Week 27 "Solo"
Solo Whist,
sometimes known as simply Solo, is a trick taking card game whose direct ancestor is the 17th-century
Spanish game Ombre, based on the English Whist. Its major distinctive feature is that
one player often plays against the other three.
However, players form temporary alliances with two players playing against the
other two if "Prop and Cop" is the current bid. It requires four
players using a standard 52 card deck with no jokers. Aces are high and the deal, bidding and play
are clockwise.
When I was a small child, my
father and some of his friends had a regular weekly card game, taking it in
turns to go to each other’s houses for an evening of cards. Their game was Solo.
Dad came from a card-playing
family. They were a working class family
in a country town where evening entertainments were few. (In my mother’s
family, it was singing around the piano, but Dad’s family had no such fineries)
All of the family played cards – especially Crib (cribbage) and Euchre. Old Lismore newspapers have accounts of “Crib
and Euchre” parties held in district halls all over the Northern Rivers during
the first 50 years of the 20th century. They were social gatherings but they were
also fundraisers for every imaginable cause – in a quick browse I found card
party fundraisers for the Red Cross, the Firemen, a tennis club, a few P &
C associations, the hospital, various Patriotic causes and for band
uniforms.
In this clipping from The
Northern Star of 4 December, 1929 I recognise at least three members of my
father’s family – his aunt Violet Goldsmith, uncle Walter Day and cousin Nell Kuskey.
 |
| The Northern Star 4 Dec 1929 |
It was inevitable that we children would all learn to play cards and a perfect opportunity arose during the long Christmas holidays of 1958/59 when the family went to Brunswick Heads for our annual beach holiday. It rained. And rained. Every day for two weeks it rained. We were a family of 5 children ranging in age from 13 to 2. There was no television. Dad went to the local shop, bought two packs of cards, and came home to teach us.
This is when we learnt to
play Euchre and Five Hundred and Crib.
Even 2 year old Margie learnt to recognise cards, and to play Snap. On a
later holiday, when she was about 8, she horrified our other grandmother with
her proficiency. Our late grandfather
had been a staunch Methodist for whom playing cards were “the devil’s
pictures’, so there were certainly none in that household.
When my other (cardplaying)
grandmother was old, she loved nothing better than a visit from my father with
his pack of cards and the crib board he had made lovingly from a piece of
Northern Rivers red cedar. They would sit at her kitchen table, chatting
quietly between hands and drinking cups of tea.
At the end of his life, Dad
developed dementia. I knew that he had
really gone when I sat with him one day to play Euchre and realised that he had
forgotten how. It still makes me cry
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