The game of croquet was introduced to Victorian England by John Jaques and marketed to the growing middle class via the manufacture of croquet sets, which were showcased at The Great Exhibition of 1851. Great Exhibition sets were reissued in the 21st century by Jaques of London to mark 150 years since the introduction of croquet to England.
The popularity of the game in Victorian times engendered a wave of publications. Each publication offered a different number of rules, ranging from 20 to 126! Consensus arrived in 1870 with the publication of The Conference Rules of Laws. The current Laws of Association Croquet number a modest 55, though that number climbs into the hundreds if you count the many sub-sections.
As the world went to war in 1914, Stanley Paul & Co. published Lord Tollemache Croquet. The text describes the game of the Edwardian golden age, supported by event photographs demonstrating the techniques of a sequence game (as golf croquet today), involving ‘tight croqueting’ where the striker put his foot on his ball and hit it to move the ball in contact over the lawn, sending it ‘up the country’.
Croquet illustrates hoops run from circles rounding them on a square court with 4 baulks, 6 hoops and 2 pegs (1st below fifth hoop, 2nd above sixth hoop). The player was required to hit the 2nd peg (turning peg) with the striker’s ball, thus gaining one stroke before advancing to 1-back. The end game involved a peg-out at the peg below the fifth hoop.
As croquet grew in popularity, so clubs were formed. In 1860 the first club was established at Worthing in west Sussex, followed by the All England Croquet Club at Wimbledon in 1868. A need to coordinate the activities of a growing number of clubs led to the formation of The Croquet Association (CA) in 1897; it remains today the national governing body for the sport in England and produces the Laws of Croquet for both Association and Golf.
The introduction of lawn tennis in 1875 challenged the popularity of croquet, but croquet continued to be played and perhaps benefited from the higher standards of lawn care that tennis demanded. Lawn mowers, first invented in 1830, improved and evolved to suit the leisure market.
