Lewis Carroll, a Jaques Family relation and avid Croquet player at Oxford croquet club in the 1860s, reflected the potentially unruly nature of Croquet in his memorable passage of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground in which the Croquet balls were hedgehogs, the croquet mallets live ostriches, (flamingos appear in later versions), “and the soldiers had to double themselves up and stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches.