It is a fact that many thousands of hockey players fought in WW1, many from the very start. However, the question of who was the first hockey player to die during the Great War may never be truly answered considering the unbelievable carnage that took place from day one.

It is possible that many of the fallen could have been hockey players but that this has not been picked up on before now. We can therefore only work on the information that has been uncovered. This indicates that Lt Charles Arthur Campbell of the 1st Battalion Cheshire Regiment was the first hockey player to die in WW1. He was killed on the 24 August 1914 and that evening his body was brought into the village of Audregnies by some pious Belgian civilians and buried close to the wall of the church there.

A fuller account appears in our Hockey Military Stories section here.

In 1951 the All England Women’s Hockey Association (AEWHA) arranged the first of its 41 London internationals to be played at the old Wembley Stadium. The programme for the day proudly announced that this was the first time a women’s team game had been played at the famous Empire Stadium.

In the early years of the event, the jealously guarded amateur status of hockey players prevented a trophy being awarded to the winners. But on Saturday 10^th March 1984 England and Ireland met with a trophy on offer for the first time – the Tipp-Ex Trophy.

The AEWHA was founded in 1895 so it had taken 88 years for its first trophy to be introduced.

The only gap in the remarkable record of annual Wembley games was in 1970 when the condition of the Wembley pitch resulted in the match being transferred at short notice to the White City Stadium.

The records of international hockey, both men’s and women’s, are littered with many matches, the authenticity of which has been hotly debated over the decades. Conversely, there are many matches that have been played between ‘allegedly’ international teams that have not been recorded. This aspect of hockey’s history is one that has to be resolved before accurate national records can be finalised.

The Hockey Museum is currently compiling a list of these matches in the hope of delivering a definitive record sometime in the future.

However, there is one match that stands out in the records as being one that should not be there. It was during the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp where England won the Gold Medal. On their way to this success England had to play France. The French were not at all confident so they allegedly employed dubious tactics. As the story goes, they invited the England team out to dinner the night before with the intention of rendering the English players unable to perform properly. However, it was a case of ‘the biter being bit’ because it was the French who succumbed to the over-indulgence. This was to such an extent that the French did not even turn up the following day.

Whilst a ‘walkover’ is an acceptable conclusion it cannot be a result because no-one ever took to the field. The records show the match as a victory for England but with no score. The match is included in England’s records and eleven players are credited with caps for the game.

It is of course illogical for all this to be the case, certainly for players to get a ‘cap’ for a game that was never played and, if there were no players, how could there have been a match?

Founded in September 1893 and disbanded in 1907, it is safe to say that in the short period of its existence the Palmerston Hockey Club established a record which has never been surpassed by any other hockey club in the country. In six successive seasons the 1^st XI only lost two matches out of one hundred and sixty played and in one of these seasons it scored one hundred and two goals with only seven goals scored against it. The two matches lost, each by a margin of one goal, were the Irish Senior Cup ties against Dublin University in 1901 and 1902.

Palmerston owed much of its greatness to the brothers Peterson – Jack and Walter, full backs; Nick, right half; Cecil, centre forward; Willie, inside left, and Bertie, outside right. Four had learned their hockey at Avoca School and all gained their green caps. Although four members of Palmerston figured on the first Irish International team that played against Wales in 1895, it was not until after the advent of the Petersons in 1899 that the club achieved its greatest successes.

So strong was the Palmerston team that in 1904 that the Irish selectors decided to place nine of the eleven in the field against England. The two remaining players were WM Johnstone of Three Rock Rovers, who took the place of B Peterson at outside right and was appointed Captain, and RB Douglas of Royal Hibernians, who filled the position of goalkeeper. The result justified the selector’s confidence as the team was victorious and Ireland won the Triple Crown for the first time.

A club whose first team remains practically unchanged for a number of years is bound in time to suffer from lack of new members, and this is what happened to Palmerston, whose numbers dwindled until, in 1907, it found itself unable to carry on and decided to disband. Some of its best players transferred to the Monkstown Club and assisted it to win the Irish Senior Cup, the blue riband of Irish hockey, a few years later.

This article is taken from the book Hockey in Ireland by TSC Dagg, published in 1944. Mr Dagg played for Ireland before WW1 and his son also played for Ireland in the mid 1930s.

Ireland has many claims to fame as far as hockey is concerned. The island’s traditional stick and ball game of Hurley can be dated back to very early times.

It is little surprise therefore that when the organised game of hockey began to appear in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Irish were particularly adept at it. In a year when Ireland will be playing in the Olympics and only for the second time, it must be remembered that both the Irish men and women featured in both of the first ever international hockey matches in 1895 and 1896 respectively. That is a deserved honour that many countries would covert.

An examination of the early years of Irish men’s hockey reveals a very interesting thread, that is the numbers of sets of brothers who played for their country in that period. It could be said that with only a few people playing the sport there were bound to be lots of brothers but in fact hockey in Ireland flourished very quickly and the clubs proliferated from the start of hockey in 1892. By 1894 there were 16 clubs and by 1896 the number had risen to 27. By 1898 there were 4 provincial branches of the Union with clubs flourishing in all.

By 1914 and the start of WW1, Ireland men had played 55 international matches, most within the British Isles. 55 matches in the days before substitutes meant that 605 individual team selections had been made. Of these, at least 164 selections were brothers – well over a quarter. The ‘brotherhood’ started with the first match of 1895 with the Birmingham brothers and went on to include 6 lots of 3 brothers and the unparalleled Paterson brothers, of whom 6 played for Ireland and on one occasion with 5 in the same team.

The writer suspects the faint possibility of another record lurking within these statistics; that is, was one of the same name pairings actually a father and son?

Most players know that, to be legal, a hockey stick has to be able to pass through a two inch ring, or 52mm in modern parlance. However, this was not always the case as, in the very early days of hockey, the width allowed was 2 ½ inches. This was reduced to the current size on the 19 September 1887.

Not many people know that!

This is potentially a very subjective claim but can anyone put forward a stronger case than this one for Stanley Howard Shoveller (1881-1959)?

To be the best amongst one’s contemporaries is perhaps the first requirement for this accolade. There cannot be much doubt about that. Shoveller played for his school 1^st XI – what is now Kingston Grammar School – from the age of 14 and was a prolific goal scorer. He was playing for Hampstead Hockey Club before he left school and for Middlesex the year after leaving school. He first played for England three years later (1902) at the age of 21, which was very young in those days. In the following 19 years he played 35 times for England. He also fought in WW1, rising to the rank of Captain and being awarded a Military Cross.

His international career spanned two Olympics, London and Antwerp, winning gold medals in both. That in itself is an achievement unlikely to be equalled again by a British player. His official England record shows that he scored 79 goals in 35 appearances, including 17 hat tricks. That is an average of more than 2 goals per match. It is possible that this tally could be posthumously increased as ‘Shove’ as he was affectionately known, captained the England team that played in an international tournament in Hamburg in 1912 as a substitute for there being no hockey at the Stockholm Olympics. At this event he scored four times against Germany and three against Austria but at present these two matches do not appear in the England records.

To make Shoveller’s record even more remarkable, he did not play in 23 England matches because his work as a stockbroker did not give him the freedom to do so. What an amazing record it might have been had he played in all the 60 matches of his era. No wonder he was called the WG Grace of his time and therefore must qualify him to be the greatest English hockey player ever – unless you know different?

In Hockive Fact 9 we recorded that England men’s first four international matches were all against Ireland in the 1890s. We therefore asked why they had not played Wales in those four years, especially as Wales had featured in the first ever hockey international against Ireland in 1895.

We now have the answer, albeit a quote from an Irish correspondent which, at this stage and certainly without physical evidence, should be taken more as supposition than concrete fact. That said, the alleged reason was that The Hockey Association (England) did not consider the Welsh strong enough to warrant holding an international match.

Another interesting fact from this very early era of international hockey is that originally, in 1895, all players had to be born in the country they represented. Within two years this was changed to, "birth or two years residence".

It is perhaps difficult for us today, playing to a strict code of rules laid down by the sport’s governing body, to appreciate that, in the early days of hockey, rules were very fluid as the sport was quite literally evolving through the last decade of the 19^th century. We know of at least a dozen different versions of the rules of hockey from that era and recently THM uncovered another. These come from Clifton High School for Girls in Bristol dated November 1894 (download the PDF by clicking the icon to the right).

From these we note that rule IX has a line 7 yards from and parallel to the goal line. This was the alternative to a circle. Rule X is an ‘offside’ rule. Rule II indicates that you cannot push the ball, only hitting is allowed. This begs the question: if you entered the striking area but dribbled with the ball into the goal, essentially pushing the ball along, and did not strike it into the goal, would it be a goal?

The simple answer to this is of course the scoring of three goals. However, when Stanley Shoveller scored eight goals against Belgium at the Antwerp Olympics in 1920, how many hat tricks was it?

Some might say two and two thirds hat tricks. However, others argue that it is in fact six hat tricks. The rationale for this is that the first three goals represent the first hat trick and every goal thereafter creates a new hat trick. So, the first three goals plus five more makes six hat tricks, unless you know different?!