Cambridge University Ice Hockey Club at the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England, is one of the oldest ice hockey teams in the world.
While the team claims a history dating back to 1885, the first strong evidence for their existence comes on 16 March 1900, when they played Oxford University Ice Hockey Club in the first Ice Hockey Varsity Match, at Princes Skating Club in London, losing 7–6. This match was played, on Oxford's insistence, with bandy sticks and a lacrosse ball. The Cambridge team was led by J. J. Cawthra, who later played for England. The following day, the two universities joined together to play Princes Ice Hockey Club.
Cambridge played a second varsity match at Princes in 1901, this time winning 6–5. In 1903, they entered the first ice hockey league in Europe, but came last out of the five teams competing.
The squad then switched to playing European tours, popularising the sport, and from 1909 - 13 and 1920 onwards playing an annual varsity match. From 1932, these matches were played in England, and although no longer able to compete with the top professional sides, they were watched by over 10,000 supporters.
In 1931, the club joined the English League, but when it finished in 1936 they did not follow most of the teams into the English National League, instead joining the lower-level London and Provincial League in 1938. In 1948, they played a season in the Southern Intermediate League, and in the 1970s they played two seasons in the Southern League. They then joined the Inter-City League and finally played in the inaugural season of the British Hockey League. Since then, they have contested an annual varsity match and compete in Division One of the British Universities Ice Hockey Association although continue to be at a disadvantage in lacking a home rink in Cambridge.
Famous quotes containing the words cambridge, university, ice and/or club:
“the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds”
—E.E. (Edward Estlin)
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)
“When the ice is covered with snow, I do not suspect the wealth under my feet; that there is as good as a mine under me wherever I go. How many pickerel are poised on easy fin fathoms below the loaded wain! The revolution of the seasons must be a curious phenomenon to them. At length the sun and wind brush aside their curtain, and they see the heavens again.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The adjustment of qualities is so perfect between men and women, and each is so necessary to the other, that the idea of inferiority is absurd.”
—“Jennie June” Croly 1829–1901, U.S. founder of the woman’s club movement, journalist, author, editor. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, p. 204 (August 1866)