stories and The Badminton Magazine

I first encountered The Badminton Magazine some years ago, when I was going to review a small book for my column, "Late Reviews." The book was The Haunted Hunt, a limited edition of 500 copies from 1965. The introduction by the 4th Viscount Knutsford noted that he had come across this story about fifty years earlier in The Badminton Magazine. So I went looking for the magazine, and found the story in January 1907 issue.  It's an interesting short tale about an obsessive fox-hunter who returns from the dead to hunt his prey.  But the most interesting thing about the story, as it appeared in The Badminton Magazine, is that it was part of a long series of "Strange Stories of Sport." 

So when I heard that Chris Harte's next project, after his index of The Captain (see an earlier Wormwoodiana post here), would be a study of The Badminton Magazine, I wanted to learn more.  Now he has produced two books. The first is The Badminton Magazine of Sports & Pastimes 1895-1923: A History, Index and Bibliography (Sports History Publishing, 2021), ISBN 9781898010142 £19.95. It is in the same format of The Captain book--that is, an oversized book, with lots of photographs of authors and the contents indexed in various ways. It's a fine study of forgotten periodical. 

But the real gem, for readers of Wormwoodiana, is the second, associated book: Strange Stories of Sport, edited by Chris Harte (Sports History Publications, 2021), ISBN 9781898010159  £12.95. It collects all forty-six stories in the series from The Badminton Magazine. The series ran from March 1905 through March 1909. Twenty-one writers contributed the tales--eleven were by Frank Savile (1865-1950), a prolific writer of short stories. A handful of other authors (including the magazine's editor, Alfred Watson) contributed multiple stories. Most are unfamiliar names today, which is not a bad thing.

The stories are from off the beaten path--that is, they are almost all unfamiliar, so there is a freshness to the tales because none have shown up in various anthologies. "The Haunted Hunt" (by "Ralph John" i.e., Ralph John Richardson), number 23 of the series, is the only tale that had been reprinted before.So if you're looking for unfamiliar eccletic stories, "strange" if not always supernatural, you'll want to get this book now. I am thoroughly enjoying it.