Ninety years in a cathedral crevice

National Catholic Reporter, Feb 18, 2005

LONDON -- Lodged in a crevice of the masonry of Lincoln Cathedral for at least 90 years has been perhaps the oldest tennis ball in England--apparently unnoticed by everyone except the family of the boy who put it there.

Gilbert Bell and his brother would play with the bali against the cathedral wall, but one day the ball got stuck. The latest this could have been was 1914; when World War I broke out, Gilbert joined the army, survived life in the trenches (including being gassed), and came back to England. The ball was still there.

The story has been passed down in the family. His 78-year-old nephew David, who now lives in Diss in Norfolk, told his children and grandchildren about it, and whenever members of the family visit Lincoln, they go to see if the ball is still there.

But when the family recently spotted scaffolding up against the wall, David wrote a tongue-in-cheek letter to the cathedral authorities asking, "May we have our ball back, please?"

The scaffolding is there to re-roof the Galilee porch, where the ball is lodged, but there are no plans to clean that part of the cathedral masonry for the next 10 years or so.

The cathedral works manager, Carol Heidschuster, has said that if the ball comes out on its own, or if they need to remove it before they get around to cleaning the stonework, they will return it to the Bell family.

Meanwhile, the family is happy for the ball to stay where it is. Assuming the ball is a tennis ball, as the Bell family has always understood, it is probably the oldest surviving one in the country. The earliest proper tennis ball held by the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum dates from 1916. The game itself dates only from 1874, when it was patented as "sphairistike."