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Jinni Featherstone-Whitty: a trailblazing polo player at Roehampton Club

Club Member Jinni Featherstone Whitty stands in a unique place in the story of Roehampton Club – a bridge between its pioneering polo past and its modern identity as a multi-sports club where she now plays golf. A trailblazing female polo player who has competed at both Ham Polo Club and the Royal Berkshire, she is also, remarkably, the only living Roehampton Club Member to have won the historic Roehampton Cup Polo Trophy, which she captured in 2000.

Jinni Featherstone Whitty: a pioneering Member

 

Introduced to polo at an equestrian event at Hickstead, Jinni Featherstone-Whitty came to the sport from a strong riding background, drawn to the speed, precision and tactical challenge of playing from the saddle.

 

She developed her game at Ham Polo Club, the last remaining polo club in Greater London, and at the Royal Berkshire, both of which have long traditions of competitive polo and a strong community of players. Her election to Roehampton Club was confirmed in 1993, marking the formal start of a membership that, in many ways, reconnects the Club with its origins as one of London’s great polo centres.

 

At Roehampton Club, Jinni has since turned much of her sporting attention to golf, despite the rigours of polo and its physical demands, bringing the same competitive instinct and quiet determination that defined her polo career onto the fairways. The transition from polo grounds to parkland greens neatly mirrors the Club’s own evolution, as the former polo fields at Roehampton Club were converted in the mid twentieth century to accommodate the expansion of the golf course and additional sporting facilities. In doing so, she embodies the versatility and multi-sport spirit that has become a hallmark of the modern Roehampton Club.

 

What sets Jinni apart in the Club’s history, however, is not only that she is one of the first female players of her generation to take up polo at this level, but that she has inscribed her name on the most historic trophy associated with the Club.

 

In 2000 she won the Roehampton Cup Polo Trophy at Ham Polo Club, placing her at the heart of a tradition that reaches back to the earliest years of Roehampton Club’s existence and ensuring that, for the 125th anniversary celebrations, hers is a story that connects past and present with unusual clarity.

Origins of polo at Roehampton Club

 

Roehampton Club itself was born out of polo. Established in 1901 as an officers’ polo club on the initiative of the Miller brothers – notably Charles Darley Miller, an Olympic polo player – the Club opened in April 1902 with a clear purpose: to provide high quality grounds for the growing number of polo players in and around London who found existing venues, such as Hurlingham and Ranelagh, increasingly over subscribed and inconvenient to reach. The original facilities at Roehampton Club included three polo grounds, a racecourse, a horse show ground, stabling for Members’ horses, and even areas where women could practise driving, tilting and jumping, underlining how completely the early Club revolved around equestrian sport.

 

From the outset, Roehampton Club attracted a distinguished membership and quickly became one of the principal centres of polo in the capital. Before the First World War it was one of eight metropolitan clubs and, with over 300 playing Members and some 550 non playing Members, ranked as the third largest polo club in London. The list of players who appeared on its grounds reads like a roll call of Edwardian and inter war society: Admiral Lord David Beatty, Sir Winston Churchill, the Duke of Westminster and King Alfonso XIII of Spain, who was so fond of playing at Roehampton Club that he paid for a grandstand to be built on top of the Clubhouse for his entourage.

 

Polo at Roehampton Club thus developed in tandem with the wider growth of the sport in Britain, which itself had been imported from the Indian subcontinent in the late nineteenth century by British cavalry officers. As the Club expanded, a nine hole golf course was added in 1904, later extended to the 18 hole layout that members know today, but polo remained the defining sport for more than half a century and shaped the Club’s early identity.

The Roehampton Cup Polo Trophy

The most enduring symbol of this golden age of polo at Roehampton Club is the Roehampton Cup. Donated by Mrs Alison Cunninghame of Craigends upon the opening of the Club in 1902, the trophy was first played for that same year and quickly became the premier prize of the Roehampton Club polo season. The earliest engraving on its plinth dates from the 1902 season, and over succeeding decades the Cup came to be recognised as the oldest polo trophy in the United Kingdom and a cornerstone of the London polo calendar.

In the years before the First World War, the Roehampton Cup sat alongside the great championships at Hurlingham and Ranelagh as one of the three major open tournaments based in the capital. It attracted strong fields and considerable social attention, reinforcing the Club’s reputation as a serious polo venue. Even after the disruptions of two world wars, the Cup retained its prestige: the first post war English polo tournament was held at Roehampton Club in 1947, with Ham Polo Club carrying off the premier trophy, a symbolic moment that marked both the revival of polo in Britain and the beginning of a closer association between Roehampton Club and Ham.

When the Roehampton Club polo grounds were finally given over to the development of the golf course and additional sporting facilities, the Cup itself found a new home. Following the closure of Roehampton Polo Club in the mid 1950s, Edward Tauchert, then a player at Ham Polo Club, arranged for Roehampton Golf Club to donate the trophy to Ham, where it remains today. Through the efforts of figures such as John O’Driscoll in the 1990s, the Roehampton Cup tournament was revitalised at Ham and is now played at a 6 goal level as part of the Hurlingham Polo Association’s Victor Ludorum series, with the finals staged in August.

Jinni Featherstone-Whitty present day link to the heritage of the Club

Within this long narrative, Jinni Featherstone-Whitty’s 2000 victory in the Roehampton Cup stands as an important modern chapter. By then, the Cup had long since left the grounds where it was first contested, yet it still carried the name and heritage of Roehampton Club and represented the oldest continuously played polo trophy in the country. For a Roehampton Club Member – and a female player in a sport that, especially at higher levels, has historically been male dominated – to win the tournament was both a personal milestone and an institutional landmark.

Her achievement ensures that Roehampton Club’s original sporting passion continues to resonate within the Club’s contemporary life, even though polo is no longer played on its own fields. As the only living Member to have lifted the Roehampton Cup, Jinni provides a direct line back to the Club’s foundation years, when the sound of hooves and mallets defined part of the landscape that is now laid out as an 18 hole golf course and new sporting facilities. In the context of the 125th anniversary celebrations, her story offers a vivid way to remind members that the Club began not just as a place for golf, croquet lawns and tennis courts, but as one of London’s great polo clubs – and that, thanks to Jinni Featherstone Whitty, that extraordinary equestrian legacy remains a living part of Roehampton Club’s history.

Steve Riedlinger, Club Archivist