"The Beast has frequently been heard, in the grounds of the Hurlingham Club, to utter the word 'bollocks!'"

"Bad Boy makes the Beast look like a paragon of good behaviour and remains banned from dozens of clubs"

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Thwock!

Ah, croquet. The mallets, the hoops, the balls. Its's as English as rain in July; as genteel as Merchant-Ivory; as summery as Pimm's on the lawn... But wait, hold on. Who's this character with the shaven head? And why do they call him the Beast?

BY BRIAN VINER

0n Monday, on the immaculate Thames-side lawns of the Hurlingham Club, the gentle thwock of ball on mallet will mark the commencement of the British Open Croquet Championship. It will be as genteel a scene as an English summer can offer, played out in the shadow of Hurlingham's majestic neo-classical mansion, the colour of clotted cream, built in 1760 for the celebrated physician William Cadogan.

The Hurlingham, founded as a pigeon-shooting club in 1869, is these days principally a lawn-tennis club, but still a cherished enclave for the former pigeon-shooting classes, for whom the decidedly mediocre food is no doubt comfortingly redolent of public school. What more appropriate backdrop could there be, one might ask to croquet's showpiece occasion? For croquet generally evokes a Merchant-Ivory image of England, a land of monocled colonels and dainty cucumber sandwiches on the parsonage lawn. An image in which there is no place for David "the Beast" Maugham.

Yet the Beast, a beefy, shaven-headed Mancunian notorious for polluting croquet with industrial language (he has frequently been heard, in the grounds of the Hurlingham Club, to utter the word "bollocks!"), is the British number three. He starts next weeks Open Championship as one of the firm favourites, and is not lacking in self-belief. A few years ago, insistent that the British team selectors had unfairly overlooked him, he protested by having his hair cropped into the pattern of a Union Jack. This is not a man known for his partiality to cucumber sandwiches.

Surprisingly, though, the Beast is more typical than the toff in top-level croquet. During the Varsity match at the Hurlingham Club, I am introduced to Richard Hilditch, a decent player, although possibly hampered by a considerable girth -"a lot of top players have let their bellies go a bit," he says. Hilditch is at pains to point out that he was educated at a comprehensive school, and that there are many more like him in croquet. Nor, by and large, are the best players an affluent bunch. In fact the Beast will be kipping on Hilditch's floor, in Southgate, north London, for the duration of the Open.

Hilditch also refers me to Terry Burge, another fine player, and more Harvey Smith than Harvey Nichols. He describes 38-year-old Burge as a former bricklayer, but when I finally contact Burge on his mobile phone - bizarrely, at a motorway service station in Slovakia - he tells me that he was actually a hod-carrier, "which wasn't even as good as a bicklayer". He started playing croquet 12 years ago "after seeing an advert in a shop window" and is currently ranked 23rd in the world.

Burge, who has a broad London accent, insists that he has never encountered much snobbery in croquet. The musical north-eastern vowels of Sid Jones, however, have been known to make the croquet establishment shudder. Not because of class or even regional prejudice, but because Jones, from his home in Whitley Bay, Tyne & Wear, is an outspoken critic of croquet's status quo.

There is no doubting Jones' almost evangelical commitment to the venerable game; he has, after all, mass-produced leaflets boldly declaring that "A Bad Day's Croquet is Better Than a Good Day's Work". The problem is that he loudly favours golf-croquet, a variant of the game popular in Egypt, over the more formal association croquet. And the Croquet Association, from its temporary office in a Portakabin in a distant corner of the Hurlingham Club grounds, is somewhat a-twitter.

So what, in a nutshell, is the difference? "Basically, association croquet is more like your billiards or snooker, in which one person makes a break for maybe 20 minutes while the other person waits," Jones explains. In fact billiards was based on croquet. It was invented by King Louis the something of France because it was raining."

I'm not sure that this is a wholly satisfactory explanation of the origins of billiards, but there is no stopping him. "Golf-croquet, on the other hand, is much more sociable," he says. "You play it in doubles and all four players are competing all the time. It's been in the doldrums here but we introduced it to Egypt in the Twenties and it is still thriving there. There are 17-odd clubs in Cairo and they are very good at it. They hit the ball at 45mph and it's a very spectacular game. I put on a tournament in Ripon [North Yorkshire] but I only allowed eight Egyptians to come. They are better than us, but we're catching up."

At association croquet, however, Britain rules the world. We have won the last four world team championships, and Robert Fulford, an Englishman, is the game's Tiger Woods, despite the not-so-tiger-ish nickname of "Bunny".

As for the origins of croquet, it is thought to have been introduced here, possibly from Ireland, around 1850. It quickly gathered popularity, not least when young gentlemen realised that by hitting their female opponent's ball into the bushes, then gallantly assisting her in the search, they could briefly escape their chaperones.

For several decades, croquet thrived. In Wimbledon, the All England Croquet Club was established. The croquet expression "pegging out" entered the vocabulary. But in the late 1870s the game itself looked like pegging out, for it was decimated by the new enthusiasm for lawn tennis. Indeed, it is no accident that the dimensions of a tennis court are half those of a croquet lawn, because club committees everywhere decided they could put their grounds to better use. In 1877 the name of the establishment in Wimbledon was changed to the All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club. In 1899 it was re-styled - and remains today - the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club.

Still, croquet continued to produce its fair share of characters, such as Monty Spencer Ell, who resourcefully overcame the terrible injuries he suffered in 1915 at the Battle of Loos, by screwing his mallet into the stump of an arm amputated above the elbow. And despite the growth of lawn tennis, croquet remained a favourite pursuit among the country house set, including King Edward VII, who was a notoriously bad loser. Moreover, the pleasures of croquet were energetically promoted throughout the British empire, and the game is still widely played in New Zealand and Australia (where it is pronounced crokey).

It has a keen following, too, in America (where, with that peculiar American enthusiasm for second syllables, it is pronounced croKAY). Groucho Marx was a devotee. More recently, Jack Fournier, of Phoenix, Arizona, caused a sensation when he arrived at the Hurlingham Club two years ago, aged only 16, and finished runner-up in the British Open. But the man who bestrides American croquet like a colossus - then, in a manner of speaking, urinates all over it - is 59 year-old "Bad Boy" Mick Mehas.

Evidently, Bad Boy makes the Beast look like a paragon of good behaviour. Bad Boy says he is a former professional baseball player and reckons to have appeared in the film Easy Rider, although no evidence can be found to support either claim. He is, without doubt, a fine croquet player, yet has served suspensions from the game and remains banned from dozens of clubs, some of which have ultimately posted his photograph at the gate to make sure he is kept out. He is widely suspected of cheating. So I call him, at his home in Palm Springs, California, to get his side of the story.

"I like croquet because I like the primitive instincts of it, the one-on-one combat," he says. " But I am a vegetarian with a pony-tail and I meditate while I am playing, so I guess that's why they don't like me, because most croquet players are slugs without a spiritual bone in their bodies. And if you want to know why I won't be coming to the British Open this year, it's because they treated me so badly when I was last there. I won the Silver Plate but they refused to give it to me. They said I would melt it down."

All of which is a far, far cry from cucumber sandwiches on the parsonage lawn. But one should not overlook: this form of croquet played inexpertly, cheerfully, but sometimes also viciously, in uneven back gardens. The worthies at the Croquet Association bridle when they hear the word "vicious" in tandern with their beloved croquet. It is untrue, they say, and largely the fault of Lewis Carroll, who immortalised the slur in Alice in Wonderland. But the writer Auberon Waugh, for one, insists that Carroll was spot on. Waugh was introduced to croquet by his father, Evelyn, when he was about 10. "It was the only game he played. And I have played it ever since. And it can get very vicious, mostly in arguments over the rules. Some say that one can put one's foot on the ball. Some say that women can do that but men can't.There is often a slight tension. And it is, of course, very unpleasant to hit one's opponent ball for six. I have seen games break up, and people get very ratty. Oh yes, very ratty indeed."