Frank Benson, actor and hockey players, in William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.

The Edwardian era would witness the peak of theatre going and its watershed moment as cinema arrived. It also witnessed a sporting boom – especially in hockey – and one club, Benson’s Hockey Club, had done much to promote the game across the country since 1890s.

Frank Benson, an Oxford University graduate, began his professional theatre career in 1882 by appearing in Henry Irving’s production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. He then joined Walter Bentley’s touring company, only for Walter to abscond with the company’s revenue to Australia leaving them high and dry. With £100 from his father, Benson would take over the company and it became the Benson Shakespearean Touring Company. Benson’s career as an ‘actor manager’ had begun and it reached its pinnacle when in 1916 playing Julius Caesar at Drury Lane Theatre, he was knighted in the Royal Box by King George V.

From the very beginning of his management, the Bensonians would be engaged in rehearsals in the morning and various sports in the afternoon. Their sporting prowess at cricket and hockey was such that clubs leapt at the chance to play against the Bensonians. It was claimed that, as well as a talent for speaking verse, for admission into the troupe one needed to be a ‘rugger blue’ – a blue is the highest honour granted to individual sportspeople at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, in this case for rugby – could run a fast quarter mile or make a useful member of a cricket or hockey team. Benson’s philosophy of combining athleticism with aesthetics in acting was considered revolutionary but unpopular with the theatrical establishment. Benson’s plays were criticised for being overly athletic and his actors overly muscle-bound. Yet many of the troupe, like Oscar Asche, went on to have great careers even if he had spent his afternoons as the hockey team’s goalkeeper.

The Bensonians were the first English hockey club to play in Ireland when they played the High School and Dublin University in early 1894. Their annual Christmas tour of Ireland would see them play against Ireland’s top clubs such as Cliftonville who they once beat 3-1 with Asche in goal and Benson scoring a hat-trick from centre forward. Though hockey was preferred, the Bensonians could be found playing rugby and even water polo. The leading hockey clubs across the country would face closely fought contests: they lost to Leeds HC 5-2 in a “fast and pleasant game”, won 1-0 in Bournemouth and thrashed Kidderminster 6-1.

Benson’s Hockey Club, as it was known, would build up a creditable reputation in the hockey world as attested to by the Bournemouth Graphic:

“Mr F R Benson’s hockey team is almost as widely known as his famous dramatic company from which it is selected. The actor manager himself is an ardent hockeyite and has communicated enthusiasm to his colleagues the result being a combination capable of meeting and defeating some of the strongest teams in the kingdom.”

Actor and hockey player Norman V Norman.		Silverstream Hockey Club, 1907-08

Though never well acclaimed by the theatre critics, Benson likely enjoyed that other touring companies followed in his wake. The Norman V Norman Touring Company played some 24 men’s and mixed hockey matches in the winter of 1905-6, winning just four games (against Barrow in Furness, Felixstowe, Sheffield Handsworth, Tunbridge Wells). Like Frank Benson, Norman V Norman played centre forward and was the team’s top goal scorer with 19 goals. By 1907-8 their playing had improved. Out of the 36 games played, they won 16 and drew 6 including a 5-5 draw with Lincoln and a 6-0 win over Middlesbrough. The following season in Belfast they played Silverstream HC, the 1908 Ulster Junior League winners, in a 4-4 draw. Norman V Norman scored all four goals.

Frank Benson’s philosophy that athleticism went hand in hand with the performing arts was now seemingly accepted with hockey playing thespians regularly appearing across the country.

James Ormandy