ICE HOCKEY
Creating Canada's Game

Canada is widely known as the home of ice hockey. Millions of Canadians have enjoyed the game since it was first played in an organized way in the last half of the nineteenth century. The game gradually developed into its present form through the activities and interest of many individuals and groups.

Hockey has been described as a game in which two opposing groups of players attempt to drive a ball, puck, or other small object through the goal of their opponents by means of sticks. In Ireland a game of this type called “hurley” was played before 1300 A.D. In Scotland the game was called “shinty” or “shinny.” In England it was called “bandy” and in France “hocquet” from the old French word for a shepherd’s crook.

Early in the seventeenth century the metal skate was invented in the Netherlands and later brought to England. During the severe winter of 1813-14 in England, a game of “bandy” is known to have been played on the ice of Bury Fen in Huntingdonshire. Within a few years definite rules had been developed for playing “bandy” on ice.

When and where ice hockey began in Canada is uncertain. There are accounts of games being played early in nineteenth century Halifax, Montreal, and elsewhere. In the centennial edition of the Picton (Ontario) Gazette (1831-1931), there is an interesting account of his early acquaintance with ice hockey by Archibald MacMechan, who graduated from University College in Toronto in 1884 and taught at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, from 1889 until he died in 1933.

"In 1871 we never heard of ground hockey or hockey sticks and we should not have known the meaning of the word "puck". All those new-fangled things came long afterwards, things to be bought in stores. We made our own shinnies (sticks). We went to the woods with our little hatchet and cut a sapling with a crooked root. This was trimmed, the bark pealed off and seasoned, and lo! there was your shinny. The name of the game was also that of the implement with which it was played. Instead of a rubber puck, which was not then invented, we used the kneecap or knuckle bone of a cow or ox. It was a solid oblong, measuring perhaps two and a half inches long by one inch wide and three-quarters of an inch thick. It could stand any amount of hammering from any number of shinnies. Any number could play as the leaders chose sides, and there were the fewest rules. You learned what to do in a minute. It was a game without subtlety or fine points. We played a simple game in a howling mob on a short, icy street. It seemed utterly unreasonable to us that the peaceful residents should object to our noise. Our skates were steel blades in a wooden body, with a hole bored in the boot heel to take a screw; and then all was strapped on."

MacMechan’s account of hockey as he knew it in 1871 is a good description of the game played by many young Canadians in the less affluent, less urbanized years before World War I. There are other accounts, however, which indicate that ice hockey was taking on a more organized form earlier in the nineteenth century.

Games are reported to have been played in a Montreal rink near the intersection of Bleury and Dorchester Streets in February and March, 1837, between a team of French Canadians who called themselves “Les Canadiens” and a team called “Dorchesters.” There were eight players: goal, point, cover-point, centre, rover, home, right side and left side.

In his volume Halifax, Warden of the North, for which he received the 1948 Governor General’s Award, Thomas H. Raddall stated that ice hockey in Canada actually began in Nova Scotia in the eighteenth century when it was played on the Dartmouth Lakes by members of the military garrison in that area. The soldiers, who had seen Indians playing a primitive form of “hurley” on the ice, developed their own version of the game and played it on skates. Raddall also reported that when the soldiers went to other military posts along the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes Basin, they played the same game there and secured their sticks from the Indians of Nova Scotia.

Confirmation that garrison teams played their particular form of ice hockey comes from a diary of 1846–47 kept by a man named Edwin Horsey. He noted in his diary that soldiers greatly enjoyed playing “shinny.” Groups of fifty or more players on each side participated in games played on the ice on Kingston harbour. Some who have studied the history of ice hockey in Canada argue that the first Canadian game of ice hockey was played in Kingston in the winter of 1855. Others maintain that it was in Montreal that ice hockey, in its present form, was first played in Canada.

Members of a Montreal football club played an ice hockey game at the Victoria Skating Rink in Montreal on March 3, 1875. The game that day, advertised in the Montreal Gazette, appears to have been novel in at least one particular way. In earlier references to ice hockey it is clear that the game was played with a hard rubber ball. The advertisement for this game stated, however, that the game would be played “with a flat, circular piece of wood.” Soon, it appears, the centre portion of a lacrosse ball, with upper and lower rounded parts cut off evenly, was used as a puck.

These early games were played on a sheet of ice at least one hundred and fifty feet long and sixty feet wide. Goalposts, later frozen into the ice, were six feet high and about nine feet wide, and centred in both ends of the ice surface. In 1899 W.A. Hewitt, subsequently the secretary of the Ontario Hockey Association for many years, introduced goal nets at a game in Montreal. This was a valuable step in the evolution of the goal.

A small group of students at McGill University began to play ice hockey in the mid–1870s. J.G.A. Creighton is credited with having brought the game from Halifax to McGill. There, three students — W.L. Murray, W.F. Robertson and R.F. Smith — recognized the need for a standard set of rules. They studied carefully the rules for English rugby and field hockey. Then they prepared a set of rules that, in their judgment, would be appropriate for ice hockey. To that point there was little uniformity in the rules for ice hockey. If the game was to attract wider interest and participation, agreement was needed on readily understandable rules that could be applied easily without much wrangling.

The rules devised at McGill by Murray, Robertson and Smith were of great help in the organization and conduct of the game there and elsewhere. The McGill University Hockey Club, which emerged in the late 1870s, is believed to have been the first organized hockey team in Canada.

Many years later, in 1936, Murray told the McGill News that he and other students at McGill rented the Crystal Skating Rink on Dorchester Street near Dominion Square for Saturday mornings. Initially, there were fifteen men on each side, as in rugby. They soon found that there were too many players on the ice and they reduced the number to seven: three forwards, one centre, two guards, and a goalkeeper.

Murray reported that he suggested in 1883 that “it would be a great thing for hockey if a series of matches could be played during Montreal’s Ice Carnival Week.” The Carnival committee agreed with Murray’s proposal and offered a $750 silver cup, emblematic of the hockey championship of the world, to the team winning most matches during the week. Six teams entered the contest and played each other twice. The McGill team won the championship.

In the last half of the nineteenth century ice-skating rinks appeared in many communities in Canada. The world’s first covered rink was built in Quebec City in 1852. Ten years later the Victoria Skating Rink in Montreal opened. (This large rink provided the standard size for ice hockey.) These and other early rinks were intended for skating, not for ice hockey. Those who wanted to play hockey usually had to wait until the leisure skating was over. Nonetheless, enthusiasm for ice hockey spread quickly in Canada.