The Origins of the Stanley Cup

Lord Frederick Stanley, 16th Earl of Derby, of Knowsley Hall donated the Stanley Cup and established the ice hockey championships while he was governor general of Canada. He came from a family famous for its love of sports. His father, Lord Edward Geoffrey Stanley, outlaid a fortune on thoroughbred racing. When Lord Frederick Stanley came into the family title, he commanded the 30th largest fortune in the world. He used his abundant wealth to support sports including bowling, field hockey, golf, cycling, and swimming near their family seat at Knowsley Hall outside Liverpool. 

When Lord Stanley arrived in Canada to serve as governor general, he fell in love with the country’s natural beauty and its winter sports. He was the first governor general to travel the entire length of the country because of the newly built coast-to-coast railroad. Lord Stanley and his sons were avid fisherman and hunters, eager to enjoy Canada’s abundant wilderness. The Stanleys were in awe of the vastness and beauty of Canada, a sparsely populated country with expanses of untouched wilderness. A great sportsman, he also admired the rugged traditions of winter sports that united Canadians throughout the Dominion.

One of Lord Stanley’s primary challenges as governor general was unifying a colonial territory with deep set religious and linguistic divides. Lord Stanley never fit comfortably in any political box, but he was in many ways a progressive influenced by the collectivist turn in political thought in the late 19th century. He believed that the government had an important role in bolstering culture and a cohesive national identity, as Jordan B. Goldstein argued in Canada’s Holy Grail. The disparate British colonies in North America had only recently unified under one colonial government, and they did not have a sense of national cohesion. Tensions between francophone Catholics and anglophone Protestants ran high. New technologies like the telegraph and the railroad eased communication and transportation across the continent, making a national identity more feasible than it had been before. Ice hockey emerged as a national sport that unified a diverse nation beginning its long road to independence and warding off the cultural influence of an expansionist United States.

Lord Stanley and his family saw their first hockey game at the Montreal Winter Carnival of 1889. The city’s carnivals of the 1880s were jubilant spectacles of revelry amid the bleak Canadian winters. Jockeys raced horses on the frozen river running through the city. Ice skating competitions celebrated Canadians mastery of winter sports. The Stanley family learned to skate so well that they attended formal skating balls on frozen lakes. They enjoyed long walks on snowshoes and took full part in the festivities. Most importantly for the history of sports and Canada, the Stanley family saw two elite ice hockey teams, the Montreal Canadiens and the Ottawa Senators, play each other. They immediately fell in love with the game. As a newspaper reporter, “Lord Stanley expressed his great delight with the game of ice hockey and the expertise of its players.”

Ice hockey’s roots stretch back centuries to premodern British stick and ball games and indigenous lacrosse. Montreal in the 1880s was the center of the modernizing sport. It began among anglophone middle classes and quickly became popular. The first formalized rules were taking shape in the period when the Stanleys saw their first game. Within months after the 1889 Winter Carnival, Stanley’s sons, Arthur and Algernon, had started an amateur team called the Rebels. Lord Stanley built a hockey rink at the governor general’s house, Rideau Hall, to host his sons’ home games and play himself. His daughter Isobel, a teenager, helped organize the first recorded women’s ice hockey match at Rideau Hall in 1890. For decades, the award for the women’s hockey championships has been named in her honor.

Lord Stanley’s children urged him to promote the sport of ice hockey. As Goldstein argues, Lord Stanley also keenly understood how hockey could give Canada much needed social and cultural cohesion in a period when it lacked political autonomy because of its colonial status. He donated a silver cup to serve as the Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup in March 1882. He mandated all teams across Canada to compete each year to win it. Rather than bolster elite ice hockey club’s hold on the sport, he emphasized that it should be a democratic pursuit open to any team that could play well. Later, the cup was rechristened the Stanley Cup in honor of the man who did so much to support the sport. 

After his five years in Canada, Lord Stanley returned to Knowsley Hall where he devoted himself to managing the family estates. His children found every chance they could to keep playing ice hockey in Great Britain, even hosting an informal game with the royal family on a frozen ornamental lake at Buckingham Palace. After Lord Stanley’s departure from Canada, the game of ice hockey spread through the Canadian northwest and soon urban centers and rural provinces alike united around their hockey teams. Hockey players and fans used the new railway network to compete in games across the country, and hotels hosted crowded parties where they read out updates on the games transmitted by telegraph to fans. By 1905, ice hockey had established itself everywhere in the country and surpassed baseball as the most popular sport. 

Sources 
Canada’s Holy Grail: Lord Stanley’s Political Motivations to Donate the Stanley Cup by Jordan B. Goldstein
Lord Stanley’s Cup by Andrew Podnieks
“Stanley, Frederick Arthur, sixteenth earl of Derby,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, by H. C. G. Matthew