Nothing indicated that this grassy plain might be a polo field.  The field was empty, the grass a deep healthy green, joined by a mane of trees to a sky heavily laden with violet clouds.  The October afternoon was warm, tropical, languorous.  To the west lay the sea, fired by the late afternoon sun to a blade of blinding silver.

 

A gang of little Bajan boys came running up, laughing and tapping metal hoops over the rutted track that ran along the edge of the field.

 

On the theory that where there are horses – or about to be horses – there little boys are found, I asked them if this was Holder’s Hill, home of the Barbados Polo Club.

 

“Yeah, the horses, they goin’ to be heah soon now.”  They continued on with their hoops to the end of the field.

 

It seemed a large field to an eye accustomed to American football. But how much larger it must have had to be to accommodate a couple of thousand Egyptians performing their springtime fertility rites – the alleged origin of the game.  The Egyptians, using the ball as the symbol of fertility, divided themselves into “teams” representing the opposing forces of spring and winter, these “teams” sometimes numbering as many as a thousand each.

 

It was the Persians however, who in the first few centuries of the Christian era adapted the springtime rite of horseback.  From Persia the game traveled East during the 5th century, gaining a name in Tibet as “pulu”.  From Tibet it moved on to China and is first mentioned in literature of that country by the poet She Chaun Chi, who died in 713 A.D.

 

Polo is known to have been popular in India as early as the 16th Century.  By the time the British arrived in the 19th, it had almost disappeared.

 

The British carried the game back to England, and polo was first played in the West at the Hurlingham Club of London in 1873, introduced by officers of the 10th Hussars.  A year later the club men sat down and drew up the first rules of the modern game.

 

Teams were reduced from eight or ten players to five, soon further reduced to the present-day four.  The field was drawn at 200 by 300 yards.  Regulation mallets were to be made of cane or rattan, measuring from 50 to 60 inches long.  Balls for outdoor play were to be made of hard willow root.  And the game was divided into periods called chukkers, seven-and-a-half minutes long with three-minute breaks for changing ponies.

 

I watched the little boys, still driving their hoops, loping barefoot through the soft grass across the field.  Then came the sound of a straining engine, and a horse trailer hitched to a station wagon appeared at the crest of the hill.  It bounced over the track and came to a halt.  A stable boy got out, lowered a ramp, and let down a sleek bay.  He was a beautiful animal, gleaming in the sun, tossing his head cheerfully as the groom struggled down the ramp with saddle, bridle and other paraphernalia.

 

As if by signal, other trucks and trailers began to arrive.  In now more than ten minutes the place was aswarm with wives chatting about children, clothes, and cane.  Knots of men, dashing and lean-looking in their flared riding breeches and knee-high boots polished to a fine sheen, with here and there a mallet or a helmet in hand, discussed the progress of this or that horse.  Each animal, in turn, had its crowd of boyish admirers.  The grooms worked unhurriedly, as though the sun would hang there an inch above the sea like a spotlight until the play was finished.

 

What might well have been no more than a grassy pasture was now undeniably a polo field.  Anxious horses, shanks bound, pawed the earth, snorted nervously, side-stepped and jostled their magnificent heads up and down in an arched motion that could only be interpreted as “let’s go.”

 

Heavy in the air were the mingled odors of horses, leather, saddle soap, polished metal, grass, earth and sea – a good rich aroma.

 

One by one the players began to break away from their groups to approach a slim gray-haired man who appeared to be an official.  Margaret Dowding, who serves as official timekeeper for the club and is the wife of one of the players, explained that since it is always uncertain who will turn out to play, the club uses a handicap system of drawing lots so that the teams will be evenly matched.

 

The players began to don the team weskits.  One of them swung into his saddle and galloped onto the field.  More followed until a round dozen or so were swinging mallets and charging up and down.

 

“These are warm-up skirmishes,” Mrs. Dowding said.  “They’ll take all the horses out for a minute or two to limber them up.  Most of the players own two or three horses.”

 

There are about 30 playing members in the club and 40 or 50 horses.  Most of the horses are either race horses which haven’t lived up to expectations, or show horses, or sometimes ponies, bought very young when their previous owners didn’t believe they showed promise.

 

Mrs. Dowding’s husband, Andrew, bought one such pony.  Now, after much patient training, he is one of the best horses in the club, to the chagrin of the man who sold him.

 

It takes four or five years to properly train a horse for the game.  He must learn to respond to finger-tip control.  He must learn to stop short, turn sharply, twist and weave.  But most importantly, he must become accustomed to having the mallet swung close to his head. 

 

To my surprise, a woman took the field.  “A lot more used to go out,” Mrs. Dowding said, “but not many now.”

 

I asked when polo was first played in Barbados.  No one seemed to know exactly, but it is known that it was played on the Old Parade Ground in colonial days by officers of the British troops garrisoned in the still-standing red barracks buildings in St. James.**  Whether or not this was before James Gordon Bennet, publisher of the old New York Herald introduced it to the U.S. in Rhode Island, in 1876, is uncertain.

 

In any case, what began in Barbados as the sport of gentlemen soldiers has become the legacy of gentlemen planters.

 

The present Barbados Club was founded in 1937 by Henry A. Arthur, now owner of the Ridgeway Plantation in St. Thomas.  (His son, Andrew, is currently a playing member.)  Jamaica, with the only other club in the Caribbean, visited for a series in 1949.  Barbados played a series against Caracas in 1951 and made a return visit to Jamaica in 1964. 

 

A boost came in 1965 when Janet Kidd, daughter of Lord Beaverbrook, British publishing magnate, leased a cane field to the club.  The cane was uprooted, the field planted in grass and inaugurated by a visit of the Potomac Club of Washington D.C. in January, 1966.

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