Special report

The game’s proud tradition among the army’s officer corps can only be boosted now that Prince William and Prince Harry have fallen into line

WORDS ADAM EDWARDS

The army is chuffed. A new generation of senior royals has chosen an assault rifle in preference to an aircraft carrier. Princes William and Harry both opted for square-bashing over sea legs, Sandhurst rather than Dartmouth.

They have not followed their grandfather, father or uncle into the dark blue of the navy. Instead, they have linked up with younger fashionable army officers, men like Captain Mark Dollar and Lieutenant Ben Vestey, who have fought with guns on the front line and battled with mallets on the polo field.

The army loves polo. The game belongs to it and it belongs to the game. There’s no other profession or trade in Britain that so clearly identifies itself with a single sport, with the possible exception of clergymen and croquet.

‘There is something very special about horse sports: they deliver good officers,’ says Major General Arthur Denaro, a Gulf War veteran, and current president of the Army Polo Association. ‘Polo requires a quick eye, quick reactions, the ability to think laterally and to get stuck in. Galloping flat out with a ball requires considerable bravery. Good polo players tend to make good officers.’

He is not the first to conclude that if you can hit a small ball with a long stick as you perch on a leather bag of bones that twists and turns like a lap dancer, then enemy insurgents are a mere bagatelle. Mark Dollar, for example, a captain in the Blues and Royals who served in Bosnia and is now secretary of the Army Polo Association, joined the army not just because he didn’t want a desk job. He wanted the thrill and excitement of soldiering but polo also played its part in his decision.

‘It was a choice between a helicopter or cavalry regiment,’ he said. ‘I decided to join a regiment with which I shared values. I’d played polo at Windsor all my life and it helped that the Blues and Royals were based there.’

Polo has always been army. It is arguably the oldest recorded team sport in history, with the first matches played in Persia over 2,500 years ago as training for the king’s cavalry.

Royal moves (above) Princes William and Harry both chose the army over the navy, learning to master guns alongside mallets on the polo field

Lead on (opposite page, top) A young Winston Churchill played polo as a cavalry officer, often writing to his mother begging her for money to buy ponies

Charge (opposite page, below) Major General Arthur Denaro, pictured in a tank during the Gulf War, led 58 tanks into Iraq – and also made it his duty to revive the game of polo for the military CORBIS; EMPICS

Those matches resembled battles with up to 100 men a side, and the game soon spread through Asia Minor, China and the Indian subcontinent as warring emperors, kings, shahs and sultans adopted it.

Two millennia and a few centuries later it arrived on the playing fields of England, thanks to the British army. Polo was flourishing in several Indian provinces in the middle of the 19th century, especially in Manipur, where Captain Robert Stewart and Lieutenant (later Major General) Joe Sherer were entranced.

In 1859, the two officers held the inaugural meeting of the first polo club and four years later the Calcutta Polo Club, the oldest polo club in the world, was founded. And when Captain Edward ‘Chicken’ Hartopp, of the 10th Hussars, read about it in a sporting journal in England, he encouraged his men to start playing makeshift games as well.

By 1869, the first official polo match was organised on Hounslow Heath. The following year polo was a standard part of a British cavalry officer’s training. The Royal Engineers took the game to Argentina while Lieutenant Colonel Thomas St Quintin, also of the 10th Hussars, introduced it to Australia.

It is no surprise that the young Winston Churchill learned the game as a cavalry officer and wrote to his mother begging for money to buy polo ponies or ‘I’ll give up the game, which would be dreadful.’ His army team was good enough to win India’s prestigious interregimental tournament in 1899, even though he played throughout his career with a bad shoulder. He finally retired at the age of 52.

Money has been an unspoken part of the game. My grandfather, a colonel with the Royal Engineers stationed in northern India in the late Twenties and early Thirties, was a keen player. He requested posts that kept him in the subcontinent because it was the only way he could afford to play. In England, in 1931, the average weekly wage was £3.50 when polo was estimated to cost a minimum of 50p an hour.

The regiments, particularly the cavalry regiments, financially supported polo and the game continued to flourish in Britain and her colonies. Only after World War II, when Britain was flat broke, did the future look grim. The cavalry – the traditional nursery for new polo players – had been mechanised and there was a sombre mood of national austerity. And yet, ironically, the Cold War kept the game alive.

‘The majority of the cavalry regiments were based in Germany in readiness for an attack from the Soviet Union,’ said Arthur Denaro. ‘Although the regiments were on duty, they were never far from a polo ground. It allowed the tradition of army and polo to flourish.’

But, just a few years later, when the Iron Curtain finally fell, and latterly when the army was involved in the Gulf War, Bosnia and Kosovo, polo became a casualty of conflict.

‘When I started playing in the early Nineties the army was still the dominant force in polo,’ said Dollar. ‘But its operational commitments of late have taken their toll on the sport.’

Ironically, polo was flourishing outside the services and yet it was getting harder for soldiers on active duty not only to find the time and place to play, but to pay for the upkeep of horses. An officer who, for example, had invested in a couple of ponies might suddenly be sent away at short notice for months. Officers ended up playing bicycle polo behind the battle lines, pedalling Raleighs in the grey Slavic dust rather than racing ponies on soft, green Berkshire grass.

‘As the tempo of operations accelerated, so polo began to play less of a part in army life,’ said Denaro, who led 58 tanks of Desert Rats into Iraq and fought three major engagements without losing a single tank. It is Denaro who can claim credit for reviving the game for the military in 1998 as Commandant of Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.

‘Polo retains an important place in the cavalry regiment, but for the first time in its history – excepting the two world wars – it was on the wane in the army,’ he said. ‘But polo for the army is more than just a game. It’s a team sport and the polo player must depend on teamwork to win. If a young officer learns to look after things other than himself, if he looks after his men, his horse and only then himself, then he is learning to be a good officer. It’s the same with polo.’

It hasn’t been easy to maintain army polo. The major general was forced to put up with a number of brickbats before reintroducing polo at Sandhurst. In the process, many of the army polo rules were restructured. For example, laws that insisted on owning one’s own ponies, or only serving officers playing for their own regiment, had to be abandoned.

‘Time has moved on,’ says Dollar. ‘And now the APA is trying to encourage the sport, the royal connection has been hugely supportive and has certainly boosted interest. Next year we are looking for sponsorship.’

Denaro adds proudly: ‘There were more cadets in the polo club at Sandhurst in 2005 than in any other sports club at the academy. I believe it is still more important to the army than cricket or rugby.’