She’s an icon of the game, a pioneer of women’s hockey, a trailblazer on skates whose name, like her famous father’s, has become synonymous with puck-pursuing excellence.

The difference between Lord Stanley, whose sacred silver trophy NHL teams battle for each spring, and his daughter Lady Isobel Stanley? Whereas he may have strapped on blades and taken up a stick to totter out for a turn around the ice at Ottawa’s Rideau Hall in his late 40s in the 1890s, she actually played the game in earnest, regularly, taking part in what may have been the first ever organized women’s game and (just for good measure) wielding her stick in the first known photograph of women’s hockey.

All of that’s well enough known, and has been dutifully documented in the 130-odd years since she was out and about on Ottawa ice. Not so another conspicuous detail of the unique hockey resumé that Isobel Stanley compiled in the 1880s and ’90s.

Let it be here known that she was the first player in the history of women’s hockey to hit the injury list.

Not that there was any such official thing in 1892. Still, it’s a noteworthy moment that’s mostly been missing from the record for more than a century. In the game’s not always entirely uplifting narrative, it also probably adds something, by some strange calculus peculiar to this sport of ours, to her hockey cred.

A bit of background, first. Isobel Stanley was the second-youngest of the eight children of Canada’s sixth governor-general, Frederick Stanley, the 16th Earl of Derby, and his wife, the former Lady Constance Villiers. Born in England in 1875, the year that the first organized men’s hockey game was played in Montreal, Isobel was 12 years old when she and four of her siblings arrived in Quebec with their parents in June of 1888 on the way to Ottawa.

The tale is oft told of how, not so long after Lord Stanley took up his official duties as GG, the family fell under the thrall of Canada’s boisterous winter game.

It was on Monday, February 4, 1889, that the Governor-General took in his first game at Montreal’s Victoria Skating Rink, during the city’s lavish Winter Carnival. It was a game between the Victorias and Tom Paton’s Montreal HC. Lady Stanley was there, too, as well as her son Victor, 22 — Isobel isn’t mentioned in press reports, and may have been back home in Ottawa.

The vice-regal party arrived 20 minutes late that night, whereupon a trumpet sounded, the play stopped, and the two teams lined up as the band played “God Save The Queen.” Victorias captain Jack Arnton then led players and fans in raising three cheers for the GG. Hockey, I guess, forgave Lord Stanley his tardiness on that first meetimng. “The presence of the distinguished guests seemed to give more vigor to the playing skaters,” the Montreal Daily Star noted, “and some very fine and sharp work was done.”

Victorias won, for the record, by a score of 2-1, with Lord Stanley expressing “his great delight” at the hour of hockey he’d witnessed.

And so the Stanleys were hooked. That winter, at least three of the boys, including Victor and 24-year-old Edward, took up sticks and played in a seven-aside game with a team manned by military men against Parliamentary rivals at the Rideau Skating Rink on Laurier Avenue on what today is the campus of the University of Ottawa. In March, Victor was assisting the referee as an umpire at a game at the Rideau between the St. James Club from Montreal and a select Ottawa team.

The previous GG, the Marquess of Lansdowne, had shown an interest in the game, and before him (1872—1878), Lord Dufferin had built a skating rink at Rideau Hall. But the Stanleys really went all in. Lord Stanley had a hockey rink added to premises. The famous photograph of Isobel on the ice dates to early 1890, which was also the year her brothers got around to organizing a Government-House team that would become known as the Rideau Rebels. (Along with Victor and Edward, Algernon, Ferdinand, and George Frederick also took up sticks at various points.)

The Stanleys played a lot of hockey that winter, some of it on Sundays, which earned Lord Stanley censure as a “Sabbath-breaker” from Ottawa’s pulpits, made international headlines, and caused a cantankerous MP to threaten to introduce legislation to stop the GG’s madness.

The red-shirted Rebels would keep up a busy schedule over several winters, touring Ontario in style. Isobel, meanwhile, seems to have played all her hockey close to home, both at Rideau Hall and at the Rideau Skating Rink.

Both Hockey Canada and the IIHF cite an Ottawa game played on Tuesday, February 10, 1891, as the original (organized) women’s game. That was a seven-aside encounter between teams No.1 and No. 2, with the latter winning by a score of 2-0.

I don’t know, though. Isobel was on the ice two years earlier at the Rideau, though her game, it’s true, was a four-on-four affair.

Isobel’s Government House team in beating the Rideaus (no score given). The winners, it might be noted, relied heavily on imported talent, which is to say English-born: skating with the Isobel, now 13, was Miss Lister, a lady-in-waiting to (and niece of) her mother’s; Theodosia (later Lady) Bagot, wife of Captain Josceline Bagot, an aide-de-camp of Lord Stanley’s who also skated for the Rebels; and a Miss Kingsford, who may have been the daughter of the historian William Kingsford. Miss Lister was the team’s captain.

The Rideau roster included a pair of Miss Scotts, likely daughters of Sir Richard William Scott, Ottawa lawyer and later a Senator. Their brother, D’Arcy Scott, was also a lawyer, who later served as mayor of Ottawa; he played for the Rebels, too.

Another enthusiastic Rideau Rebel was Lord Kilcoursie, who was also in Ottawa to serve as an ADC to Lord Stanley. He’s the man, of course, who in 1892 would read out a letter at Ottawa’s Russell House Hotel in which his boss declared a desire to bequeath a challenge cup for Canadian teams to skate after.

Lord Stanley made good on the offer, of course: yet another aide went silverware shopping in London to secure the original Stanley Cup, which was first awarded in 1893.

Kilcoursie was a hockey poet as well as a player and trophy-herald: at that same Russell House banquet he recited a jolly rhyme, “The Hockey Men,” that was enthusiastically received. It began:

There is a game called hockey
There is no finer game
For though some call it ‘knockey’
Yet we love it all the same.

It was Kilcoursie who scouted (some of) the Stanleys for posterity. As noted by historian Jordan Goldstein, author of the Canada’s Holy Grail: Lord Stanley’s Political Motivation to Donate the Stanley Cup (2021), Kilcoursie later reported that, as hockey players, “Algy was the best and his sister Isobel the neatest.”

It would be nice to know more. In the photograph, she only has one hand on her stick, but that would seem to suggest she was right-handed. Was she a passer or preferred to take the shot? Was there a slapper in her repertoire, a snap, a wrister?

Which brings us to the winter of 1892. It was this very week 132 years ago that Isobel, 16 now, hit the ice at Rideau Hall and, well, hit the ice. It’s an incident that hasn’t had its due, whatever that might be, in the years since it happened. It counts as a painful absence from the annals of women’s hockey and indeed from the standard (and otherwise comprehensive) histories of Lord Stanley and his legacy.

Until now.

In short:

Ouch. Severe pain doesn’t sound good. The injury is altogether unfortunate, of course, not something you’d wish on anyone. And yet the fact that Isobel suffered for her sport does kind of amplify her hockey bona fides. The fortitude, too.

It was a practice, sure, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t intense. Was there a slash, maybe a crosscheck, by an overzealous brother or lady-in-waiting? Was the play reviewed? Any supplementary discipline? We’ll never know.

Lady Isobel was, I guess, out for the season, which is to say, off the ice. I haven’t come across any mention of her playing hockey the following winter, though I’m not counting out her return: I feel sure that she was back on ice as soon as she could hold a stick. That would have been the Stanleys final winter in Canada. Lord Stanley’s tenure in Canada came to an end in September of 1893 and with that, Lady Isobel returned to England with her family.

She married Francis Gathorne-Hardy in 1897. He was a second lieutenant, then, in the Grenadier Guards; later he turned into a general.

Lady Gathorne-Hardy’s status as a hockey legend took a while to play out, but it was finally enshrined in 2000 when Hockey Canada established the Isobel Gathorne-Hardy Award, awarded to a player at any level whose (and I quote) “values, leadership, and personal traits are representative of all female athletes.”

In 2016, the Premier Hockey Federation named its championship trophy the Isobel Cup. That lasted seven seasons, until the PHF subsided in 2023, making way for the PWHL. The new league hasn’t said what it’s going to do in the way of a cup, so the Isobel’s future, for now, remains in limbo.

There’s one more account of Lady Isobel on ice, I should say, after she broke her arm in 1892. Lord Kilcoursie is, again, the source, via Jordan Goldstein.

In an unpublished memoir, Lord Kilcoursie recalled that back in London in the winter of 1893-94, he received a summons one day. “I was ordered to be at Buckingham Palace at 3.30 p.m. and bring my skates and ice hockey stick.” On his arrival, he found the Prince of Wales and his wife, Princess Alexandra (later Edward VII and Queen Alexandra), along with “three Stanleys, Lady Isobel, and a few more.”

As Goldstein has written, the Stanleys’ enthusiasm for hockey had convinced the Prince of Wales to give it a go on the frozen waterways of the Palace gardens. Kilcoursie described the action:

It was decided to play a “quiet” game on the ornamental water. Their Majesties kept goal — one at each end. The score was 0-0, which was as it should be.