Why does "Back to square one" date from the early 1960s?

Barney Ronay often appears the Private Eye's Pseuds Corner. That's because he writes intelligently and allusively about football, and nothing reveals the Eye's roots among public school boys of the 1950s more clearly than that column.

For the Eye, being dismissive of football is still an important social marker - you prefer rugby, of course - and artistic or other esoteric interests are to be teased out of your classmates in case they affect their ability to run the Empire in later life. (As I once blogged, it took the public schools decades to notice the dwindling of the British Empire.)

I'm saying all this because I'm now going to disagree with Ronay, who tweeted today after the prime minister warned us all against "going back to square one":

"Back to square one" is a phrase from early radio football comms when paper with squares on was used to convey where the ball was. It meant passing back to your own defence. In an irony lost on Rishi all successful modern teams go back to square one constantly

I'm not convinced by the logic of this gotcha. With my philosopher's head on, as Glenn Hoddle would say, I distrust the idea that an expression's meaning is decided by its derivation, so that it can "really" mean something other than what we all think it means.

Because, as Wittgenstein wrote, "the meaning of a word is its use in a language". There's no hidden, 'real' meaning to be discovered. (Incidentally, my philosophy professor at York was called Ronald Atkinson. It didn't seem funny at the time.)

I also doubt this story about "back to square one" coming from its use in early football commentaries. The question of its derivation was once debated in the Guardian, and this produced a pretty convincing debunking from a George Brindley:

As a boy in the 1930s, I regularly listened to such broadcasts while following the movement of the ball on a football-pitch chart in the Radio Times which was divided into eight squares. Captain H B T Wakelam gave the commentary while Charles Lapworth would murmur "Square 3" . . . "Square 5" . . . as the ball moved about the field. Wakelam never mentioned the squares, and Lapworth said nothing else. The phrase "back to square one" was never used. 

On the 50th anniversary of broadcast commentaries in 1973, an article in the Radio Times credited the phrase to these commentaries, but one has only to look at the diagram to see that the phrase could have no relevance: "back" to one team would be "forward" to the other; the restart after a goal was never in square one; and a pass-back to goal could also be "back to square two", "square seven" or "square eight".

My hunch was that it came from Snakes and Ladders or a similar game, though even the meanest snake won't drop you back on square one. So I turned to the British Newspaper Archive, expecting to find lots of 19th-century examples.

But it turned out to be very rare in those days, and you are as likely to find "back at square one" or "back in square one" as the phrase we are looking for.

And there was absolutely no sign of the expression catching on between the wars, as we would expect if the theory about it coming from early football commentaries were true. I expect suspect we have found another instance of the rule that all popular etymology is wrong.

What really surprised me is that the expression took off in popularity at the beginning of the Sixties and has never looked back since. The Ngram below confirms this.

Should we be looking for a forgotten television quiz or radio panel game where "Back to square one" was a catchphrase? Because something at that time caused it to become suddenly popular.

What does the panel think?

"For me he's written that too well. If he'd just dashed something off, he'd have beaten the keeper."

"He's trying to compete at the top level and he's taken way too long over moving the game on. It's embarrassing."

Later. Thanks for to a reader for sending me the link to an edition of Balderdash and Piffle from 2006 that considers the derivation of 'back to square one'. It examines and rejects the football theory, as well as another about the phrase coming from the game of hopscotch. It finds a 1959 example of the phrase that mentions the game of Snakes and Ladders, but the fact the author has to spell out his meaning suggests the phrase was not much in circulation then.

Besides what interests me now is the reason for the sudden popularity of the phrase from 1970. I shall go back to the British Newspaper Archive for clues.