First published in Squash Player 25.2
By James Zug
Queen Victoria and Ali Farag have much in common.
The game of squash was invented in the 1850s during the very heart of Queen Victoria’s sixty-three year reign. Both Queen Victoria and Farag are squash parents: Victoria’s descendants, especially the Prince of Wales and later King Edward VIII, played squash and in 1938 a court was put in at Buckingham Palace, the late Queen’s home.
Ali Farag, along with his wife Nour El Tayeb, have Farida, a daughter who has run around many a squash court.
Queen Victoria and Ali Farag have also featured on stamps. In 1840 a profile of Queen Victoria was on the penny black, the world’s very first adhesive stamp used in a public postal system. In 2023 Ali Farag appeared on a thirty-five leone stamp issued by Sierre Leone commemorating his world No.1 ranking.
Someone who knows much about both these stamps is Craig Thorpe-Clarke. Born in 1957, Thorpe-Clarke grew up in Melbourne, Australia in a house with an avid collector, his mother’s brother. This uncle, an actor, modelled for young Craig the life of a collector.
“My uncle owned 20,000 records and 5,000 books,” said Thorpe-Clarke. “He bought me my first books on squash and took me to second-hand bookstores and showed me what it meant to collect something.”
At age fourteen, Thorpe-Clarke started playing squash. In his suburb of Melbourne, he had a nine-court facility a mile away in one direction and a fifteen-court facility a mile away in another direction. In the 1980s he moved to England and taught squash at the Surbiton Racket & Fitness Club, Roehampton Club and Eton College.
A decade later he migrated to the U.S. and spent thirty years coaching varsity teams at universities—Vassar, Penn and Bard—as well as at Cynwyd Club in Philadelphia.
Thorpe-Clarke also coached the U.S. women’s national team at the 1994 and 1996 World Team Championships and at the 1995 Pan-American Games. He might be most well-known in the States for running coaching certification weekends, which he has done for over a third of a century.
All the while, he has collected items relating to squash.
Today, after a half century, he might be the philatelic king of the world. He first used bricks-and-mortar stamp shops, and after the internet came along, eBay became a favourite buying emporium.
Countries from all corners of the world, whether squash powerhouses with thousands of courts and world champions or nations with only a handful of players and total courts in the single digits, have produced stamps: Australia, Brunei, Cayman Islands, China, Ecuador, Egypt, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Liberia, Lichtenstein, Malaysia, New Caledonia, Pakistan, Papau New Guinea, Qatar, Samoa, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Solomon Islands and South Korea.
Great Britain, as the inventor of squash, has often put out stamps; despite their claims it appears that Pakistan produced the world’s first squash stamp in 1962, not Great Britain fifteen years later.
Technology has changed the market, as countries commemorate international events in a timely manner. During the 2006 Commonwealth Games, Australia quickly turned photographs into stamps.
Despite the rise of email and decline in letter writing, many billions of stamps are used every year. Every once in a while they feature squash.
“I always think when I get a new stamp, ‘this is great, now what else is out there?’” Thorpe-Clarke said. “I’m still finding stuff all the time.”
