The Hockey Museum (THM) has recently acquired a set of blazer buttons that once adorned the England blazer of George Hardy. These buttons, emblazoned (ahem) with the HA logo of the Hockey Association, presumably made their way to Hardy’s fellow England player, Captain John Yate Robinson who passed them down through the Robinson family line. The buttons were donated to the museum by Robinson’s great nephew.

Quite how or why the buttons passed from Hardy to Robinson is lost in the fog of time. Whilst our Great Britain match records are now complete, the England records are not finalised and have yet to be fully researched and cross-referenced. What records we do have show that Hardy played only one game for England, against France on 18 April 1908 in Paris. Robinson didn’t play in that game but did play against Scotland two weeks earlier in Edinburgh and then subsequently, after Hardy’s sole England appearance, in the London Olympic Games in October 1908 (winning gold). Hardy played for Brooklands, Cheshire and the North; Robinson for Oxford University and the South. Despite never having been in the same England side together (as best we know), somehow these buttons passed from Hardy to the descendants of John Yate Robinson; and what happened to his blazer?

A mystery then, but an intriguing one. The buttons, which innocuously spell out HA-HA-HA, appear to delight in their ambiguity, mocking our efforts to establish absolute provenance. The brass cheek of it.

Shane Smith
04.09.2020