Iron stones

Shirley Adams, a long-standing collector of curliana from Nepean in the area of Ottawa, has been in touch - see her comment here.

She is the source of two iron curling stones in my collection. The first came from Bob, when he was uncluttering himself before going to work and live abroad when he retired. It had come, he said, from Shirley, whom I met at the Glasgow Silver Broom in 1985.

The other was a direct gift from Shirley to me and it was brought from Nepean to my door by two special couriers, young curling friends of Shirley’s, who were on their way to the Broom at Vasteras. The iron had travelled the whole way from Canada as hand luggage! The body was wrapped in corrugated cardboard and through the top protruded the brass handle – for ease of carrying and identification. The couriers said that the appearance and weight of the object had caused considerable suspicion and much inspection but when they told people that it was 'a present for a ******* judge in Scotland' that seemed to smooth its passage!

We unwrapped it on the kitchen table and hanselled it with several drams of malt whisky, with a very little of which the iron was baptised.

The photograph below shows the two irons beside a conventional stone for comparison. Although the Blue Hone Ailsa is larger it weighs less: it is 37 pounds; the painted iron is 56, and the unpainted one is 60 pounds.

Both the irons ran on a cup of 7.5 inches; that is, the sole of the stone was hollow and only the outer edge was in contact with the ice. The unpainted iron has on its base a stamped maker’s mark: JOHN BRAIDWOOD & SONS MONTREAL, all in a circle round the much larger figure 17.

Irons were the common 'stone' in Lower Canada. Clubs which played with stone stones were generally called 'Granite' clubs to distinguish them from the iron-players. It was as late as the 1940s that the iron players decided to let their irons rust and make common cause with the granite-players.

Top: Two irons and a blue hone.
Above: The makers’ stamp on the sole.

The Seigniory Club

I added this post card to my collection recently. It's a real photograph, published by Photo Services Limited of Montreal, showing curling at the Seigniory Club, Quebec, Canada. It predates 1959 when the card was sent in the mail.

But look closely at the content. The ladies on the rink nearest the camera are playing with irons. By the look of these they are the smaller of the two sizes of irons played with in the middle of last century and, as I recall, weighed about the same as a curling stone. The men in the background are playing with stones.

Bonspiel (the History of curling in Canada, an on line resource from the Library and Archives Canada) says this about irons: "Quebec has had a long tradition of using iron curling stones as a substitute for granite. This came about because there were problems getting granite stones from Scotland. The iron stones were made at a forge in Trois-Rivières, Quebec. John Kerr, in his History of Curling, says that these stones were shaped like huge teakettles, weighed 46 to 65 pounds each and were owned by the clubs.

Quebec and the Ottawa Valley used iron stones in regular play up until about 1955, when they were replaced by granite stones, thus putting Quebec in step with other parts of Canada and the rest of the world. The use of iron rather than granite was a sore point and caused problems in organizing games and bonspiels (tournaments) for Quebec teams. The Ladies Curling Association of the Canadian Branch of the Royal Caledonian Curling Club held annual competitions for the Lady Tweedsmuir Trophy, and irons continued to be used in this competition up until and including 1953."

Did you notice the 'leaves' in the ice?