Here is an article from London, England talking about the life of Lord Byron who recently had passed away. In his youth, he enjoyed to play hockey – which would probably put that around 1800. Lord Byron as did Charles Darwin attended Cambridge University, both of these men are mentioned to have played hockey in the early 1800s. Now he may have played field hockey, but the game was called “hockey” and it eventually went on to the ice in England.
Here we have an article from England that tells about the drowning of a boy who went through the ice trying to retrieve his bung while playing hockey.
Here is an article in England that tells the story of a couple boys stealing cork bungs to play hockey with. The victim took one of the young boy’s hat and chopped it up on a chopping block.
Here is an article from 1835 in Sherbourne, England where again we see rough, foul mouthed, lower class “blackgaurd boys” playing hockey. We see crowds watching on the shore. We also learn something interesting, that what we know as skates were called “swift shoes” and these sold at the local cutler shops in England.
Here is another British newspaper with an article describing the ice conditions of parks in London, along with attendance and sport played. Again we see hockey players as being lower class, “rift-raft”, a nuisance on the ice.
Here is an article from New York in 1887. We see in this article gangs of kids in New York playing street hockey.
Here is another American newspaper out of Montana in 1892, that states hockey as being “the famous English game”.
Here is an article from 1886 describing hockey as an old juvenile game. We now see the upper class in New York playing the game. They were playing games with both men and women on teams. This might actually be the first female hockey fight ever recorded.
Here is a great article describing the growth of hockey in North America. Teams from Montreal went to a winter carnival in Vermont to challenge newly formed teams that had never played a competitive game.
With Charles Dickens again we see references to hockey in multiple illustrations from “The Pickwick Papers”. First published in 1836, there is an illustration called “Mr. Pickwick Slides” where we see on the ice a hockey stick, bung, and a curling broom. Later versions of the illustrations show ice skates on the bank of the pond.