In Terence Rattigan’s screenplay for the film The Final Test (1953), an ageing cricketer, Sam Palmer, is dismissed for nought in his last innings. Unimpressed by his father’s fame, Palmer’s son Reggie, an aspiring poet, hero-worships Alexander Whitehead, a literary icon. But unbeknown to Reggie, his idol is a long-time admirer of Palmer. When Whitehead learns the identity of Reggie’s father, he accepts an invitation to dinner to meet him. Both Palmer and Whitehead are tongue-tied by the eminence of the other, until the conversation turns to cricket. The poet tells the cricketer – to his astonishment – that he envies him his profession. ‘I,’ says Whitehead, ‘am a creative artist. I will be judged on my work because I leave a record. You – on the other hand – will see your legend grow. You are like Paganini, Nijinsky and Garrick: one day you’ll sit on Mount Olympus between Don Bradman and W.G. Grace.’
In this, Rattigan touches on a central truth. Reputations grow in the memory. This is especially true of cricket. Lovers of the game tend to view its past romantically, however crusty they may otherwise be. Just as the fictional Sam Palmer would ‘see his legend grow’, so have the reputations of the early cricketers and their sponsors. Nonetheless, we can say with absolute certainty that the years of the later patrons, Mann, Tankerville and Dorset, were formative ones for cricket. By 1750 the game had taken root; forty years on, technique and style had evolved, famous grounds had been laid out, detailed scores were kept, the rules had been codified and a governing body was in place. Further changes lay ahead, but in its essentials modern cricket had been born, and clubs were spreading far beyond its narrow birthplace of the Weald. Two of them were to have a lasting impact.
Hambledon, about fifteen miles north of Portsmouth, is an ancient Hampshire village whose cricket expertise ensured that its history is now more legend than fact. Many believe that the game was first played at the village’s Broadhalfpenny Down, despite the reality that its genesis is at least two hundred years earlier. Yet Hambledon has become myth, and – as ever – myth has become reality. The myth sprang, unintended, from the pen of one man. John Nyren was born at Hambledon in 1764, the son of Richard Nyren, captain of the Hambledon team, guardian of their cricket ground and, until about 1771, proprietor of the Bat and Ball inn on Broadhalfpenny Down. From the age of twelve young John watched the Hambledon team, at the time when they were in their heyday and he was at his most impressionable. His love and admiration for Hambledon cricket was never to leave him, and over fifty years later, in 1833, he published The Young Cricketer’s Tutor,* which in its final chapters included his recollections of the great days of Hambledon.
The book is a charming portrait of his heroes, infused with romanticism as Nyren recalls, no doubt with advantages, the deeds they did. It is a boyhood memory of men and their successes, in which virtues are recalled, fun is revisited and any failings, squabbles and miseries left unrecorded. It is a cricketing fairy story, a fusion of King Arthur and Robin Hood, and its simple recitation of good men and great events is a delight. The Young Cricketer’s Tutor is the source reference for mid-to-late-eighteenth-century cricket, for no other comparable record exists. It carried the Hambledon team – or, more accurately, teams, for their glory days exceeded thirty years – into legend. The ‘great’ games were big social events. A pavilion, ‘the Lodge’, was erected for members, and the boundary was circled with tents for the teams and for catering: with flags flying, it was a colourful sight. Hambledon cricket was not just a game, it was big business. The team was professional and well-paid, the bets were large, and the logistics of feeding and watering twenty thousand spectators were formidable.
No doubt the team’s fame is merited, even if Nyren does gild the lily. It was a remarkable collection of individuals. Every season they met for practice on the first Tuesday of May and each Tuesday thereafter. As their fame grew, even their practice days attracted crowds of spectators.
In the mid-1770s the two premier bowlers were Tom Brett and the left-handed Richard Nyren. Brett, a farmer, dark-haired and strong, was the fastest bowler of his day, and famed for his accuracy. Nyren, a Slindon man and nephew of the great cricketer Richard Newland, was the undisputed leader of the team in all matters: batsman, bowler and, despite his stout build, ‘uncommonly active’ in the field. Off the field he was a hard-headed businessman, mine host of the Bat and Ball, who advertised matches to attract crowds to the game and thereafter to his inn, where he sold ‘punch to make hair curl’ at twopence a pint. John Nyren remembers his father as ‘the head and right arm’ of Hambledon cricket, adding that he ‘never saw a finer specimen of the thoroughbred old English yeoman’. In those few affectionate words the character of Richard Nyren stands out: did any father ever receive a finer tribute from his son?
The second-string bowlers were William Barber, who took over the Bat and Ball from Richard Nyren in 1771, and the unfortunately named William Hogsflesh – ‘staunch fellows’, Nyren tells us, ‘and thorough going’, which conjures up an image of honest yeoman cricketers with no intellectual pretensions. Nyren characterises a later bowler, Lambert (or possibly Lamborn; he is sometimes confused with William Lambert, an early-nineteenth-century Surrey player), known as ‘the Little Farmer’, as something of a bumpkin, without intelligence but with talent. Lambert was in fact a shepherd, and had the natural gift of bowling underarm off-breaks. He practised these aiming at sheep hurdles, but it was only when he was told where to pitch them by Richard Nyren that he tumbled out Kent and Surrey batsmen ‘as if [they were] picked off by the rifle corps’.
The finest of the early batsmen was John Small Senior, a pioneer of forward play, renowned as the best judge of a short run – a skill perhaps learned from his specialist fielding positions at the equivalents of the modern-day cover point or midwicket. Small was the Hambledon version of the ‘senior pro’, whom Richard Nyren consulted on tactics and cricket law; he also entertained the team with his fiddle and double bass, and made bats and balls in the off-season. It was Small who developed a new straighter bat with a marked shoulder at the head of the blade. This was a great improvement, but it was still unsprung – such refinements lay far ahead.
Behind the stumps, the wicketkeeper – with no protective pads or gloves – was Tom Sueter, handsome and easy-natured by temperament, who must have stood up to Brett’s fast bowling for he ‘stumped out’ many a batsman. He was also an accomplished left-handed batsman. Sueter was popular, ‘a pet of all the neighbourhood’. A chorister in Hambledon church with a sweet tenor voice, he often sang solo or led team songs in the dressing room, and afterwards as they drank their ale at the Bat and Ball. His partner in harmony was George Lear, counter-tenor, middle-order batsman and, his chief role in the team, longstop to Sueter’s wicketkeeping.
New players arrived to strengthen the team over the years. Noah Mann, short and swarthy as a gypsy, would ride twenty miles each way on horseback to practice every Tuesday: a fleet-footed, agile man, he batted and bowled left-handed and was an excellent fielder. Poor Noah came to a sad end: after a convivial evening he fell onto the smouldering ashes of a fire, and died of his injuries. He was only thirty-three. Years later, his son would umpire one of the most fateful games in cricket history (see page 132).
Even among the working men of the team, the two Walker brothers, Tom and Harry, stood out as ‘unadulterated clod hoppers’. But they were difficult to dismiss and utterly without nerves – valuable attributes in a cricketer. Harry was a dashing batsman, quite unlike his brother. ‘Old ever-lasting’ Tom, who once faced 170 balls for one run, was hardly an advocate of brighter cricket. He did, however, make the first century on the first Lord’s pitch (which was subsequently partially covered by Dorset Square): 107 for MCC against Middlesex – followed by four other hundreds on the same ground. Nyren’s description of Tom Walker is memorable:
a hard, ungainly scrag-of-mutton frame; wilted, apple-John face; long spider legs, as thick at the ankles as at the hips; the driest and most rigid limbed chap; his skin was like the rind of an old oak, and as sapless. He moved like the rude machinery of a steam engine in the infancy of construction and, when he ran, every member seemed ready to fly to the four winds.
A second set of brothers, George and William Beldham, brought forth the greatest batsman cricket had yet known. ‘Silver Billy’ Beldham had been taught by a gingerbread baker, Harry Hall, and he had learned well. Hall, from Farnham – the very cradle of cricket – may have been the first batsman to realise the full potential of playing forward. Hall was not a great player, but he batted side-on, with his left elbow up and a straight bat, which meant he could play down the line of the ball and hit to the off side of the field in a manner that had previously been impossible. Beldham was a keen pupil, and in the game in which Tom Walker scored the first hundred at Lord’s, he scored 144. ‘Silver Billy’, an instinctive ball player, was a star from the moment of his arrival at Farnham in 1780 at the tender age of fourteen. He was engaged by Hambledon in 1785, aged nineteen, and played his first ‘great’ game two years later. Beldham was a batsman of elegance and style, a savage hitter with a particularly fine cut; a fine fielder in the slips and a competent medium-pace bowler, he lived for ninety-six years, played cricket for forty of them, and his memories, faithfully recorded by Pycroft in a famous conversation in The Cricket Field (1851), cast light in his old age upon the times in which he played.
Many other talented cricketers were part of these Hambledon teams: James Aylward (see page 70), the rustic who in 1777 scored 167 over three days, at the time the highest score in cricket; John Wells, a baker and a brilliant fieldsman, built like a cob horse and known as ‘Honest’ John; the Freemantle brothers, John and Andrew; Tom Scott; John Small Junior; Richard Francis; Tom Taylor; William Fennex; Richard Purchase; and finally – but by no means least – the man who changed cricket forever: David Harris.
The name of David Harris does not convey the magic of a Sydney Barnes, a Harold Larwood or a Shane Warne, but his role in changing the face of cricket was greater than any of theirs. As Tom Brett left Hambledon, Harris arrived, to become the pioneer in that most fundamental of cricket skills, bowling on a length – and nothing was ever the same again.
Early bowling was underarm and along the ground, as in the ancient game of bowls: the ball, therefore, did not rear up, and the stumps did not need to be of any height. But in a 1744 codification of the laws the stumps were both heightened and narrowed. They became twenty-two inches in height and only six inches in width, and were adorned with both a proper bail and a popping crease. The target for the bowler was suddenly very different, and the concept of ‘length’ bowling became possible: a ball could pitch and rise and still hit the stumps, rather than passing safely over them.
From this much followed, and Harris practised summer and winter to perfect his new style. He was accurate and difficult to score off, and his best deliveries rose to trap unprotected fingers against the bat handle. Such ‘length’ bowling was a tricky prospect for the batsman: for a start it was no longer possible to play with the old- fashioned curved bat resembling a hockey stick. In or around the 1750s, therefore, the modern bat, or a near replica, was born, with a flat and square-faced front. Even so, the batsman’s plight remained dire if he stood within his crease and attempted to swat every ball to leg in the traditional manner.
Before the advent of the new bat, forward defensive strokes were unknown, as they were all but impossible with the ‘hockey-stick’ shape. But against bowling pitched on a length it became essential, as did an array of strokes familiar today but unknown in the mid- eighteenth century. David Harris not only changed bowling, but batting too, as batsmen adapted to face the new threat to their wicket.
On one occasion Harris was presented with a gold-laced hat for an outstanding bowling performance. So far as we know he did not take three wickets in three balls on that occasion, but this incident may be the origin of the action, adopted in the 1850s, of presenting a hat to a bowler who accomplishes that feat. Or it may not, for in his wonderful series of novels purporting to be the adult memoirs of the cad Harry Flashman, immortalised in Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), George Macdonald Fraser gives a different explanation. In Flashman’s Lady (1977), Flashman, by trickery of course, dismisses the great cricketers Felix, Pilch and Mynn in three balls, and is presented with a hat by Mynn. It is pure fiction of course, but for all we know something similar may have occurred. One day, hopefully, a researcher may uncover a hidden piece of cricket history to reveal the truth.
John Nyren’s recollections of Hambledon give us a vivid picture of early cricket that is unavailable elsewhere … and yet one longs for more. His narrative is rich in character studies of the players, but silent upon their lives and views. What did this mixture of honest yeomen and simple rustics think of the society in which they lived? How did they react when they left Broadhalfpenny Down to play matches in the sprawl of London? Did they know anything of the political turmoil of the wars against France, of the American Revolution and the fall of Lord North’s government? What opinions did they have of twenty-four-year-old William Pitt the Younger becoming Prime Minister? Did they know Captain James Cook had discovered Australia? Nyren is silent on all these issues.
There may also be errors in his account of the changing game itself. Under Articles of Agreement signed for a game in 1727 (see Appendix 1, page 399), runs were scored when the batsmen crossed and touched the umpire’s stick. In The Young Cricketer’s Tutor Nyren refers to a ‘block hole’ between the stumps which the batsman had to touch to register a run – this was before the introduction of the popping crease. Thus, in this version of run-scoring, bat and fingers might collide – painfully for the fingers – when an attempt was made to ‘run out’ the batsman before, like a badger, he was safe and ‘in his ground’. Unlike the ‘umpire’s stick’, the ‘block hole’ theory of how runs were registered has no other contemporary confirmation: it may be right, but it is based only on Nyren’s 1833 manuscript. It seems an unlikely tale to invent, so possibly both methods were in use for a time, perhaps by different clubs; but the ‘umpire’s stick’ has the better historical pedigree.
Nyren may have misled us also about the size of the stumps. In the early eighteenth century, pictorial evidence suggests that wickets were about six inches wide, although the height varies: a 1739 engraving by Gravelot, a Frenchman, seems to show a height of around twelve inches, whilst in a 1743 painting by Hayman they appear to be the twenty-two inches approved in the 1744 codification of the laws. Yet, writing in the 1830s, Nyren refers to a manuscript he had seen which claimed that ‘about 150 years since’ – i.e. about 1680 – wickets were twelve inches high and twenty-four inches wide. No one has ever found this manuscript or any corroborating evidence.
Events caused two further innovations that were to last. In May 1775, five of Kent were playing five of England at the Artillery Ground, London. John Small Senior, in his prime as a batsman, was facing Lumpy Stevens, without doubt the pre-eminent bowler of the day. Fourteen runs were needed for victory – and were got. But before they were, Lumpy beat Small’s defence three times, only to see the ball pass between the two stumps without disturbing either of them or the single bail. Morally, Small was out, he had been beaten, but as the wicket was undisturbed, he batted on. This was so patently unjust that from then on a third, central stump was added to prevent the ball passing straight between the wicket. By 1776 the press were reporting that ‘it had been decided to have 3 stumps to shorten the game’. They were half-right: three stumps, yes – but to end an anomaly, not to shorten the game.
Another lacuna in the rules was exposed by a piece of sharp practice some time in the early 1770s. Thomas White of Reigate (not, as sometimes claimed, Shock White of Brentford), a regular England player, strode to the wicket carrying a bat as wide as the stumps – and, very possibly, a smile that was even wider at this attempted mischief. Nothing like this had been seen before, or would be seen again for two hundred years, until in 1979 Dennis Lillee tried, unsuccessfully, to use an aluminium bat during a Test match against England in Perth. The concept of such a wide bat was so at odds with the spirit of the game that it was soon outlawed, and as John Nyren, noted: ‘An iron frame, of the statute width, was constructed for, and kept by, the Hambledon Club, through which any bat of suspected dimensions was passed, and allowed or rejected accordingly.’
In this fashion the laws continued to evolve, and though they were not yet universally applied, they soon would be. The intriguing question is, who determined and enforced the laws? It is probable, in pre-MCC days, that clubs such as Hambledon set the rules, and they simply became common usage.
The belief that Hambledon was the fount of cricket is by no means the only misconception about the club: the many myths of Hambledon would require Sherlock Holmes to unravel them all. They have, over the years, bamboozled even eminent and serious cricket historians such as Harry Altham, Derek Birley, David Underdown and R.S. Rait Kerr. In setting out what I believe to be misconceptions, made in the light of information available at the time, I mean no disrespect to those who related them as fact.
The history of Hambledon Cricket Club is shadowy from its inception, the date of which is itself a matter of controversy. Birley and Altham assert that the club was playing by 1756, but this is very questionable. It is true that the first known reference to Hambledon and cricket appears in that year – but not to a Hambledon Club. On 28 August 1756 the Public Advertiser reported a five-aside match, for £20 a side, between five gentlemen of the parish of Hambledon and five named others at the Artillery Ground, London. It added that on the following Monday an eleven-aside game would be played between the Dartford Club and eleven gentlemen of the parish of Hambledon, this being the deciding match between the teams for £50 a side. However, one cannot assume that this is the Hambledon Club. Dartford is referred to as a club, but Hambledon is twice described explicitly as a parish. It cannot be asserted confidently from this that Hambledon had yet formed a club, although a number of historians have done so. The minutes of the Hambledon Club, held at the Hampshire Record Office in Winchester, almost complete from 1772 to 1786, when the club was at its peak, contain no mention of the law-making responsibilities which some writers have attributed to it at this time, and nor has any yet turned up in contemporary newspapers.
The confusion appears to arise from a document, in the hands of the MCC and dated 1771, which purports to limit the width of cricket bats to 4¼ inches, a law which was to come into force in 1774. This paper bears the signature of three people who were believed to be Hambledon cricketers – yet in fact none of them was a member of the Hambledon Club. It may be one of the many cricketing fakes produced to supply a market avid for ‘historic’ documents. But even if the document is genuine, it does not establish the Hambledon Club as lawmakers. We do know – after the Thomas White incident – that three Hambledon cricketers signed a club rule over bat sizes, but that does not signify that they were rule-makers for all cricket controversies. In any event, when the 1774 rule revision took place Hambledon officials were present, and no doubt they urged the inclusion of a rule on the maximum size of bats.
At the beginning of the Hambledon Minute Book is a curiosity that teases over two hundred years later. ‘By order of the Club, May 1st, 1781’, a number of standing toasts are presented, presumably for formal dinners. After proper acknowledgement to royalty, there are toasts to the ‘Hambledon Club’, ‘Cricket’ and ‘The President’. All these were standard fare, but in the midst of the cricketing toasts is the oddity – a toast to ‘The Immortal Memory of Madge’. Who or what is ‘Madge’? Is it an acronym? If so, for what? Was ‘Madge’ an early financial supporter? If so, I can find nothing to identify him. Was ‘Madge’ a woman, perhaps an abbreviation for Margaret? Or was it an in-joke among the club members that can no longer be deciphered? The possibilities are infinite, but the answer is hidden: we may never know.
Other club records are more revealing. There is a famous scene in the 1939 film Goodbye, Mr Chips, starring Robert Donat, in which the old schoolmaster Chips recalls punishing a boy for changing his marks in a Latin test from a 0 to a 9. A similar exaggeration is evident in estimates of the membership of the Hambledon Club. It has been claimed that ‘assiduous researchers’ have discovered that at its peak the club had 157 members; however, the researchers were neither assiduous nor accurate. All they did was to add up every subscriber over the twenty-five years between 1772 and 1796, and assume that sum total was the peak membership.* This is patently absurd: some would have withdrawn from membership, some would have died, and in any case many of the names are duplicated. The earliest surviving annual subscription list, for 1791, contains only fifty-two current members, and nothing in the club’s minutes suggest that the figure ever much exceeded that.
There is also uncertainty about the identity of the club’s founders. Altham speculated that the Reverend Charles Powlett was, if not the founder, at least the principal architect in developing the club. His assessment is that Powlett, assisted by Philip Dehany (sometimes inaccurately spelt ‘Dehaney’), was prominent, together with others who had been pupils of Westminster School in the 1740s. Later writers have concurred, yet this can only be conjecture – we do not know, and it is equally likely that the founders could have been Thomas Land (1714–91), a minor patron of cricket, or John Richards (c.1737– 1819), a Hambledon resident and the first treasurer of the club.
Land lived at Park House, a mile to the east of Hambledon village, beside the lane leading to Broadhalfpenny Down, and served as a local justice of the peace. He is possibly first mentioned in connection with Hambledon in the St James’s Chronicle in September 1764, which refers to a game between the Gentlemen of Chertsey and Gentlemen of Hambledon called ‘Squire Lamb’s Club’. For ‘Lamb’ one could read ‘Land’, and by this date Hambledon is being referred to as a club. For the record, Hambledon won, although Chertsey were successful in a rematch. I can find no record of the outcome of a third and decisive game.
Land is mentioned in the version of the club song written by the Reverend Reynell Cotton, master of Hyde Abbey School, Winchester,* probably in 1772, and authorised in 1781:
Then why should we fear either Sackville or Mann,
Or repine at the loss of Bayton and Land?
This suggests that by then he had severed his connection with the Hambledon Club. None of this is conclusive. It is possible that ‘Squire Lamb’s Club from Hambledon’ is not the Hambledon Club but a short-lived predecessor. Perhaps ‘Lamb’ is not ‘Land’. The absence of references to Land in later years counts against him. So far as I can see, there is no mention of him in the club minutes, and his obituary in the Hampshire Chronicle of 27 June 1791 refers to him as a ‘celebrated fox hunter’ but does not mention cricket. He is therefore a possible founder only, and the case for him is as speculative as is that for Powlett and Dehany.
By 1767 the Hambledon Club’s existence can be established. From the early minutes we know the names of thirteen gentlemen who were definitely members, and twelve others who may have been by 1772; but returning to Altham’s claim that it was founded by former Westminster pupils, only four certainly attended that school, of whom only two were there in the 1740s. The club’s members from 1772 onwards were highly influential: they included thirteen who either had, or were to inherit, titles, fourteen clergymen, and ten who were to become Admirals. Three members elected in the 1780s – Richard Barwell (1782), John Shakespeare (1784) and Laver Oliver (1786) – had gained riches in India. Hambledon had a lot of clout. Over a twenty-year period the club’s Presidents included the Duke of Chandos, a future Duke of Richmond, and the Earls of Northington, Winchilsea (twice) and Darnley, as well as Lord John Russell. However, the eminent members from far away were outnumbered by those from nearer home. Over half of the initial twenty-five, who did not include Land – another strike against him as founder – lived within easy distance of Broadhalfpenny Down, which suggests that the club was simply founded by a group of local gentlemen. This is a less glamorous paternity than legend has suggested, but it is probably accurate.
Another uncertainty relates to the management of the club. Altham implies that Powlett ‘piloted’ Hambledon through ‘at least one crisis’, and that when the club folded in 1796 he was ‘the last to abandon the sinking ship’. This is creditable if true, but it conflicts with the known facts. There is no record of Powlett attending any of the club’s final meetings, nor of his being a subscriber for their last season. It seems that he sank before the club.
John Richards, however, did not, and he was the central figure in running the club throughout its heyday. Richards was about twenty- nine years of age when he settled in Hambledon in 1766, buying ‘Whitedale’, a large house just outside the village. Five years later he made his only known appearance as a cricketer, playing for Gentlemen of Hampshire against Gentlemen of Sussex at Broadhalfpenny Down. He is a type familiar to cricket history – the lover of the game with little skill at actually playing it. From the outset he seems to have been club treasurer, and thus financial executor of the club’s wishes. He was the club’s factotum, loyal and ever-present, as is reflected in a series of references from the club’s minutes: in 1773 he was asked to check the expense of a conveyance to carry the team to away matches and then, later that year, to purchase it from surplus funds; in 1780 tobacco was ordered to be held in his safekeeping; in 1784 he was supervising alternatives to a ‘booth’ on the club’s new ground at Windmill Down; and in 1787 he was asked to provide ‘six spitting troughs’ and a ‘hogshead of the best port … to drink immediately’.
Richards was active in many local causes, and in 1772 was one of three nominees for Sheriff of Hampshire. He seems to have been as passionate about politics as cricket: in 1775 he helped found the Hampshire Club ‘for the support of public liberty’, acting sometimes as its steward, while in 1780 he was chairman of a meeting which adopted a petition against Lord North’s government, promoted by his fellow Hambledon member Philip Dehany. He filled local government posts such as Surveyor of Highways, and though not himself a farmer, invented, according to the Hampshire Repository, ‘several useful ploughs and implements of the drag and harrow, and a machine to weigh draft’. He was an energetic and inventive man who loved shooting, and thought little of walking six hours with his gun slung over his shoulder. In the midst of all these other pursuits he remained a faithful member of the Hambledon Club, and was one of only three subscribers who attended its final meeting before it was wound up in late 1796. But even then his stamp on the club did not end: his son, the Reverend Richard Richards, served as vicar of Hambledon for forty-one years, and was a member of the reformed club in the early nineteenth century.
Despite exaggerations of its historical significance, there is no doubt that Hambledon made a notable contribution to cricket. Although the image of Broadhalfpenny Down painted so fondly by John Nyren is an enduring one, it is misleading, since the Hambledon Club did not only play there. After the Duke of Dorset complained about the ‘bleakness of the spot’ the club moved on: the Duke’s word was law. From 1778 many home games were switched to Stoke Down, fifteen miles to the north, and in 1782 the club began to use Windmill Down, much closer to the village, for their fixtures. This ground remained in use until the 1830s, and was the site of the first brick pavilion, where in 1784 the minutes instructed that ‘a bell be hung in the Lodge under direction of the Stewards’ – perhaps the first ever bell to signal the start of a game.
Other improvements were made too. In September 1784 three of the members were authorised to ‘make such alterations to the “booth” as they think proper’, and, more intriguingly, to erect a ‘dulce lenimen for the Ladies’. This term occurs three times in classical Latin (once in Horace’s Odes and twice in Ovid’s Metamorphoses), and broadly means ‘a sweet and healing consolation’ – a charming description of an early purpose-built, on-site lavatory. Hambledon was always a very welcoming club to the ladies: as early as 1773 it bought green baize to cover the chairs in the ‘Ladies tent’. By the early 1790s there was such pride in the club among its members that on match days they wore their own uniform of a sky-blue coat with a black velvet collar and the letters ‘CC’ (denoting Cricket Club) engraved on the buttons. Occasional games were still played at Windmill Down, but between 1777 and 1795 there was rarely more than one ‘great’ game a year – the sole exception being 1783, when two games were played. There were none at all in 1780, 1784, 1785 and 1794.
In July 1794 that old Hambledon warhorse Tom Walker lit a fuse that would smoulder for thirty years: he began to experiment with round-arm bowling, which gave him additional pace and an original line of attack. To test this new form of bowling, a match was played at Dartford between sides led by Walker and David Harris. Walker’s team (scoring 130 and 59) defeated Harris’s (76 and 60) by 53 runs, with only ‘Silver Billy’ Beldham (27) putting up significant resistance to Walker’s new style of bowling. But the rustic Walker did not enjoy a social position that enabled him to press his case. Hambledon, although not the lawmaker of the game, said no to round-arm bowling, and that was the end of the matter. Walker went back to batting, and to bowling slow lobs. The conservatism that has so often governed cricket set the experiment quietly aside. Nonetheless, a seed had been sown.
In 1796 the original Hambledon Club was dissolved,* but not before leaving behind yet another small mystery that may never be solved. The club minutes record the presence of the revolutionary Tom Paine at a cricket match (Hambledon, East Meon and Petersfield vs Portsmouth) at Windmill Down on 29 August 1796, and specifically refer to him as ‘Author of the Rights of Man’. If true this is remarkable, for had Paine been arrested in England at that time he would have faced the death penalty, in all its grisly horror, for treason. Madcap and reckless he may have been, but surely not to this extent, especially as earlier that month he is known to have declined to sail from France to America for fear of being picked up by a British warship patrolling the Channel. Theories abound as to what he was doing at Hambledon, but none convinces.
In many ways Hambledon and Hampshire were synonymous on the cricket field, and the teams that represented them were apt to bear either name. It seems that the Hambledon members welcomed the dual description, for a club minute of 17 September 1782 refers to ‘those players who intend to play in the County matches this year’, and ruled that they should receive ‘four shillings if winners and three shillings if losers’.
The Hambledon Club is pre-eminent because we know about it. But, out of the mists, some other clubs began to appear. An ‘Old Sussex Cricketer’ writing in 1882 claimed that there was ‘a very strong club at Oakendene, near Cowfold’ between 1790 and 1815.* No such club can be found under that name, but if for ‘Oakendene’ one can substitute ‘Ockenden’, the mystery may be solved. Ockenden Farm divides the Sussex villages of Cowfold and Twineham, and a club certainly thrived under the name of Ockenden from 1798 to 1811. Moreover, such sources as exist reveal that it played challenge matches and included well- known ‘given’ players in its team. Ata match in August 1807 the ‘county’ shows Cowfold and Twineham with ‘Silver Billy’ Beldham in its team, as well as the famous all-rounder William Lambert and the long-hitting civil servant E.H. Budd, one of the leading amateur batsmen of the day. The Cowfold and Twineham Club disappears in 1811 without apparent reason, and was never reformed. It is probable that there are many more such stories which have been lost in the annals of time.
Be that as it may, Hambledon playing on Broadhalfpenny Down will forever catch and hold the imagination, and even if I feel a killjoy for dismissing some of the myths that have come to surround the club, I believe there is still ample evidence for it to be recognised as an important part of early cricket history.
In the years during which the Hambledon star rose and fell, the small world of cricket widened – and so did the cast of enthusiasts who came together to form the most famous club in history: the Marylebone Cricket Club.
For two hundred years, from its inception, the MCC was the most influential voice in cricket. But like Hambledon’s, its birth is clouded in uncertainty. In the run-up to the formation of the MCC, cricket was growing in the rural areas and taking root in London. Clubs were springing up. Rich and powerful patrons were arranging games as a vehicle for gambling, bringing a source of income to ground landlords, brewers, caterers and cricketers alike. The press was reporting cricket more widely, sometimes with full scorecards. But amid this activity, controversies were arising over such matters as the width of the bat, the need for three stumps and the general rules of the game. The fracas at Sevenoaks in 1773 when a fielder, Richard Simmons, huddled so close to the batsman it was thought to be intimidating has already been mentioned. These controversies needed adjudication by a governing body whose judgement would be accepted by all. There was no democratic structure to elect such a body, and no one whose writ would run, other than the rich and powerful patrons whose enthusiasm and money had promoted the game for over half a century.
Thus far, regulation had been rather informal. Rules were set out in 1744, although this may have been merely a revision, or a codification, of existing practice. It is, however, certain that in 1774 a group of noblemen and gentlemen met at the Star and Garter in Pall Mall to revise the laws of cricket.* The Star and Garter was a fashionable watering hole – and one with notoriety in its history. Nine years earlier the fifth Lord Byron, grandfather of the poet, had dined there with a neighbour, William Chaworth. For several hours they had dined well, but not wisely, when a fierce quarrel broke out about – absurdly – the number of hares on Chaworth’s estate. Byron’s manic temper was let loose; he was not known as ‘the wicked Lord’ without reason. An upstairs room was acquired in which to settle the dispute in candlelit privacy, but tempers rose ever further, swords were drawn, and in a duel Byron killed his friend. He was immediately charged with murder, but as a member of the House of Lords he claimed the right to be tried in Westminster Hall before 250 of his fellow peers. The trial was a sensation. Byron had often been the object of scandal, and now he was on trial for his life. Special galleries were erected for the crowds, thousands of tickets exchanged hands at six guineas a time, and all London society attended in their finest attire, having risen early to be present for the 7 a.m. start. The spectacle lasted only one long day, and at 6 p.m. Byron – dressed in mourning as a tribute to his dead friend – was acquitted of murder but convicted of manslaughter. Through a legal loophole he went free. Days later he was back in the House of Lords, and returned to his wayward life.
From the Star and Garter, the trail of the noblemen and gentlemen is muddied. In May 1775 there is a reference in the Public Advertiser to a game to be played by the ‘Noblemen and Gentlemen of the Cricket Club’ – but no precise name for the club is given. They reappear again, described in the Morning Post as members of the ‘Grand Cricket Club’, in October 1778, when they established a fund to reward cricketers who distinguished themselves in county matches. This patronage implies wealth and power, although the identity of the benefactors is unknown. In 1784 the ‘Cricket Club of Noblemen and Gentlemen’ was based at Willis’s, a fashionable club in King Street, St James’s. Its membership included Lord Winchilsea, a nobleman of the old school who became President of Hambledon in 1787. By the following year, 1785, the club had switched its formal meetings to the Star and Garter, where the Morning Post reported that the members dined at 5.30 p.m. on 30 May.
It is likely, but not provable from known documents, that this string of reports relates to the same group of cricket-loving enthusiasts. Now comes a conundrum that is crucial, but about which we can only conjecture. In the Record Office at Leicester there is a large broadsheet in four sections. One section is entitled: ‘Rules of the Cricket Club’ (that name again), while the other three are ‘Committee’, ‘List of Subscribers of the Cricket Club’ and, foremost of all, ‘The Laws of Cricket, revised at The Star & Garter, Pall Mall, February 25th, 1784’. Here is the mystery: the names on the membership list suggest an earliest possible date of 1786,* but the heading duplicates the title of the laws published in 1774 –is‘1784’ a misprint, or are the rules a reprint from 1774? We cannot be certain, but the club rules make for fascinating reading (see Appendix 2, page 401). A ‘stock purse’ was built up of fees for dinners, and smaller sums from which club expenses were met. There are strict injunctions on membership and behaviour. None but ‘gentlemen’ can play. No one shall dispute the umpire’s decision, upon penalty of a guinea fine. Only members and guests can enter the committee tent, and no horses or carriages are to be admitted to the cricket ground. It is all very clear-cut.
The membership of the club was impressive: 144 names, easily the largest known membership of any eighteenth-century cricket club. Nor were they any Tom, Dick or Harry: among them were the Duke of Dorset and Sir Horace Mann, together with twenty-two peers, including Viscount Maynard, husband of that vivacious and peripatetic paramour, the former Miss Nancy Parsons. A five-man committee presided: the Earl of Berkeley, Sir Peter Burrell, the Hon. Captain Monson, the Hon. Lionel Damer – a Sackville on his mother’s side and cousin of the Duke of Dorset – and, as treasurer, the great Hambledon stalwart the Earl of Winchilsea.
The club played its cricket near White Conduit House, a round building with adjoining pleasure gardens north of Pentonville Road. On the edge of open country lay an open space – White Conduit Field – and it is here that the ‘Lordling Cricketers’ had their ground. They were not popular visitors, and on 22 June 1785 the Daily Universal Register, the forerunner of The Times, admonished them:
It is recommended to the Lordling Cricketers who amuse themselves in White Conduit Fields, to procure an Act of Parliament for enclosing their play area, which will not only prevent them being incommoded, but protect themselves from a repetition of the severe rebuke which they jointly merit, and received on Saturday evening from some spirited citizens whom they insulted and attempted vie et armis to drive from the footpath, pretending it was within their bounds.
This conjures up a vision of an embarrassing encounter as jaywalkers, very possibly including the author of the press report, crossed the cricket ground. Clearly the play area was unsatisfactory, and as a result a cricketing legend enters the scene.
One of the regular spectators, employed as an occasional bowler and general attendant, was a twenty-eight-year-old Yorkshireman who combined a love of cricket with a bustling business acumen: Thomas Lord (1757–1832). Both Winchilsea and Charles Lennox* offered patronage to Lord if he would open a private ground. The site Lord chose was situated on part of modern Dorset Square, just north of Marylebone Road, extended to cover modern Ivor Place, much of Boston Place and one-third of Marylebone Station, and was in every way superior to White Conduit Fields. It was on a seven-acre field that, apart from the playing surface, would hold over two thousand spectators and still leave sufficient space for a covered recess under which refreshments could be served. The playing surface – unsurprisingly – was uneven, but the ever-resourceful Lord assured his patrons that it would be laid out like a bowling green for the 1787 season.
Before the season began, the club held an opening meeting at its usual venue, the Star and Garter, on Monday, 30 April, followed by dinner at 5.30 p.m. Despite the impending change of ground, no change of name was proposed, and the club continued to be known as the White Conduit Club. However, Lord – remembering the jaywalkers at the previous venue – fenced in his new ground to ensure privacy. On 21 May 1787 a match was played between the White Conduit Club and the County of Middlesex ‘in the new cricket ground, the New Road, Mary-le-Bone’. On 31 May and 1 June Middlesex again played on the ground, beating Essex by 93 runs.
Winchilsea and Lennox must have been delighted. Winchilsea’s patronage was acknowledged in the World later that season, when it reported a game between the club and an England side. He is credited with ‘good nature and liberality’ as well as the generosity to ensure that Lord made a net profit. Lord was a lucky man: apart from a guaranteed income, he was much praised for the facilities he provided – which happened to abut a tavern of which he was the lessee. He was a shrewd son of Yorkshire.
The name of the White Conduit Club could not last, and on 30 July 1787 Lord’s new ground staged a game between eleven gentlemen of the Mary-le-Bone Club and the Islington Club. This may be the debut of the MCC, as the Mary-le-Bone Club was probably the old White Conduit Club under a name that reflected the site of its new ground, but we cannot be absolutely certain. In any event, the White Conduit Club was playing as the Marylebone Club from the following season, 1788. Confusingly, the first MCC match was against a team designated as ‘the White Conduit Club’ – whom they beat by 83 runs.
The MCC has long claimed 1787 as its foundation date, and this may well be correct, but there is no irrefutable evidence in support of their contention. Although we can assume that the Mary-le-Bone Club that played against Islington was the renamed White Conduit Club, it could have been a wholly separate team using Thomas Lord’s ground. No definitive evidence is available. Nonetheless, 1787 has entered history as the birthdate of the MCC, and fifty years later, in 1837, a grand jubilee match was held between the ‘North’ and ‘South’ of England to commemorate this anniversary. This apparent corroborative evidence is unconvincing: none of the players or officials involved in 1787 was still alive, nor were any of the founding club members, and any records were destroyed in the fire of 1825 (see page 145). Although we know that Lord’s ground opened in 1787, we cannot be certain that the MCC was formed at the same time.
The club’s initial membership is equally uncertain. Altham says that the Earl of Tankerville was ‘one of the leading spirits in the White Conduit and Marylebone Clubs’, whereas Rait Kerr asserts that he was a member of the MCC and Hambledon. So far as I can discover, he was a member of neither. Birley says that Tankerville, the Earl of Sandwich and the Duke of York were members of the MCC, but once more, I can find no proof of this.
Evidence is available, however, for the proposition that the MCC was accepted as the voice of authority from the outset. When, in 1788, a dispute over cricketing law arose between teams from Leicester and Coventry after a batsman hit the ball twice to protect his wicket, it was ‘submitted to the first reputed cricket society in the Kingdom’, namely, the MCC. Three years later, nine MCC members were invited to adjudicate over a dispute in a match at Hambledon on 13–15 July 1791 between England and Hampshire. The MCC was in business.
* ‘Collected and edited by Charles Cowden Clarke’. It is probable that Cowden Clarke wrote the book as a ‘ghost’, but the memories are Nyren’s.
* Listed in F.S. Ashley-Cooper, The Hambledon Cricket Chronicle 1772–96 (1924).
* And President of the Hambledon Club in 1773, and possibly in 1774 too.
* The club was revived in 1806, but never again attained the eminence of earlier years.
* ‘Sussex Cricket, Past and Present’, Cricket, 13 July 1882.
* This revision contains the first known mention of ‘leg before wicket’. However, there is no record of any LBW dismissal in a game until 1795, when the Hon. John Tufton was out to J. Wells for 3 runs while playing for England against Surrey at Moulsey Hurst.
* One of those on the list, ‘Lord Dare’, is probably in fact Lord Dacre (there was no ‘Lord Dare’), who succeeded to the title in that year.
* In May 1789 Lennox (1764–1819), later fourth Duke of Richmond, fought a duel on Wimbledon Common with the Duke of York over a promotion that had been given to Lennox in the Duke’s regiment without the Duke having been consulted. Neither was hurt in the duel.