We saw in our second chapter how cricket was spread in the first half of the eighteenth century by the aristocracy, the likes of the Duke of Richmond and Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales. Poor Fred died in 1751, a year after the subject of our next object came into existence.
The commemorative stone erected in 1908 on Broadhalfpenny Down marks the site where the Hambledon Club was formed circa 1750. The club didn’t last long – within half a century they had drawn stumps – but in the years of its existence its influence was such that Hambledon became known as the ‘cradle of cricket’.
Of course, in reality it was no such thing. Cricket pre-dates the formation of the Hambledon Club by a good 200 years, but the myth of the Hampshire club took root when in 1833 John Nyren wrote The Young Cricketer’s Tutor. Nyren was the son of Richard, who captained Hambledon in its formative years as well as running the Bat and Ball Inn on Broadhalfpenny Down. John Nyren could spin a yarn like Shane Warne could a ball, and his book immortalised Hambledon and exaggerated its influence. Nevertheless, for a brief period in the second half of the eighteenth century, Hambledon was the foremost club of its day, attracting the leading players, gamblers and spectators to the picturesque Broadhalfpenny Down.
As many as 20,000 people were said to have attended the really big games, terrible for the Down’s wildlife but a boon for the myriad stallholders who erected their colourful tents around the ground’s boundary.
John Nyren could spin a yarn like Shane Warne could a ball
Richard Nyren was the driving force behind Hambledon Cricket Club. A left-handed bowler of some repute, he organised and promoted the matches, and afterwards, when the match was complete, he invited everyone back to the Bat and Ball Inn. There they drank punch, at twopence a pint, strong enough, said his son, ‘to make hair curl’.
Word of the Hambledon Club spread across southern England, attracting players who would become cricket’s first ‘characters’. There was Tom Brett, strong as an ox and a demon fast bowler; behind the stumps was dashing Tom Sueter, a pet of all the neighbourhood and the man credited with mastering the ‘cut’ as an attacking shot; John Small, a shoemaker turned batmaker, used his own tools to accumulate vast scores.
Two of the men who would leave a lasting impression on cricket arrived late on in Hambledon. William ‘Silver Billy’ Beldham played his first game for the club in 1785, when he was nineteen, the start of a cricketing career that would redefine the art of batting. David Harris did something similar for bowling when he replaced Tom Brett as Hambledon’s main strike bowler in the 1770s. Harris was the first bowler to understand the importance of a good line and length, the pioneer of a skill that every subsequent bowler has striven to master.
As Harris’s career blossomed, so the fortunes of Hambledon began to wilt. Their finest afternoon had come one glorious June day in 1777 when they thrashed ‘a fully representative eleven of England’ by an innings and 168 runs in a match that received much publicity.
Soon more and more young men took up the game, many of them wealthier and better connected than the bucolic batsmen and bowlers of Hambledon. In 1787, ten years after the club’s most famous victory, the Marylebone Cricket Club was formed. ‘More and more did London become the centre of cricket,’ wrote Harry Altham, ‘and steadily the membership [of Hambledon] declined and the players were lured away by the golden magnet.’
Ironically, one of the last matches of importance that Hambledon played was in 1793 at Lord’s, the ground that had usurped Broadhalfpenny Down as the ‘cradle of cricket’. Three years later the club was dissolved, and though an attempt was made to resurrect it a few years later, Hambledon’s day had passed. Marylebone was now the pre-eminent club in England, and Hambledon became just an extra on the scorecard of history.
The publication of Nyren’s book in 1833 first restored Hambledon’s reputation and then embellished its importance in the early history of cricket. It also awakened in Englishmen a romantic longing for the past, for a pre-Industrial Revolution England, when they perceived life to be purer. In reviewing Nyren’s book in The Gentlemen’s Magazine, the Reverend John Mitford wrote:
Farewell, ye smiling fields of Hambledon and Windmill Hill! Farewell, ye thymy pastures of our beloved Hampshire, and farewell, ye spirits of the brave who still hover over the fields of your inheritance. Great and illustrious eleven! Fare ye well! In these fleeting pages at least, your names shall be enrolled. What would life be, deprived of the recollection of you? Troy has fallen, and Thebes is a ruin. The pride of Athens is decayed, and Rome is crumbling to the dust. The philosophy of Bacon is wearing out; and the victories of Marlborough have been overshadowed by fresher laurels. All is vanity but cricket; all is sinking in oblivion but you. Greatest of all elevens, fare ye well!