CROQUET PEOPLE:  Lily Gower

At the Budleigh Salterton tournament in 1898 there appeared a tall, slim young girl of twenty-one with a fine head of golden hair. In her first tournament, without ever having previously played on a full-sized court or seen first-class play, and having learnt her tactics entirely from Arthur Lillie's book, she created a sensation by beating C.E. Willis, the previous year's champion, in the final.

This was Lily (or more correctly Lilias) Gower, who went on to win the Ladies' Championship for the next three years after which, disdaining the unequal opposition of her own sex, she turned her attention to the men. In 1901 she won the Open Gold Medal, not, however, without a controversial issue arising. In the semi-final her opponent, G.H. Woolston, asked for an umpire to be appointed in charge of the game on the grounds that Miss Gower was double-tapping or 'spooning' as it was then called. This led to a sharp division of opinion, not as to whether Miss Gower was guilty of the offence (this did not seem to be in dispute and in fact the umpire gave several decisions against her) but whether it was gentlemanly of her male opponent to protest. Upon the whole, opinion was against Woolston, particularly as letters to Lawn Tennis and Croquet claimed that Miss Gower was not alone in this offence, alleging that other leading players were equally guilty. Double-tapping is a perennial problem.

From 1899 to 1907 Lily was at her peak; women champion three times, runner-up and winner of the Champion Cup; Open Champion in 1905; Women's Gold Medallist; three times Open Gold Medallist and finally Men's Gold Medallist. This last paradox requires some explanation. In 1907 the two Gold Medals were altered from Open and Women's to Men's and Women's but owing to ambiguity in the wording of the conditions it appeared that women could still enter for the men's event. This Miss Gower did and won it, a feat that Miss Nina Coote repeated the next year. Women had won the Open Championship and the Men's Gold Medal five times in the last eight years and the men had had enough. In 1909 the committee passed an unequivocal resolution, that women could not enter for the Men's Gold Medals nor men for the Womens'.