At Simons Mansion’s garden party, Melissa is relieved to
learn 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.
BC: Romans play Paganica where they walked across fields
and hit a small, leather ball with a curved stick and aimed to strike certain
trees. The winner was the person who hit all the trees in the fewest possible
strokes.
1300s: Peasants in Languedoc (southern France) played a
game where they hit balls with shepherd crooks through bent willow branches.
1830: A French doctor developed a new version of the
sport, named it croquet (French for “crooked stick”), and used it as a form of
outdoor exercise for his patients.
1851: John Jacques II, famous toy and game manufacturer,
introduces croquet at the Great Exhibition in England. The game quickly becomes
the vogue throughout Europe and the entire British Empire.
1859: First record of a croquet court in the USA, at
Nahant, MA.
1863: Captain Thomas Mayne Reid wrote, Croquet: A Treatise
and a Commentary, in which he argued that croquet was a character building
alternative to actual warfare.
1864: John Jacques brought the rights to the rules of
croquet and printed 25,000 copies of Croquet: Its Laws and Regulations.
Mysteriously, the first edition of this work is described as “thoroughly
revised.” That same year, the Park Place Croquet Club of Brooklyn organizes
with 25 members with the quote, “Croquet is probably the first game played by
both men and women in America.”
1867: French dictionary, for the first time, defines
croquet as a game.
1870: The city father of Boston banned croquet as a
dangerous occupation conducive to moral corruption, if not a threat, to the
very structure of civilization. A councilor commented, “The lady, placing her
foot upon one of two closely juxtaposed balls and administering a sharp thwack
with her mallet, gives a thinly disguised symbol of female aggression against
male society. Where will it all end?”
1871: The National Croquet Club held an extravagant
tournament, in which 17,000 troups paraded around the courts, spectators were
packed five deep, and there was a full-dress ball.
1872: Lewis Carroll invented Arithmetical Croquet.
1878: President Rutherford B. Hayes spent $6 of American
taxpayer money on a set of fancy, boxwood, croquet balls.
1891: McLoughlin Brothers copyrighted the rules for
Tiddledy Wink Croquet, and E.I. Horsman came out with Lo Lo the New Parlor Game
Croquet where colored discs represent the (croquet) balls, and the “mallet
discs” are used to snap them in positions or through the arches.
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: Hollywood 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.
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