As the Champions of Europe were triumphantly crowned on the field, we celebrated (off the field!) our largest ever exhibition.
We hope you enjoyed watching the Unibet EuroHockey Championships 2015 either on TV, through the various website channels, or live at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
If you visited The Hockey Museum (THM), either at the Olympic Park or at the Masters tournaments held at Old Loughtonians and Southgate Hockey Clubs, thank you.
The Museum’s EuroHockey exhibition, which featured historical video footage and artefacts from the early years as well as a giant illustrated timeline that charted the history of hockey and stretched the length of the stadium (below), was a fantastic success. Manned by a team of Museum volunteers, it welcomed an estimated 4,500 visitors during the ten day tournament and we received some fantastic feedback which made it all worthwhile.
A number of hockey artefacts were donated and will augment our collection, as well as promises of additional items that are currently languishing in cupboards and lofts as well as a number of old club records. Members of many of the competing teams and national associations, including the FIH and EHF, visited and promised to donate items. Wolfgang Hillmann, President of Deutscher Hockey Bund (DHB), donated a set of indoor goalkeeping kit from the 1970s (above left with THM Trustee Dil Bahra) and the Polish delegates added a number of hockey stamps to the Museum’s collection. We will certainly give them all a safe home.
During the tournament, we received nearly 200 enquiry forms. If you were one of these, we aim to respond to all enquiries by the end of the month, and to offers to donate artefacts to the museum in this timescale too.
The Championships also provided the Museum with a platform to launch its Oral Histories project which is supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Oral history is the recording of a person’s memories. It is the living history of a person’s unique life experience and preserves their past for the future. A booth was set up in the exhibition stand and a number of hockey personalities including Leandro Negre, Roger Self (right with THM Oral Histories lead Evelyn Sommerville), Anne Ellis, Martin Gotheridge and Bernie Cotton were interviewed.
Once again, many thanks for your support for The Hockey Museum and we look forward to seeing you soon. On Wednesday 30 September, as part of National Heritage Day, THM will be hosting an Open Day at Woking and we plan to be open on a regular basis in the New Year; we also hope to be exhibiting at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in June 2016 during the Women’s Champions Trophy.
Mike Smith and Dil Bahra, September 2015
