Far from being a simple case of thwacking a ball through a hoop with the equivalent of a big hammer, the game of croquet requires skill and strategy. Lesley Bates finds out more.

UNTIL recently, my knowledge of croquet was, I confess, rudimentary - restricted to what little information I had gleaned from Lewis Carroll and Alice In Wonderland.

So I was slightly flummoxed when I turned up at Hamptworth Golf and Country Club for an introduction to the game and wasn't handed a pink flamingo and a rolled-up hedgehog.

Instead, I found myself taking swipes at a ball with a 3lb wooden mallet while Richard Dickson, a jovial chap who runs a chicken farm in Downton when he is not out on the croquet lawn, tried to communicate the finer points of roqueting, croqueting, running the hoop and pegging out.

They play golf croquet and the more complicated and strategic association croquet at Hamptworth.

Richard valiantly tried to explain the rules of both, but it didn't take long before I was baffled by talk of breaks and bisques and felt I might be better off having a crack at it.

The mallet is heavier than you expect.

The weight of the head swinging like a pendulum at the end of the handle is murder on the wrists until you get the hang of it and the concentration considerable as you work out how to knock one ball against the other, so that ball A goes past the hoop while ball B lines up in the ideal position to go through it on the next shot.

As in golf, there is a handicap system from -3 to +20 to enable players of different abilities to compete.

The object of both games, to a greater or lesser degree, is to score hoops - but I was having difficulty simply persuading the ball to pass through the damned things, which, I swear, narrowed as the ball approached. Mostly, the ball shot past, although now and then it thunked frustratingly into the hoop and stopped dead between the uprights.

It's a game for all seasons, all shapes and sizes, all ages from nine to 90 - and that's not the best of it. "As a sport, it's diabolically cheap," says Richard. "All you need is a pair of flat shoes."

You do, however, have to pay a membership fee of around £125 per annum at Hamptworth, which entitles you to play on the two croquet lawns and use of the clubhouse facilities. Mallets and balls are supplied free of charge and there are no green fees.

Tuition also tends to be freely given as seasoned players willingly pass on tips and advice as you go along.

"It takes a few hours to learn the basic shots, but rather longer to learn how to play them," says Richard.

Whispers of violent goings-on on manicured croquet lawns belie the game's genteel image.

Richard, one of two Richards behind the game at Hamptworth - the other is Richard Stevens - says its vicious image is a popular misconception.

"I think that's going back to the days when Aunt Maud used to put her foot on the ball and shove it into the shrubbery," he says.

No one is quite sure how it all began, but it's believed that croquet was first played by French peasants walloping wooden balls through willow hoops way back in the 13th Century.

The game was called paille maille, and by the 17th Century, it was proving popular with Charles II's court as pele mele. "I went to St James Parke, where I saw the Duke of York playing at Pesle Mesle," wrote the diarist Samuel Pepys in 1661.

Played with a club, a wooden ball, and two hoops, the game came to be called pall mall.

No prizes, then, for guessing how the name of one of London's most famous thoroughfares originated.

Like all fashions, it lost favour and virtually disappeared in the 18th Century, only to pop up again in the mid-1850s as an Irish import known locally as crooky.

By 1869, the All England Croquet Club was founded at Wimbledon (now the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club), but the popularity of the game waned when lawn tennis was introduced to the country in the 1870s.

When the Olympic Games were revived in 1896, there were calls for croquet to be included and at the Paris games the following year, croquet became an Olympic sport - although it appeared to attract only French players and one paying spectator - an Englishman.

Across the Atlantic, croquet was taken up by New York high society where American literati and glitterati took to it with zeal - writers such as George S Kaufman and Dorothy Parker and Hollywood luminaries including Darryl Zanuck and Harpo Marx were exponents.

Today, despite its popular image as a blue rinse sport, beloved of the bus pass generation, it thrives at universities such as Cambridge, Oxford and Durham.

Hamptworth is one of a number of small clubs across the country, but you can also have a go at Mompesson House in Salisbury, where the Reverend Roger and Jacqueline Hawkins organise regular sessions throughout the summer, recalling the days when the Townsend family would assemble on the lawns for a game.