The early history of the
Scottish Croquet Championship

The first ten years

The following advertisement appeared in the Scotsman on 16th August 1870.

 

 

The Championship was won by David Johnstone Macfie, a Greenock-born landowner and Justice of the Peace, as it would be each year until it was wrested from him in 1876 by John Clark Forrest, a bank agent who was also Provost of Hamilton. The following year the Provost was emulated by one of his daughters, Miss Jessie Clark Forrest, who was 16 when she beat her 18-year-old sister in the final. It would be another twenty-two years before a woman would enter the Open Championship in England. The 1878 champion was Walter Gray Lawrie, a produce broker from Glasgow, and Macfie regained the title the following year. Most of the tournaments were held in Moffat, the exception being 1872 when the venue was Kilmux in Fife, then Macfie’s home. The following year he moved to Borthwick Hall, near Heriot, where he lived until his death, just two days short of his eighty-seventh birthday, in 1915. The Macfie family fortune was made from sugar and Allan Fullerton Macfie, David’s nephew, was the first winner of the golf Amateur Championship in 1885.

The Scotsman carried reports of the 1873 Championship, one of which begins:

“Yesterday morning the Moffat croquet tournament was resumed. All the competitors were forward on the Beechgrove Grounds in good time. A few minutes were occupied in inspecting the promised championship medal, which in view of the interest excited, the donor had decided on making, worth £15, 15s. A gold St Andrew’s cross, surrounded by balls and mallets, through which the inscription, “Scottish Championship Croquet Medal” is interlaced, having in its centre a shield on which the red lion rampant surmounted by a crown appears, forms the device of the medal; to this is attached ribbon and clasps. The design is the work of Messrs Marshall & Son, Edinburgh.”

Presumably the winner (Macfie) kept that medal, but in 1875 another was made which was to be held by the champion for only a year. It measures just an inch in diameter, but it is inscribed with the names of the winners from 1875 to 1879 and from 1898 to 1906; bars attached to the ribbon extend the record to 1914. The medal was discovered in Gleneagles Hotel in 1990 and donated to the Scottish Croquet Association. It was the work of Mackay, Cunningham & Co of Edinburgh, the firm that made the claret jug presented to the winner of the golf Open Championship.

The “Gleneagles” medal (click to view high-resolution image in a separate window)

Two mallets also survive from this period; both belonged to the Edinburgh croquet club but they offered the so-called “Moffat” mallet as the trophy for the Championship of Scotland and it is now in the possession of the SCA. The minutes of the Edinburgh Croquet Club refer to this mallet in 1967 as having recently come into the club’s possession so it is possible it was the gift of William Munro (of Munrospun knitwear) who had bought Borthwick Hall in 1964. The painted inscription “Champion of Scotland” is still clearly visible and a silver plaque places it in “Moffat 1871”. The other mallet has the word “Highgate” painted on the mallet head (though much less clearly) and the date 1869. Since Macfie was a quarter-finalist at a tournament there that year, there can be little doubt this mallet was also his as it was the custom of the time to give mallets as prizes.

The “Highgate” mallet		The “Moffat” mallet

The Beechgrove grounds in Moffat had only recently been laid out when the first championship took place. In 1880 the croquet lawns were, like so many others at the time, converted to tennis courts and no further competition was held until 1897.

It appears that the Championship may sometimes have been restricted to Scottish entrants, for in 1879 there was an All Comers’ prize for which the well-known player Mr GPW Willoughby from London competed, though he did not play in the Championship. On the other hand, the runner-up in 1871, Arthur Lillie, was English; he was the author of two books on croquet and very influential in formulating the laws.

The winners for the first ten years of the Championship, and such runners-up as we have so far determined, were:

The Craiglockhart years

From 1897 until 1914 the Scottish Croquet Championship was held at the Edinburgh Hydropathic, now part of Napier University’s Craiglockhart campus. The tournament was normally only one event in six days of croquet and it attracted an average entry of about two dozen, including visitors – and indeed several winners – from England and Ireland. In those days the fastest scheduled travelling time by rail from London to Edinburgh was almost twice the current time, at 8 hours 15 minutes. From Belfast it might have been a little less, as the boat train in conjunction with the Larne - Stranraer crossing had been running since 1885.

The hydro’s head gardener, Henry Carmichael, had seven lawns to care for until 1907 when an eighth (known as the bear pit) was added, followed by a ninth in 1911. The lawns were regarded as among the best in Britain and the green-keeping equipment must have been quite good – the lawnmower was invented in 1830 – as the standard of play reported is very high.

The Championship was run as a knock-out and matches in all rounds were best-of-three, though in 1911, in very dry conditions, it became dark before the third game of the final could be completed and the trophy was shared. (The tournament was generally held in the first half of July from 1897 to 1906 but moved to September in 1907 to 1914.)

The 1907 report of the Edinburgh week in the Croquet Gazette tells us:

“The principal event was the Championship of Scotland, which entitles the winner to the possession for a year of the championship medal, a handsome little trophy, bearing the Scottish lion on its obverse side, while on the reverse are recorded the names of winners, dating back to 1875. The champion also receives a valuable silver cup, the gift of Mr Woolston, of Croyland Hall, Wellingborough.”

The medal referred to is, of course, the “Gleneagles” medal. The SCA is very fortunate to possess, through the generosity of Gail and Tremaine Arkley of Independence, Oregon, two of the silver cups, those for 1906 and 1913. We do not at present know how many were made but one was certainly on offer for the 1902 championship, where it is described as being presented by Mr CJK Woolston. This is Mr Charles Woolston, a maltster and corn merchant, the father of Geoffrey, who had won the 1900 Championship, and of Charles (CE) and Wilfred (JW) who both competed in 1902. Could he have instituted this generous gift to mark his son’s success?

The cups were both bought from the Edinburgh shop of Wilson & Sharp, whose hallmark (and the date-letter for Birmingham assay office, 1912) appears on the 1913 trophy; that on the 1906 one is for the firm of Hawksworth, Eyre & Co Ltd (with the date-letter for London, 1905). They have been made to similar designs but are not identical. Including the handles they are almost 9 inches across and 5 inches high.

The list of all the winners and runners-up is as follows.

 

Although David Macfie still competed in the Championship until 1906, he was never to win it again, but in 1890 he had married and his wife was to win three times. Since the wedding was in Carmarthen and Mrs Macfie was born Mary Jane Lloyd it would, however, be bold to claim that she was entirely Scottish. Her first win, in 1897, was in circumstances strange enough perhaps to explain why her name was not that year engraved on the medal. There were sixteen entrants and the first two rounds were played normally apart from the fact that two of the matches were decided when one of the players retired. However, both of the semi-finals were decided in that fashion, Macfie giving the first semi-final to Mrs Macfie and a Mr Dixon conceding the second to a Miss Dixon! Mrs Macfie won the final easily +25, +23.

Mrs Julian Parr (Mrs RC Parr on the medal) and Lady Julian Parr are one and the same, and her sister Marcia also appears in two guises; they came from Cheshire and were daughters of Colonel the Honourable Robert Julian Orde Jocelyn who was to become the seventh Earl of Roden (in Ireland). Lady Julian Parr won the CA Women’s Championship in 1913. In The History of Croquet David Prichard recalls that in 1900, when she was not yet 14, she beat Macfie at the Northern Championships; he would then have been 72.

Leslie O’Callaghan is, in croquet terms, the most famous of the names on the “Gleneagles” medal. An Irishman, he won the Champion Cup (the forerunner of the CA President’s Cup) and the British Open three times each. In addition he won the Irish Championship three times and was runner-up three times.

A few other facts are known about the winners. Arthur Law was a vicar in Wiltshire for 40 years and a founder-member of Cheltenham Croquet Club. Geoffrey Woolston was a very rapid player, the first game in the 1901 final taking him 20 minutes.  He also won the Champion Cup three times. The Woolston home is now the Wellingborough heritage centre. John Haviland, a solicitor, travelled from nearby Northampton.

Samuel Smartt was the vicar of Newry, County Down. Evelyn Bramwell was a three-time winner of the Women’s Championship while Alan Boumphrey won the first three North of England Championships in 1903, 1904 & 1905. Captain GD Lister served in the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment, was wounded at Mons in August 1914, but was invalided home and survived the war. He continued to be a member of the Croquet Association (as a Lieutenant Colonel) until 1922. John William Thain was a Dundee-born Edinburgh lawyer and was the only Scot to have won (or at least shared) the Championship in its Craiglockhart years; he was 44 at the time.

John McMordie, of Belfast, won the Irish Championship twice and the North of England Championship once; he also played in the 1937 Macrobertson Shield. Prichard says that but for refusing to play in London he would have won many more tournaments.  J Hughes, from Liverpool, was runner-up in the North of England Championship twice including 1913, the year of his Scottish victory. GFB Wace, the last winner, was a well-known player from St Albans who sometimes played under the pseudonym G Effby. Perhaps when we have access to the 1911 census we may be able to find Hughes’ and Wace’s first names.

The reason that we do not know the name of the runner-up in the 1914 tournament is explained by Prichard:

"By the beginning of September it was clear that public opinion was against croquet tournaments and the remainder of the calendar fixtures were cancelled, although Edinburgh took the hypocritical course of holding their tournament but requesting that it should not be reported in the Gazette." 

 

The Edinburgh Hydropathic as it is today, with part of a croquet lawn

In 1917 the Edinburgh Hydropathic was taken over as a hospital (in which Siegfried Sassoon met Wilfred Owen) and at the end of the war it was only briefly reconverted to a hydro, being sold in 1920 by James Bell who had owned it since 1890. It has since been a convent and teacher-training college, as well as part of a university, but many of the lawns are still easily identified nearly a hundred years after they were last used.

The Scottish Championship would not be played again until 1968 and not until 2003 would it be cast in such a form as once more to attract players from England and Ireland.

Two further medals

While donating the Woolston trophies to the SCA, Gail and Tremaine Arkley also generously sent two medals.

 

The “Fenwicke” medal

The first, a silver medal inscribed “United All England Croquet Association”, and won by Miss M Fenwicke, is just a little over an inch in diameter. It was made by the firm of Cornelius Desormeaux Saunders & James Francis Hollings Shepherd of Holborn Circus, London and has the London date-letter for 1898, the year it was played for according to the bar on the ribbon. The United All England Croquet Association was founded in 1897 and changed its name to the Croquet Association in 1900.

A Miss M Fenwicke and a Miss W Fenwicke both competed in the 1902 Championship; the CA membership list for that year has a Miss MG Fenwick in Branson House, Darlington and the 1905 telephone book for that area has a Miss Margaret G Fenwicke living not far away in Hurworth-on-Tees where she remained until her death in 1937. If our identification is correct, she would have been about 50 when she won the medal.

The replica of the medal struck to commemorate the coronation, in 1911, of King George V and Queen Mary, is 1½ inches in diameter and weighs about 15 pennyweights. It is housed in a case labelled JS & WW Lawson, 172 Buchanan Street, Glasgow, but the hallmark is that of Marples & Beasley and the assay office Birmingham. The firm produced a number of interesting items, such as masonic and military badges as well as the Robertson’s golly! There is no record of the medal having been played for.

The “Stevenson” medal

The donor was Daniel Macaulay Stevenson. Although he never won the Championship he was twice runner-up. Possibly he was too busy to practise quite enough as he was Lord Provost of Glasgow for three years from 1911, receiving a baronetcy in 1914. As a town councillor he had succeeded, in the face of Scottish Presbyterianism, in having Glasgow open its libraries and museums to the public on Sundays. He made his fortune from coal and shipping and was one of Glasgow University’s greatest benefactors, endowing chairs in French, Spanish and Italian (among others) in an effort to promote understanding between nations. In 1934, though aged over 80, he was elected Chancellor of the university, a post he held until his death ten years later.

 

Acknowledgments

I have drawn heavily on work done by Ian Wright, which has appeared in several editions of the Scottish Croquet Association Handbook, and I am also grateful to Ian for other information he has given me, some provided for him by David Prichard whose book, referred to above, was also indispensable. Chris Williams, Klim Seabright and David Magee all kindly looked things up for me in the Croquet Association archives. Tony Baxter used his copy of the 1881 census to locate Provost Forrest in Hamilton and WG Lawrie in Glasgow as well as discovering CJK Woolston’s occupation. John Burnett of the National Museum of Scotland was inspired to suggest that DM Stevenson was the man who became Lord Provost of Glasgow, and Tony Whateley consulted Glasgow directories to confirm that that person lived at the address in the CA archives. Dr Tim Leunig of LSE generously gave me a database containing railway timetables for 1905. Most of all, however, I would like to acknowledge the generosity of Gail and Tremaine Arkley whose offer to the SCA of the 1906 and 1913 cups made me so interested in doing the research on the Championship.

The photographs of the three medals and the two mallets were taken by Ian Wright. Those of the cups are from Gail and Tremaine Arkley’s collection, those of the three players are courtesy of the Croquet Association and the photograph of the Edinburgh Hydro was taken by Colin Tait.

For the identification of hallmarks and their dating two web-sites were invaluable, those of Giorgio Busetto and Tony & Rosemary Harrison-Smith & Eliot Isaacs.

 

David Appleton, January 2008

Appendix: The Scottish Championships of 1906 and 1913

1906		DJ Macfie	}
				WM Miller	}
		WM Miller					}
						Dr G Kerr
		JD Tod	}
				Dr G Kerr
		Dr G Kerr
								Mrs Macfie	}
		Rev JW Blake	}
				DM Stevenson	}
		DM Stevenson
J Blank  JW Thain  WJ Lloyd  Mrs Macfie  J Williamson  Mrs Wordsell  AG Boumphrey  Mrs Horn	} } } }					Mrs Macfie
		JW Thain (wo)	}
				Mrs Macfie
		Mrs Macfie (wo)
										AG Boumphrey
		J Williamson	}
				AG Boumphrey	}
		AG Boumphrey					}
						AG Boumphrey
		J Taylor	}
				WCB Christie
		WCB Christie
								AG Boumphrey
		H Lee	}
				P Dunderdale	}
		P Dunderdale
						P Dunderdale
		J Bell	}
				S Dixon
		S Dixon

 

The following is taken from The Scotsman of Friday 29th June 1906. When reading it, it is worth remembering that the game being played was the sequence game, the hoops were 4 inches wide, and the setting included a turning-peg as well as the winning-peg so the game could be won by 28 points. Up to and including 1905 there was no redress for being wired; a lift to A baulk was instituted in 1907, but in 1906 the law was that if a ball was within a foot of a hoop it could be moved a foot in any direction. Another change in the laws which was peculiar to 1906 was that the game started from the middle of the south boundary; until then one started a yard in front of hoop 1, and from 1907 from anywhere on A baulk. A “rover” is a ball for the peg.

 

“The tournament was continued yesterday, and the most important events were brought to a conclusion. The greatest interest centred in the final round of the championship, the players in which were Mrs Macfie, a former holder of this honour and winner in many other events, and Mr A.G. Boumphrey, who takes a high rank among the devotees of the game. The final round was entered upon in the afternoon, and attracted the close attention of all present. In the first game there was a good deal of out-and-in play before Mrs Macfie got possession. She played a steady and safe game until well round with the ball, when Mr Boumphrey shot in and went away on one of his all-round breaks. He kept in till one ball was a rover and the other for the penultimate hoop. At this stage Mrs Macfie had a chance at a ball close past a hoop. She brought off a brilliant shot, and, making herself a rover, pegged out Mr Boumphrey’s blue ball, but unfortunately omitted to notice that black had a five yards’ shot at its hoop. The other balls were carefully wired behind the winning peg, but Mr Boumphrey, taking careful aim, shot right through his hoop and ran down the other balls. He then promptly made his remaining hoop, and ran out, winning by 14 points. The second game was much more in Mr Boumphrey’s favour. He got in at once, and made his points in a very short time. Mrs Macfie got in once or twice, but could not get a comfortable break set. Mr Boumphrey won by 25 points, and again became winner of the Scottish Championship, his brilliant play being much appreciated by the spectators, who gave him a hearty cheer when his balls had struck the winning post.”

 

In 1913 Mr Hughes, whose handicap was –½, was the favourite; Mr Stuart played off 1, Miss Heap and Miss Arrowsmith 1½, Mrs Snow 2 ½, Dr Findlater and Mr Hodgson 3. The draw, clearly not seeded, was as follows.

Miss B Arrowsmith	}
		Miss B Arrowsmith	}
Mrs D Marriage					}
				Miss B Arrowsmith
J Bell	}
		HO Hodgson
HO Hodgson
						Miss B Arrowsmith	}
WCB Christie	}
		WCB Christie	}
J Wilkinson
				Mrs F Workman
Mrs H Talbot	}
		Mrs F Workman
Mrs F Workman
								J Hughes
Dr W Findlater	}
		J Hughes	}
J Hughes					}
				J Hughes
Miss M Heap	}
		Miss M Heap
JW Thain
						J Hughes
CH Dunderdale	}
		F Workman	}
F Workman
				A Stuart
Mrs Snow	}
		A Stuart
A Stuart