Probably the first real collector of hockey material was Bill Malherbe of South Africa, although the claim might be hotly contested if anyone knew what was in Ken Howells’s (of Teddington Hockey Club and Wales) collection. Sadly, his total and vast collection was thrown away shortly after his death, so we will never know. However, we do know what was in Bill’s collection because he produced a bibliography in 1965, although the listing is only of published material: books, magazines, programmes, etc. It runs to 131 pages spanning 1890 to 1965.

In addition to this, we know that Bill had the first hockey stamp collection and other hockey memorabilia. It is understood that the collection was given to the South African Hockey Association on his death but there has been no trace of it for decades.

Sadly therefore, the end results are the same; both collections have been lost. Together, these two collections would probably exceed what we have at The Hockey Museum today though our collection continues to grow. Thankfully we have the bibliography of Bill’s collection, found as part of a lot of material left to us by Barbara and Nevill Miroy. Ultimately our collection will be listed in a more modern format, and it will be constantly updated as new collections arrive.

The moral of this story is: please don’t let your hockey material suffer the same fate as that of Bill Malherbe or Ken Howells.

September 2014