17 December 2020
A cricket scene: Shaun Pollock, South Africa, bowls to batsman Michael Hussey, Australia, 27 December 2005; Pollock had one-upped a hat trick in 1996 by taking four wickets in four successive balls
North Americans are probably most familiar with hat trick from ice hockey, the name for the feat where one player scores three goals in a single game. It’s a seemingly nonsensical name, and its origins are not in hockey but in stage magic before moving into the world of sports with its use in cricket.
Hat trick is the name given to any of a variety of stage magic tricks involving a hat, perhaps most famously that of pulling a rabbit out of one. The term hat trick first appears in the United States in the Boston Morning Post of 26 February 1840:
That Master Young, at the N. E. Museum, does his tricks with remarkable ingenuity—what he calls “the hat trick” is the cleverest thing in the legerdemain line we have witnessed for many a year.
The term quickly crossed the Atlantic and appears in newspaper accounts of stage magic shows in both Britain and North America throughout the 1840s and 50s.
Then in a cricket match between the All England Eleven and the Twenty-Two of Hallam and Staveley, played at Hyde Park, Sheffield, 6–9 September 1858, bowler H. H. Stephenson knocked over three wickets with three successive balls. In celebration of this feat, his team awarded him with a new hat. The incident is recorded in Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle of 12 September 1858:
The next four wickets fell to H. Stephenson without troubling the scorers; he took three wickets in three successive balls, entitling himself to a new hat, which was presented to him by the Eleven.
At some point, someone dubbed Stephenson’s feat a hat trick, a play on words combining the sense of an amazing bit of magic with Stephenson’s prize of a hat. But the sporting sense of hat trick isn’t recorded in print until 23 June 1865, when it appears in the Chelmsford Chronicle:
When the fourth wicket went down for 60 the excitement was intense. Grays, however, had yet a man equal for the occasion, and Mr. Biddell going on at W. Sackett’s end, with his second ball bowled the Romford leviathan, Mr. Beauchamp, and afterwards performed the hat trick by getting three wickets in the over, Mead being bowled for 0 and Mundy and Lawrence caught by long stop and slip respectively.
The phrase moved into other sports starting with horse racing in 1893. From the London Evening News of 14 September 1893:
“Morny” Cannon was going strong and well at Warwick yesterday, and did the hat trick by riding three winners in as many mounts.
And from there it moved into other sports, including eventually hockey. Exactly what needs to be done to achieve a hat trick varies with the sport, but it is always a set of three.
Sources:
Boston Morning Post, 26 February 1840, 2. NewspaperArchive.
“Cricket.” Supplement to the Chelmsford Chronicle, 23 June 1865, 1. Gale News Vault.
“Cricketer’s Register.” Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle (London), 12 September 1858, 3. Gale News Vault.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2017, s.v. hat trick, n.
Photo credit: Prescott Pym, 27 December 2005, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.