You will notice that a history of polo is always slippery, frisky and sly, with no claim about what happened treated as gospel by the next burrower into ancient facts.  This is very lucky for an ignoramus like me who has never played that game but whose family was in it for two generations, over two wars.  After World War II Lord Cowdray used to give polo parties in London but he did not know enough girls, so because of being acquainted with my father, my sister Deirdre and I got invited, though we were completely out of our depth, a couple of damp squibs amongst a bunch of burly mallet-crazy middle-aged men.

Polo, the Balti word for ball, similar to the Tibetan bolo, is a very old game, starting in Persia, where it was the national game.  There is written proof of it in 600 BC, when the Persian poet Firdausi described a match between the Turkomans and the Persians.  Concrete evidence is a 500 yard-long polo ground in Ispahan, the Persian capital, from Shakespeare’s time in the 16th century, with stone goal posts eight yards apart – the same width as today.

Polo spread to China, Japan and India, the sport of young warriors who could afford the ponies.  It has always been a very Sloany, Army sort of game, fun and flashy.  The news that polo is about to be in the Olympics is not true.  The Olympics are overcrowded (baseball and softball will go after Beijing) and incoming sports must be possible for the youth of today’s world.  Polo fell out of fashion in the Far East by the 19th century but was still played by the local warriors in the mountains of the north-west and the north-east frontiers of India.  It was exported again when British Army officers saw it.  They set up polo clubs in India, the first, the Calcutta Club, in 1862.  Horses were a staple of life then, but the cavalry regiments shaped the fast-moving craze for the sport of polo. 

In 1868 the Malta polo club was founded to cater for the British officers stopping off on their journey back from India.  Recommended reading is Kipling’s story about a polo pony, ‘The Maltese Cat’, who was acquired there.  In 1869 the first polo match was played in England, called ‘hockey on horseback’, organised by Edward Hartopp of the 10th Hussars, who had read about the game in The Field and arranged for a team of his brother officers to play the 9th Lancers on Hounslow Heath.

In the 1870s John Watson of the 13th Hussars drew up the rules for polo, when serving in India.  He was later a star of the All Ireland Polo Club.  In 1872 the first polo club in Wales and England was founded by Captain Francis Herbert, of the 7th Hussars, at his brother’s estate at Clytha Park, Monmouthshire.  In 1874 the Hurlingham Club in south-west London (founded in 1861 for pigeon shooting) started its polo (although it is no longer played there) with a Life Guards vs. Royal Horse Guards match, watched by the Prince and Princess of Wales.

In 1875 the first official match was played in Argentina, after polo was introduced by the English and Irish there.  In 1876 Lt .Col. St Quintin, 10th Hussars, took polo to Australia and James Gordon Bennett Junior took it to the USA after having seen it at Hurlingham.  In 1883 the Calgary Polo Club, the oldest in Canada, was started, and in 1899 the Montreal Polo Club. 

The best polo teams and individuals were welcomed all over the world, as pop groups are now, not by audiences but by the home teams, who craved improving their game while having no expectations of winning.  In September 1910, Arthur Grenfell Esquire donated the Grenfell Cup to promote polo in Canada.  His younger brothers were the famous twins R. and F. Grenfell, who had been playing a series of matches in the United States with their team-mates F.A. Gill and Lord Rocksavage, and were the first English polo team to visit Canada.  As Iris Clendenning writes in her History of the Montreal Polo Club: ‘The play of the Grenfell twins was the feature of the matches.  Having played together in positions one and two for years, they had perfected a system of team play, which was magnificent to watch.  Each one seemed to know just what the other would do with the ball when he had possession and placed himself accordingly.  Between them they scored almost all of their team’s goals, and it was done by system and not simply by single-handed attacks…  It was a tremendous loss when both brothers were killed in action in World War I, Captain R.N. Grenfell falling in the opening days of the war, when he died on September 16th, 1914, while leading the 9th Lancers to capture a German battery and was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously.’  Read More.. Click Here