The MCC was an aristocratic body. In its early days the most regular spectators were the Duke of Dorset and Charles Lennox (the future Duke of Richmond); a selection of peers including Winchilsea, Darnley, Cardigan and Lord Frederick Beauclerk; and other high-ranking individuals such as Colonel (later General) Bligh, the Hon. John and Henry Tufton, Sir Horace Mann, the Hon. Thomas Twisleton, and Messrs Charles Anguish, Louch, Powlett and George Dehany.* They were often joined by the Marquess of Hertford, Lord Thanet and, from time to time, the Duchess of Richmond, Lady Wallace and ‘other ladies’, although the feminine contingent were merely guests, and the MCC began – as it remained for so long – a male enclave.
Beyond the small world of cricket there was little interest in the birth of the MCC. Certainly for the next twenty years there would be many distractions. Britain was in a ferment of change. The Industrial Revolution, fifty years into its stride in the 1790s, was changing the way of life in town and country. In industrial areas the textile, iron, coal and metal trades had revolutionised production to meet a demand boosted by the fear, and then the reality, of war against France. In the two decades to 1800, war and industry would fuel a fourfold increase in the production of pig iron. In the first three years of the new century, forty-seven new blast furnaces were built to supply munitions, bridges, nails, vats, iron chains – and even pipes for the infant gas industry. In London a network of docks was being constructed. By 1815 Hull was building a port to rival Liverpool and London.
As commerce boomed, so did shipping, with a thousand vessels a year being built. Between 1795 and 1805 the mercantile fleet grew by one-third. The navy built warships to fight France, and four thousand mature trees were sacrificed for each one. Large quantities of forest were cut down: Scotland and north-west England lost nearly all their trees. The price of timber soared, and in counties where there was no coal for heating, and few trees left to burn, cold food was the normal diet.
Steam power was making an impact. In 1802the Charlotte Dundas, the first steam-powered canal boat, was in operation, and a decade later two hundred passengers at a time were being carried by a steam vessel on the Limehouse canal, while a steam packet was under construction that would travel from London to Calais at the eye- watering speed of twelve miles per hour.
Even so, the majority of jobs were still on the land. Agricultural prices rose, as the growing population (10.9 million, according to the 1801 census) needed to be fed, and this problem worsened when war with Napoleon cut back the imports of foreign corn. Land – even marginal farming land – was enclosed, as farming enjoyed a boom period due to inflation. But not all farmers prospered. For smallholders and their village workforces, the future was precarious. Many farms were too tiny to be profitable without wartime inflation, and new inventions such as the threshing machine reduced the need for labour. The plight of the rural poor was dire, and parish funds supplemented their wages to enable them to eat – in 1801 a Suffolk labourer earned nine shillings a week, and received a further six shillings in Poor Relief. This had the perverse effect of subsidising employers, who were able to keep wages low. War allied to industrial and agricultural turbulence was a heady brew, and brought hardship and discontent to millions of the urban and rural poor. Even when peacetime beckoned, their plight worsened.
Seventy-five years earlier the sharp eye of Daniel Defoe had observed class distinctions as he rode around England, but he had rejoiced in the underlying harmony of the social fabric: this was now about to crack. The well-to-do had been terrified by the French Revolution, which raised a spectre they feared and poisoned their minds against the underclass, however justified their grievances might be. As each month passed, the impact of war and Industrial Revolution began to chip away at the cohesion of society and widen the gulf between rich and poor, town and country. The rise of the meritocracy gained pace, and as the new industrialists tasted power and success they became less willing to defer to those who regarded themselves as their social superiors. The aristocracy, the meritocracy and the working man were all at odds. A storm was gathering, and the time was ripe for change.
Cricket could not be immune from the impact of war and social upheaval, although in its own modest fashion it meandered on, providing the old, familiar relationship between men far apart in wealth and rank. But for some years it did only meander. Historians have speculated that the decline in the amount of cricket played at this period was a side-effect of the Napoleonic Wars, and there may be some truth in this. Certainly earlier wars had such an impact. A summary of all known cricket matches during the Seven Years War (1756–63) shows a decline in the number of games from thirty in 1755, one year prior to war, to ten in 1761.* But this is a partial explanation only. Young men were not conscripted for the war (apart from a few press-ganged sailors), and neither armies nor navies were particularly large. Nevertheless, some credence can be given to the negative impact of the Napoleonic Wars. Hambledon subscription lists survive from 1791 to 1795, and they reveal how many members enlisted in the army or navy and went abroad: in 1791 none were lost to the club; in 1792 one; in 1793 six, two going abroad (presumably with the army) and four to sea. Six were also lost in both 1794 and 1795.
The historian Arthur Haygarth, the most avid researcher in all cricket, devoted his life to disinterring information about the game. In his Cricket Scores and Biographies (1862) he discovered that the MCC played twenty-four games in 1800, falling to seven in 1803, then rising slightly before falling again to only two in 1811 and 1812, before a steady growth back began. Similarly, a record of ‘England’ matches reveals eight in 1800, two in 1802, and a total in single figures (often only one a year) until 1825. A similar pattern is evident in a study of Sussex cricket over the same period.
Cricket-lovers had never welcomed the interference of the military in their game. In 1758, when the Superintendent of the Lines at Chatham had refused to let local people play cricket he received a letter threatening to murder him. Two years later there was outrage when a powder magazine was built on the cricket field at Gosport. Not all military officers were so insensitive. Before the Battle of Quiberon Bay in 1759, the British commander Sir Edward Hawke (a forebear of Lord Hawke, the eminent Victorian cricketer and administrator) had no reservations about the game. A sailor wrote home from the Namur: ‘I take this, being the first, opportunity to inform you of my welfare. We live here very happily, have extreme fine weather, go ashore very often and play at cricket.’*
Affection for cricket was not at the expense of patriotism. When county militias were reformed in 1778 a contemporary song, ‘The Man of Kent’, celebrated the event and the role of cricketers:
When Royal George commanded
Militia to be raised,
The French would sure have landed,
But for such youths as these;
Their oxen stall and cricket ball,
They left for martial glory,
The Kentish lads shall win the odds
Your fathers did before ye.
While this song singled out Kent, the militias were nationwide, although Kent’s location left it a likely front line in the event of invasion. Concern was such that even the cricket ground at Coxheath was requisitioned as a military camp. The commander-in-chief did not live a tented life on manoeuvres, but resided at old Sir Horace Mann’s house while he was abroad. No doubt he was visited by the Duke of Dorset, who served as Colonel of the West Kent militia, although surprisingly there is no record of his regiment playing cricket. Other regiments, however, certainly did – for example, the officers of the Cinque Ports Corps played against Portsea Island in July 1781, and against the Bucks militia the following month.
There is evidence that cricket clubs were depleted by the demands of war. The diary entry of Richard Hayes of Cobham for 10 July 1778 suggests that the seafaring traditions of Chatham had an adverse impact on the team: ‘Meopham Fair to the cricketing. The club is many of them gone to sea. No wonder they was beat.’ It may be that in the 1790s the great bowler Lumpy Stevens was enlisted. A letter from ‘A Kentish Cricketer’, dated 20 May 1793 and published in the Sporting Magazine, reports that Ensign Hamilton of the 3rd Regiment, a member of Sevenoaks Vine Cricket Club, had a cannonball diverted from his head by an unnamed Sergeant, linked a day later in the Maidstone Journal to Lumpy. The report suggests that Lumpy might have thought ‘his province invaded by the Sergeant who so dextrously caught the cannon-ball’. This story reeks of good-natured banter in which Lumpy’s celebrity as a bowler was the subject of a jovial comparison to the nimble fielding skills of the Sergeant with an altogether more deadly ball.
War, then, was a factor in impeding the previously steady growth of cricket. So was social turbulence as families gave priority to their livelihood, and leisure featured lower among their priorities. There is one other factor that inhibited the growth in the number of games played, and would continue to do so until well into the nineteenth century. Travel options were still primitive. Travelling on horseback was tiring and slow for individuals, and inconceivable for whole teams, even in carts. One alternative, travelling by stagecoach, was expensive, slow and painful. In the 1750s it took six days to travel from London to Newcastle, four and a half days to Manchester and two days to Birmingham. Coaches were faster by the 1780s, but London to Newcastle was still three days’ hard journeying, while Manchester took twenty-eight hours, and Birmingham nineteen. Nor were such journeys comfortable as a German tourist, Karl Philipp Moritz, testified in 1782, having ridden, as many did, on the outside of the coach:
The getting up alone was at the risk of one’s life, and when I was up, I was obliged to sit just at the corner of the coach, with nothing to hold by, and a sort of little handle fastened on the side … the moment that we set off, I fancied that I saw certain death await me.
Matters did not improve once the stagecoach got into its stride:
The machine now rolled along with prodigious rapidity, over the stones through the town, every moment we seemed to fly into the air; so that it was almost a miracle that we still stuck to the coach and did not fall … When we came to get down hill, then all the trunks and parcels began as it were, to dance around me… I was obliged to suffer this torture … till we came to another hill again, when [I was] quite shaken to pieces and sadly bruised.
It is no wonder cricketers sought fixtures in their own locality.
The perils of travel were so intense that coaches were known as ‘God permit’, the unspoken thought being ‘God permit I arrive safely’ – a reasonable prayer, as they sometimes overturned and pitched their passengers off. Many stagecoach travellers arrived bruised and beaten at their destination. More expensive, but faster and safer, were post-chaises, which carried only two passengers compared to a stagecoach’s six or eight. But they were an option only for the minority of the population, and certainly not for rustic cricketers.
The game of cricket had travelled further than individual teams were able to do, and had spread widely by the time the MCC was formed. Before 1700 it can only be proved that it was established in a handful of towns and villages in Surrey, Sussex and Kent; there is no record yet uncovered of it having spread north of the Thames by that date.
Cricket spread westward first, to Hampshire, although – possibly due to a lack of local newspapers – there are no references to the game there until 1729, when a combined Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire team played Kent; local teams in Hampshire can first be traced in the 1740s. But early references to West Country cricket are sparse and contradictory. In 1776 the Salisbury Journal refers to cricket being ‘but lately introduced in these parts’, yet other evidence suggests it was well-established. Records reveal that in 1772 a team of players from the Hampshire villages of Ringwood and Fordingbridge, and Downton in Wiltshire, opposed the ‘noted players’ from Milford in Hampshire.
Similar evidence comes from Dorset, where the game was sufficiently popular in the 1730s for twelve men of Dorchester to challenge all-comers ‘to play at cricket for twelve pairs of gloves, value one shilling’.* It seems that the attraction of a bet, however modest, added spice to cricket far beyond the circle of the great patrons.
In September 1729 the Weekly Journal reported that an eleven-a-side game was played in Gloucestershire for a purse of twenty guineas, and nearby in 1769 the ‘young gentlemen’ of Cirencester were ‘introducing the manly game of cricket into this county, where it has been hitherto unknown’. Other games are recorded at Durdham Down, Bristol (Bristol vs London), in 1752, and in 1769, again at Bristol, where the actor William Powell, a great rival to David Garrick, died after catching a cold that turned to fever after he had been playing or watching cricket on a chilly day.
Somerset was staging cricket in the 1770s. A local diarist, John Yeoman, refers to it in 1774 as a game which ‘children play in our County’, but in some places it was being played by adults. The village of Bruton played Redlinch in 1772 at Wincanton, and in 1795 men and youths of Bath played at Claverton Down, where, it was reported, ‘the novelty of this manly exercise, in a regular match, drew together a great number of spectators’. By 1819 a Bath Club was active, and the rise of club cricket began in the county, as it did in Gloucestershire, where isolated matches can be traced as early as a hundred years before.
Cricket was recorded in one south-western market town in 1773 by the novelist and diarist Fanny Burney, then only twenty-one, who wrote from Teignmouth in Devon of ‘a grand cricket match… the cricket players dined on the Green, where they had a boothe erected, and a dinner from the Globe’. And at Falmouth a club existed where members gave ‘a very elegant entertainment to the ladies’. However, regular inter-parish cricket is not known to have reached Devon or Cornwall until the 1820s.
Cricket did not spread evenly across whole counties, but was adopted in small villages or towns where local enthusiasts promoted the game. When Stockton opposed Stockton Downs in 1799 it was reported as ‘an event so novel in the county of Wiltshire’. Yet it was not that novel: only a few miles away, Calne, Devizes, Salisbury and Marlborough had been merrily playing cricket for a quarter of a century. So had Westbury, from 1783.
In many counties – Hereford, Worcestershire, Shropshire, Cheshire, Lancashire, Cumberland, Westmorland, Staffordshire – there are virtually no eighteenth-century references to cricket. The pace quickens in the nineteenth century, and the invaluable Bell’s Life reports in 1829 that although ‘2 or 3 years ago’ cricket was scarcely known in Cumberland, ‘now there are eight strong clubs’. Similarly, from the early 1820s regular – probably annual – fixtures were played between clubs in Liverpool and Manchester.
Cricket spread northwards from its south-eastern cradle, travelling east of the Pennines up to Northumberland. In his book The History of Cricket (1997), Peter Wynne-Thomas traces bats being manufactured at Welbeck Abbey, the Nottinghamshire seat of the Duke of Portland, as early as 1748. By the 1770s Nottingham was fielding teams against Sheffield, while in the latter decades of the eighteenth century cricket ‘societies’ had been formed in Newark, Bingham and Southwell. The Leicester Journal of 17 August 1776 advertises a ‘great match’ between Barrow-on-Soar and Mountsorrel, but does not report the outcome.
There are even earlier traces of cricket in Northumberland and County Durham. Records exist of the game being played at Raby Castle in 1751, and a ‘great match’ between the gentlemen of Gateshead and Newcastle ended in an easy victory for the former in mid-June 1753. At Hexham in January 1766 the river was frozen so solidly that a sheep was roasted upon it and the meat sold at twelve pence a pound to a numerous company ‘who afterwards played at cricket’, while others danced.* In eighteenth-century Hexham, hardy cricketers did not restrict the game to the summer.
Yorkshire too was enjoying cricket by the mid-century. It was played at Stanwick in 1751, and in 1773 West Auckland played Scruton at Piercebridge. Two years later, Colburn and Hipswell, near Richmond, contested a match that drew ‘a great number of spectators who had fine diversion’. But Yorkshire cricket may already have had a long history. The court roll relating to Hillham, fifteen miles east of Leeds, notes in 1620: ‘terr in loco voc Crickitt’, which seems to mean ‘known to the locals as a cricket ground’. Although this cannot be wholly relied on without corroborating evidence, it does suggest an earlier genesis for cricket in Yorkshire than research has yet uncovered. A more reliable record is The History and Antiquities of Richmond, published in 1821, which looks back at ‘various games and pastimes’, and includes cricket as an amusement of ‘the lower class of people’. This designation of cricket as a traditional game of the rural population hints at it having been played for some time, and not introduced from outside by travelling gentry. But once more, this is not definitive evidence.
Outside England, cricket was being played in Wales by local gentry at Carmarthen by 1783. The following year the Hereford Journal reported that a ‘Swansea Cricket Meeting’ had been fixed on 6 May for the first occasion of the season ‘according to last year’s resolutions’. The subscribers were invited to meet at the Bathing House to appoint a steward for that day, and a treasurer for the season. Welsh cricket then vanishes from view until its re-emergence in the 1820s, by which time clubs had been set up in Pontypool, Cardiff, Usk and Newport.
The earliest definitive accounts of cricket in Scotland are from the records of the leading aristocrats. In the 1780s, strangers were banned from the estate of the Duke of Hamilton – a brother-in-law of Sir Peter Burrell, a grandee of the White Conduit Club – on days when he was playing cricket. The Duchess too, the former Miss Elizabeth Ann Burrell, was a cricket enthusiast; she had met the Duke at a match in 1777 at the Oaks, Woodmansterne, Surrey, between the Countess of Derby XI and Ladies of Quality and Fashion. Miss Burrell scored more ‘notches’ than any other lady, and the Duke, mightily attracted by her face and form, married her in the close season. Other leading figures in Scotland were devotees of the game. Viscount Cathcart, a native of Surrey, and his brother-in-law the Duke of Atholl, played in a match at Shaw Park, Alloa, in 1785. Four years later the Gordon Castle Club included in its team for a match against the 55th Regiment the Marquess of Huntly (a future Duke) and his brother-in-law Charles Lennox – who scored 136, the first ever century in Scotland. A distant cousin, Lord Strathavon, yet another aficionado of the White Conduit Club, also played. The English connection was promoting the game in Scotland, and more eminent Englishmen would try to do so later. Lord Palmerston, the future Victorian Prime Minister, was at Edinburgh University in the early 1800s. When he failed to find enough people to ‘muster up’ to play cricket he turned to golf – ‘A poor game compared to cricket, but better than nothing,’ opined his Lordship. It was not a judgement endorsed by many Scots – then or now.
For anyone to ‘muster up’ a team to play cricket, facilities were needed, although we know very little of how cricket grounds at the time were functioning. Some famous venues disappeared. In 1780 a new lease banned cricket on the venerable Honourable Artillery Company site in London where so much early cricket had been played. Horace Mann’s ground at Bourne Paddock continued to stage matches, but many others depended on being adjacent to hostelries: even Hambledon had been a neighbour to the Bat and Ball before matches moved from Broadhalfpenny Down to Windmill Down in 1782. ‘Mr Siddle’s new cricket ground at Deptford’ in Kent was staging matches by 1748, followed by others at Gosport in Hampshire (1760), West Hill at Hastings, in Sussex (1769), Kevington at St Mary Cray in Kent (1768), Shipdham in Norfolk (1770), Linchmere in Sussex (1771) and Chatham in Kent (1772). None of these was allied to an inn or hotel.
As soon as it was formed, the MCC took precedence over all other clubs – even Hambledon. It had prestige, rank and the endorsement of cricket’s leading sponsors. Membership was highly prized. In 1793 the prolific playwright and dramatist Frederick Reynolds was enjoying a huge triumph with his comedy How to Grow Rich, but in 1827 he would write in his memoirs:
Notwithstanding this success, and my natural propensity towards the drama, yet it at this period only afforded me a secondary pleasure. The love of a mere pastime – of cricket was the first; and at length increased to such a height, that the day I was proposed as a member of the Marylebone Club, then in its highest fashion, I waited at the Portland Coffee House to hear from Tom Lord the result of the ballot with more anxiety than I had experienced the month before, while expecting the decision of the audience on my new play. Being unanimously elected, I immediately assumed the sky-blue dress, the uniform of the club, and soon thoroughly entered into all the spirit of this new and gay scene.
And gay, in the traditional sense, it was: the MCC presented the grave and serious face of authority to the world outside, but members did not take themselves seriously. Reynolds spills the beans about their facetious behaviour. Often it was schoolboy humour: Charles Anguish emptied a colleague’s snuffbox and substituted hellebore, thus causing an unstoppable fit of sneezing in the midst of a toast. Reynolds does not identify the victim, except to note that he was a Member of Parliament speaking at a dinner for his electors. Sarah Siddons, the great tragedian, witnessed this comedy and much enjoyed it, but one guest sourly remarked: ‘Sir, I can see no humour in a man who owes me three guineas.’
Even the much-loved Sir Horace Mann suffered from pranks. A fellow MCC member extracted mottos from bon-bons set in front of Sir Horace at dinner, and substituted bon mots of a riper and coarser nature. The courtly Sir Horace, blissfully unaware, began to read one of them aloud to the lady sitting beside him before stopping abruptly, tearing up the offending piece of paper and fleeing the room in shame. The lady remained to titter, blush and fan herself while the whole room chuckled.
Reynolds recalls that Charles Lennox was at his best after a few drinks: ‘His Grace was most himself when not himself.’ Lennox, whether himself or not, was a practical joker, as Reynolds discovered when offered the loan of a horse to ride to a cricket ground. The horse had been trained to be averse to red coats, and when Reynolds met some soldiers it became ungovernable and he was pitched to the ground. Lennox was vastly amused, and as Reynolds was lucky enough to survive intact, his whimsical good humour was able to be recorded for posterity.
Some MCC members stood aloof from the buffoonery. The bachelor Lord Winchilsea was ‘too punctilious’, and if Lords Thanet and Darnley had a frivolous nature, they hid it from public gaze. So did Lord Frederick Beauclerk, of whom more later, to whom frivolity was unimaginable. Lord Cardigan, whose son would lead the Light Brigade to disaster in the Crimea, was often a target of ‘the wags’, though Reynolds is silent on the details.
Tomfoolery apart, it was cricket that bound the members together. Lord Frederick Beauclerk stood ‘unrivalled’ as a cricketer, claimed Reynolds, who played a single-wicket match against him and was permitted ten innings to a solitary one by Beauclerk. Reynolds hit a few ‘high, home and easy’ balls, but was unable to bowl out his opponent, who won easily and pocketed the guineas. A second single-wicket match against another fellow MCC member, Henry Tufton, ended more dramatically: Reynolds hit the ball into Tufton’s arm with such force that a bone was broken. After medical treatment the genial victim informed his persecutor: ‘Reynolds, Lord Frederick has never fractured anything but wickets, so play him.’
Reynolds regarded his cricketing days as his happiest, and he played with many of the top players around the turn of the nineteenth century, including on one occasion the ‘celebrated, formidable [David] Harris’:
In taking my place at the wicket, I almost felt as if taking my ground in a duel … and my terrors were so much increased by the mock pity and sympathy of Hammond, Beldham, and others round the wicket, that when this mighty bowler, this Jupiter tonans, hurled his bolt at me, I shut my eyes in the intensity of my panic, and mechanically gave a random desperate blow, which, to my utter astonishment, was followed by a loud cry all over the ring of ‘run, run’.
I did run; and with all my force; and getting three notches, the Duke of Richmond, John Tufton, Leigh, Anguish, and other arch wags, advanced and formally presented to me twenty-five sixpences in a hat, collected from the by-standers, as ‘The Reward of Merit.’ Even Lord Winchelsea, and Sir Horace Mann, contributed to this, and then all playfully commenced promoting a new subscription, which only stopped, because I could not stop the next ball. To my great joy, up went my stumps, and out I walked; certainly with some little éclat, being the first member of the club, who had been considered a regular player, i.e. paid for his services.
The ‘mock pity’ of the close fielders and the collection of sixpences for the wealthy Reynolds hint at the revelry of the MCC’s early members.
Although the MCC had become the leading force in cricket, it did not yet have a settled ground. On 17 August 1810 the final game was completed* at Thomas Lord’s Dorset Fields ground, as the lease expired: a team designated the ‘Old’, its members being thirty-eight years of age or more, beat the ‘Young’ by ninety runs. The astute Thomas Lord had foreseen that the lease would not be renewed, and had rented two fields on the St John’s Estate, upon which he prepared a ground for 1809; for that season he had two grounds in use. The new ground was adopted by the MCC in May 1811, but was never popular, and a mere three games were played on it in two years. Then fate intervened when Parliament fixed a route for the Regent’s Canal that flowed through the ground, and its role in cricket was over.
Lord was undaunted, and laid out a third ground, upon eight and a quarter acres of land rented in nearby St John’s Wood for £100 per annum. It opened on 22 June 1814 with a match, almost certainly organised by Lord Frederick Beauclerk, in which MCC beat Hertfordshire by an innings and 27 runs. Beauclerk, ‘Squire’ George Osbaldeston, E.H. Budd and William Ward all played in the inaugural game. Lord’s had found its permanent home.
* Not Philip Dehany of Hambledon fame.
* J. Carter, Cricket Quarterly, Vol II, No. 3, 1964. pp.161–71.
* Norwich Mercury, 7 June 1759.
* Sherborne Mercury, 9 May 1738.
* Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 25 January 1766.
* The game began on 24–25 July, but its completion was deferred until 17 August because of rain.