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Remembering Marjorie Le Boutillier
Remembering Aiken’s Horsemen
Marjorie LeBoutillier, Polo Player
By Pam Gleason
If players and spectators at Aiken polo matches have learned anything in recent years, it is not to discount young female players. The rise in youth polo, especially at Aiken Polo Club, has meant that many more young women are getting into the game. Despite their generally smaller size, many of these players have proven themselves on the field, besting teams of older, larger and stronger riders. At first glance this seems like it must be a new phenomenon in the city, where just a few decades ago there were few women players. But if you go back and read the newspapers from the 1920s and 1930s, you will discover that it is not.
In fact, Aiken Polo Club has a long history as a hotbed of women players. Most Aiken equestrians know of Louise (Lulie) Hitchcock, one of the founders of the Aiken Winter Colony. She is best known as the longtime Master of the Aiken Hounds, but she was also a polo player, as well as the wife and mother of two 10-goal players (Thomas and Tommy Hitchcock.) Her biggest influence on the game was as a coach, teacher and organizer of polo for young people. There were youth teams that played at Aiken Prep School (for boys) and the Fermata School (for girls.) Players included the future stars of the Golden Age of American polo: 10-goalers Tommy Hitchcock and Stewart Iglehart among others. There was also an enthusiastic and dedicated contingent of young women who played. The standout among these was Marjorie LeBoutillier.
Marjorie, born in 1916, was the younger daughter of Thomas LeBoutillier, Jr. and Florence Stevenson LeBoutillier. Like many members of the Aiken Winter Colony, the LeBoutilliers were New Yorkers with a home on Long Island. They spent their winters in Aiken, indulging in all sorts of outdoor activities. The LeBoutilliers were all gifted athletes. Thomas LeBoutillier, a Yale graduate who competed as a sports shooter at the 1908 London Olympics, was an avid polo player. Florence LeBoutillier, whose father founded a brewery in New York and made a fortune, grew up around horses. Although she did not appear to play polo herself, both her brothers did – one of them was the 10-goaler Malcolm Stevenson, a member of the renowned “Big Four” polo team that dominated the international polo scene in the early part of the 20th century.
Both LeBoutillier daughters, Marjorie and her older sister Florence, attended the Fermata school in Aiken. Natural athletes like their parents, they were talented at racket sports such as tennis and squash, and these skills easily transferred to polo when they picked up the sport. In fact, Marjorie, who was playing polo before she reached her teen years, was a standout from the start. In 1928, a society writer named Grace Robinson wrote a story about the equestrian scene in Aiken for Liberty magazine. She was greatly impressed by all the horse activities, but most especially by the polo players. “Girls’ polo is one of the usual features of Aiken,” she wrote. “Marjorie LeBoutillier, only eleven years old, is one of the fastest players.”
Marjorie and other young women used to play two or three times a week in Aiken, sometimes in all female games, and sometimes on mixed teams. In addition to Mrs. Hitchcock, their coaches included the well-known umpire and instructor Captain Gaylard, as well as the brilliant international 10-goaler, Devereux Milburn. In the summers, they played at the Meadowbrook Club on Long Island and at the Point Judith Polo Club on Narragansett Pier in Rhode Island.
The majority of the young women who played
in the late 1920s and early 1930s in Aiken eventually gave up the sport, many of them hanging up their mallets after getting married. But this was not the case with Marjorie LeBoutillier. Throughout her teen years and into her early 20s, her name appears with some regularity in the newspapers, which covered polo as a society sport. She played in all women’s games, and, when those were hard to come by, she joined the men in high goal practices.
“Gals Too Soft to Go for Polo So “Little Boot” Plays it Solo,” declared a 1935 headline above an article about Marjorie’s polo exploits. “Little Boot has made the grade. She’s now allowed – even invited – to play with men,” started the article, which went on to describe her athletic prowess, and included a photo of her smiling as she enters a polo clubhouse, dressed in a long coat over boots and spurs. “Men only,” is painted clearly on the door.
Marjorie played cut-in games with the ten-goalers – Cecil Smith, Louis Stoddard, Stewart Iglehart – and was known as the Tommy Hitchcock of women’s polo. She didn’t have her own horses, but used to borrow them from her uncle Malcolm Stevenson or from Stoddard and Iglehart. In the summer of 1935, she was a surprise participant in an otherwise all male polo match, playing with the Lawrence team at the Woodmere Club on Long Island: it had been rumored that the opposing team had been planning to recruit her, too, but Lawrence had beaten them to it.
It would not be the last time that she was invited to play in otherwise all-male matches, at which she acquitted herself brilliantly, scoring goals and propelling her teams to the trophy table. Contemporary newspaper articles about these matches often noted that she played and scored, but did not, for the most part, make any comment about a woman playing in a sport that was officially reserved for men. She seems to have been widely accepted.
Meanwhile, organized women’s polo was growing rapidly, especially in California and Texas, where there were many women’s teams. In 1934, a group of clubs in California formed the Pacific Coast Women’s Polo Association, which later became the United States Women’s Polo Association. The California women did quite a lot of traveling, playing against women’s clubs in Texas, and eventually coming East to challenge the New York women.
At Bostwick Field, 1935
By the summer of 1937, there were enough women playing on Long Island to make up a good squad. Marjorie, who was rated 8 goals in the USWPA book, was the captain of the Long Island Freebooters, while Ann Jackson, who was the president of the USWPA, captained the California Ramblers. The teams met on the field at Bethpage State Park, where Marjorie’s team won three straight matches. The final game was a squeaker with the Freebooters tallying in overtime, 7-6.
In 1938, Marjorie married the 10-goaler Stewart Iglehart. Iglehart, who had played with and against her since childhood and often lent her horses, was very accustomed to women players. In fact, his mother, Aida E.M. Birrell Iglehart, who was born in Chile, was also a polo player. According to an announcement in the New York Times, the couple were married in Marjorie’s mother’s home on Long Island. (Her father had died of a cerebral hemorrhage while playing polo in 1929.) “Both are polo players” read the subhead to the announcement, going on to explain that after the ceremony the couple were on their way to California. Why? To play polo of course. Both of them. After her wedding, Marjorie continued to reign as the foremost
woman player on the East Coast. Her marriage to Iglehart did not last, however. They had a son, Stewart Jr., and then were divorced in 1946. Two years later she married again, this time to Daniel McElroy, an assistant vice president of J.P. Morgan & Co. Daniel, like Marjorie, was a champion amateur squash player.
And what about polo? World War II disrupted the sport everywhere, and many of the old clubs were never revived. The ones that did come back after the war were generally quieter. Times changed. Within a short period, most people seemed to forget the long history of women polo players, and most clubs did not allow women to play: if Marjorie was on the field in the post-war period, there is no official record of it. It wasn’t until 1973 that the United States Polo Association finally admitted women as members, and it wasn’t until the late 1980s that many clubs in the country would let them play. Marjorie, whose other sports included golf and ice hockey, died in 1997 at the age of 80.
Today, women are the fastest growing segment of the United States Polo Association, and here in Aiken, there is a new crop of accomplished young women on the field. Like Marjorie LeBoutillier, these women were practically born with a mallet in their hands and they have an inborn passion for the game. They seem destined to carry on her forgotten legacy.
