Croquet's Outrageous History, Part Two

At Simons Mansion’s garden party, Melissa is relieved to learn that croquet is one of the planned amusements, since she had previously played it with her family at a picnic.

Of course, the annoying presence of Henry Matthews considerably diminishes her fun, especially after he sarcastically compares her playing style to Mrs. Joad, winner of the first women’s croquet championship, held in 1869 in England.

However, despite the Victorian fondness for croquet (which Boston banned in 1890 for moral reasons because young people might disappear into shrubbery together to look for balls), the game has a long, interesting, and somewhat amusing history. It has been utilized as medicinal exercise, deemed character-building and a substitute for warfare, banned for threatening civilization, and been the catalyst for full-dress balls.

Thank you Maui Croquet Club (http://www.mauicroquetclub.org/) for sharing the croquet facts on the game’s early years. Visit the site for additional croquet history and information. See also the November 2, 2010 BryonySeries blog post, Croquet's Outrageous History, Part One.

1894: Frederick Douglass builds a croquet court at his Anacosta, Virginia, USA, home named Cedar Hill, overlooking the capital of the United States. An article in The Washington Post on 18 September 2005 entitled Restoration Will Let Visitors See How Frederick Douglass Lived said, "As if completing the image of the proper Victorian-era gentleman that Douglass sought to project, a croquet court spread across his expansive lawn just outside his library window, near the grape arbor and the peach trees. The former slave loved croquet. If there's some dissonance in that fact, well, that's Douglass."

1899: A new set of rules was standardized (perhaps in Norwich, Connecticut, USA) for the American version, which was given a new name: roque, formed by clipping the first and last letters from croquet. It was played on a court of hard-packed dirt, with hard rubber balls, very narrow wickets, and short mallets. The court was enclosed by a wooden barricade to keep the lively balls on the field of play.

1901: Lily Gower wins the English gold metal, beating England's best male players, including G.H. Woolston. The game was only slightly marred by a dispute concerning a tactical manoeuvre called double tapping about which Woolston complained. Ladies, and even men, had been known to double tap before and, anyway, it was felt that Mr. Woolston was not a gentleman for mentioning it.

1902: Judge Barlaine Deane in the London Divorce Court adjudicated a case of cruelty brought by the wife of the Reverend Fearnley-Whittingstall. He heard the lady explain that during a game of croquet her husband became so infuriated because she claimed that his ball had not properly passed through the hoop that he refused to speak to her for a week. "I do not think," said Judge Deane, "that there is a game so liable to put one out of humour as croquet."

1907: Lily Gower wins the Men's Open! The rules had been very loosely drafted by the Hurlingham Club, and Lily had taken advantage of a tactical loophole which enabled her to enter. The rules were immediately tightened up.

1934: [The Draw and Process tournament format] was given a trial in [Australia] at the Camberley Heath tournament, but it was not popular with the players nor the managers whom it was intended to assist, the latter complaining "You never get rid of anyone." [History of Croquet by David Prichard]

1940's: Holywood stars Harpo Marx, Louis Jordan, Darryl Zanuck, Tyrone Power, George Sanders, Gig Young, Prince Romanoff, and Samuel Goldwyn popularized nine-wicket croquet on the West coast of America. Bets of $10,000 were made. The level of play was high: at the start of a game, Louis Jourdan would light a cigarette, take a deep puff, and place it on the stake; then he would do an all-round run in time to pickup his cigarette for one last puff.