THE name has a hint of 1950s schoolmarm about it, the accent is distinctly North American and the residence is Wimbledon, none of which offers much in the way of clues to her principal sporting interest. Admittedly her home province is Nova Scotia, while Scots have acquired a new status in the leafy London suburb due to their sporting prowess over the past decade, but even that does not narrow it down much.
Joy Elliott-Bowman – the hyphen is a marital choice rather than reflecting aristocratic background – grew up, of course, with ice hockey, so initially tried field hockey on starting her course at Aberdeen University a decade or so ago, but found it too technical. When a classmate suggested she might feel more at home with an alternative which permitted use of both sides of the stick – albeit on grass – she found an immediate affinity with shinty’s apparent lawlessness.
She consequently became so hooked that when, in 2012, work took her and wife Bernie south, they immediately sought out the small band of brothers and sisters engaged in the good fight, promoting this most Scottish of sports in England’s capital, a battle that has been going on for some time it seems.
Now the outgoing captain of the London club – now set to lead their first all-women’s team that is currently being set up – Elliott-Bowman offers an illuminating history lesson that dates back to the 19th century and effectively outlines the debt Brian Clough, among many others, would seem to owe this most highland of sports.
A stick used by the original Nottingham Forest Football and Bandy Club in 1865 sits among FA Cup medals and an ornamental cannon gifted to the club by Arsenal in the boardroom at the City Ground, marking the link (bandy being a version of the sport played on ice) as Elliott-Bowman explained.
“The London Shinty club dates back to 1894 so there’s been a team of some description, on and off, since then. The Northerners and the London Scots merged at that point.
“The Northerners club was based at Nottingham Forest. That was the start of the football team there. Shinty was there before the football team, then there was a shinty and football club and then they kicked them out. Quite a few of the Northern football teams started as shinty teams.”
So much, then, for any notion that it has been forever confined to Scotland’s Highlands and Islands and, indeed, Elliott-Bowman admits that having grown up in what is something of a Canadian Celtic stronghold, she was not unaware of shinty’s existence before she crossed the Atlantic.
However, she and Bernie also arrived in London at just the right time because, for all its provenance, the London club had been in abeyance for several years just before they arrived.
“There had been a bit of a hiatus from 2006 to 2011 when there was no team. In 2011 Graham Love, who was the captain before me, had moved down to London for a job in engineering and decided to try to re-start it,” she noted.
“He got in touch with a number of the guys who had been playing in 2006. Some came back and then he started collecting people who had moved down. For the first two years there were maybe four or five of us at training at a push.”
Not so now. The powers of persuasion at play have also been demonstrated in the unlikely award of funding from Sport England, an organisation that might have been expected to have baulked at being asked to support such a characteristically Scottish sport.
However much official encouragement they receive, though, with enthusiasts like Elliott-Bowman involved, shinty’s bid to establish itself south of the border appears to be in good hands.
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