Paper chase (game)

[1] The 'hare' is given a head start of five to fifteen minutes, and runs ahead periodically throwing out a handful of paper shreds, which represent the scent of the hare.

The game may also be played with a piece of chalk instead of paper, where the hares leave marks on walls, stones, fence posts or similar surfaces.

This term was made popular by the paper chase scene in Tom Brown's School Days (1857) and is still used in modern hashing and in club names such as Thames Hare and Hounds.

[4] The main inter-house cross-country races are still called the Junior and Senior Paperchase, although no paper is dropped, and urban development means the historical course can no longer be followed.

Students busily tear old newspapers, copybooks and magazines into small pieces to fill four large bags with the paper ‘scent’.

In chapter 39 of his semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh, published posthumously in 1903, Samuel Butler describes a school based on his alma mater, Shrewsbury.

In the 1954 memoir by Vyvyan Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde, he describes playing paper chase at Neuenheim College in Heidelberg, Germany in 1896.

"[W]hen the river was frozen and the snow lay thick upon the ground, so that it was impossible either to row or to play football, paper chases were organised by the master in charge of games.

No form of exercise is quite so utterly pointless and boring as a paper chase, and we used to try to slink off and get lost and find our way home by ourselves; though this, if discovered, was apt to lead to a painful interview with the games master."