CROQUET PEOPLE: Jonathan Kirby

3 March 2006
Scotland , United Kingdom
by Jonathan Kirby on the Nottingham Board

My parents had a garden croquet set which I probably played a bit with from a young age, and I learned the rules (but not correctly) from an old edition of the Know The Game book. That book contained a description of how to play breaks, but I didn't ever understand it, and if I made two hoops in a turn (on a small lawn with wide hoops) I was happy. At some point I remember being taken to some sort of garden party which happened to be taking place at the Bush Estate, part of Edinburgh University, and there was a Scotland v England match happening, which I watched for a while but didn't understand any of. I remember wondering why the players didn't try to make any hoops! This was probably in the late 80s or early 90s and I would have been around 10. Perhaps some people who played in such a match remembers it? My memory may be making some of it up. That certainly didn't get me interested (not the lack of hoop-making, which suggested tactical richness, but I was 10 and the players were adults), but it did tell me that croquet had a serious side and wasn't just played in back gardens.

When I went to University in Cambridge, I noticed the croquet club at the societies' fair, and probably put my name down then, but I didn't go along until the end of my second year in May 1999, at the age of 20. I had the good fortune that that year there were some serious players around. Matt Davey who had learned to play at Trinity College Dublin and Carrickmines was running the club, and an Australian called John Wentworth was also on the committee. They were probably around the handicap 3-5 mark. Will Windham from Norwich was also around, with a handicap of about 8. Better fortune still was that two international players arrived in Cambridge that year: Sam Tudor of Wales (–0.5) and Aaron Westerby of New Zealand (–1.5, and a former world number 1). The CU croquet club had one club session per week for the eight week term, and I think I got hooked quickly enough to go to all of them. The first week Will taught me how to play the game and the second week Aaron taught me what a four ball break was.

At the end of the term I was the reserve in the Varsity match, which is played at Hurlingham. With this strong team, Cambridge won the morning singles 6-0, so with the match won, I played in the afternoon doubles, partnered by Aaron. We won +26tp, playing I think on lawn 2, which I thought was a good start to my competitive croquet career! I should point out that there were about seven breaks in the nine hoops I made. As an aside, one of the Oxford team we whitewashed that year was Jenny Williams, now a New Zealand international, who started playing at the same time as me.

That summer I looked up croquet clubs in the Edinburgh area, and went along to the Bush Croquet Club [now the Meadows Croquet Club]. I was made welcome, and improved fairly rapidly mainly by trial and error in playing handicap games, on full sized lawns, against the other members. The handicaps of the people who turned up to the weekly club nights ranged I think from 3 to about 12, with the occasional appearance of higher handicapped people. This was a club with two lawns, an equipment shed and nothing else but some trees for shelter. Only for hardened dedicatees, of which I quickly became one. (This club has now moved into the centre of Edinburgh, has been renamed the Meadows Croquet Club, has proper facilities, and has grown substantially.)

Over the past six years I have played in a lot of tournaments, and had one year living in Manchester in which I practised a fair amount at Bowdon Croquet Club. For the last three years I've been doing a doctorate in Oxford, and have been helping to run the croquet club here, and doing some practice too.

I am single, and have been a student since I started playing. I probably practised for an hour a day on my back lawn at home for a couple of months in the summers when I was an undergrad, but that was with lightweight balls on a small (eighth sized?) lawn with long, soft grass. I played for one evening (three hours?) per week at the Bush club nights, and played a few weekend tournaments. I probably practised a bit more the year at Bowdon, and probably less the last couple of years. I've always done a lot of "mental practice" away from the lawn though.

For the last four or five years I think that almost all of my holidays have been croquet-related, or work-related. (Can you have a work-related holiday?) The clubs I've been involved with have been the Cambridge University Croquet Club, the Meadows Croquet Club, Bowdon Croquet Club and the Oxford University Croquet Club. I've been part of the administration at two of those, most of the people at Bowdon are extremely friendly and everyone at the Meadows club has been wonderful over the years.

I have received virtually no coaching, but learned something from talking to my opponent after most of the first few hundred games I played. Nowadays I play some games where I don't learn anything new, but usually at least one of me and my opponent will learn something from talking afterwards.

As for admin, I was the treasurer of the OU croquet club for two years and coach for three so far, have done various other coaching things (always unpaid and usually not even getting expenses as is the culture in British croquet, slightly disappointingly perhaps given that doing more or less the same thing using exactly the same skills is what I do professionally as a tutor), and I'm on a WCF committee. This year I think that I probably owe it to GB croquet to put some of that admin time into practising, as some people will want me to play well come November.

[Also, see 2006 MacRobertson Shield Players.]