Charteris' Notebook: George Morrow's "Sports" Series

Wodehouse's "forgotten sports" gag spans 46 years:

Forgotten Sports of the Past—Splitting the Straw. (The Little Warrior ch. 14, 1920)
Forgotten Sports of the Past—Number Three, Meeting the Mater. ("Something Squishy", 1924)
Forgotten sport of the past—Waving the Tortoise. (Sam the Sudden ch. 24, 1925)
Cruel Sports of the Past—Beating the Steak. (Spring Fever ch. 17, 1948)
Forgotten sports of the past. Squaring the housemaid. (Uncle Dynamite ch. 9, 1948)
Forgotten Sports of the Past—Getting The Scenario. ("Genesis of a Novel", 1966)

All these are a reference to the equally long-lived "Sports" series of cartoons by George Morrow (1869-1955), published in Punch since at least 1910 as variations of "Cruel/Forgotten Sports of the Past". These generally had the structure "X-ing the Y", Y often being the name of an animal, and involved a pun.

Morrow has a fairly complete Wikipedia page. See also his obituary in Punch, January 26, 1955, and his entry in the Dictionary of Twentieth Century British Cartoonists and Caricaturists. Add to the bibliography George Morrow, His Book (1920) available online; and see a collection of cartoons at the Punch website.

Below are all the examples I could find of "Sports" in Punch, ranging 30 years. Click each image to expand. Possibly there are others, but they are not so easy to locate in online repositories like the Internet Archive or HathiTrust. Some day someone will compile a comprehensive index of the magazine for the 20th century. The incredible Curran Index unfortunately (but naturally) stops at 1900.

Wodehouse also recalled two of these in "Falconry: Who Needs It?", published in Playboy in November 1956:

READING A BOOK not long ago about popular sports of the past, I was interested to note how few of them have succeeded in keeping their grip on the public taste. They had their day and vanished never to be heard of again. I suppose about the only one that has survived into our modern age is haberdashery. You still find dashing the haber going on. But what of knurr and spell? Or boxing the compass? Or mocking the turtle? (A cruel sport, this last. The players stood in front of their turtles and made wisecracks about their faces, and the competitor who was the first to get his turtle good and sore won the chukker.)