Cranleigh School were presented with Sholto Marcon’s Great Britain hockey cap on Speech Day.
The Hockey Museum have been at the core of a project to retrospectively award caps to all GB players and as Marcon never married and has no traceable surviving family, it was felt fitting that the School should have his cap. Former GB international Rob Clift made the presentation to Richard Organ, Cranleigh’s director of hockey, fittingly on the pitch named in honour of Marcon.
The Reverend Charles ‘Sholto’ Marcon played in both matches at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics when GB took gold. He scored a hat-trick in the second game, a 12-1 win over Belgium. There should have been a third game but France conceded the tie as their squad had been drinking all night. These were the first official games played by a GB side and the only ones Marcon appeared in. He also played 23 times for England.
Marcon was appointed to teach at Cranleigh Prep School in 1921. He at once took over the Senior School hockey, which had been started in 1919 and raised standards to the extent that by the 1930s it more than held its own against the religion that was rugby. “How he continued to spend so much time running the hockey and yet carry out his duties at the Junior School is a mystery,” noted The Cranleighan. “The secret was a great devotion to his calling and the young, allied with fairly austere living and tremendous physical fitness.” He left Cranleigh to be ordained in 1936.
Following his death in 1959 tributes in The Times referred to Marcon being “one of the finest hockey players of his or any subsequent generation”. Charles Blackshaw, at the time Headmaster of the Prep School and a close friend, said “he was passionately fond of hockey and, apart from being a brilliant performer himself, he was a magnificent and inspiring coach.”