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A S I L V E R L I N I N G
As Silver Leys Polo Club celebrates its 125th anniversary, Alec Banner-Eve explains
its mission to share the sport and the club with as many people as possible
M H F P O LO ; H M A L I K
This year, Silver Leys Polo Club celebrates its
125th anniversary – its ‘quasquicentennial’
for anyone searching for the word. Originally
known as the Stansted Polo Club, established
by Tresham Gilbey in 1892, the polo club
moved in 1894 when Walter Gilbey (Tresham’s
father) bought the site known as ‘Silver Leys’.
Walter Gilbey was renowned for his founding
of Gilbey’s Gin, and the original pitch was
donated by Walter to the town of Bishop’s
Stortford for mainly equestrian and other
“sporting activities.”
Now, the original Silver Leys site is
the home of the successful Bishop’s
Stortford rugby team, and, located close by,
in what is now the heart of the town, was Sir
John Barker’s Grange Stud. According to
Horace Laffaye’s
The Evolution of Polo
, in the
early 1900s ‘Sir John Barker was the first
breeder to select mares that had made
a reputation on the polo ground and bred
good ponies from them’.The current polo
grounds are only a stone’s throw away from
this birthplace, in Bury Green, and in the
last decade the club has seen a lot of change
and huge amounts of organic growth.
Bishop’s Stortford itself is a vibrant
market town with good schools, and its
excellent transport links to London and
convenient location just minutes from
