Victoria Park croquet club is an interesting and frustrating one to research, everything should be so familiar yet it’s often not.
When the club was actually founded is still a mystery, most club members thought 1925, but records exist back to 1916 with relative certainty and with less substance back to 1911. It strongly seems to be another club that founded ( 1911 ) without a venue and then that venue appears vaguely ( 1912 ). Maybe it folded as quickly as it appeared and reappeared in 1916.
Gazette records show a 60th anniversary in 1976 and a 70th anniversary in 1995 !
The club colours were Royal Blue, Light Blue and Gold.
Victoria Park’s venue also shifts around a bit although all on roughly the same site.
The murky early history mentions stables, tennis courts, croquet courts and bowling greens.
It appears that some horse trading was done over the years as sports moved away to other venues and businesses nearby expanded in area.
Certainly in the 1960’s deals were done that moved the bowling club to East Victoria Park and shut down the fledgling Ashburton club, with it’s players coming to Victoria Park to play. Ashburton had been started in East Victoria Park during 1956 by the Baker family and was named after Ashburton Street, the Bakers established a progressive club that had a majority male membership and among other things played Golf Croquet regularly.
Victoria Park held a very popular electric light carnival for many years.
It also had a good relationship with the Northam club often sending officials to help at their tournaments, this was probably due to two ( at least ) of Victoria Parks better players having learnt to play in Northam.
Despite this the Victoria Park courts were always undersized by more than the allowed tolerance at the front and by an enormous amount on the rear lawn.
It produced many great players over the years but had very little success in pennant competition, possibly because the more recent great male players were workers and could not take part in a largely mid week event.
Victoria Park never won the A grade or Division 1 pennants;
B Grade 1924, 1957, 1964
A3 in 1950
C2 in 1949
Div 2 1968, 1969
Div 3 1969, 1973, 1979
Div 4 1969
So in 1969 they won all the minor grades !
Victoria Park of course is not dead yet as it lives on in the new Higgins Park club.
The recently vacated site, is now just weeds and the heritage listed building awaiting it’s next move !
Martin Clarke – 2022
