By CroquetClaude · 3 min read
Why your club needs a history keeper
Club history is at risk twice over: old prints and honour boards can be lost to fire or flood, and twenty years of digital photos are scattered across phones and old websites. Here is how CAQ plans to help clubs keep it.
Club history is at risk in two ways. Old prints, honour boards and albums can be lost to fire, flood or time, and twenty years of digital photos are spread across phones, laptops and old websites. CAQ will help each club that wants one find a history keeper, and will offer photo fixing and safe storage.
A club's history is at risk in two ways. The old record of printed pictures, photobooks and team photos is physical and can be lost to fire, flood or simply just the passage of time.
The record of the last twenty years is much more digital, stored as files and it is spread so widely across people and computers that much of our history may already be lost to this digital desert.
Croquet needs to act on this so the future knows our current stories. CAQ will work with clubs to preserve croquet history for the next 100 years of play.
The old record
The older record of our game is physical: framed prints, trophies, honour boards, plaques, printed newsletters and photo albums. CAQ President John van Barneveld has said, as reported in our Fixing old photos for the history project guide, that the recording of club history is important and the history in our clubhouses needs preserving, especially honour boards, noting that clubs such as Merthyr and McIlwraith have only partial records after past fires or floods.
CAQ wants to have the history in our club houses preserved.
The digital desert
From about 2005 on, the way photos were used changed.
Members take more photos than ever, but now they go to phones, laptops and social media rather than into a central club album.
The 1930s are likely in a photobook in a clubhouse cupboard but ask where your club's photos from 2008 or 2015 are, and the answer is often someone's old laptop, a website nobody pays for anymore, or a Facebook page.
CAQ wants to collect and preserve our digital history for the future.
The plan
A history keeper at each club that wants one. This will be one willing, interested member who gathers photos and records, labels them, asks long-standing members what they remember, and keeps it all in one place. It will not be a committee job.
Gather people wanting to preserve their club's history. This can be a group or one person. CAQ will help them store all the information in one secure place. It is the honour boards and photos as well as conversations with long-standing members about their stories of the club.
Fixing old photos. Clubs will be able to send in a phone photo of an old framed print or trophy with light glare and crooked angles. myCroquet will straighten and crop the image and remove glare making it look its best for posterity.
This is demonstrated over here: Fixing old photos for the history project.
Keeping it safe. Club photos will go into the CAQ photo archive, which already holds 2,810 captioned photos from past news, including Southport's last five years of news and pictures.
We will be able to photograph an old print or honour board on our phones and with one click send it to be stored. The image will be straightened and cropped, a description drafted for the member to check, and it will be published on the club's history page with a "Contributed by" credit. More in our Historical Photos module guide.
What to do next
If someone at your club is keen to be your history keeper, tell us who they are at hello@croquetqld.org and we will help them get started.