THE HEWITT CUP, IT HAD TO BE. Stephen Hewitt had all the gear, see: floodlights, stands, scoreboard, St John Ambulance men — all laid out beautifully on a huge piece of chipboard.

Kids turned up most evenings and filed upstairs to his bedroom. Some could hardly reach the table. One or two used their thumbs, heaven help them. Others brought only nine men, with heads missing or double ankle fractures: out came the Bostik.

I made it to the final against, aptly enough, Hewitt. I won 3-0 but his was the moral victory. I cheated. While he flicked to kick, I succumbed to the index-finger slide, Subbuteo’s greatest felony. He is still grumbling about it now, 25 years later.

We were not the only ones re-creating Wembley in our bedrooms. A survey carried out in 2002 showed that 90 per cent of fathers over the age of 30 have at one time owned a Subbuteo set. The game is as much part of our heritage as Marmite, the Sunday roast and England losing crucial qualifying matches.

While the Hewitt Cup was in progress, none of us stopped to think where the man who invented the game was on that very night. Well, Peter Adolph could have been at one of several places, most of them pretty exotic. He might have been behind the wheel of his Pontiac Firebird or sailing first-class to New York on the Queen Elizabeth 2; or carousing with his Flamenco-dancer lover or sipping his favourite tipple in a Soho night spot. Alternatively, he might have been sleeping alone at his factory, banished there by his exasperated wife.

Adolph planned an autobiography but died in 1994 before he could get anything down on paper. When his son, Mark, came across a folder marked “Memoirs” in his father’s effects, he decided to write it for him in Growing Up With Subbuteo (Sports Books), published this week. It is some story, framing the rich and restless life of an enigmatic man, part-international playboy and part homespun local businessman.

His first foray into public life was at 21 as a singer with Oscar Rabin and his Romany Band. They appeared regularly at the Hammersmith Palais, where Adolph ran through classics such as If You Were the Only Girl. During the war he was a driver at RAF Brize Norton although, with typical panache, he claimed later that he had been a navigator in bombers flying over Berlin. His first business venture grew out of a deep love of ornithology. He traded in birds’ eggs, then a perfectly legal occupation.

One evening in the mid-1940s, he was running a button through his fingers after it had come off his mother’s coat. It had a flat bottom and rounded sides and, when he fastened a washer to it, he realised it was better balanced. He developed the button to incorporate the figure of a footballer and improve significantly a game already established called New Footy.

He placed an advert in The Boy’s Own Paper purely to gauge the level of interest in a new game of table football. He was in New York about to value an egg collection when he received a cable from his mother. Postal orders to the value of £7,500 (the equivalent of £200,000 today) had been sent to their home from all points in the UK. He caught the next boat back and, along with his mother and a friend, set about actually making the game. They bulk-ordered buttons from their local Woolworths and spent six months fixing and sticking to fulfil orders.

Initially, he wanted to call it Hobby, but the Patent Office ruled it too vague. He settled instead on Subbuteo, taken from the Latin name for the hobby hawk, falco subbuteo. The demand was sustained and Adolph established a factory in his home town of Tunbridge Wells.

As the company expanded, he set upon an extravagant lifestyle, sailing regularly on the QE2 and spending winter months in Cannes while maintaining a watchful eye on his company. England’s World Cup victory in 1966 caused the business to rocket and three years later he sold the company to Waddington, the games manufacturer, for a sum of £250,000, a colossal amount in those days.

“Dad was looking out one day over the factory yard and saw someone he didn’t know who was working for him,” Mark Adolph says. “I think he realised it wasn’t the same any more.”

Adolph separated from his wife, Pam, after a long-term affair with his secretary was discovered. He also had romances with a Flamenco dancer he had met in Barcelona and a woman from Tunbridge Wells, nearly 40 years his junior.

Adolph saw out his days living at homes he owned in Gibraltar and Spain, where he divided his time between photography and botany, seeking out rare orchids. He returned to England when his wife died, visiting the funeral parlour where he sang If I Loved You from the musical Carousel, while waving a crucifix over her coffin — they had been to see the show on their first date.

He died in 1994 after breaking his hip in a fall at a drinks party at his home in Gibraltar.

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