The Hockey Museum (THM) is pleased to share that it is working with Hockey Wales to support their National Lottery-funded heritage project to research, digitise and celebrate Welsh hockey heritage.
When the International Hockey Federation (FIH) became involved in supporting our fledgling museum financially back in 2015, we committed to broadening our collecting remit. This changed from exclusively focusing on English hockey (and on Great Britain at international level) to include international tournaments and the administration of hockey at world level. We changed our name from The National Hockey Museum to The Hockey Museum (THM) to reflect this and, at the same time, committed to guiding other FIH-member nations to recognise and preserve their own heritage.
Despite the FIH withdrawing their annual funding of THM several years ago, we have continued to honour the objectives of the partnership. We have contacts with personal collectors in Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, Australia and France, but our work supporting other nations with their heritage has often been closer to home; we have relationships with the Irish Hockey Archive based out of Dublin City Library and the developing Scottish Hockey Heritage Group. Now that list can categorically include Wales after Hockey Wales’s successful grant bid.
THM will support Hockey Wales’s project objectives by offering professional advice around the cataloguing and digitisation of heritage material currently stored in Cardiff, by hosting their visiting researchers, and by drawing on our extensive experience of collating definitive match and player statistics for Great Britain. This work has the added benefit of bringing in some much-needed funding to THM to help plug our annual operating deficit.
The Welsh project involves:
- Completing a definitive dataset of Wales international players and matches.
- Presenting ex-international athletes with an honours cap.
- Digitising memorabilia and records.
- Developing a cross-curricular resource for primary and secondary schools in and working with schools to educate students on how to digitise data and research historical records.
- Promoting the history of Welsh hockey clubs.
- Developing a hockey history page on the Hockey Wales website.
