Foreword
The expansion of women’s hockey into a sport played by millions around the world is a story led by the All England Women’s Hockey Association (AEWHA) – the governing body for women’s hockey in England for 101 years. It was founded by a group of independently minded Victorian-era women 130 years ago this month (as of April 2025). The fascinating story of those first years and the key women who drove the early development of the game, first in England, then across the world, is told by Dr Jo Halpin, a regular contributor to The Hockey Museum.
Inspired by the Irish and influential to the world: the formation of the AEWHA
Dr Jo Halpin
In 1895, the All England Women’s Hockey Association (AEWHA) was founded. It governed the sport for women in England for more than a century.
By 1895, hockey had developed into the premier winter team sport for privately educated schoolgirls and university women, and private clubs were being established across the country.
The AEWHA’s formation followed that of the Irish Ladies’ Hockey Union (ILHU), which came into existence in October 1894, and came about after a winter tour to Dublin by a group of Cambridge scholars.
Shortly after Christmas 1894, a team of past and present students from Newnham College headed to Ireland at the invitation of Alexandra College to play a series of matches. Despite snow-bound pitches, the tourists – led by maths graduate Isabella Jameson – drew two matches, with Merton and Howth, and lost one to Alexandra College, before the fourth match had to be cancelled because of the extremely inclement weather.
After a week of sport and socialising with the founding clubs of the ILHU, Jameson returned home to seek support from England’s leading university and women’s clubs for a national governing body, so that international matches might be played against Ireland.
Isabella Jameson was a student at Newnham College, Cambridge when she was inspired by a tour to Ireland to set up England women’s first national governing body for hockey. She became the first Vice-President of the AEWHA.
Having invited Alexandra College to tour England in April 1895, Jameson was hopeful of having an English association in place by then to enable a first international match to take place. This was not to be the case, however, so Jameson, Emily (Edith) Godschall Johnson, captain of East Molesey Ladies’ Hockey Club – England’s first recorded women’s hockey club – and Elizabeth Guinness, vice-principal of Royal Holloway College, Egham, decided instead to raise “as good an ‘English’ team as they could” to face the Irish tourists.
No details have yet been found of this English XI, but on Wednesday 10 April 1895, a pseudo international match against Alexandra College was played in Brighton and ended in a 0-0 draw. Afterwards, a meeting was held to discuss how to progress the idea of an English women’s hockey association.
This meeting – which by all accounts (except the official minutes) was held in a teashop in the Sussex coastal town – was attended by Jameson, Johnson and Guinness, plus Christabel Lawrence, a games mistress at Wimbledon House School (later known as Roedean), and Emily Tatham, a member of East Molesey LHC.
It was agreed that the organisation would be called the Ladies’ Hockey Association (LHA) and that it would adhere to the same playing rules as the men’s Hockey Association (HA), which had been reconstituted in 1886.
The founding clubs listed in the minutes as being eligible to put forward candidates for the positions of vice-president, honorary secretary and honorary treasurer were:
- Royal Holloway College
- Newnham College, Cambridge
- Old Newnham (former students)
- Girton College, Cambridge
- Wimbledon House School
- The Croft (Weybridge & Walton)
- East Molesey
- Somerville College, Oxford
Jameson (Newnham College) was installed as vice-president, while Lawrence (Wimbledon House School) took on the roles of honorary secretary and treasurer.
The bare bones of an organisation were now in place and at some point before its first general meeting in November 1895, the LHA approached the HA about the possibility of affiliating. The men, however, decided that:
“[The Hockey Association] could not officially recognise in any way the proposed association and that it was entirely a matter for the ladies’ clubs to decide whether they would form an association without any reference to the Hockey Association”.
The ladies’ clubs had already decided that they would and they took up the challenge willingly and with both hands. The next day the LHA held its first general meeting at Westminster Town Hall, where they discussed how the organisation would be run, when subscriptions should be paid, and what constituted a quorum. Esher, Wimbledon and Bournemouth hockey clubs were invited to join, and two key positions within the LHA were decided upon.
Emily Johnson was named captain of the yet-to-be-selected All England women’s team, and Lilian Faithfull was invited to be the association’s first president.
Emily Johnson (left) was the first England women’s national team captain. Lilian Faithful (right) was the first President of the All England Women’s Hockey Association.
A graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, Faithfull had captained the college’s 1st XI hockey team and earned a first-class degree in English literature and language. After lecturing at Royal Holloway College for five years, she was appointed vice-principal of the Ladies’ Department at King’s College, London, in 1894.
Faithfull would eventually succeed in getting the Ladies’ Department renamed the Women’s Department, because, she said, “the former did not pass exams but the latter did”. It was probably for similar reasons that she supported a proposal to change the name of the LHA. Having already decided to add the words “All England” to the association’s name, delegates voted to change it again at the 1896 annual general meeting (AGM) in September – to the All England Women’s Hockey Association.
It was under the AELHA moniker, however, that the governing body selected its inaugural England XI, to play Ireland in Dublin on Monday 2 March 1896. The first-ever women’s international hockey match ended in a 2-0 victory for Ireland.
The First Ever Women’s International Hockey Match in 1896 – The Hockey Museum
The England team which played Ireland in the first women’s international hockey match in 1896.
Over the next 100 years, until the two English governing bodies merged in 1996, the AEWHA innovated and pushed boundaries to grow the sport among women and girls in England and internationally (see below) – and it did so as an entirely female-run organisation.
Whether in response to the HA’s rejection of its affiliation request in 1895 or for some other reason, the AEWHA maintained its position of never having a man serve on its executive body.
AEWHA Presidents honours board featuring all of the Presidents of the AEWHA between 1895 and 1997.
Early AEWHA achievements
Organisation
Within 13 years of being founded, the AEWHA had nearly 300 clubs affiliated to it, as well as county associations and five territorial associations – North, South, Midlands, West and East Anglia. It also organised annual international matches against Ireland (from 1896), Wales (from 1900) and Scotland (from 1902).
In addition, it had an official magazine, The Hockey Field, launched by student Edith Thompson in 1901. Edith would later become AEWHA president.
Over the 101 years of its existence, the AEWHA had fifteen presidents, from Lillian Faithful through to Monica Pickersgill. Each guided the development of the association in their own expert way.
Rules
In 1907, the AEWHA diverged from the men’s HA playing rules that it had adopted in 1895 and began to set the agenda when it came the sport’s development.
It initially banned the hooking of sticks and went on to amend the regulations on tackling from the left-hand side and penalty corners, obliging the attacking team to stop the ball before a strike on goal, rather than taking a ‘flying hit’ at it.
While the HA quickly followed suit on the latter two changes, it would be 31 years before it banned the hooking of sticks in the men’s game.
In the intervening period, a consensus emerged that hockey as played by women was superior to the version stubbornly adhered to by the men.
England international player Eric Green described the AEWHA rule changes as “a very distinct improvement in several respects”, adding that they made the game “far cleaner and more interesting to watch”.
International governance
The AEWHA was the driving force behind the formation of the International Federation of Women’s Hockey Associations (IFWHA) in 1927. It was the idea of AEWHA president Frances Heron Maxwell and for more than 50 years the IFWHA governed the international game for women, staging triennial tournaments and conferences around the world. The AEWHA were particularly instrumental in the organisation of the first of these in 1933 and 1936, well ahead of any such gatherings in the men’s hockey world.
Like the AEWHA, the IFWHA was entirely female-led and developed separately from its male-led equivalent, the Fédération Internationale de Hockey (FIH), until the two organisations merged in the 1980s.
Development of the game
The AEWHA did much to try to grow the sport and raise playing standards in England and overseas. They recognised the power of touring teams and their ability to spread the gospel of women’s hockey around the world. In 1914, the AEWHA sent an England team on a first-ever tour to Australia and New Zealand. Tours were not exclusive to England national teams; club and county teams were also encouraged to tour overseas. Matches were often well supported and received strong coverage in the press wherever they played.
The AEWHA (England) touring team to Australia in 1927 pose aboard their ship.
In the 1920s and ‘30s, the AEWHA made use of technology to produce three hockey coaching films, which were seen by around 175,000 players in clubs and schools, not only in the UK but around the world. The men’s hockey press of the day acknowledged that the “women’s hockey film had scored a triumphant success”.
From the early 1920s, it also nominated coaches to travel to America to help the United States Field Hockey Association develop the game there.
Production of the AEWHA instructional films, 1930s.
Watch parts of the AEWHA instructional films, digitised from The Hockey Museum’s cine film collection, on our YouTube channel: AEWHA instructional films, Hockey and You
Epilogue
In her article, Jo discusses many of the developments made to the game before the start of the Second World War. By the end of the 1930s, hockey had become the major team sport played by schoolgirls; there was a thriving structure of club hockey played throughout England and the rest of the UK, but also in Europe and across much of the Commonwealth.
After the War, the AEWHA continued to look for new opportunities. A pioneering agreement with Wembley Stadium in 1950 to bring women’s international hockey to a much bigger audience was a gamechanger. From 1951 through to 1991, the women’s hockey international matches played at Wembley became an annual focus for schoolgirls and club players with audiences peaking at 68,000 in the 1970s. With BBC and ITV also broadcasting it on Saturday afternoon TV, women’s hockey reached new national and worldwide audiences. It became a significant income stream for the AEWHA for many decades.
Remembering Wembley – The Hockey Museum
Towards the end of the twentieth century, a changing world heralded big decisions for the last few AEWHA presidents. The opportunity for women to play at the Olympic Games, the merger of the men’s and women’s world governing bodies in 1984, and an increasingly professional game drove the need to merge the English men’s Hockey Association (HA) and the AEWHA. This enabled hockey to make the most of new opportunities for funding, sponsorship and development.
The merger eventually took place in 1996, one year after the AEWHA celebrated its centenary in fine fettle with an old-style jamboree in Sheffield. There was sadness from many for the loss of a much-loved institution, but the courage and professionalism of the women who had founded and run the AEWHA from those early days through to the 1990s ensured that it merged with the men from a position of strength. A position that has seen the women’s game continue to grow in the decades since.
Editor’s postscript
For her article, Jo drew on her extensive research into the early years of hockey in England and internationally. Several of her academic publications are shared below.
Sources
Marjorie Pollard, Fifty Years of Women’s Hockey (St Christopher Press, Letchworth, 1946).
