By CroquetClaude · 6 min read · First added 28 Sept 2026
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.
TLDR: Your club's history is at risk in two ways. The old printed record can be lost, and so can the photos of recent years. CAQ has a plan to help clubs keep that history safe.
CAQ will work with clubs to preserve croquet history for the next 100 years of play, so the future knows today's stories.
The old record
The older record of the game is physical. It includes framed prints, trophies, honour boards, plaques, printed newsletters and photo albums. These things can be lost to fire, flood or simply the passage of time.
CAQ President John van Barneveld has said that the recording of club history is important. He has also said that the history in our clubhouses needs preserving, especially honour boards. 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
The digital desert means photos and records spread so widely across people, computers and websites that they are hard to find, and much of them may already be lost.
The way photos were used changed from about 2005 on. The last twenty years are mostly digital files. Those files are spread across many people and computers. Much of our history may already be lost. Members take more photos than ever, but they go to phones, laptops and social media rather than into a central club album.
Photos from the 1930s are likely in a photobook in a clubhouse cupboard. Photos from 2008 or 2015 are often on 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
| Part of the plan | What it means |
|---|---|
| A history keeper | A history keeper at each club that wants one: 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 everything in one secure place: honour boards, photos, and long-standing members' stories of the club. |
| Fixing old photos | Clubs will be able to send in a phone photo of an old framed print or trophy, even with light glare and crooked angles. myCroquet will straighten and crop it and will remove the glare. |
| Keeping it safe | Club photos go into the CAQ photo archive. It already holds 2,810 captioned photos from past news, including Southport's last five years of news and pictures. |
Send your photo in as it is, without tidying it first. Email it to hello@croquetqld.org or upload it at share.croquetqld.org.
With the Historical Photos module in myCroquet, a club member will photograph an old print or honour board on a phone. With one click, the member will send it to be stored. A description will be drafted for the member to check. The photo will then be published on the club's history page with a "Contributed by" credit. A member will be able to upload up to around a hundred photos at once. It is not switched on for any club yet.
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.
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