GORE COURT HOCKEY CLUB - 100 years old !!

George Andrews was a well-known local businessman who had started life as a ‘bird boy’ and risen to be Managing Director of Smeed Dean, the local brickmakers, barge owners and shippers.   He had been succeeded in this position by his son, Harold.   Both were devoted to the town and to sport, and had been associated with Gore Court Cricket Club for many years.  Harold was currently Chairman of both Cricket and Hockey Clubs, and he took charge of efforts to find a new home, eventually leading to the Grove at Key Street, at that time comfortably outside of the town.   With help from the Andrews and the County Playing Fields Association, the Cricket Club bought the freehold of the central area, services were brought in and a pavilion constructed, so that both Clubs were able to move over in 1929 without a break.   George Andrews had himself bought the adjacent land, with the intention of giving it to the Council to be used as a public open space.  In the end, he and the Club agreed that, to protect the area from possible future development, the whole area should be transferred to Council ownership, with the Club having a 199-year lease on the central area.   That is the situation that obtains today.

 

The first season at the Grove continued the successes of the previous ones, and, despite Walter Wood’s absence for almost half the season through injury, the 100 goal mark was passed for the third successive season.   This led the club to offer the ground to the KCHA for County matches, and on 31 December 1931, Kent (with four Sittingbourne players in the side) met Essex at the Grove in one of the first County matches played outside the London area.   Another game was hosted the following season, but then, despite invitations, no more men’s games were played at the Grove until after the war, although it was used for a number of ladies’ matches.   The games had not attracted very many spectators, and from the point of view of many of the visiting Counties, Sittingbourne was not an easy place to get to, requiring a journey into London and then out again.   Travel was indeed something of a problem for a rather scattered sport such as hockey.   While a number of members had cars, overall, until well on into the 1930's, the teams had to rely on public transport, usually rail, to get to their away games.   The ladies seem to have had something of an advantage in this.   In 1930 the East Kent Gazette reported that ‘they (the ladies team) would not have reached Ramsgate in time for the bully-off at 2.30 except for the kindness of the Stationmaster, who stopped the London-Thanet express at Sittingbourne for them’.   Those ladies must really have had something..!!

 

Despite these travelling problems, the fixture list was beginning to have something of a modern look.   Canterbury and Maidstone had been on it for many years, and in the early 1930's it was stretching to Cliftonville, Gravesend, Tunbridge Wells and even to South Saxons at Hastings.   The club was of sufficient standing to play the major London clubs, although only their 2nd XI's.  While they had a number of players of county calibre, they could not match the strength in depth of the Londoners, the whole of whose 1st XI's would be of County, Divisional or International standard.   Stewart Dixon regarded his appearance in a South trial as the red-letter day in his whole hockey career.

 

By 1936 the club’s membership had grown to the point where a regular men’s 2nd XI could be fielded;  this was an immediate success, only one game being lost in the first season, and a similar standard was maintained until the war.

 

In contrast to 1914, both the cricket and the men’s hockey clubs made determined efforts to carry on when war broke out in 1939.   There were vast problems, of course.   One of the most bizarre was a request from the Authorities for ‘Obstructions’ to be placed on the ground.   In the early years of the war, there was great concern over the possibility of airborne invasion, and obstacles – usually derelict vehicles – were placed on all stretches of open ground, such as golf courses, to prevent the landing of gliders and troop-carrying aircraft.   A very sensible precaution, but it does take a stretch of the imagination to envisage a glider, let alone an aircraft, landing on the Grove!   There were more mundane, but more troublesome, problems – maintaining the pitch, obtaining balls and other gear, providing some sort of hospitality – and the few officers remaining had a tough time.   On the positive side, the club was one of the few to keep going through the war, and players would travel from as far as Ramsgate to play for them, so that a strong side could be fielded.

 

The move to the Grove in 1930 had effectively made the Cricket and Hockey clubs joint owners of the ground, but unfortunately little thought seems to have been given to the practical workings of this, and in the later 1930's and the early years of the war petty niggles between the two clubs became increasingly numerous.   To a considerable extent this arose from the fact that there was very little common membership between them, but fortunately there was one major link, Harold Andrews, and it is not the least of his services to the clubs that he acted to settle the problem.  He called a meeting ‘to resolve once and for all the differences that had arisen between the clubs’ and a formal scheme of collaboration was worked out.   This survived the stresses and strains of the war and immediate post-war years until in 1947 the obvious step was taken of amalgamating the two clubs.   The Hockey Club adopted the more distinctive name of the older Cricket Club and their colours of dark blue and gold in place of the previous blue and white.   This progressed steadily, and it was a source of great pride to hockey players when a member of the original hockey club, Dr. R.G. Birch was elected to the Presidency of Gore Court in 1971.

 

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