Quoit in the act: 170 years of Darlington Quoit Club

Even if you have found yourself in one-way Raby Terrace at the rear of Skinnergate, perhaps searching for a parking space, you probably won’t have noticed the humdrum door.

But if you do notice it, and if you are intrigued enough to inspect it close up, there are a couple of little clues on it as to what lies behind.

In its centre is a much polished plaque with a C inside a Q. What could that be?

Around the doorknob is the giveaway. “Darlington Quoit Club 1846” it says, in small lettering on a metal ring – a ring that may well be a quoit.

Turn the doorknob, open the red door, and you enter the surprise inner sanctum of not just any old quoit club but one that is believed to be the oldest in the world.

It was founded, as the doorknob says, 170 years ago, and it has commemorated the start of the anniversary season by admitting women as members for the first time.

It is possible that there are older clubs somewhere in the world, as the game of quoits dates back to ancient Greece where it was a variation on the Olympic sport of discus. Poorer Greeks could not afford a solid brass disc, and so got some old horseshoes, bent them into a ring, and threw them at a stake in the ground.

Perhaps because of these humble beginnings, quoits has traditionally been regarded as a lower class sport, its clay ends often to be found covered with tarpaulins outside working men’s clubs.

Except in Darlington. In Victorian times, this was a club of movers and shakers (and, it must be said, of drinkers as well). In 1891, when its annual dinner was held at the Fleece in Blackwellgate, a local newspaper reported that the club “is said to include everyone that has any consequence in the town”.

At the 1893 dinner, a speaker addressed the anti-quoit snobbery by saying: “This is no vulgar institution, such as southerners may deem a quoits club, but an institution of great worthiness and dignity."

At least 16 of its members have served as mayor of Darlington, although the last was way back in 1950 – whether this says something about the decline of the standing of the club or, as the club operated a strict blackballing procedure when it came to electing new members, of the councillors is open to debate.

The club was founded in August 1846 in the Dun Cow Inn in Post House Wynd where Mrs Bennison was the landlady. There were 49 founder members and Thomas Blythe was elected the first president.

From the beginning, they competed among themselves every early autumn for the Silver Quoit – the winner would be the following year’s captain and the runner-up the lieutenant. However, the club has never entered a competitive league, its members happily competing among themselves and entertaining visiting clubs to friendlies.

Indeed, the minute books reveal that the club turned down lots of requests from other clubs for matches. In 1874, for instance, it was challenged by the newly-formed Darlington Borough Quoits Club which had a ground in Kendrew Street. You would have thought this was an ideal opportunity for the Darlington Quoits Club to establish its rightful supremacy over the newcomer, but the challenge was turned down “due to members’ poor attendance at practice”.

So although quoiting has obviously been very important to the members, it is hard not to feel that drinking has also been a major attraction, even distraction, over the years.

In those early days, they threw their quoits wherever they could find a ground – behind Central Hall in Houndgate, on the Green Tree Fields at the rear of Skinnergate, and in the garden of Mr Blythe’s son-in-law, James Peel, who lived in Bransom House on the corner of Hollyhurst Road and Woodland Road. Peel is now regarded as "one of the best English landscape painters of the late 19th Century", renowned for drawing his inspiration from the cloud-laden skies of Wales, Yorkshire and Northumberland. Scores of his works survive in galleries around the country; one recently sold for £11,000. Only in one of his paintings are the humans more important than the windswept hills or running rivers – that painting is entitled The Quoit Players of Darlington, but no one knows where it hangs now.

Another of the club’s early grounds was at Polam Hall, the mansion on Grange Road which was then the home of stockbroker and newspaper proprietor Robert Thompson. However, in 1863, Mr Thompson wrote to the club’s annual meeting saying the quoitsmen were no longer welcome due to “the disgraceful proceedings at Polam on the occasion of the match against Richmond”. The president replied to Mr Thompson, protesting that “the club had no control over this conduct”, and in the minute book, a note has been added that “Richmond players to blame”.

However, the next item on the agenda at the meeting was a discussion about the club’s change of venue to the King’s Head Hotel. The change was put down to the “dissatisfactory manner in which dinner was served at the Fleece on the occasion of the match against Richmond Club”. One wonders whether the disgraceful proceedings at Polam were carried on to the Fleece which caused the bar staff’s dissatisfactory manner.

As the 19th Century wore on, sobriety crept in to the club’s events. By about 1880, the club had established a “refreshment hut” in Raby Terrace, near its new ground behind Skinnergate. In 1896, the club bought the property for £100, and club president, captain and town mayor George Marshall, who was also a builder, started to construct a clubhouse.

Complete with ten earthenware spittoons, it was ready for 1898, mayor Marshall performing the opening, and someone referred to as “woman” in the club’s minutes employed to do the cleaning. The clubhouse housed the bar, card schools, dominoes games and snooker table.

In the yard behind were six ends for the playing of quoits – an end is a deep pit full of damp clay from the North York Moors with the stake in the middle, and the quoits are thrown at it from 11 yards.

By the 1930s, the club was described as being full of businessmen and professionals, many of them with addresses in the West End and many of them also masons. They were happy with their own company, rarely playing matches against other clubs, but, with a membership growing to 150, competing among themselves for an increasing number of trophies.

In 1946, the club courted publicity to celebrate its 100th anniversary, George Welford, the well-known headmaster of Eastbourne School, and the club president, Major Robson, taking part in a BBC broadcast.

Since then, it has slipped back behind its anonymous door and quietly its members have gone about their quoit playing and their socialising, but the news that the first female members have been accepted has catapulted it into the headlines after 170 years.

The club now has nearly 100 members. The clubhouse is open from 7pm on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights, with Mondays and Thursdays being games nights, and annual subs are £45 – men and women now alike.

Email pricer@kbr.co.uk for further details.