June is Sport and Fashion Month, so The Hockey Museum is celebrating the heritage of sportswear by shining a light on the fascinating research of our PhD student Emmy Sale! Now in the second year of her studies, Emmy shares an update on her investigations into the development of women’s hockey clothing.
Across our social media channels this month (see button links in the website header) you will have met Dashing Dora, learned about Edwardian women accessorising their hockey skirts, and discovered how Scotland re-designed their 1960s playing tunic. There are also posts about the All England Women’s Hockey Association (AEWHA) uniform rules and a rare 1907 children’s book illustrating girls’ school hockey.
A few specific stories will be written up in greater detail over the coming weeks and months and will be linked below as they are published online.
Research progress
By Emmy Sale
I am excited to share some of my recent research findings and continued searches for important objects in the history of women’s hockey clothing.
In the second year of my research with the museum, I’ve been focusing on clothing before the First World War. I recently spent five days at the AEWHA archive at the University of Bath looking through 178 files including minute books, scrapbooks and photographs dating between 1895 and the 1990s to determine the exact year of rule changes and changes to the England national team uniform. I found a hockey skirt with matching jacket dating to 1908 in the Doris Langley Moore collection at the Bath Fashion Museum, which had been shortened to keep up with skirt length rules. Using the surviving photographs of the East Molesey and Wimbledon women’s clubs that were founded by 1890[SS1.1], I have been reconstructing the dress of early women hockey players and their restrained approach to sports clothing in comparison to the British Ladies’ Football Club and Original English Lady Cricketers. Finally, Marjorie Pollard has led me on a research trail to find Irene Carpenter’s England skirt dating to 1911, which had travelled from Cecille Hummel’s private collection in Reigate to Castle Howard in Yorkshire, but now it’s whereabouts is unknown since the collection was auctioned off in 2003.
If you’re interested in hearing more of my research, I will be presenting a paper at the British Society for Sport History Annual Conference in Edinburgh, 27-28 August 2026: 2026 BSSH Conference | British Society of Sports History
Emmy Sale is researching the development of women’s hockey clothing using The Hockey Museum’s collection as the foundation for her doctoral studies.
