Virginia Water Hockey Club
The Virginia Water Hockey Club (also sometimes called the Virginia Water Bandy Club) was a successful ice hockey club during the early days of the sport in England.
History
The club was based in Berkshire, just outside of London, and called the Virginia Water Lake their home waters. The club was founded by Harold Blackett in 1873. The Virginia Water Hockey Club was the first organized team to be created outside of the Fens.
The club played its first documented game against Oxford in 1879. As they used a flat brewer's bung covered with leather and reinforced with string and straight or slightly curved sticks made of ash, the Virginia Water club can be considered the first ever "modern" ice hockey club in the world.
They were the best club in the Metropolitan District (London area) throughout the 1870s and 1880s. A combination team composed primarily of their players, known as the "Virginia Water Team", handed the Bury Fen Bandy Club its first ever defeat in 1891. The clubs played very different styles of hockey, with the fen-men preferring curved sticks and a ball. This led to the formation of the National Bandy Association and the codification of nationwide playing rules a few weeks later.
The Virginia Water players greatly preferred playing the Fens style of hockey after first attempting it in the 1891 match. Sydney Farlow wrote the following: "Up to this date the Virginia Water men played with a light ash stick in lieu of a bandy, and a bung instead of a ball; and a very pretty game it was, with long hard hitting practically out of the question, and plenty of scope for short and accurate passing and dribbling, and pace in addition. But this famous match sealed the fate of the stick and bung; every one had to agree with the Fenmen that their larger bandy was the proper implement, while the ball, too, was recognized as possessing advantages over the bung, whether leather covered or not."
The Virginia Water Club also played the game indoors after the opening of several artificial rinks in London in the late 1890s. They won the first-ever organized tournament, the New Niagara Challenge Cup, in 1897. Virginia Water was defeated by the Niagara Ice Hockey Club the following year.
Meanwhile warmer winters led to the sport of outdoor bandy dying out by the early 1900s. The Virginia Water club was listed as an "Open-Air Bandy Club" in 1901, but it appears the club was shuttered a short time afterward, as no documented matches involving them exist after this.