Stephen Potter

Stephen Meredith Potter (1 February 1900 – 2 December 1969) was a British writer best known for his parodies of self-help books, and their film and television derivatives.

His series of humorous books on how to secure an unfair advantage began in 1947 with Gamesmanship, purporting to show how poor players can beat better ones by subtle psychological ploys.

As he reached school-leaving age he wrote in his diary, "If this war doesn't end soon I shall have to join the beastly army and lay down my blooming life for my blinking country.

[3] Potter was demobilised in 1919, and spent a few months in his father's office learning book-keeping, before going to Merton College, Oxford, to study English.

[4] His family paid for his university education, a fact that put him in the shadow of[clarification needed] his elder sister Muriel (later a form mistress at St Paul's Girls' School, then headmistress of South Hampstead High School),[5][6] who had won a scholarship to St Hugh's College, Oxford,[7] and had taken a first-class degree.

[1] In 1935 he published his most important contribution to the subject, Coleridge and S.T.C., a discussion of the duality in the poet's nature, "not merely the earlier and the later, but the true and the false, and the exciting and the nauseating," as John Middleton Murry put it in a review in The Times Literary Supplement.

Reviews were good, but with reservations that Potter oversimplified the dichotomy in Coleridge's nature (The Observer) or else did not explore the underlying reasons for it (TLS).

G. M. Young wrote of it: "if I were suddenly commissioned by some Golden Dustman to organize a new University, I think I should send for Mr. Potter and offer him the Chair of English literature forthwith.

He wrote of George Saintsbury: "It is recorded that for eighteen years he started the day by reading a French novel (in preparation for his history of them) – an act so unnatural to man as almost in itself to amount to genius.

He was a leading player of the club's idiosyncratic version of snooker, and some of his later "gamesmanship" ploys are thought to have originated in the Savile's games room.

Later in the war years he and his wife moved south, living in a farmhouse in Essex where she found more scope to pursue her career as a painter.

To the despair of his publisher he was a far from methodical author: every Potter manuscript was "a mass of dirty bits of paper, vilely typed, corrected in illegible biro, episodic and half-revised.

"[20] This book, The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship: Or the Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating, illustrated by Frank Wilson, was published in 1947, and sold prodigiously.

[21][22] It was the first of his series of books purporting to teach ploys for manipulating one's associates, making them feel inferior and thus gaining the status of being one-up on them.

[23] With the success of Gamesmanship, Potter left the BBC in 1949, ended his existing journalistic commitments, and briefly became editor of a weekly, Leader Magazine.

[29] In mixed gamesmanship, for a man "a good working knowledge of the Chivalry Gambit is essential"; a woman's counter to "the least signs of trying the 'I have long adored you from afar' move", is to "treat it immediately as a formal proposal of marriage which you shyly accept.

Its publisher, Rupert Hart-Davis, privately wrote of the book, "Gamesmanship made me laugh a lot, and its two successors were just good enough (all three still sell prodigiously), but the world has moved (deathwards, you may say) in the last ten years, and Potter hasn't budged an inch.

The foreign policy of the American secretary of state John Foster Dulles was universally known as "brinkmanship",[33] and in England Prince Philip borrowed from Potter in 1957, accusing accountants of "taxmanship – the art of scoring off the Inland Revenue without actually cheating".

[34][35] According to Joyce Grenfell, Potter had become bored with the joke by this time, "but for the rest of his life he found it difficult to speak or write naturally, so accustomed had he grown to the jocose gambits and ploys of his own invention.

The Times Literary Supplement, called it "this sympathetic, beguiling book" and looked forward to a sequel,[38] and other papers from The Daily Express to The New Statesman praised it in their reviews.

[39] In 1965 when his youngest son was about 9 years old, Potter wrote a children's book, Squawky, illustrated by George Him, with whom he had earlier created the mythical County of Schweppshire as part of an advertising campaign for a soft-drink manufacturer.

[1] The 1960 film School for Scoundrels recapitulates many of the "one-up" ideas, and extends them to "Woo-manship", meaning the art of manipulative seduction of women.

Starring Richard Briers, Peter Jones (who also played a supporting role in School for Scoundrels), and Frederick Jaeger, it was subsequently broadened into three series that were broadcast between 1976 and 1978.

Raffles and the Match-Fixing Syndicate, by Adam Corres, is an extension of Potter's theories, explaining the principles of cricket gamesmanship and the psychology of "thinking the batsman out".

[21] In 2007, devotees of Potter created an annual winter golf tournament based on the tactics espoused in the author's book Gamesmanship.

[44] What has been termed Potter's "blend of flat and serious tone (reminiscent of a gentlemanly sports handbook) united with a sceptical judgement of the values of the English middle-class social scene"[45] would thus seem to have fed into Berne's own "sardonically humorous Games People Play ... con-games of daily life that Dr Berne describes with desperately penetrating gallows-wit".