Two Swedish researchers compiling an encyclopedia of hockey history
have scored a hat trick of significant new discoveries, including what
they’re calling the earliest known image of a hockey player – a
well-dressed skater with a curved stick and flat-edged puck striding
along England’s ice-covered Thames River in December 1796.
Sport
historians Carl Giden and Patrick Houda have also unearthed an
extremely rare book published in 1776 that includes the first detailed
description of field hockey – ancestor of dozens of derivative sports,
from NHL hockey to ringette to the underwater game of “octopush” – as
well as another vintage illustration of a group of boys at play that’s
considered the earliest of its kind.
The engraving of the
Thames River skater came to the researchers’ attention after a U.S.
collector purchased it from an antique shop in Maine. Though the image
was printed in 1797, Giden and Houda believe the scene depicted took
place in December 1796, when a spell of unusually cold weather swept
across Britain and froze rivers and ponds throughout Greater London.
The
picture’s background even contained a clue – a distinctive obelisk
situated on the riverbank behind the skater – that allowed the Swedes to
pinpoint the location of the scene as a bend of the Thames near the Kew
Observatory west of downtown London.
A second boy seen
lacing up his skates is believed to be sitting on the edge of Islesworth
Ait, a large, teardrop-shaped island in the middle of the river.
“In
1797, the word ‘hockey’ had been used in London and its surroundings
for about 50 years, replacing the medieval term ‘bandy ball,’ ” the
researchers write in an article recently added to their ever-expanding
online compendium of hockey history. “The artist’s intention must have
been to picture a pair of skating hockey-players. Later similar
paintings are not known until the 1850s.”
Giden told
Postmedia News that the image is a “very important discovery,” not only
because it’s “the first engraving of hockey on skates” but because it
shows a puck – “or as it was called at this time, a ‘bung,’ probably
made of cork or wood.”
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Bungs are stoppers or plugs used to
cover the circular openings in barrels of rum or other liquids. These
objects were known to have been used by shinny players in the 19th
century until rubber hockey pucks were introduced in Canada in the late
1800s.
The 1776 publication, titled Juvenile Sports and
Pastimes, contains a “very careful description” of field hockey, said
Giden, providing an unprecedented account of a traditional recreational
activity that was, by this time, coalescing into a more formalized
sport.
The book’s references to the word “hockey” – to name
the game as well as the object of pursuit, a small ball – represent
“the first known contemporary use of the word ‘hockey’ – predating later
records by about 25 years,” the researchers note.
Meanwhile, the woodcut image of five field hockey players is described as “the first known illustration of the game.”
Giden
and Houda, both members of the Canadian-based Society for International
Hockey Research, have posted their latest findings at the group’s
website.
The work of the Swedish researchers, powered by
their determined digging through digitized historical documents, has
added rich layers in recent years to earlier chronicles of hockey’s
evolution, such as the 2006 book How Hockey Happened by SIHR founder
Bill Fitsell, a well-known journalist and author from Kingston, Ont.
Images
of people playing ground games with curved, hockey-like sticks go back
to antiquity. And Dutch painters as early as the 16th century show
scenes with skaters carrying sticks and hitting a ball – possibly
playing a golf-like game on ice called kolv.
But hockey
researchers distinguish between such traditional pastimes and the more
formalized forms of ground and ice games that seemed to coalesce as
field hockey in the mid-1700s and later as ice hockey.
Most
experts agree that modern ice hockey was born in Montreal in March
1875, when an indoor game governed by a specific set of published rules
was described in detail in the next day’s Montreal Gazette.
But
there are many competing claims regarding the “birthplace” of hockey
based on pictures or published references to hockey-like games in
earlier eras of the sport’s development. For example, the writings of
British explorer Sir John Franklin – who described his men skating and
playing “hockey on the ice” while wintering in the Canadian Arctic
during an 1825 mapping expedition – have prompted the town of Deline,
N.W.T., to controversially claim that it’s the original home of the
game.
Windsor, N.S., and Halifax-Dartmouth have mounted
similar claims, and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia grabbed headlines
across Canada in 2004 when it unveiled an 1867 sketch of stick-wielding
skaters on Dartmouth’s Lake Banook.
“This is a momentous
occasion for Canada and for the world,” gallery director Jeffrey
Spalding said at the time. “There may be another image, an earlier
image, somewhere else in the world. But until that comes up, Halifax
holds the hammer.”
Then, about a month later, Fitsell and
other SIHR researchers revealed the existence of a painting by
19th-century U.S. folk artist John Toole that appeared to show a
rudimentary version of hockey being played in – of all places –
Virginia.
Produced in 1835 and held by the National Gallery
of Art in Washington, D.C., Toole’s Skating Scene captures four
sportsmen holding curved sticks and battling over a small, round object.
In
2009, a painting by pioneer New Brunswick artist Helen Maria Campbell –
dated to the early 1830s – was hailed as a potential contender for
world’s earliest picture of ice hockey.
It showed a scene on the frozen Saint John River near Fredericton that included a skater with his stick on the ice.
“It’s
fascinating,” Fitsell said at the time. “This is the earliest painting
of British troops skating with something that looks like a hockey
stick.”
Fitsell has shown in his research that the ice
version of field hockey originated in England as “hockey-on-the-ice” and
was transported to North America in the late-18th and early-19th
centuries by British troops stationed overseas.
The latest findings, said Giden, reinforce Britain’s significance as an important incubator for hockey’s fledgling phases.
I have seen an image of a boy in Virginia, in a well-known portrait painter’s piece, holding both a hockey stick and at his feet a puck made of dark leather. It was painted in late 1750’s. Please let me know if this is of any significant value compared to those depicted on ice