The ongoing series of Great Britain (GB) honours cap presentations to current and former GB players is a direct outcome of THM’s Playing Statistics Project. These presentations are really a ‘bolt on’ to the stats project, perhaps triggered by THM’s small collection of various historical hockey caps.

Our research has illustrated to us that, amazingly, hockey in England and GB has never officially nor consistently awarded caps to its international players beyond the very occasional landmark, e.g. for 200 international appearances. This is despite the custom of calling such appearances, caps!

What does this extract from the Hockey Association minutes of 1903 tell us about the awarding of honours caps to international players?

From the early minute books of the Hockey Association (HA), it was clear that there was no appetite to reward or physically recognise its players. This presumably was part of the very strong ‘amateur’ ethic of those early years. We will be exploring ‘amateurism’ in future articles.

At a meeting of the HA on the 24 September 1903 a proposal was put forward “by Mr Tebbott that some gold or other badge should be given to international players, but as no-one seconded the proposition it was withdrawn”.

Five years later, at an HA Council meeting held at the Royal Station Hotel in Bath on 7 March 1908, “a proposal by Mr Trestall that caps should be given to any player who represented England was also not seconded and so was withdrawn”. 

In 1924 a set of cigarette cards was produced by Hignett Bros & Co. of “International Caps and Badges” as part of a sporting series (pictured). The Welsh and Irish cards incorporate cap imagery, and we are aware of the existence of caps for these nations from this era – we have a Welsh one in the THM collection (click here to discover more). However, the English and Scottish cards depict only cloth badges, which concurs with our belief that neither English national association (men or women) has ever presented honours caps to its players for any consistent period of time … unless you know differently?!

So, THM’s current project to present GB caps, which will be followed in 2023 by the presentation of England caps, is the first time that honours caps are being made available to all our international players.