Tower and Town, October 2026 (view the full edition)President's PieceI began looking into the history of Marlborough Hockey Club while preparing a short speech for the club’s 125th anniversary dinner at the Town Hall, hoping to link its origins with its role in the community from 1900 to the present day. I imagined a quick race through the decades, finishing with the current season and its awards. Instead, I found myself drawn into a far more fascinating story than I had anticipated - and I certainly failed to keep to my allotted ten minutes. My starting point was the club’s Minute Book, miraculously discovered in an old dusty box. Beginning in 1924 (and sadly ending in 1971), it records officials, matches won and lost, complaints about teas, weather and pitches (nothing changes), and nearly fifty years of club life. I certainly hadn’t expected to find women playing a full role in the club by 1924; we had assumed the women’s club founded in the 1980s was Marlborough’s first, but that was not the case. The Minute Book led me to newspaper archives to fill in the earlier years. The Marlborough Times of February 1900 reported that a group of men met at the Castle and Ball Hotel and decided to form a hockey club. The Mayor, Mr Morrison, became the first President, with Vincent Head Junior appointed Treasurer and Secretary. The club then appeared regularly in newspaper reports, playing mixed, men’s and ladies’ matches and organising well attended dances and social events, often - and appropriately - at the Town Hall. From the outset, many of the male players were magistrates, councillors and shopkeepers in the town. A large number were Masters or employees of the College. Mr Crosby and Mr Luff of Crosby & Luff - the shop that later became Crosby & Lawrence - managed to be all three: founder members of the hockey club, and racquets and cricket coaches at the College. Mr Crosby went on to serve twice as Mayor of Marlborough. It has been fascinating to compare the handwritten AGM reports with the newspaper accounts of the same meetings. In 1926, for example, Miss Flux is reported by the Marlborough Times to have asked whether it was fair that the ladies paid subscriptions while the men did not - a question that does not appear in the club’s own record of the meeting! The redoubtable Miss Flux appears frequently in newspaper reports of the time, as do many of the women players, active in town life, raising money for the war effort, organising concerts and whist drives, and running charities - always with tickets available at Flux & Co on the High Street. Ironically, as technology has advanced, our records have become harder to trace. Minutes from the 2000s are difficult to locate; many were typed on work computers and never backed up, leaving a gap in the club’s history. Match reports today often appear only on social media, where they may not be recoverable. The club stopped producing fixture cards in the 2010s, and although results are online, we have lost records of friendly fixtures and club details. However, it is not all gloom. The club website now provides a focal point for official documents, and we are in touch with the Hockey Museum in Woking. We have begun collecting photographs and memorabilia from members, along with their stories, for which I am very grateful - and always eager for more. If you can help, or contribute stories or photographs, please get in touch. In the club’s 126th year, gathering these stories highlights how closely its past is woven into the life of the town and those who have played their part in it. Caroline Baynes<br>President |