‘So proved themselves supreme in women’s hockey throughout the world’: a history of English and British international women’s hockey 1951–2016

Abstract

Women’s hockey in England was well established by 1951 with an extensive national and international network of associations and federations. The sport was also proudly amateur and the All England Women’s Hockey Association (AEWHA) expected their representatives to uphold that ethos. At the same time, women’s hockey had benefited from a new British government policy on education, and the lack of interference from the larger International Olympic Committee (IOC) or the Fédération Internationale de Hockey (FIH). This changed after the early 1970s when the sport experienced renewed external influences not seen in previous generations, from the British government’s increasingly interventionist sport policy and the IOC’s ambivalence towards amateurism. More critically, the FIH broke off relations with their counterpart International Federation of Women’s Hockey Associations (IFWHA) after the IOC introduced women’s hockey to the Olympic Summer Games schedule in 1980. No longer able to influence their direction or keep challenges to their authority contained, the leaders of the AEWHA became increasingly pragmatic during the 1980s and 1990s. In doing so, the AEWHA was able to largely keep the amateur character of hockey whilst also participating in the Olympic Games. The formation of England Hockey (EH), in the grips of financial deficiency and low morale in 2003, broke with the past and achieved Olympic success in the summer of 2016. Academic literature, until recently, has ignored women’s hockey and particularly its international role post 1945. By exploring the rich source materials held at The Hockey Museum (THM) Woking and Bath University, and combined with oral histories, this thesis seeks to fill that gap in the literature by examining how an ‘high’ amateur sport adapted to challenges outside of its control. The decline of amateurism in women’s hockey was not a linear process. The result, unlike the period 1895 to 1939 when amateurism had priority, was an international sport transformed into a professionalised elite one.