Читать книгу More Than A Game: The Story of Cricket's Early Years - John Major, John Major - Страница 9

In 1700 England was on the eve of an empire that would carry to the world a language, a system of law, a parliamentary tradition and, more prosaically, team sports – above all cricket. The growth of this empire was not preordained, the product of no grand design, but the natural consequence of free trade, self-interest and fear. Its roots reached far back, but we may usefully trace it from the birthdate of cricket – the early age of Elizabeth.

From that time, trade had played a crucial role in extending British ambitions. Imports of sugar, coffee and tobacco from Virginia, and tea – by the mid-seventeenth century on its way to popularity – all whetted the appetite for more trade and greater overseas possessions. Industry and commerce expanded steadily, but by 1700 England was still only a middle-ranking power. By contrast, France had an economy twice the size of England’s and a population nearly four times as large, whereas India – destined to become a British possession – had nearly one-quarter of the trade of the entire world. The wider world was far away from England’s damp island: it took up to seven weeks to sail to America against the winds, nine weeks to Barbados, and six months to round the Cape of Good Hope en route to Calcutta. But events and sea power were to shape a momentous century. No one could have dreamed what lay ahead.

In the English villages, peasants and craftsmen were finding a wider market for their produce in the towns and cities. Basic crops of wheat, barley and rye went to make bread for the masses. Barley had a wider use: it made malt for the beer and ale that had long been the drinks of England, except in the cider districts of the western counties. Even children drank weak beer, since it was often healthier than impure water. The roads were dire, which restricted the movement of men and materials. Waterways and rivers were used as highways. West Country cheeses were carried to London by sea. When harvests were plentiful, surplus corn was exported. As trade grew, so did profits for the merchants who reinvested in agriculture. The Industrial Revolution lay half a century ahead, and England still enjoyed a truly beautiful landscape. The desecration of forests for timber, coal and housing had not yet begun. Swamps and wildernesses were being tamed for agriculture, and population growth had not yet marred the land with the scars of development.

Other than in a handful of villages, no one was much bothered about the infant game of cricket. Greater events, far away from the cradle of the game, were shaping the future. But cricket was putting down roots. It was still a rustic sport, poorly endowed and, so far as we know, confined to the south of England. Teams had no set number of players. Rules were haphazard, and varied from village to village. Dress was variable. Bats were curved. Two stumps – most likely so-called because the primitive game was played with the stumps of trees as a wicket – were still the norm. Bowling was underarm and along the ground (hence ‘bowling’), Drake-style, but faster. The concept of the carefully-prepared modern cricket square was unknown, and wickets were pitched on bumpy, grassy surfaces that were unpredictable and could cause nasty injuries. It would be another hundred years before anyone wore protective leg or shin pads, even though a serious injury could cost a rural player his livelihood.

In the early 1700s these hardy players had no concept of the changes that lay ahead for their game as they nursed their bumps and bruises. For the eighteenth century would see the establishment of a governing body, albeit self-appointed, the first laws codified, the game spread through and beyond the southern counties of England, scores and records kept spasmodically, and the style of cricket evolve. Even ladies’ teams were formed. Cricket would emerge from its infancy.

Early in the new century the game was adopted by influential patrons, and became a welcome distraction in London. The capital may have been the centre of wealth and the leader in fashion, but daily life was harsh for the majority of its citizens. The London of early cricket was a town of unpaved streets and open sewers, where garbage and bodily waste were tipped from the windows of leaky, broken-down slums in which eight to ten of the poorest people would huddle in a single unheated room. In the worst quarters, decrepit houses quite literally fell down on their dwellers’ heads. In such conditions life expectancy was low and infant mortality huge. Children slept in the streets, clothed only in rags, and no one was safe out at night if the gin shops had been busy in the evening – as usually they had.

For most of the sick, folk remedies were all that were on offer, and superstitious nonsense was widely believed: it was thought efficacious to apply a live toad to the kidneys to treat a urinary infection, or a hanged man’s hands to a cyst. But some tangible improvements to health care were being made. Philanthropists founded hospitals in the major towns and cities. In London, new hospitals – including maternity hospitals – were established to supplement St Bartholomew’s and St Thomas’s, which had served the capital for six hundred years. Guy’s and Westminster Hospitals were born out of private philanthropy, but the demands of healthcare also led to the foundation of St George’s and the London and Middlesex Hospitals, all of which opened their doors between 1720 and 1745. And such a licentious age brought the Lock Hospital into being – it cared for sufferers from venereal diseases. The Foundling Hospital, another new arrival, cared for destitute children and raised funds through a public lottery.

For all its primitive nature, London was a vibrant city, and enjoyed greater pre-eminence in the nation than ever before or after in its history. In 1700 it boasted two thousand coffee shops, where the rich smell of roasted coffee offset the stench of unwashed bodies and the reek of tobacco. Coffee shops became a centre of social life, where gossip and news were exchanged. One coffee-house keeper, Edward Lloyd, set up a pulpit for shipping news, and Lloyd’s of London was born. Each shop had its own clientele. The Cocoa Tree Chocolate House attracted Tories, while Whigs would be found at St James’s. Poets favoured Wills Coffee House, and the clergy gathered at Truby’s. Aristocrats played cards at White’s Chocolate House, where professional gamblers waited to fleece them.

London’s streets were alive with vendors selling flowers, milk or newspapers; there were bootblacks, domestic servants on errands and porters carrying everything from letters to heavy burdens. Elms lined many of the streets, but so did household waste and effluent. Residents had to endure the stench of livestock being driven to market – or to the abattoirs on Tower Hill. The animals battled with the fashionable modes of transport: sedan chairs carried by ‘chairmen’ who feared that the new invention of umbrellas would cut their trade,* and hackney carriages drawn by horses. The River Thames was covered with ships, boats and barges of all kinds, and the smell of fish leaving Billingsgate would linger in the air.

Cleaner air could be enjoyed either by walking beyond London to the rural villages of Hampstead or Kentish Town, or in the ‘lungs’ of the city – Hyde Park, Green Park, Kensington Gardens or St James’s Park, where society strolled in their finery hoping to see and be seen. London drew people in like a magnet, and by 1730 had 6–700,000 inhabitants, compared with only 20–30,000 in Birmingham, Manchester and Sheffield. Dr Samuel Johnson, a native of Lichfield, with a modest population of three thousand, would say of his adopted home: ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.’ It was a tribute to the vibrancy of a town that was, among other things, embracing cricket with enthusiasm.

It is, perhaps, not surprising that it did so. Leisure for the masses was limited and often violent. Cockfighting was brutal but popular. Bare-knuckle boxing, often in the yards of taverns or in Marylebone fields, competed with cricket as a rising entertainment. It began as a spectator sport in the 1730s, with the great Jack Broughton as the main attraction. Broughton wrote the primitive ‘rules’ of the ring, and was sponsored by the cricket-loving, Scots-bashing Duke of Cumberland, who even built a theatre in which to stage his main bouts. Ahead for boxing lay Daniel Mendoza, Tom Cribb and a long line of champions who would further popularise the sport.

An even more violent entertainment was execution day at Tyburn. It was a holiday: shops were closed, stands were erected for spectators and the condemned were drawn through the streets in carts. Life was cheap for the very poor, and often the judicial system robbed them of it for modest offences. In the fifty years from 1690 the number of offences carrying the penalty of death by hanging rose fourfold, to 160: sheep stealing, minor theft, any number of offences against property, all carried a capital sentence. The criminal code was barbarous for a nation that was among the least violent in Europe.

Cricket was not a civilising influence in the bustle of eighteenth- century London – such a Victorian notion lay far ahead. Early cricket sponsors came from dubious sources: pubs and breweries eager to sell their product, and rich patrons attracted by the scope for gambling. These early patrons are elusive figures. Little is known of their character and lifestyle, and such scraps as are available offer only a partial portrait. Nonetheless, early newspapers, court cases over wagers, and memoirs of the great families enable us to piece together some of the jigsaw. The midwives of cricket were a mixed bunch: some mad, some bad, and some idle. All would have vanished into obscurity but for their promotion of cricket.

At the time the more raffish gentry took up the game, it was growing in popularity in rural areas. The Church, its old enemy, remained as hostile as ever, but the public were warming to the spectacle, and matches often attracted huge crowds. A rough and tumble, or an illegal affray, was a frequent accompaniment to a competitive game or an unsettled bet, and in a violent age that may have been an added attraction.

All this made news, and the early newspapers – soon to be joined (in 1706) by the first evening paper, the London Evening News – lapped it up. Reports in the Post Boy, the Postman or the Weekly Journal were sparse, but then as now, trivia made good copy, and the size of bets laid and the rivalries between aristocrats were widely reported. Attractive games were advertised by sponsors, often innkeepers keen to attract a thirsty crowd, and tended to be between teams of eleven or twelve players, though there is no clue as to why that number was settled upon. In every (advertised) instance the match was arranged to accommodate a wager:

These are to inform Gentlemen, or others, who delight in cricket playing, that a match of cricket, of 10 Gentlemen on each side, will be play’d on Clapham Common, near Fox-Hall [Vauxhall], on Easter Monday next, for £10 a head each game (five being design’d) and £20 the odd one.

Such an advertisement, from the Post Boy of 30 March 1700, is typical, but even the ‘gentlemen’ players were not always regarded with respect. A burlesque poem of 1701 parodied a Tunbridge beau:

It’s true he can at cricket play,

With any living at this day,

And fling a coit or toss a bar,

With any driver of a car:

But little nine-pins and trap-ball,

The Knight delights in most of all.

Conceiving like a prudent man,

The other might his honour stain,

So scorns to let the Publick see,

He should degrade his Quality.

‘He should degrade his Quality’ – this was pure snobbery from the author, who evidently believed that cricket should remain a ‘peasant’s game’. But not all poems were written to mock. Five years later, in 1706, the far more elegant pen of William Goldwin published Musae Juveniles, a collection of poems in Latin, one of which, ‘In Certamen Pilae’, describes a cricket match, giving evidence of the nature of the contemporary game as well as confirming that it was played at Eton when he was a pupil there in the 1690s. Goldwin later became vicar of St Nicholas, Bristol, and his famous poem tells us much about early cricket. His lines reveal that batsmen had curved bats, and the ball was a leathern sphere, thus confirming that early cricket employed the leather casing for balls first adopted by the Romans nearly two thousand years earlier. The umpires (there were two) officiated whilst ‘leaning on their bats’, and the scorers ‘cut the mounting score on sticks with their little knives’. Batsmen could be caught out by a fieldsman who ‘with outstretched palms joyfully accepts [the ball] as it falls’. Finally, Goldwin refers to the ‘rustic throng’, thus telling us that cricket was a spectator sport from the outset, and that its first supporters were rural working men.

While matches between ‘gentlemen’ were growing in popularity, more impromptu games were also thriving on common land at Chelsea, Kennington, Walworth, Clapham and Mitcham, as well as on rural grounds around the Weald. The rustic cricketers were not always welcome. As the Postman warned on 5 April 1705:

This is to give notice to any person whatsoever, that they do not presume to play at foot-ball, or cricket, or any other sport or pastime whatsoever, on Walworth Common, without lease of the Lords of that Manor … as they will answer the same when they are sued at law for so doing.

The name, Walworth Common, implies that it was common land, but the lords of that manor felt otherwise. They wished to discourage cricket, as did their allies the Church, who were only too happy to promote propaganda against it. A contemporary pamphlet recounted the tale of four young men unwise enough to play cricket on a Sunday. As they did so, a ‘Man in Black with a Cloven-foot’ rose out of the ground. The Devil, for it was said to be he, flew up into the air ‘in a dark cloud with flashes of fire’, but left behind him a very beautiful woman. Two of the players lost interest in the game and stepped up to kiss her. This was a bad move. The young men fell down dead: it was, after all, the Sabbath. Their companions, shocked at the result of such sin, ran home, appropriately to Maidenhead, where they lay in a ‘distracted condition’. The local minister prayed with them, and in church preached a sermon on the theme ‘Remember the Sabbath Day to Keep it Holy’ (Exodus 20, Verse 8). For good measure, he denounced cricket as a ‘hellish pastime’ – thus explaining to the congregation why the Devil was so attracted to it. At the inquest into the deaths of the two unfortunate youths, the coroner and the jury attributed their fate to ‘the last judgement of God, for prophaining his Holy Sabbath’. In cricket’s infancy, such poppycock resonated among the ill-educated peasantry. No one even considered a more likely cause of death: the players were struck by lightning, and the beautiful woman was a figment of the fevered imagination of a sunny day.

More eminent men than these rustic boys found themselves the victims of pamphlet propaganda. In May 1712 a broadsheet, The Devil and the Peers, attacked the Duke of Marlborough and an unidentified peer for playing a single-wicket match in Berkshire. This was real villainy, for the match was on a Sunday – and for a wager of twenty guineas. The unidentified peer, ‘who went to Eaton School’, was most likely Marlborough’s son-in-law Francis Godolphin, known by his courtesy title Lord Railton. Godolphin won, but – for even hostile pamphleteers must fawn over a Duke – not before His Grace had ‘gave ’em several Master strokes’. Marlborough was, after all, a national hero, and Sunday or not, master strokes were master strokes. Despite his sycophancy to Marlborough, the sour old pamphleteer predicted that the ‘Sabbath-Breakers will not escape the Hands of Justice’. He was wrong: not even the Church dared to move against the Duke, who heavily outgunned minor officials, as well as the pamphleteer.

So, of course, did the early patrons, all of whom had wealth or title, or both, to bolster their immunity from potential attackers. This is fortunate for cricket, since otherwise the spoilsports might have won the day. Aristocratic patronage began to lend a social respectability to cricket that it badly needed. Stow’s Survey of London (1720) mentions cricket as no better than football, wrestling, bell-ringing, shovelboard and drinking in alehouses as an amusement of ‘the more common sort’, but this slur would soon become redundant. Samuel Johnson played cricket at Oxford University in 1729, and Horace Walpole refers to cricket at Eton between 1727 and 1734.* Eton cricket also features in a poem entitled ‘The Priestcraft or the Way to Promotion’ printed in 1734 ‘behind the Chapter House in St Paul’s churchyard’ and written by an eighteenth-century angry young man, J. Wilford, who offers tongue-in-cheek advice to ‘the inferior clergy of England’ about how to behave at the forthcoming election. In the midst of his rant he unwittingly confirms that cricket was of rising interest:

No more with Birch, let Eton’s pupils bleed;

No more with learned lumber stuff their head,

Her rival fee! Like Nursery of Fools,

Who practice Cricket, more than Busby’s Rules.

Clearly, the aristocracy’s fascination for cricket was being reflected in the schools and universities to which they sent their children.

Three early patrons stand above the rest: Edward Stead, a sponsor of Kentish cricket, and two sponsors of Sussex, the Duke of Richmond and Sir William Gage. Stead (1701–35) lived the proverbial ‘short life but a merry one’. In his teens he inherited large estates in Kent, but he soon set about losing his fortune at cards and dice, to which, along with cricket, he was addicted. ‘The devil invented dice,’ said St Augustine, but Stead was not listening. He was so reckless that at the age of twenty-two he was forced to mortgage some of his lands to repay his gambling debts and raise capital.

By night Stead played the tables. By day he abandoned them for cricket, and formed his own team, ‘Stead’s Men’, or sometimes ‘Men of Kent’. Throughout the 1720s he arranged and played in many games – with mixed fortunes. On one occasion, Stead’s men were in a winning position when their Chingford opponents refused to finish the game. The cause of their refusal is unknown, but as a large wager depended on the result, Stead went to court to get his money. His plea was heard by the aptly-named Lord Chief Justice Pratt, who, it was reported, ‘not understanding the [rules of the] game, or having forgot’, simply ordered the match to be finished from where it left off, and made no order that Stead should be paid the sum due on the wager. There is no record of whether the game was ever completed or the wager settled. Nor do we know if the insolent journalist who doubted the Lord Chief Justice’s competence was fined for contempt.

But the ruling that the game should be finished had a favourable repercussion for cricket, if not for Stead. When, a week later, in Writtle, Essex, a zealous justice of the peace summoned a constable to disperse a few innocent locals playing the game, a cricket-lover wrote indignantly to the press with the unanswerable question: was it legal to play cricket in Kent at the order of the Lord Chief Justice – but not legal to play in Essex?

With or without his guineas, Stead played on. In August 1726 the ‘Men of London and Surrey’ faced him for twenty-five guineas at Kennington Common. Two years later his team was matched against the Duke of Richmond for ‘a large sum of money’ at Cox Heath. In the same year Stead and another of cricket’s early patrons, Sir William Gage, played an eleven-aside game for fifty guineas at the Earl of Leicester’s park at Penshurst. Stead’s men won after leading by 52 to 45 on the first innings. The final margin of victory is not recorded. It was the third occasion that summer that the ‘Men of Kent’ had defeated the Sussex team.

This fixture seems to have been a popular event, for the teams were rivals again the following year at Penshurst, when Gage obtained his revenge and won back double his money. The star of the game was a groom of the Duke of Richmond, Thomas Waymark, who ‘turned the scale of victory by his agility and dexterity’. Undeterred by this defeat, Stead, whose enthusiasm was greater than his success, played on – the gambler’s ‘win some, lose some’ mentality being his natural instinct. In August 1730 he and three other gentlemen played, and lost, against four men of Brentford for a ‘considerable wager’ in the deciding match in a series of three.* In June 1731 his ‘11 Gentlemen of Kent’ lost to ‘11 of Sunbury’, and thirty guineas changed hands. On 4 September a further (unknown) sum was wagered on a Surrey and Kent game, but a severe rainstorm washed out the fixture when Surrey, with three men to bat, needed twelve runs to win. The drenched cricketers agreed to a rematch, and Stead’s guineas were temporarily saved.

Stead was a graceful loser, and his nonchalance won him powerful friends. In August 1733 his team was matched against one raised by Frederick Louis, the Prince of Wales, the eldest son of George II, for a plate valued at £30. The game was played at Moulsey Hurst, Surrey, and the Prince’s men won. The contest was repeated in 1735, when Stead backed a London club against the Prince’s ‘Surrey’ team, and gained a narrow win by one wicket. It was to be the gambler’s last throw: Stead died a month later near Charing Cross, having done much to popularise early cricket.

One of Stead’s familiar opponents, Sir William Gage, succeeded to a baronetcy in 1713, at the age of eighteen. Nine years later he was elected to the Commons as MP for Seaford, which he retained until his death twenty-two years later. His estate, Firle in East Sussex, was one of the cradles of cricket, and it is likely that he learned to love the game as a boy. Apart from contests against Stead, Gage’s ‘Sussex XI’ were familiar opponents of the Duke of Richmond, the Earl of Middlesex, Lord John Sackville and the Prince of Wales. A letter to Richmond written by Gage on 16 July 1725 catches the flavour of the times:

My Lord Duke,

I have received this moment Your Grace’s letter and am extremely happy Your Grace intends as the honour of making one [presumably a game, but possibly also a wager] on Tuesday, and will without fail bring a gentleman with me to play against you, one that has played very seldom for these several years. I am in great affliction from being shamefully beaten yesterday, the first match I played this year. However, I will muster up all my courage against Tuesday’s engagement. I will trouble Your Grace with nothing more than I wish you success in everything but ye cricket match.

The wording of the letter suggests that the approach for either a game or a wager came from Richmond, and may have been for a single-wicket contest. Gage is keen to assure the Duke that he and his partner are in neither good form nor practice, although whether this was really the case or was intended to entice a larger wager is unclear. The fact that Gage tells Richmond he has only just played his first game of the year, with the season so well advanced, suggests, if true, that he may have been engaged on parliamentary duties.

Other games against Richmond were certainly between teams of eleven a side, for one, at Lewes in August 1730, was postponed because the Duke’s most accomplished player, his groom Thomas Waymark, fell ill. It is likely that Richmond was being cautious as the wager was high. In any event, the match was off.

Gage’s enthusiasm for cricket is summed up in a letter from John Whaley to Horace Walpole in August 1735, after he had seen Gage’s Sussex team beat the Gentlemen of Kent: ‘They seem as much pleased as if they had got an Election. We have been at Supper with them all and have left them at one o’clock in the morning laying betts about the next match.’ Where bets were concerned, return matches were common courtesy, and later in the month the Earl of Middlesex, supported by his brother Lord John Sackville and nine other gentlemen, defeated Gage and his Sussex colleagues to secure their revenge and – perhaps – recover their money.

The combination of cricketing rivalry and betting could be combustible. In July 1741 Slindon beat Portslade in a game attended by Gage and the Duke of Newcastle. On 5 August, Gage wrote to Newcastle to report the aftermath:

… the night of the cricket match after Your Grace left the field there was a bustle occasioned by the cry of ‘Calves head’ being resented by some of Your Grace’s friends and some hearty blows were given … the Western cricketers that had left the hearing of it returned with their cricket batts and dealt some heavy blows which carried the victory … I am glad the cricket match was over before this happened.

Sometimes the blood flowed during a match. The Old Whig reported on 1 July 1736 that ‘two famous Richmond men’ were playing two London men, Mr Wakeland (a distiller) and Mr Oldner, when one of the Richmond men (who were not named) was badly injured. The ball ‘hit up against the side of his nose, broke his nose, hurt his eye, and bruised his face … he lost a great quantity of blood’. ‘Notwithstanding this accident some Human Brutes who laid [bets] against the Richmond men, insisted he should play … after his nose was set, and his face dressed, and one side tied up, [he] attempted to play again.’ It was gallant but unavailing. The blood flowed again, and the match had to be rescheduled.

In its long history, cricket talent has often passed from father to son – for example, in recent years the Pollocks, Cowdreys and Stewarts, among others– and this phenomenon was evident with the greatest of the early patrons, the Sackville family. Three Sackvilles were prominent supporters of cricket, and a second wave was to follow. Lionel Sackville was created first Duke of Dorset in 1720, and in his pomp maintained his own ‘cricketing place’ at Knole near Sevenoaks: it was the first ground to be regularly mown, rolled and cosseted in preparation for cricket. There is no record of how often games were played at Knole, but Dorset employed as a gardener Valentine Romney, who according to the Kentish Gazette ‘was held to be the best cricket player in the world’. It was, of course, a ‘world’ still confined to the Home Counties of England, but the Duke’s employment of Romney bore testimony to his enthusiasm, which was inherited by his sons Charles and John.

In 1734, at the age of twenty-three, Charles Sackville, bearing the courtesy title of Earl of Middlesex, was elected Member of Parliament for East Grinstead, the family borough, but the embryonic politician had a far greater enthusiasm for cricket than for government. One year after his election he was seen at cricket matches, in the company of the Prince of Wales, more often than in the Commons. The two men raised teams to play one another, and in one encounter Sackville’s team won by four wickets for a prize of £1,000,* even though the Prince had employed Cook of Brentford, reckoned to be one of the best bowlers of the day. A return match at Bromley Common saw Sackville win by ten wickets. The Prince’s team batted first and scored 73, a reasonable score on the bumpy wickets of the day, but it was easily topped by Sackville’s Kent, who amassed 97. When London collapsed in the second innings for 32, Kent needed only a mere 9 runs for a comfortable win. A contemporary report gives a flavour of the social niceties when a Prince of the realm was involved. The Earl and his team were in place by 11 a.m., together with a multitude of spectators, but the stumps were not pitched until the Prince arrived two hours later, having driven leisurely to the ground in a one-horse chair. At the end of the game, pandemonium ensued as the Prince departed. The large crowd, boisterous and refreshed with strong ale, mingled together and ‘a great deal of mischief was done, by some falling from their horses, or others being rode over … and one man was carried off for dead as HRH passed by’. It must have been mayhem.

Middlesex was an easy-natured character, who loved fun, was open-handed and lavished substantial sums of money on opera as well as cricket. Not everyone approved. In 1743 the acidic Horace Walpole wrote to his friend Horace Mann:

There is a new subscription formed for an Opera next year to be carried on by The Dilettanti, a club, for which the nominal qualification is having been in Italy and the real one being drunk: the two chiefs are Lord Middlesex and Sir Francis Dashwood who were seldom sober the whole time they were in Italy.

This was a harsh judgement, but standard fare for Walpole, who did not always escape unscathed himself. One victim jeered that ‘he used to enter a room as if he were stepping on a wet floor with his hat crushed between his knees’. In short, he minced. Perhaps Walpole’s sharp tongue was a weapon of self-defence. If so, he was exercising it again on 4 May 1743:

Lord Middlesex is the impresario and must ruin the House of Sackville by a course of these follies. Beside what he will losethis year, he has not paid his share of the losses of the last, yet he is singly undertaking another for next season, with the utmost certainty of losing between £4000 and £5000.

Not everyone was so censorious – or ungrateful. Years later, an obituarist praised Middlesex as ‘a leading Patron of Opera’. Walpole would have scoffed, and it beggars the imagination what he might have written of the scale of present-day opera subsidies. The Duke of Dorset shared Walpole’s analysis of his son’s opera ventures, for he advised the King not to subscribe: if the son fell out of favour with the monarch, the father had no intention of doing so. Walpole dripped contempt: ‘Lord Middlesex is so obstinate that this will probably only make him lose £1000 more.’

Such episodes infuriated Dorset, who sought a steadying influence for his wayward heir. He found one in Grace Boyle, the daughter of Viscount Shannon, whom Middlesex married, no doubt under duress, in 1744. Grace was no beauty – she was unkindly described as ‘low and ugly but a vast scholar’, and ‘very short, very plain, very yellow, and a vain girl, full of Greek and Latin’. She seems an unlikely bride for the pleasure-loving Middlesex, but Dorset was pleased to have tied his son down: in relief, he settled £2,000 a year on him. Unfortunately, Middlesex didn’t tie Grace down, and she became the mistress of the Prince of Wales, which suggests either that the Prince loved fine minds or that Grace was less plain than her detractors claimed. Or perhaps not – the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay claimed, rather spitefully, that the Prince of Wales often quitted ‘the only woman he loved [his wife] for ugly and disagreeable mistresses’. In any event, Middlesex may have had other things on his mind: the first cricket laws were framed that same year.

The old Duke died in 1765, and Middlesex succeeded to the Dorset title. Sackville manuscripts were soon recording bills for cricket bats (at 2s.6d. each) and cricket balls (at 3s.6d. each). But the new Duke’s final years were unhappy; he passed them as a ‘proud, disgusted, melancholy, solitary man’, and his behaviour became irrational and unbalanced. When Grace died in 1763 he lived with a girl he hoped to marry, but was thwarted when his family prevented the match, citing his unstable mental state. The second Duke of Dorset died in 1769, disillusioned, insolvent, mad, and a widower.

His brother John followed an eerily similar path. He entered Parliament even younger than Middlesex, being elected for Tamworth at only twenty-one years of age. He sat in the Commons for thirteen years, but, the family preference being strong, cricket took priority over his parliamentary duties. He played for his brother’s teams, as well as those he arranged himself. As an Equerry to Queen Caroline from 1736 he too came to know the Prince of Wales well, and in 1737 the two of them arranged what the London Evening Post called ‘the greatest match at cricket that has ever been contested’. The game, held on 15 June at Kennington Common, was one of the social events of the year. A pavilion was erected for the Prince, and the press of humanity was so great that one poor woman, caught in the crowd, had her leg broken. Her pain was alleviated with a generous gift of ten guineas from the Prince. Lord John Sackville had assembled a fine team, and Kent won comfortably. A return match was arranged, but Kent won again, by an innings.

In June 1744 Sackville gained a small measure of immortality by taking a crucial catch as Kent beat England by one run at the famous Artillery Ground in London. The poet James Dance, alias James Love (a name he adopted after marrying a Miss Lamour), described it in ‘Cricket: An Heroic Poem’, published on 5 July that year:

Swift as the falcon, darting on its prey,

He springs elastick o’er the verdant way;

Sure of success, flies upwards; with a bound,

Derides the slow approach and spurns the ground.

Prone slips the youth, yet glories in his fall,

With arm extended shows the captive ball.

In other words, Lord John took a running catch and fell over. The description of the event was a bit floral, and the poet confessed in one of his mock-scholarly footnotes that ‘though this description may a little exceed the real fact, it may be excused as there is a great deal of foundation for it’. If so, one wonders why the apologetic footnote was penned.

In that same year there were tricky hurdles for Lord John to face off the field. Two days after his mistress Frances Leveson-Gower gave birth to his child at Woburn Abbey, her irate parents compelled them to marry. Sackville’s cricketing friend the Prince of Wales soothed the ruffled in-laws and offered to make up Lord John’s allowance from his father to £800 a year, which was accomplished by appointing him a Lord of the Bedchamber. It was a much-needed sinecure, for lack of funds was a constant burden for this impecunious second son. He had hoped to inherit the Sussex estates of his elderly great- uncle Spencer Compton,* valued at £3,000–£4,000 per annum, but upon his expected benefactor’s death he received nothing. His great- uncle may have feared the money would be squandered.

A lost inheritance, an unwanted child and a hasty and unwelcome marriage were not the sum total of Lord John’s misfortunes. The taint of mental instability was as strong in the Sackville genes as the love of cricket. In 1746, as a Lieutenant Colonel in the 2nd Foot Guards, he was arrested for desertion as his regiment was about to embark for overseas service. He was released to confinement in a private lunatic asylum, and hustled abroad by his embarrassed family. In 1760 Lord Fitz Maurice reported that Sackville was eking out an existence in Lausanne, ‘living on a poor allowance and but very meanly looked after. He was very fond of coming among the young English at Lausanne, who suffered his company at times from motives of curiosity, and sometimes from humanity. He was always dirtily clad, but it was easy to perceive something gentlemanlike in his manner and a look of birth about him, under all his disadvantages. His conversation was a mixture of weakness and shrewdness, as is common to most madmen.’ When told his brother Lord George had been dismissed from the army in 1759 for failing to obey an order to advance at the Battle of Minden, John immediately responded, ‘I always told you my brother George was no better than myself.’ Unstable or not, he seems to have had an accurate self-image.

John Russell, Duke of Bedford, was related by marriage to Lord John Sackville, and shared his enthusiasm for cricket. In 1741, before six thousand spectators, his team played a match at Wotton, Bucks, against a side raised by Richard Grenville, brother-in-law of Pitt the Elder. Grenville was obviously keen to win, for he paid his players two guineas each, but he lost the game, and no doubt his bets too. Ralph Vernay, a critic of gambling, wrote: ‘These matches will be as pernicious to poor people as horse races for the contagion spreads.’ Bedford also lost two games at Woburn Park to teams raised by the Earls of Sandwich and Halifax, but he was successful a year later in beating a London side at the Artillery Ground. The following year, 1743, London had their revenge, winning two matches, the latter at the Artillery Ground for five hundred guineas. Nothing daunted, the Duke played on and continued to sponsor games at Woburn Park until at least 1756.

The Prince of Wales was not the only cricketing enthusiast with royal blood. Charles Lennox, the second Duke of Richmond (1701– 50), a grandson of Charles II and his French mistress Louise de Kérouaille, later Duchess of Portsmouth, was among the most important of the early patrons. Introduced to cricket at an early age, he became a lover of the game, patron of matches, sponsor of players and father and grandfather of significant figures in cricket history. At the age of eighteen, as Lord March, he was married to a thirteen-year-old girl in settlement of a gambling debt. The cynical ceremony over, the bridegroom toured Europe and the child-bride returned to her education. Five years later, on the eve of a formal reunion, they met by chance and were entranced with one another. They enjoyed a long and idyllic marriage before Richmond died at the age of forty-nine; his Duchess, the once child-bride Sarah, survived him by less than a year. His friend Lord Hervey, often the possessor of a wicked tongue, wrote in his Memoirs:

There never lived a man of more amiable composition; he was kindly, benevolent, generous, honourable and thoroughly noble in his way of acting, talking and thinking; he had constant spirits, was very entertaining and had a great deal of knowledge though, not having had a school education, he was a long while reckoned ignorant by the generality of the world.

It was a kindly and apt epitaph, and surprising too, from a man once described by Alexander Pope as ‘a painted child of dirt that stinks and stings’. The Duke of Richmond would have been flattered by the tribute, but more pleased, perhaps, that both his sons were able cricketers.

In his prime the Duke was fastidious about how his team was turned out. In 1726 he paid for ‘waistcoats, breeches and caps’ for his cricketers, and two years later burdened them with ‘yellow velvet caps with silver tassels’. Apart from these sartorial touches he was also meticulous about the rules under which he played, and two games against a Mr Alan Brodrick – one to be played in July 1727 in Surrey, the second in August in Sussex – saw these spelled out in great detail. The pitches were of twenty-three yards; a player falling sick during the match could be replaced; any player voicing an opinion on any point of the game would be turned out, with, of course, the exceptions of the Duke and Mr Brodrick; each side should provide one umpire; batsmen must touch the umpires’ stick for every run or it would not count; and no player could be run out unless the wicket was broken by a fielder with the ball in his hands. From these Articles of Agreement (reproduced in full as Appendix 1, page 399) we see glimpses of how conformity began to be reached in the rules of cricket.

Richmond was a keen gambler. Some of his wagers were for a comparatively modest twelve guineas a game, but he was apt to take on far larger bets, although accepting only a percentage of them personally: for example, in April 1730 he and four others shared a wager for a hundred guineas on a game in Hyde Park. In August 1731 he sponsored two matches for two hundred guineas a time against a Middlesex XI led by a Mr Chambers (probably Thomas Chambers, a forebear of the great nineteenth-century MCC figure Lord Frederick Beauclerk). Chambers won the first match on 16 August, and was winning the return on the twenty-third when the allotted time elapsed and it was declared drawn. The latter game drew thousands of spectators, including many ‘persons of distinction of both sexes’. It ended with the near-obligatory affray, in which, as Fog’s Weekly Journal reported, ‘The Duke and his cricket players were greatly insulted by the mob at Richmond and some of the men having their shirts tore off their backs: and ’tis said a law suit will commence about the play.’

Richmond’s love of cricket was lifelong. Ten years later, in 1741, his correspondence is full of cricket chat as he writes about the Sussex County by-election. There was a lot of cricket in Sussex in June of that year. On the tenth he confides to the Duke of Dorset: ‘My steward is now going about the parishes, he has been at a cricket match today.’ Four days later, Richmond writes to the Duke of Newcastle that ‘Sergison [Thomas Sergison, the Tory candidate] was expected last night at Westdean and ’tis believed he will go to a great cricket match in Stansted Parke tomorrow between Slyndon and Portsmouth.’

To the Duke of Newcastle he added that Sergison was ‘attended by Lisbon Peckham* and four or five of the Chichester Tory’s, butt did not ask for one vote, and I don’t believe could have made one if he had asked. I got Tanky** to come in order to swell and look big at him but Sergison never appeared before us, butt went off as soon as we came.’ So he may have done, but the episode was not over, as a further letter to Newcastle on 29 July revealed: ‘have you heard that Sergison treated his people the night of the cricket match at Portslade and that there was a bloody battle between them and the Slyndoners but the last came off victorious tho’ with some broken heads’ – a reference to the match attended by Newcastle and Sir William Gage.

Slindon – ‘poor little Slyndon’, as Richmond referred to it – was a favourite side of his, for he wrote again to the Duke of Newcastle apologising that he would be late for a meeting because he wished to see Slindon play ‘the whole County of Surrey’ at Merrow Down. A postscript notes gleefully that ‘wee have beat Surrey almost in one innings’. This correspondence suggests that cricket was not an isolated amusement in Sussex in 1741, but that a series of matches were played, that they were not all sponsored, that they could draw large crowds, and that Richmond was an enthusiast for the game itself, irrespective of whether wagers were involved. Cricket was becoming a settled part of rural life and a proper subject for aristocratic correspondence – even by-election candidates attended games as part of their campaigns.

But Richmond has more information for us yet. In 1745 he was one of the backers of three games between Surrey and Sussex,* the accounts of which are preserved in the Sackville manuscripts at Maidstone:

To 12 gamesters at the Artillery Ground And Moulsey Hurst @ 3 guineas each	£37–16s–
To 10 gamesters on Bury Hill, 9th Sept	£10–10s–
To Martin of Henfield on ditto	£ 2– 2s–
To Adam Newland for going to fetch him	10s–
To the scorer	10s–6d
To half the bill of expenses paid by Mr Smith	£10– 9s–
	___________
	£61–17s–6d

The above bill to be paid for in the following proportions:
Duke of Richmond 40	£24–15s–
Lord Sackville 20	£12– 7s–6d
Mr Taaf 20	£12– 7s–6d
Duchess of Richmond	10 £ 6– 3s–9d
Lord Berkeley 10	£ 6– 3s–9d
	_________
	£61–17s–6d

Richmond and Lord John Sackville were old allies as patrons, but that did not inhibit Lord John from rebuking the Duke about his team selection: ‘I wish you had let Ridgway play instead of your stopper behind, it might have turned the match in our favour.’

Two of the other sponsors of the Surrey–Sussex games, ‘Mr Taaf’ and the Duchess of Richmond, merit special mention. Theobald Taafe (c.1708–80) was an Irishman with aristocratic connections and a long purse, having married a wealthy Englishwoman. Sometime MP for Arundel as a Whig, he was a boon companion in ‘riot and gaming’ of the Duke of Bedford and Lord Sandwich. Horace Walpole, that censorious correspondent, wrote to Horace Mann on 22 November 1751:

He is a gamester, usurer, adventurer, and of late has divided his attentions between the Duke of Newcastle and Madame de Pompadour, travelling with turtles and pineapples in post-chaises to the latter, flying back to the former for Lewes races – and smuggling burgundy at the same time.

Walpole had a fine disregard of the laws of libel. But perhaps he was right, for later that year Taafe was charged with robbing a gambling associate in Paris and thrown in prison. He was released after representations by the British Ambassador, but his constituents in Arundel were unimpressed: he came bottom of the poll at the next election in 1754. Thereafter he became notorious as a gambler, libertine and confidence trickster, and was twice more imprisoned in France, including a spell in the Bastille.

As for the Duchess of Richmond, the Goodwood accounts reveal that she bore the costs of staging cricket matches, which suggests that she had absorbed a love of the game from the Duke. In July 1741 she writes him: ‘If there was a leisure day I should be glad to get Slindon and East Dean ready to play at cricket.’ The very next day she writes: ‘Send a servant as soone as you can to lett Robert Dearling at East Dean know he is to get the people att your house on Saturday and the same person must afterwards go to John Newland with the same message.’ Newland was almost certainly John Newland of Slindon, one of three brothers who played for England against Kent in 1744. Nor was the Duchess’s interest short-term. In July 1747 the Whitehall Evening Post was clearly referring to her when it reported of a ladies’ match: ‘They play very well … being encouraged by a lady of high rank in their neighbourhood, who likes the diversion.’

The dukes were not the highest-born enthusiasts for cricket: that accolade belongs to Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales (1707–51), known to history as ‘poor Fred’. The eldest son of George II and Queen Caroline, from his childhood his life was a constant and deadly feud with his parents, with mutual dislike evident on both sides. The underlying cause of the bitterness between them is unknown, but we can conjecture. Certainly the fact that Frederick was educated in Hanover, and barely saw his parents between the ages of seven and twenty-one, cannot have helped. As an adult he lived in an unimpressive house in the unfashionable area of Leicester Fields (now Square). It was a time of Whig domination, in which Tories were regarded as the enemies of the ruling family and excluded from preferment: only Whigs were ennobled or created baronets. Prince Frederick courted the out-of-favour Tories, welcomed them to his home, and opposed Whig policy. All of this must have hugely irritated the King – which was, of course, its purpose.

When the Prince put politics aside he turned to cricket, and matches with such as Stead, Gage and the Sackvilles. He was first seen at a cricket ground at Kennington in 1731, after which his interest blossomed. At the end of a game between Surrey and Middlesex at Moulsey Hurst in July 1733 he paid a guinea to each player for their skills, although that afternoon cricket was only the forerunner of the entertainment. As the Prince prepared to leave a hare sped past him, pursued by soldiers. The terrified animal took to the nearby Thames for sanctuary but, undeterred, the soldiers jumped in and caught her before she had swum to the safety of deep water. A joyous water battle ensued as the soldiers fought over the captured hare, to the vast amusement of the onlookers. The fate of the hare is unknown.

Such diversions whetted the Prince’s appetite for the game. At Moulsey Hurst in June 1735 he backed Surrey and other country men against London in an eventful contest. London’s finest bowler, a Mr Ellis, dislocated his finger and was replaced by the famous Cook of Brentford. It was a bad day for fingers, for one of the Prince’s team also damaged a digit, retired for a while and then returned to the crease, but failed to score many runs.* The London team won, with Mr Wheatley, a distiller, and a Mr Dun leading them to victory.

The Prince played his first match (the Prince and ten noblemen vs London) at Kensington Gardens in 1735, aged twenty-eight, and two years later, in June 1737, was leading a team against the Duke of Marlborough for ‘a considerable sum’. The Prince’s team won, and in July were due to play for £500 against the same opponents, but the game was apparently abandoned following the birth of his eldest son the day before. It was a birth that typified the enmity that now existed between the Prince and his parents: his wife was staying at Hampton Court, but when she was ‘in her birth pains’ he removed her so that his child was not born in a palace in which the King and Queen were resident. He was not alone in his hostility: his parents fully returned it. The King’s view of Frederick was that he was ‘a monster and the greatest villain ever born’, while Queen Caroline confided to the Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole, ‘You do not know my filthy beast of a son as well as I do.’ Shortly after her grandchild was born the Queen died, and the royal family’s tangled personal relationships were once more exposed. ‘You must remarry,’ the dying Queen told her husband. ‘Non, j’aurai des maîtresses’ (‘No, I shall have some mistresses’), he replied, in a staggering example of boorishness. ‘Ah, mon Dieu,’ signed the Queen, ‘cela n’empêche pas’ (‘My God, that needn’t stop you’).

Although the Prince was more frequently a spectator than a player, often bringing distinguished guests with him,* in a game at Cliveden, his home in Buckinghamshire, sometime in 1749 he received a heavy blow on his side from a cricket ball. When he died two years later while dancing at Leicester House, that blow was widely thought to be the cause of the abscess that killed him. Following the wretched Jasper Vinall (see page 24), his was another death attributed to cricket. It is probable that his father did not miss ‘poor Fred’, and another of his late mother’s assessments of him echoes through the ages: ‘My dear firstborn is the greatest ass, and the greatest beast in the world, and I heartily wish he was out of it.’

Out of it he now was, but propriety required the King to order full mourning. All public amusements ceased. Ladies dressed in black bombazine and plain muslin, while men wore black cloth (with adornments or decorations), plain muslin cravats and black swords. Both sexes wore muffled chamois leather shoes. This ostentatious display continued for six months. ‘Deep’ mourning lasted a week, ‘full’ mourning for three months, and, farcically, ‘second’ mourning for a similar time, during which grey could replace deepest black. One effect of this charade was to destroy sales of silk, and thus rob fifteen thousand workers in Spitalfields of their jobs. Cricket showed more genuine respect to the Prince, with a game in his memory at Saltford Meadow near Bath in July 1751.

While Frederick had been alive and enjoying his cricket, his younger brother William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (1721–65), had been involved in more savage business. Much of Scotland had never been reconciled to the Act of Union with England in 1707, and in 1745 the Jacobite cause raised its standard once more. ‘Bonnie’ Prince Charlie landed in the Western Isles, and within three months was ruler of most of Scotland. His army marched, winning victories as far south as Preston, but gained few adherents either in the lowlands of Scotland or in England. At Derby they halted and turned to march back to Scotland, pursued by the English under Cumberland. In April 1746 Cumberland destroyed the Scots at Culloden, and the Jacobite revival ended. The English pursued the rebels with ferocity, accompanying Cumberland’s victory with merciless slaughter that earned the enduring epithet ‘Butcher’ for their commander. So hated was he that when Dr Johnson visited Bedlam, he found an inmate tearing at his straw in the belief that he was punishing Cumberland for his cruelty to the Scots. If he had visited Jonathan’s Coffee House at Temple Bar he would have seen some more cruelty: it was decorated with the severed heads of Scots rebels. They remained on display for years. None of this seems to have impacted upon the cricket patrons, who rejoiced at the defeat of the Scots and welcomed Cumberland to their number.

There is no doubt that Cumberland was merciless in his pursuit of those who were seeking to turn his father off the throne, and his porcine features and eighteen-stone bulk added to the image of ruthlessness. The reality that he was also a brave and innovative commander, with an eye for merit among his soldiers (he promoted Howe, Coote and Wolfe) and a record of solid if unspectacular reforms of army procedures, is buried in the small print of history.

At leisure, Cumberland loved horse-racing, cards, the fine arts, especially Chelsea china, and when not soldiering he was a frequent spectator at cricket. In one of his early forays, in August 1751, his team was beaten by an innings by a side raised by Sir John Elwell, Bart, an opponent who was better known for his love of fox-hunting. But in the same month Cumberland’s team was victorious against Lord Sandwich in what may have been a return match, for a letter from Robert Ord to the Earl of Carlisle dated 13 August reports the ironic outcome of an earlier encounter:

You see in the papers that Lord Sandwich has won his match at cricket against the Duke, but what I think the best part of the story is not told here. The Duke, to procure good players on his side, ordered 22, who were reckoned the best players in the Country, to be brought before him, in order for him to choose 11 out of them. They played accordingly, and he chose 11. The other 11, being affronted at the choice, challenged the elect to play for a crown a head out of their own pockets. The challenge was accepted; and they played before the Duke and the elect were beat all to nothing.*

It seems, at least for the first match, that Cumberland was a finer judge of soldiers than of cricketers.

Horace Walpole’s disapproving correspondence unmasks another noble cricketing sponsor. Henry Bromley, Lord Montford, became a peer in 1741 when George II allowed his mistress Lady Yarmouth to sell two peerages to raise funds. Bromley immediately raised teams to play Lord John Sackville, and was sufficiently active in society to catch Walpole’s attention, as he wrote to Horace Mann in June 1749:

‘I could tell you of Lord Montford’s making cricket matches and fetching up parsons by express from different parts of England to play matches on Richmond Green; of his keeping aide-de-camps to ride to all parts to lay bets for him at horse-races …’ The bets were lost, and Montford wasted his fortune, but he lacked neither courage nor style. When he realised he was £30,000 (about £3 million today) in debt he made his will, read it carefully three times and then went into the next room and shot himself through the head before his lawyer had left the house.

Another notorious gambler, William Douglas, Earl of March (1725–1810), put his knowledge of cricket to good purpose. He entered into a wager that he could convey a letter a certain number of miles within a given time, which, since the distance was faster than horses could travel, was deemed to be impossible. But March was cunning: he enclosed the letter within a cricket ball and had it repeatedly thrown around within a circle of eminent cricketers, easily covering the distance. It was sharp practice, but he won his guineas.

John Montague, Earl of Sandwich (1718–92) – famous for the invention of the snack bearing his name – features in cricket history as the cricket-lover to whom James Dance dedicated his 1744 ‘Cricket: An Heroic Poem’ (see page 53). He was also the subject of some satirical verses written by Sir C. H. Williams which appeared in the Place Book for the Year, 1745:

Next in lollop’d Sandwich, with negligent grace

For the sake of a lounge, not for love of a place

Quoth he, ‘Noble Captain, your fleets may now nick it,

For I’ll sit at your board, when at leisure from cricket.’

Sandwich, who was a Lord of the Admiralty at the time, kept up his cricketing activities alongside his official duties. In June 1751 he organised three matches against the Earl of March for the sum of a thousand guineas, the winner requiring two victories. Both Sandwich and March played in the games, and Sandwich’s team of ‘eleven gentlemen from Eaton [sic] College’ were dressed in silk jackets and velvet caps to add to the spectacle. They also ‘took constant exercise’ to prepare themselves. The result of the first match is unrecorded, but Sandwich won the second and March the third, so the fate of the guineas is unknown. As an added attraction, a further entertainment that appealed to all classes was laid on: there was cockfighting between each match, at which spectators shouted their bets as the blood and feathers flew. It was an odd accompaniment to cricket, but cockfighting remained a hugely popular sport.

Sandwich maintained an active interest in playing cricket until at least 1766, when he was in his late forties. As George Montague wrote to Horace Walpole in October that year:

Lord Sandwich would play at cricket when he was at Sir George’s this summer with his eldest son, against Sir George and the youngest Sir George caught him out left handed before he got one, went in, fagged him fourteen times till the Earl was not able to run any or move, but paid his money and went to bed.

‘Sir George’ was Sir George Osborn, Bart (1742–1818). Sandwich was a tall, vigorous man who when not playing cricket was an active member of the notorious Hell Fire Club. He certainly lived up to its reputation: after his long-suffering wife finally left him in 1755 he had three sons by a mistress who was murdered by a deranged clergyman in 1779.

Cricket had entered the bloodstream of the aristocracy, and a relative handful of patrons, enthusiasts for cricket and betting, did much to popularise the peasant’s game. Until 1750 most teams were known by the name of their home town or parish, or by the identity of their patrons. There are references to a few cricket clubs: in 1718–19 the Rochester Punch Club Society in Kent had been formed, and was playing a London side. A Clapham Club appeared in 1731, and by 1735 there were at least two clubs in London – a Westminster Club that played its home games at Tothill Fields, and an Artillery Ground side, which also played under the loose nomenclature of the ‘London Club’. Another London club was playing home games at Lamb’s Conduit Fields by 1736, and in 1745 and 1747 advertisements in the Norwich Mercury invited ‘lovers of cricket’ to ‘subscribe their names for the ensuing season’. The enthusiasts of Norwich clearly took the game very seriously: spectators were warned ‘not to bring dogs along with them’, for ‘if there was any interruption … by them in the game … all such dogs will certainly be killed on the spot’. The poor animals found chasing the ball irresistible, thus hindering play.

It was a fierce threat from enthusiasts of a game growing in fame. In 1755 cricket would even earn a mention in Dr Johnson’s new dictionary. ‘Cricket’, defined Johnson, is ‘a sport of which the contenders drive a ball with sticks in opposition to each other’ – accurate insofar as it went, but inadequate. Soon the game would be far better-known.

* Jonas Hanway (1712–86) is credited with inventing the umbrella, but this is doubtful: in 1710, two years before Hanway was born, Swift wrote: ‘The tuck’d up seamstress walks with hasty strides/While streams run down her oil’d umbrella’s sides’ (‘City Show’).

* Walpole (1717–91) was the fourth Earl of Orford and third son of Prime Minister Robert Walpole. A sometime MP for Callington, Castle Rising and King’s Lynn, he is most remembered for his letters and memoirs.

* The earlier matches had been played at Westerham on 28 May and at Kew Green on 4 June.

* Kent (Sackville) vs London and Middlesex (Prince of Wales) on 12 and 30 July 1735.

* The Earl of Wilmington, who succeeded Sir Robert Walpole as Prime Minister in 1742.

* Henry Peckham, nicknamed ‘Lisbon’ because of his interest in the wine trade, notably port, was a merchant and three-time Mayor of Chichester. He was the grandfather of Harry Peckham, who was to help revise the Laws of Cricket thirty-three years later.

** The Earl of Tankerville, whose grandson was also to be on the committee revising laws with Harry Peckham.

* At the Artillery Ground, London, and Moulsey Hurst in August, and at Bury Hill on 9 September.

* The injured man was Wood of Woodcote, a member of an avid cricketing family who formed nearly all of the Surrey team that beat Kent at Duppas Hill, near Croydon, in 1731.

* For example, the Prince and Serene Highness of Hesse in June 1746.

* Quoted in Eric Parker, The History of Cricket (1950).