In recent years, The Hockey Museum (THM) has run several stories featuring connections between hockey and a wonderful country manor house and gardens in Kent that goes by the unusual name of Great Comp. Three of the women who lived at Great Comp in the early part of the 20th century – Frances Heron Maxwell, Vera Machell Cox and Eva McLaren – had a profound impact on the development of women’s hockey and women’s cricket as well as involvement in the Suffrage movement, the Women’s Institute and the Land Army in both World Wars.
We have been collaborating on this research project for a few years and thought it high time we gave our readers some more background: an overview of how we found out about Great Comp, details about the three pioneering feminists at the centre of these stories and to outline some of the exciting plans THM has to help tell the stories of Great Comp and the amazing women who lived there.
A rear view of the Great Comp manor house, which is set in a beautifully curated garden that is open to the public. The house is currently undergoing repair work.
How it started
Back in the summer of 2021, the Museum received an email seeking information about a house called ‘Great Comp’ and a hockey player called Vera Cox. The enquiry came from Frances Thompson in Australia, the great-great-niece of Vera Cox. We knew very little about Great Comp at the time but because THM has been working to compile the England women’s national team records we knew that Vera was a successful England international player (1908-1912) who also captained the England team during her last two years. We were intrigued enough to phone Frances to find out more. Frances told us that she had been researching her family history from the early part of the 20th century using the letters written by Vera Cox and her nine siblings – two older sisters, Enid and Avice, and seven older brothers.
The Machell Cox family letters
These letters are quite unusual as they run like a pre-digital e-mail chain; the previous letters being attached to the current letter being sent to the next sibling and so on, so that everyone got to read everyone’s news. The letters were referred to as ‘The Budget’ by the family. The letters started back in 1906 and continued through to the 1980s. Initially it was just the 10 siblings involved but as the next generation grew up, they gradually took over the writing. The letters are also not just text, they included drawings, poems, press cuttings, cartoons and photographs – an in-depth, content-rich commentary on one family’s experiences and their views on the changing world. In the 1980s, two of Frances’s uncles (then in their 80s) took the decision to place the whole collection of letters into the care of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. By then they numbered over 2000. This is where Frances Thompson found them when she came to research her family history – such an amazing primary source for her work.
The Cox family were very proud of Vera’s achievements back in the early 1900s. There are frequent references to her hockey and other activities and many family members watched her play and spent time at Great Comp. Through the research that Frances has already been able to do, we know much more about the playing of hockey back in that period, how it was viewed by family members, the social scene around a game and aspects of how hockey developed in those formative early years. That said, Frances has only begun to scratch the surface of these stories, so there is much more to discover about the people and about Great Comp itself, where much of the hockey took place.
A short history of Great Comp
The site at Great Comp has been occupied since the 13th century and the original 700-acre estate was owned by the Lambarde family. The large Grade II* Listed country manor house there today was built in the 15th century; the front still looks largely as it did when built but the rear of the building has seen many alterations over the decades.
The house has enjoyed 19 registered owners, but when Mr and Mrs Heron Maxwell bought the house and moved there from London in the early 1900s they made a momentous difference to the way it was run and used for the next 50 years. The gardens were improved, two hockey pitches and a cricket square were laid and maintained by Patrick Heron Maxwell, a sports pavilion was built with the financial support of Eva McLaren and the house was prepared to welcome numerous visiting hockey and cricket teams. It was thought to be the only women’s hockey ground in private ownership at the time. The house became the nucleus of many other activities including large family gatherings, meetings, theatre productions and it was the headquarters of the Women’s Land Army in Kent during both World Wars.
The pavilion (or gymnasium) built in the grounds at Great Comp specifically for use by women’s hockey and cricket teams.
The pavilion (gymnasium) as it is today. Now, sadly, a privately owned property. How great would it be if we could save this building for the nation and restore it as a satellite hockey museum!
After Patrick’s death in 1919, Frances Heron Maxwell continued to actively organise sporting and other events at Great Comp until the start of the Second World War. Little sport was played there after 1945 and Frances died in 1955. The estate passed to Vera Cox who sold it the following year and moved to Scotland. The new owners, Roderick and Joyce Cameron, further developed and landscaped the beautiful gardens and opened them to the public in 1968. They set up the Great Comp Charitable Trust in 1982. The Trust has managed the house and gardens since. It is now a wonderful place to visit, maintained by nationally renowned horticulturist Willian Dyson who curates a national collection of Salvias and Rosemaries.
Joyce Hatton, Vera Cox and Frances Heron-Maxwell. Frances and Vera were the driving forces behind women’s hockey and cricket in Kent and both had roles in the national associations of both sports.
The fascinating stories start to emerge
While Frances Thompson, THM and Great Comp all knew bits of this history, it was only when Frances and THM past-chairperson Katie Dodd visited Great Comp in the spring of 2022 that we started to piece the bigger picture together. Walking around Great Comp more than a century after its sporting heyday really brought to life the stories from the Cox family’s ‘Budget’ letters and the photographs from Vera’s scrapbooks (1908-12) which had recently been discovered within the Pat Ward collection at THM.
Discovering Vera Cox’s Missing Scrapbooks – The Hockey Museum
Scrapbooks created by Vera Cox, identified by her handwriting, were discovered amongst the Pat Ward collection held at The Hockey Museum.
Frances Thompson (bottom left) and players from Sevenoaks and Teddington hockey clubs stage a 1910s hockey re-enactment at Great Comp Garden in August 2022.
Some of the land at Great Comp has been sold, many new trees have grown and the house has undergone alterations but it still possible to piece together where the sports pitches were sited, where the old photographs were taken and where teas were served and evening social events were staged. It became obvious that Frances Heron Maxwell (or Max, as she was known), Vera and Eva were central to everything that was going on.
Max was the matriarch homeowner and general organiser, already in her late 40s but still playing hockey. She had founded her own hockey club, Pilgrims, based at Great Comp. Vera was the second-in-command; an international hockey star playing for Atalanta HC. Eva was famous in her own right as a suffragist but was a willing organiser of teas and general arrangements at Great Comp as well as a keen hockey player. From 1908 right through to the 1930s the grounds at Great Comp saw many hockey matches and tournaments. They were the home pitches for Pilgrims Ladies’ Hockey Club and often hosted Kent Women’s County trials. East of England matches were frequently played there and in 1927 it was the venue for an international match between the England and South Africa national teams.
The South Africa women’s national hockey team at Great Comp in January 1927.
Photograph from the AEWHA Archive at the University of Bath.
While all three women were involved in hockey, it is Vera Cox whose career in hockey was the most outstanding, not only as an international player and captain but also as a national umpire, selector, administrator and coach. Vera played for England from 1908 to 1912 and was captain for her last two seasons. She would undoubtedly have played for longer if she had not suffered a serious knee injury when playing against Ireland. When unable to play she took up umpiring and ran the line for over 30 international matches between 1914 and 1939. Not content with this, she also sat on various All England Women’s Hockey Association (AEWHA) committees where she campaigned for rule changes and improvements in umpiring standards. She appears frequently in official documents and hockey magazines of the day proposing new ideas or writing reports about the need, among other things, to persuade the men’s Hockey Association to modernise their rules!
Max also played her part off the pitch and was influential in developing many aspects of hockey within Kent and the East before being elected President of AEWHA in 1913, a post she held until 1922. For much of this time she was supported by Vera in her role of Honorary Secretary, and it is no surprise that the two of them then went on to use their experience to form the new England Women’s Cricket Association in 1926. The structure and organisation of this new organisation was closely modelled on that of the AEWHA.
There is still so much more to uncover about these three women’s previously untold stories and their lives at Great Comp.
Plans to bring more of these stories to life
THM has developed great partnerships with both Frances Thompson and the Great Comp Charitable Trust. There are exciting plans developing for how we can further research and share the many fascinating stories of the amazing women who lived and played at Great Comp. In the coming months we hope to be able to bring you more detailed stories from the research that we and others will be undertaking:
- Frances Thompson will be visiting the UK in September 2025 to continue research into the Cox family letters in the Bodleian Library. She has also been invited to give a talk at Great Comp on Friday 5 September and we will publicise details of this when they are known.
- In recent months, Frances Thompson was able to contact another of her relatives, John Staines, the grandson of Avice Cox, Vera’s older sister. He has now donated further Cox family memorabilia to THM, which gives even more insight into Vera’s life. This amazing collection of papers, scrapbooks and memorabilia will provide valuable additional research material, not only for us at THM but also for cricket and social history researchers.
- The story of a fabulous commemorative certificate dedicated to Eva McLaren, created posthumously in recognition of her financial support for the building of the sports pavilion at Great Comp. This was discovered during one of THM’s visits and triggered the first research into Eva’s involvement at Great Comp.
- THM is currently digitising our early women’s hockey magazines. Once complete, the searchability of this digital archive will give amazing, enhanced access to further stories relating to Great Comp. It will be fascinating to see what new information this throws up.
- Volunteers at THM continue to research the various scrapbooks and archive material we have from this early part of the 20th century that help to contextualise and tell the story of hockey at Great Comp.
There is so much more to discover about Great Comp and these incredible, pioneering women. We invite you to join us on this journey. Subscribe to our mailing list in the footer below to receive these stories as they are published and much more besides.
