Home News Diary Lawn booking Club competitions Activities History Membership Contacts How to get there Where to stay Why play croquet? Croquet myths Association croquet Golf croquet Useful links Archive

Club

Croquet

Wrest Park

Tournament entry than and now

Eric Audsley has donated a framed entry form for Bedford CC’s tournament from June 1939, which will soon be on the wall in the pavilion. Although CqE now operates an online Fixtures Book and tournament entry system it was not long ago that the Fixtures Book was literally that (the 2019 edition ran to 192 pages), with a page containing a generic entry form to be copied, completed and sent off to the relevant secretary.

The first thing to notice on the Bedford form is that the club and date are preprinted, suggesting that there was a basic form which had been overprinted with the individual club’s details. The printers were the Holmesdale Press, who started printing a weekly Gazette in 1904 and provided the CA with office facilities until 1910. They continued as the CA’s printers until 1966, two years after a disastrous fire.

Removing the form from the frame revealed that not only was there a horizontal perforation for the receipt but also a vertical perforation, which had been folded over to fit the frame, showing that the form was one of a number presumably bound on the left edge. Not only that: the frame holds two forms for the June tournament and two for a tournament scheduled for Sept 18 in the same year - the latter, in common with all calendar fixtures, was cancelled immediately war broke out.

One can’t help wondering how anyone entering the tournament who was not a Bedford member obtained an entry form.

The form in its entirety, showing the vertical perforation.

CqE are aware that not everyone can enter online and the website has two slightly different statements of which this is one: “If you are unable to enter online you should submit a Tournament Entry Form to the relevant Entries Secretary.” If you click on this you go to another page with a heading of Entry Forms, but there is no Tournament Entry Form to be seen. However, if you go to Search and enter Tournament Entry Form you are rewarded with a .pdf of the form that used to appear in the printed Fixtures Book. The pdf can be located via the site map but not via the site itself. This anomaly has been passed on and should be corrected in future, but if you should need a Tournament Entry Form you now know where to find one.