The history of hockey at St Catharine's

The following article by Dr Chris Thorne was first published in the 2018 edition of The Wheel, the College's annual newsletter. 

The first Varsity Hockey Match took place in 1890, and 24 years later St Catharine’s produced its first hockey Blue in C.L. Corfield. He presumably made the most of the College’s independent sports field, which opened in 1893 after a bequest from St Catharine’s Fellow Edmund Yorke enabled the purchase and development of the current ground.

Returning from the First World War, Corfield won his second Blue in 1920. The interwar years saw only slim pickings for our hockey players, with just six Blues in the 20 years; but J.D. Wakeling bettered Corfield’s feat by winning Blues in 1938, 1939, 1946 and 1947.

In the 1950s, the College won the Cuppers tournament twice and produced six Blues, including Derek Day who won a Bronze Medal for Team GB in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. But Day was not, in fact, the College’s first hockey Olympian, since A.Q. Khan (a Blue in 1951) had represented Pakistan in the 1948 London Olympics. Another six Blues in the 1960s foreshadowed a “golden era” between 1968 and 1981, when the College won the Cup on nine occasions (and reached the final on a further four). The peak was in 1981, when St Catharine’s had seven Blues, with Richard Dodds as the University Captain. Dodds also played internationally, winning a Bronze Medal in the 1984 Olympics (Los Angeles) and the College’s first Olympic Gold Medal as Captain of the British team in 1988 (Seoul).

Meanwhile, women arrived at St Catharine’s, and were not slow to show sporting prowess. With only small numbers, their first hockey was in mixed teams, but by 1982 they had a full squad. Soon the women were supplying personnel to the University team and won their Cup on five occasions from 1984–90. Until the 1980s all hockey was played on grass; in Cambridge the first Astroturf pitch was at Cambridge City HC on Coldham’s Common, laid around 1990. Soon both Cambridge University and St Catharine’s (on the initiative of, and the funding from, alumnus Peter Boizot (1950)) were planning all-weather surfaces. The College pitch was declared open in November 1995, with the University’s facilities following shortly thereafter.

Although the 1990s were not a successful period for College hockey, we still produced Blues in small numbers each year. Mixed hockey matches became popular, and from 2002, winning habits returned, leading to the second and current “golden age”. The men won Cuppers from 2002–2007, as well as several league titles; the women won both Cup and league in 2002, 2005 and 2006; and together they won the Mixed Cup for the first time in 2008. Although the number of full Blues, both men and women, produced by the College is now fewer, many College players represent the University’s second and third teams, and grassroots support remains strong. Since 2009, the men have won Cuppers five times, the women seven times and the mixed team five times. With “clean sweeps” of all three Cuppers competitions in 2011, 2012 and again in 2018, St Catharine’s is nowadays synonymous with enjoyable and successful hockey.