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More Than A Game: The Story of Cricket's Early Years
John Major
The former Prime Minister examines the early history of one of the great loves of his life in a book that sheds new light on the summer game’s social origins.All his life John Major has loved cricket. In ‘More Than a Game’ he examines it from its origins up to the coming of the First World War. Along the way he considers the crucial role of the wealthy patrons who gambled huge sums on early matches; the truth behind the legends that have grown up around the famous Hambledon Club; changes in rules and techniques, including the transition from underarm to overarm bowling; the long-standing, but often blurred, distinction between 'gentlemen' and 'players'; the coming of the MCC and its role as the supreme arbiter of the game; the spread of cricket throughout the British Empire; and the emergence of the county game and international competition.It is a story rich in anecdote and colourful characters. Many of the great names from the 'Golden Age' of cricket – C.B. Fry, Ranjitsinhji, 'Demon' Spofforth and of course the towering figure of W.G. Grace – are still well-known today. But long before then the game already had its stars: men like the Kentish innkeeper's son 'Lumpy' Stevens, who played at the highest level until he was nearly sixty; 'Silver Billy' Beldham, who was taught how to play by a gingerbread baker; the notoriously avaricious and ill-tempered Lord Frederic Beauclerk, a direct descendant of Charles II and Nell Gwynne; and the mighty 'Lion of Kent' Alfred Mynn.


MORE THAN A GAME
The Story of Cricket’s Early Years


JOHN MAJOR


To Norma, Elizabeth, James and Luke

Contents
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS (#u5790b70e-3732-597d-bbd5-27f2325e8218)
PREFACE (#u8bbbb1b1-336a-52df-9fab-7b172b8d6239)

1 The Lost Century of Cricket (#ud48f78fb-cf42-5793-b1f8-3ae185969c6c)
2 The Early Patrons (#u96e3ed52-deb3-5c8d-9005-b74afa5d58b9)
3 The Later Patrons (#u881d71da-9fd4-5be1-91d7-d5b553cf5f83)
4 The Men Who Made Cricket (#u1f4e47a0-c90d-537a-94fd-4cdf0dd70b79)
5 Cricket Spreads: Early Roots (#u8001410e-79f1-5bcf-9fbb-ef307543ddce)
6 The Round-Arm Rebellion (#u8fa41a0c-6339-5249-aa43-042c2131a98f)
7 The Mandarins of Lord’s (#u093f4e98-2c15-5e2c-a3f2-17689efac497)
8 The Rise and Fall of Single-Wicket (#u475534f5-61c6-51b7-b774-290d22aff31c)
9 The Missionary and the Mercenaries (#udba49f76-7418-50ca-8237-436c1aee5e46)
10 Wider Still and Wider: Cricket Goes Abroad (#u9b48b88d-8049-5e21-ad33-0a663af31c09)
11 The Birth of the Ashes (#ubda6da12-5894-506d-ab42-1d5c3a945685)
12 The Boom in Leisure: Competition for Cricket (#u9b9392b6-6d8b-53b0-8eda-eeba0a5ac880)
13 The Cricketers and the Counties (#ubd2f748d-9a50-54f5-9f2e-043cb62de266)
14 The Chroniclers and the Scribes (#u1c3dcbb7-89f2-5377-8889-525abb46dfaa)
15 The Autocrats (#u41e17569-d66d-5935-a5c6-8e6ac781c28e)
16 The Grand Old Man and the Backroom Boy (#ue4b2920b-fe82-5e83-95f7-9c322b06aecf)
17 Your English Summer’s Done (#u846174d4-3abf-5b3c-85c9-ee299983af9a)

AFTERWORD (#u675542a5-c715-5a70-9426-52e50bf1c479)

APPENDIX 1: ‘Articles of Agreement by & between His Grace the Duke of Richmond and Mr. Brodrick (for two Cricket Matches) concluded the Eleventh of July 1727’ (#uca30407a-d014-56ae-a36d-9ce573940882)
APPENDIX 2: Rules of the White Conduit Club (#u1aae4999-1a6d-58ef-a896-c60bde6b9702)
APPENDIX 3: ‘Laws for Single Wicket’ (1831) (#ub9cd9369-9d0c-5dbb-8431-0aea0d99d1a5)
APPENDIX 4: Important Single-Wicket Matches 1800–1848 (#u4c526db7-f2e4-5942-8c4a-a5666cdab947)
APPENDIX 5: W.J. Prowse, ‘In Memoriam, Alfred Mynn 1807–1861’ (#u22a13624-4bd7-53df-a02c-79cbbf8b965e)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#u305bf7c5-c68f-5bc9-810e-489df11ff753)
INDEX (#u3cf4b9a5-4b04-5155-97d7-07a21f8a8b95)
COPYRIGHT (#u78c3bb17-b4b9-5f45-b63e-f3b9478e9216)
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#ubb92c703-696c-5ceb-a6cc-85b688f2069d)

Illustrations (#u0843e381-a358-5c6d-8f3e-f8b7be1731e8)
Charles Lennox, second Duke of Richmond, a keen gambler with a lifelong love of cricket. Mezzotint by John Faber Jr, after John Vanderbank. (Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, London)
Sir William Gage, whose estate Firle in East Sussex was one of the cradles of eighteenth-century cricket. (Courtesy of the Firle EstateTrustees)
Cricket being played in 1743 at the Artillery Ground in Finsbury, London. (The Roger Mann Collection)
Lionel Sackville, first Duke of Dorset, one of the great early patrons of the game. Portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1717. (Private Collection,© NTPL/John Hammond)
Charles Sackville, second Duke of Dorset. Portrait by Rosalba Carriera. (Private Collection, © NTPL/John Hammond)
Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, an enthusiastic early patron of cricket. Portrait miniature by Gaetano Manini, 1755. (© AshmoleanMuseum, University of Oxford/The Bridgeman Art Library)
The Duke of Cumberland, a better judge of a soldier than a cricketer. Portrait by David Morier. (© Private Collection/Philip Mould Ltd/TheBridgeman Art Library)
A match at Moulsey Hurst, on the banks of the river Mole in Surrey. (The Roger Mann Collection)
‘Lumpy’ Stevens, the most deadly underarm bowler of his day. (TheRoger Mann Collection)
Sir Horace Mann, the most amiable of cricket’s early benefactors. (TheRoger Mann Collection)
John Frederick Sackville, third Duke of Dorset, the third in a line of great cricketing patrons. Portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1769. (Private Collection, © NTPL/John Hammond)
The Countess of Derby plays cricket with other ladies at The Oaks, in Surrey, in 1779. (The Roger Mann Collection)

John Nyren, whose memories of Hambledon have given us a vivid picture of early cricket. (The Roger Mann Collection)
An eighteenth-century cricket match, possibly at Hambledon. (TheRoger Mann Collection)
A page from a sketchbook by George Shepheard, showing some of the Hambledon cricketers. (The Roger Mann Collection)
The Bat and Ball Inn on Broadhalfpenny Down, Hambledon. (TheRoger Mann Collection)
‘Silver Billy’ Beldam joined the Hambledon club in 1785, and lifted the art of batting to a new level of style and elegance. (The Roger MannCollection)
Lord Winchilsea, a key founder of the MCC who encouraged Thomas Lord to acquire its first ground. (The Roger Mann Collection)
Cricket Played by the Gentlemen’s Club, White Conduit House, Islington in 1784. (The Roger Mann Collection)
An engraving, after Thomas Rowlandson, depicting a match between the ladies of Hampshire and Surrey at Newington in 1811. (The RogerMann Collection)
The canny Yorkshireman Thomas Lord, who left the world’s most famous cricket ground as his memorial. (The Roger Mann Collection)
William Ward, a central figure in securing Lord’s place as the headquarters of cricket. (The Roger Mann Collection)
Benjamin Aislabie, first Secretary of the MCC. (The Roger MannCollection)
Lord Frederick Beauclerk: avaricious, ill-tempered, hypocritical, and adept at bending the rules. (The Roger Mann Collection)
Fuller Pilch, the finest batsman of his day, and ‘single-wicket champion of England’. (The Roger Mann Collection)
John Wisden, the founder of the Almanack and a fast round-arm bowler. (The Roger Mann Collection)
The Scorer, by Thomas Henwood (1842). (The Roger Mann Collection)
Alfred Mynn and Nicholas Felix before their famous single-wicket contest in 1846 for the title ‘champion of England’. (The Roger MannCollection)
William Clarke, the finest underarm bowler of them all, and the founder of Trent Bridge cricket ground. (The Roger Mann Collection)

Clarke’s All-England Eleven of 1847. (The Roger Mann Collection) The All-England Eleven on the move in 1851, by Nicholas Felix. (TheRoger Mann Collection)
George Parr, who succeeded Clarke as leader of Nottinghamshire and the All-England Eleven. (The Roger Mann Collection)
The first English overseas touring team. George Parr’s men gather on deck before their 1859 voyage to North America. (The Roger MannCollection)
H.H. Stephenson’s English team arrives in Melbourne on Christmas Eve 1861. (The Roger Mann Collection)
Tom Hayward and Robert Carpenter, two fine Cambridgeshire batsmen of the 1860s. (The Roger Mann Collection)
Arthur Haygarth, whose Cricket Scores and Biographies is the bedrock of our knowledge of the years 1744 to 1878. (The Roger MannCollection)
The 1880 Australians, the first visitors to play a Test match in England. (The Roger Mann Collection)
Charles Alcock, whose immense backstage contribution to cricket warrants a higher place in the mythology of the game than history has yet given him. (The Roger Mann Collection)
Alfred Shaw, who bowled the first over in Test cricket. (The RogerMann Collection)
Edward Mills Grace, W.G.’s elder brother and one of the most formidable cricketers of his day. (The Roger Mann Collection)
W.G. Grace poses with Harry Jupp of Surrey. (The Roger MannCollection)
Three of the remarkable Studd brothers, two of whom played Test cricket for England. (The Roger Mann Collection)
‘The Demon’ – Frederick Spofforth, the first of the great Australian bowlers. (The Roger Mann Collection)
The Hon. Ivo Bligh led the English team which recovered the Ashes in Australia in 1882–83. (The Roger Mann Collection)
Lord Harris batting at Lord’s for the Lords and Commons Eleven against the touring Canadians in 1922. (The Roger Mann Collection)
The Ideal Cricket Match, by Sir Robert Ponsonby Staples (1887). (TheRoger Mann Collection)

A.S. Wortley’s portrait of W.G. Grace. (The Roger Mann Collection)
The Surrey batsman W. E. Roller on his way to bat at The Oval, painted by his brother George in 1883. (Reproduced by kindpermission of Surrey County Cricket Club. © The Oval CricketGround/Wingfield Sporting Gallery/The Bridgeman Art Library)
The noted stonewaller William Scotton. (The Roger Mann Collection)
The formidable Lord Hawke, while captain of Yorkshire. (The RogerMann Collection)
Arthur Shrewsbury, one of the greatest batsmen in Victorian England. (The Roger Mann Collection)
Gentlemen vs Players at Lord’s (1895). (The Roger Mann Collection)
Albert Trott, the only man to have hit a ball over the pavilion at Lord’s. (The Roger Mann Collection)
Ranjitsinhji enchanted spectators with his wristy technique, and his torrent of runs for Sussex and England. (The Roger Mann Collection)
Stanley Jackson, the first man to score five centuries against Australia in England. (The Roger Mann Collection)
The mightiest of all of cricket’s great entertainers, Gilbert ‘the Croucher’ Jessop. (The Roger Mann Collection)
Victor Trumper: the majesty of his batting left spectators awe-struck. (The Roger Mann Collection)
William Murdoch, C.B. Fry and W.G. Grace at Crystal Palace in 1901. (The Roger Mann Collection)
Kent vs Lancashire at Canterbury by Albert Chevallier Tayler (1906). (The Roger Mann Collection)
Sydney Barnes, regarded by many as the finest bowler of all. (TheRoger Mann Collection)
A.E.J. Collins, the Clifton College schoolboy who scored 628 not out in a house match in 1899. (The Roger Mann Collection)

Preface (#u0843e381-a358-5c6d-8f3e-f8b7be1731e8)


All my life cricket has been a joy. My sister taught me the game when I was very young, and it met a need that has never gone away. She would bowl to me as I clutched a tiny bat and tried to defend the wicket chalked on our garage door. I was rather embarrassed by my sister’s tutelage until I learned that W.G. Grace had been taught under the eagle eye of his mother. That made me feel better, but not play better.
I have only a dim recollection of those early days, and of watching the local village side whilst my father enjoyed a game of bowls. He preferred Drake’s game to Hutton’s; but I turned my back on the bowling green and my eyes to the cricket square.
There was no coaching at my primary school, but we did play cricket. I can still relive one incident that has the power, over half a century on, to bring a hot flush of embarrassment to my face. It was a game in which for the first time I wore full whites, pads and gloves, and had my own bat. I was expected to score runs, and that made me even more nervous – caring too much rarely produces the best outcome, as I was to learn later in life. I strode to the wicket, took guard, carefully looked at the field placings, and prepared for the first ball. I played forward and felt the ball hit the middle of the bat. But the boy at first slip appealed, and the umpire/teacher squinted down the wicket, raised his forefinger theatrically and gave me out, leg before wicket. I was mortified, and without thought, stuttered, ‘But, but, I hit it!’
Uproar ensued. ‘Out,’ snarled the umpire/teacher. ‘Out. Off’ – he was now waving his arm like a windmill – ‘Off you go.’ He was right, of course, that I should not have questioned his decision. He was not right to mutter ‘Bloody boy,’ as, head down, I walked off, shamed and burning with injustice. That teacher’s angry face is imprinted forever on my mind; it is not a happy memory. But not even he could turn me away from cricket.
We are led to believe that our character is formed in our earliest years. I believe that. Joy and pain are at their sharpest when they are new. I remember trying to hide my deep disappointment that my parents were never able to see me play cricket. They had many reasons not to do so – chronic ill health, worry, the struggle to make modest ends meet when the week outran the money. They were old, too. When I was six my father was seventy, and my mother closer to fifty than forty. Both smoked, and their poor health was made worse by the foul habit. It would kill my mother in the end, but for many years before that, hacking coughs and shortage of breath were a daily occurrence. And they were exotics: our neighbourhood did not house many ex-trapeze artists, gauchos, jugglers, card-sharps or speciality dancers, and even as a boy I knew my parents were not to be judged by the usual criteria.
Once, I was certain they would come. Our school team was due to play close to our home, and I wrote out instructions for my parents on how to get there – out of our gate, turn right, then right alongside the brook, a further turn right where I went bird-nesting, and there we would be, in a field to the left. I was captain, and set a field with myself at cover-point and midwicket so that I had a clear view of the entrance gate, but neither of my parents came. My father had been doubtful anyway. He was losing his eyesight, although as a nine-year-old I was not aware of that. And my mother, who had gamely promised to come, was too ill with her interminable bronchitis. As I carried old Dr Robinson’s prescription to the chemist the following morning, I vowed I would never smoke.
Years later, Alec Bedser told me that his mother never saw him, or his twin Eric, play cricket. Not that Mrs Bedser was without opinions. When Alec took eleven wickets in his first Test match at Lord’s, the press asked for her views of her son. ‘Which one?’ ‘Alec,’ they said. ‘Why Alec?’ ‘He’s just taken eleven wickets in a Test on his debut,’ they explained. Mrs Bedser was forthright: ‘That’s what he’s paid for, isn’t it?’
As a child, cricket entered my bloodstream, and it has given me a lifetime of enjoyment and solace. Yet there are pessimists about the game. As long ago as 1932, C.P. Snow was moaning: ‘These days, a man of taste can only go to an empty ground and regret the past.’ The same dreary view can often be heard on county grounds today, as hindsight flourishes with the aid of rose-tinted spectacles.
I have never understood why we see the past as a Golden Age. It’s a false image. There was little golden about Victorian England, when children were sent scurrying up chimneys to clean them. Or Restoration England, when every portrait shows a closed mouth because a smile would have revealed rotten or blackened teeth. A cool analysis of the past will temper the rosing of the spectacles. The same is true of cricket: there have been many golden days, but the aspic of old photographs can hide the worst of times as well as the best.
As a game, cricket is complex. People who have never played are apt to say, ‘I don’t understand it.’ Much the same was said about the Impressionists, although there was nothing complicated about their art: as Claude Monet put it, ‘I simply looked at what the universe had to show us and used my brush to give an account of it.’ So too with cricket: it delights the eye and touches the soul. Part of this is physical: the smell of linseed oil on willow, the feel of ball on bat, the pleasure of holding a shiny new red ball, the clatter of disturbed stumps, the snick and catch that turns heads, and, on the best of days, the scent of newly-mown grass under the warmth of the rising sun. There is no cricketer alive who has not enjoyed these sensations, and cherished the memory of them. Lucy Baldwin, a fine cricketer and wife of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, put it well: ‘The crack of bat against ball amid that humming and buzzing of summer sound is still to me a note of pure joy that raised haunting memories of friends and happy days.’ Romantic tomfoolery? Perhaps. But cricket is that sort of game, and it would lose much of its charm if it were not.
One does not have to be talented to be besotted by cricket, as a thousand village games prove each summer. I first saw this at school. One boy, whose anonymity I shall protect, practised in the nets for hours – and often, I suspected, in front of a mirror – for every batting movement ended in a pose of classical perfection. No cricket whites were ever more neatly pressed, or pads or boots whiter, or bat more beautifully oiled, and when, head high, he strode out to the wicket, he oozed class and confidence. Alas, the image was false: he put so much into the elegance of every stroke that he overlooked the need to hit the ball, and all too soon would turn in surprise to look at his shattered stumps. He left the crease swiftly yet gracefully, nodding in congratulation to the bowler, head still high, bat tucked under arm, pulling off his batting gloves as if, for all the world, he was returning to the pavilion in triumph.
He was never downhearted. As he took his pads off, he would tell us all that he had been beaten ‘in the flight’ or ‘off the pitch’; and, theorists all, no one suggested he had, again, just missed a straight one. He knew the theory of cricket. He knew the statistics. He knew the spirit in which the game should be played, and he revelled in it. Runs or not, it was joy enough for him to be on a cricket pitch. I don’t know if he ever read A.A. Milne, but his poem had him exactly right:
But what care I? It’s the game that calls me –
Simply to be on the field of play;
How can it matter what fate befalls me,
With ten good fellows and on egood day!
I was so lucky that cricket was played at my grammar school; it was, with rugby, the only activity that made the experience bearable. During one game the pitch was positioned within striking distance of some enticing windows, and the temptation to put the ball through one of them was irresistible. The prize was to be a pint of illicit beer – I was only fourteen at the time, and such devilment appealed. A cross-batted heave missed the main target but did crash through an adjacent church window. The tinkle of glass brought a great cheer. It was enough: a triumph was celebrated.
Not long afterwards a heavier drink, scrumpy, caused more trouble. I drank a little too much, and as I travelled home it began to extort its revenge. I arrived safely, but when my father opened the door I was on my knees barking at him. I thought it was funny. He did not. Only my mother’s intervention saved me from being banned from cricket.
I was no cricketing prodigy, but nor was I a complete mug. I had my days, and they remain precious memories: 50 runs in a house match, with the winning hit a straight four that whistled past the bowler’s nose; 33 runs scored in three overs to win a game on a day when every hit seemed to find the boundary; 7 wickets for 9 runs, including a hat-trick, in a Colts game, when four of the runs scored off me were an edge that, half a century on, I still know that an even half-alert fielder should have caught in the slips. A meagre return for my love of the game, you might think, but only if you don’t know cricket. Runs, wickets and catches are all very well, but they don’t capture the fun of it all, the camaraderie, the hopes, the mini- triumphs and disasters, the wins, defeats and close finishes, the sunny days and the wet ones, all memories every cricketer locks away for the dark months when the summer game is in hibernation.
When my father finally lost his eyesight and all his money in the early 1950s, our family were uprooted from our modest bungalow in Surrey to two rooms of a multi-occupied Victorian relic in Brixton. The accommodation lacked finesse, but it was within walking distance of the Kennington Oval at a time when Surrey had the greatest county team of them all. I camped out at The Oval during the summer holidays as a devoted spectator. It cannot have been so, but memory insists that the sun always shone and Surrey always won. And what a feast they offered. Peter May’s bat rang like a pistol shot, and the suffering ball bounced back from the pavilion pickets before a fielder had even moved. May’s batting once got me into a frightful scrape.
I had borrowed my father’s precious gold stopwatch to time how long it took a May off-drive to reach the boundary, and in pressing the stop button it slipped from my fingers and smashed open on the terracing. The innards sprang out. The watch looked terminally sick. So did I as I confessed all to my father. ‘Tell me,’ he said, gingerly holding the watch by a broken spring, ‘about Peter May.’
May was one of many great players in that Surrey team. Tony Lock, menace shining from his bald pate, bowled the unplayable ball and caught the impossible catch. Jim Laker ambled gently to the wicket, but his off-breaks spun and spat at the batsman. The thin man, Peter Loader, was fast as a whippet; and Alec Bedser, the great medium-pacer, stately as a galleon, tormented batsmen with nagging accuracy and a leg cutter no other bowler has ever matched. Decades later he told me he discovered the leg cutter by accident, and had taken two years to perfect it. ‘It’s a leg spinner, really,’ he confided, ‘but you need these to bowl it properly.’ Thereupon he held up the enormous Bedser hands and chuckled. These were golden days of sun and shadows, Tizer and sandwiches, and I shall never forget them.
The 1950s were also a time of massive immigration to England from the West Indies, and many of the new Britons settled in Brixton. The house we lived in was for a time multi-occupied and multi-racial, and it provided a good primer on poverty for a future Conservative Prime Minister. I knew the immigrants as neighbours. I lived with them. I played with their children. I shopped with them in Brixton market. I saw them for what they were: men and women seeking opportunity and a new life in a land immeasurably more wealthy than the ones they had left behind.
Others, more fearful, more suspicious, saw them in a harsher light. They feared for their jobs and their livelihoods. They were frightened of possible turmoil in their neighbourhoods. Bigots and foolish men inflamed these fears. Pessimists predicted trouble. Brixton became a powderkeg of racial discontent. People waited for it to blow. Waited for the riots, the lawlessness. They waited in vain. The new Britons settled in. The dire predictions of conflict proved to be wrong.
In my youthful innocence, I wasn’t surprised. Instead of inciting fear, the bigots and pessimists should have gone to The Oval, where, when the West Indies played, it was carnival time: the atmosphere was noisy and full of fun as the crowd enjoyed glorious days of cricket. For those in the packed ground the painful reality of life in Brixton was put aside, even though at close of play it was still there. Prejudice and hardship were daily companions to the new Brixtonians. Dr Johnson, who knew London two hundred years earlier, had it right: ‘This mournful truth is everywhere confessed/Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed’.
Slow rises worth – but it did rise. And the West Indians’ cricket, the way they played and the way the team conducted themselves in victory, did much to help. A few years earlier they had taken on England at her own game, in her own country, at the very headquarters of cricket. And they beat her on merit. Perhaps no win in cricket ever had such social significance as Ramadhin and Valentine’s destruction of England at Lord’s in June 1950. A big hundred by Clyde Walcott set it up; it was then won by the charm and guile of the cricketing sophisticate’s delight: the art of great spin bowling. It was intelligent cricket – the West Indies out-thought England as well as outplayed them. As a result, all West Indians walked a little taller in their tough lives because their national cricket team had lifted their morale. No wonder the calypso rang out in celebration: ‘Cricket, lovely cricket’, indeed!
This is a classic illustration of the power of cricket. It can uplift whole communities – whole nations even – or cast them down. And because cricket is played largely in the mind, and reflects the society from which the cricketers spring, it can imprint the character of that nation indelibly upon the minds of those who watch the way in which a national team plays.
When not at The Oval, I spent hour upon hour defending a Brixton lamp-post against the bowling of any passer-by. Only my half-brother Tom and our mutual friend Butch were regulars, and only bad light, in the form of nightfall, stopped play. In 1966 my love of playing the game reached a premature end when a car accident in northern Nigeria left me with a leg so shattered it was almost lost; but that did not mean I would never again pick up a bat.
As Prime Minister, in 1991 I attended a meeting of Commonwealth Heads of Government in Harare and opened the batting in a charity match with the Australian Prime Minister, Bob Hawke. The previous evening Bob had entertained his fellow heads of government with a selection of Australian and trades union songs, most of them unrepeatable, as we shared more beers than was wise. The following morning, since I had not held a bat for years, I had a net before the game. As I looked around the lovely Wanderers ground, I was flattered to see that it was filling with spectators, although my Press Secretary Gus O’Donnell, never one to let hubris pass unchallenged, did wonder aloud whether they might have come to see their local hero Graeme Hick, who was due to bat at number three.
Bob Hawke and I opened to gentle bowling, and began to settle down, with Bob stealing the bowling towards the end of each over. I didn’t mind: it was a joy just to be there. We tapped the ball here and there, and ran our singles. After a few overs the wisdom of the Hawke strategy was revealed: ‘Off you go,’ said the umpire, waving us off the pitch as he added, rather pointedly, ‘It’s time for the real cricketers.’ A roar of applause greeted our departure.
Hawke had scored over 20, while I had less than 10. ‘Did you know we didn’t have long?’ I asked him as we trudged back to the pavilion. ‘Jeez, yes,’ he admitted, a Cheshire-cat-sized grin splitting his craggy features. ‘Didn’t you know, John? Arrh, heck – I thought you did.’ Not for the first or the last time, I noted that Australians play hard.
Our host in Zimbabwe was the President, Robert Mugabe, in the years before he encouraged militants to force out white farmers and steal their property. In 1991, Mugabe talked to me fondly of cricket. ‘It civilises people and creates gentlemen. I want everyone to play cricket in Zimbabwe. I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen!’ From beyond the grave, Lord Hawke would have approved, though he, like me, would have regarded land theft as most definitely ‘not cricket’. Hawke would have disapproved too of the mismatch between Mugabe’s sentiments and the outcome of his policies: his government all but destroyed Zimbabwean cricket.
Forty years after I first visited The Oval, I came to know the Surrey club from the inside. During my years in government The Oval was a sanctuary where cares were put aside. Upon the morrow of defeat in the 1997 general election I bade my farewells to Downing Street and the Queen and headed to The Oval for a leisurely lunch and a soothing afternoon of cricket. Nor did the balm fail me: ‘You had a rough decision, mate,’ called out a gnarled regular, before turning to more important matters. ‘This boy is a good bat.’ Indeed he was: it was a young Combined Universities batsman, Will House, later of Sussex, who played a fine cameo innings. Since leaving office I have been able to step back into the pleasures of cricket as if it had never been interrupted by the rude reality of politics.

No one has ever had a sufficient gift of tongues to do justice to the charm of cricket. In fact we cannot even be sure how – or when – the game began. Folklore tells us that generations now gone would pause as they passed some insignificant village game, simply to see how the next ball fared, and then, uplifted and enlightened, pass on their way. Observation tells us that people do so still. So we know the fascination of cricket from its birth. We know, too, its historic moments and its famous players. But how did cricket come to be built into the warp and weft of the English language? How did it develop into the favourite pastime of a large part of the English- speaking world? Why – in all sport – does cricket possess a literature that no other can match? Why do grown men babble of games they never saw and cricketers who died a hundred years before?
A wet day makes a conversationalist of the most taciturn cricket- lover. One rain-drenched hour at The Oval was filled with a discussion about Don Bradman’s last Test innings, when the great man was bowled second ball by Eric Hollies for a duck in the final Test of the 1948 series. It is a story every cricket-lover knows, and, cheated of cricket, we were debating at which end the Don was batting. Someone turned to Arthur Morris, the former Australian Test batsman, who was listening silently as he sipped a glass of red wine. ‘Surely, you must know, Arthur? Were you in that team?’ asked an ignoramus. Raman Subba Row, the former England batsman, who knows his history, choked. ‘Yes,’ said Arthur, sipping placidly. ‘I was at the other end when Don was out. I scored 196.’
There is a postscript to this story. As Bradman returned to the pavilion he was stopped in the Long Room by Field Marshal Montgomery, once captain of cricket at St Paul’s school, who had famously encouraged his troops to ‘hit Rommel for six’. Montgomery barked at him, ‘Sit down, Bradman, and I will tell you where you went wrong.’ The absurdity of anyone telling the most prolific run-getter of all time how to bat apparently escaped the old soldier. Bradman revealed this vignette in a letter to the Surrey Club many years later; he did not mention whether he had taken the opportunity to criticise the Field Marshal’s battle plan at El Alamein, but probably he did not. This was wise, as Montgomery was never plagued by self-doubt. A man who can say, ‘As God said – and, on the whole, he was right …’ is not a man to be crossed. Bradman was prudent to keep his own counsel. Moreover, he was courteous even when a sharp response was justified.
I discovered this for myself that same rainy day at The Oval. I had never met Bradman, but I did occasionally speak to him on the telephone. As we debated his last innings during one of the showers, Raman remembered it was the Don’s birthday, and someone suggested I phone him with our congratulations. I did so. As we spoke, I described the day’s cricket and the wretched weather. ‘How is it in Australia?’ I asked. ‘Dunno,’ came the reply. ‘It’s two o’clock in the morning here.’
Sir Donald Bradman is from the aristocracy of cricket. He is one of the rare breed of cricketing knights, all of whom are from the upper class of talent. But the honours system is haphazard, ultimately at the whim of subjective judgements and sometimes perverse. In the more class-conscious Victorian age, even W.G. was overlooked. As Prime Minister, I wished to put right some injustices. I could not simply award honours, but I could nominate for the appropriate independent scrutiny committee to adjudicate.* (#ulink_7bc8a61f-763f-5a9b-a7a5-c275f3ceeb55) My first nomination for consideration was Harold Larwood, one of England’s greatest fast bowlers, who had been disgracefully treated by the cricketing establishment after the notorious ‘bodyline’ series against Australia in 1932–33. He had been driven out of Test cricket for obeying his captain’s instructions.
The Scrutiny Committee were startled at a nomination for a cricketer who had ceased playing nearly sixty years earlier, and I daresay sucked their teeth before deciding to award Larwood an MBE – below tariff, I thought, but welcome nevertheless. I had a further small list of names, but thought it proper to proceed cautiously, a decision I came to regret, for the Grim Reaper struck before I did, and my other nominations came too late.
When Harold Larwood was awarded his honour, I received a message that he wished to speak to me. I telephoned him in Australia, and learned something of the generous mind of cricketers. Within two minutes he was talking not of himself but of Jack Hobbs and his skill in batting on treacherous wickets. Larwood spoke with affection of Hobbs, as well as awe, and that conversation remains imprinted on my mind for the generosity of spirit it showed. It is a trait that is uplifting in all walks of life.
The statistics of cricket are a total fascination to the aficionado. For years my Cabinet colleague Peter Brooke and I used to pose one another abstruse cricket questions across the Cabinet table, or in restaurants, or on any occasion we met. Peter’s knowledge of cricket is encyclopaedic: who else could name any cricketing parson who scored a hundred before lunch at Bangalore during the Indian Mutiny? My old friend Robert Atkins, an MP once and then an MEP, has telephoned me each Sunday morning for years to discuss the state of English cricket and bemoan the loss of Corinthian values. Sometimes he even talks of politics: he bemoans the loss of Corinthian values there, too. But not every politician is a cricket-lover.
When I was Prime Minister Cabinet met on Thursday mornings, at the same time as Test matches began. In those days Cabinet debated policy and took decisions, so the meeting stretched on until lunchtime. From time to time folded messages would be brought in to me by the Duty Clerk. I would read them before passing them to Robin Butler, the Cabinet Secretary, a descendant of the great Victorian cricketer Richard Daft, and from him they would cross the table to the Chancellor, and later President of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club, Ken Clarke. Grimaces or smiles would follow. These notes drove my Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine, who sat on my left, to distraction. Prime Minister, Cabinet Secretary, Chancellor … was sterling crashing? Was there a crisis? A ministerial resignation? No: they were the Test scores: disbelievingly, Michael filched the notes from my blotter for the Heseltine Papers.
Cricket can be a bridge between opposites. The late Bob Cryer, a very left-wing Labour MP, would always stop to talk cricket with me. John Redwood, a very right-wing Conservative MP, who in 1995 attempted with a great deal of gusto to pitch me out of No. 10, would do the same if, by miscalculation, we found ourselves at the same dining table in the Commons. Even the journalist Simon Heffer, a persistent and hostile critic, was able to summon up a bleak smile if we passed one another at the idyllic cricket ground at Wormsley Park in Buckinghamshire that was Paul Getty’s pride and joy.
Cricket can also bind friendships. When the Conservative Party lost the election in 1997, John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia, and his wife Janette were among my first visitors: as a consolation John presented me with that Australian symbol, a baggy green cap: it is a treasured possession. Four years later I was talking about cricket caps and helmets to the old Australian Test all-rounder Sam Loxton. ‘Helmets,’ scoffed Sam. ‘I didn’t even wear a helmet at Tobruk!’ In 2005, when we met at Lord’s during the Ashes tour, a chortling Sam presented me with an authentic Australian helmet. I was forever grateful we’d talked of helmets, not protectors – although I doubt Sam wore one of those at Tobruk either.
A love of cricket is for everyone. As the great batsman K.S. Ranjitsinhji pointed out early in the twentieth century:

Go to Lord’s and analyse the crowd. There are all sorts and conditions of men there round the ropes – bricklayers, bank clerks, soldiers, postmen and stockbrokers. And in the pavilions are QCs, artists, archdeacons and leader-writers. Bad men, good men, workers and idlers, are all there, and all at one in their keenness over the game … cricket brings the most opposite characters and the most diverse lives together. Anything that puts very many kinds of people on a common ground must promote sympathy and kindly feelings.
That has been my experience, too. A few years ago I was invited to the beautiful island of Barbados to deliver the annual Frank Worrell Lecture. The following evening a galaxy of Caribbean cricketers – Everton Weekes, Clyde Walcott, Garry Sobers, Wes Hall, Charlie Griffith, Richie Richardson – attended a dinner for me at the British High Commission. Cricket conquers all differences, and I – an ex- Conservative Prime Minister – enjoyed some memorable (to me, at least) cricketing exchanges with the old West Indian opener Alan Rae, whose politics were very different. No one cared, and someone on that lovely evening, Wes Hall I think, referred to cricket as ‘the happy game’. You can’t play cricket if you’re unhappy, and you can’t be unhappy if you do play cricket was a maxim that met general approval over the rum punches and the laughter. It has certainly been true in my own life.
In fact, cricket can unlock all the emotions. On the day, after sixteen barren years, that England regained the Ashes at The Oval in 2005, I watched the crowd spontaneously and joyously sing ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. There are precedents for such a display. When Jessop scored a famous hundred to win the final Test against Australia at The Oval in 1902, the spectators hurled their bowler hats to the sky in ecstasy. We may be sure that many were lost. So too at Jack Hobbs’s first innings at The Oval after passing Grace’s record of 126 career centuries in 1925. Amid the applause the Yorkshire captain called for three cheers for Hobbs and then, Yorkshire being Yorkshire, dismissed him for a beggarly eight runs. The emotion displayed that day was affection for a great cricketer. When Boris Karloff, an enthusiastic amateur wicketkeeper, visited The Oval, Surrey weren’t sure what to do with him. He was watching the cricket avidly from the balcony when, in reply to a polite enquiry from an anxious host, he muttered in that inimitable voice: ‘Wonderful. I think I’m dead and gone to heaven!’
Karloff was a character. Cricket attracts them. I was on The Oval balcony with another, Sir George Edwards – then around ninety years of age – when a guest asked the old man, rather pompously, what he remembered of the war and what, if anything, he’d done in it. George smiled bleakly. ‘I helped design the Wellington bomber,’ he said, ‘if that counts.’ I treasure that moment. It was an understatement: George did more than that. He worked with Sir Barnes Wallis on the ‘bouncing bomb’ that destroyed the great German dams but which, in early tests, kept sinking. George, a keen cricketer, knew why. ‘It’s underspin, not overspin,’ he explained. Barnes Wallis relented – and the Dam Busters took out the Möhne, Sorpe and Eder dams with a leg-break.

‘History is bunk,’ supposedly said Henry Ford, who never played cricket. That is not my criticism. A number of fine writers have already told the story of cricket. Is there more to be gained by treading on the old turf? I believe so. There are myths to dispel, neglected areas to be examined, for the history of cricket is often seen in a vacuum, as if it developed unaffected by the turbulent history of the nation that gave it birth. But from its earliest days, to the recent tremors of match-fixing and corruption and the innovation of technology-aided umpiring, the game has held up a mirror to the temper of the nation.
Moreover, what of the cricketers? Too often, they appear in one- dimensional form only: all that is known is their on-field exploits. But what were they like? Who were they? What did they do after the cricket years were over, and their eyes dimmed and their sinews stiffened? What was happening off the field as they played cricket? How was the world changing? How did people live? What were their recreations? Cricketers had a flesh-and-blood existence outside the game, and however imperfectly, I shall try to bring alive the mosaic of times past in order to present a more rounded picture of them and the nature of their lives.
Cricket, once first among English games, is no longer so, as the winter sports of football and rugby grow in popularity. It must fight for its future. Even the cricket season seems to shrink annually as football eats away at both ends of the season. By the autumn equinox on 22 September the season is dead and gone, even though, theoretically at least, the sun is still above the horizon for twelve hours every day. Even the refraction of the sun’s rays, caused by the earth’s atmosphere, which gives the British Isles an extra six minutes of daylight, cannot compete with the commercial imperatives that lengthen the football season.
And yet – cricket is different. It is a team game made up of individual contests. Batsman and bowler are locked in gladiatorial combat. One must lose. Each batsman faces alone the hostile intent of every member of the fielding side, all seeking to dismiss him, with the sole support of his batting partner at the other end of the pitch. He knows his contribution may decide the outcome of the match. And can any other game provide a father figure for a nation to match W.G. Grace, who turned a country-house sport into an international obsession – and who is still recognised by his initials alone nearly a hundred years after his death? No, it cannot. Can any other game offer a pre-eminent genius so far above the normal run of talent as Don Bradman? No, again.
In its first 450 years, cricket has besotted wise men and fools. Its fairy godparents were gambling and drink. Its early enemies were Church and state. And yet, it has brought together beggars and royalty, thrown up a rich array of characters, invaded literature and art, and evolved from primitive beginnings to the sophistication of the modern game.
Although cricket is of the very essence of England, the skills of Bradman and Sobers, of Hadlee and Tendulkar, are evidence that the game has far outstripped the land of its birth. England no longer owns cricket. Like radar, penicillin, electricity, the steam engine, railways, the jet engine, computers and the worldwide web, cricket is an English invention – an export as potent as the English language itself. At one level it is a game and no more; at another it helped cement an Empire and bind a Commonwealth. Its legacy is a fellowship of cricket-lovers across continents and through generations. In the world of sport, it is the greatest story ever told.
It began a long time ago.
* (#ulink_5f55a49c-267c-5014-80de-aba357c93150) As anyone can now do under reforms I instituted in 1993.

1 (#u0843e381-a358-5c6d-8f3e-f8b7be1731e8)

The Lost Century of Cricket (#u0843e381-a358-5c6d-8f3e-f8b7be1731e8)


But we don’t know how long. The search for the birth of cricket has been as fruitless as the hunt for the Holy Grail: neither can be found.
What is cricket, at its most basic? It is a club striking a ball: so are golf, rounders, baseball, hockey and tennis. So are the ancient games of club-ball, stool-ball, trap-ball, stob-ball, each of which some scholars have been keen to appropriate as ‘early cricket’. The nineteenth-century pioneer historian the Reverend James Pycroft asserts, without proof, that ‘Club-ball we believe to be the name which usually stood for cricket in the thirteenth century.’* (#ulink_6e9c01cb-c1b5-5792-9f6d-d2166c23f4ca) His case, however, collapses in the light of later evidence, and the great mid-nineteenth- century cricketer Nicholas Felix (a pseudonym – his real name was Nicholas Wanostrocht) was more likely right when he wrote: ‘Club ball is a very ancient game and totally distinct from cricket.’
The paucity of early mentions of cricket has led to some farfetched assumptions about games that might have been cricket, but probably are not. The poet and scholar Joseph of Exeter is said to have written in 1180:
The youths at cricks did play
Throughout the merry day.
If they did so, no one else noted it for hundreds of years. This claim has other defects, too: the couplet sounds more eighteenth-century than twelfth, and all Joseph’s known writing is in Latin. In any event, in 1180 Joseph was onhis way to the Third Crusade as an official chronicler, and thoughts of ‘youths’ and ‘merry days’ may not have been uppermost in his mind.* (#ulink_3aebfd9d-02d2-5c11-9e1a-6d42f40e4a3e) We can dismiss Joseph of Exeter. Even less likely is the evidence of an eighth-century monk, Eustatius Constacius, that cricket was played in Florence for the entertainment of Parliament.
Much ink has been spilled by historians over an entry, in 1300, in the wardrobe accounts of King Edward I referring to the sixteen-year-old Prince of Wales, the future Edward II, playing ‘creag’ and other sports with, as some have suggested, his childhood friend the lamentable and doomed-to-a-bad-end Piers Gaveston. It is evident that ‘creag’ is a game, but it requires a mighty leap of faith to claim that it was cricket; the kindest judgement that can be made upon this romantic assumption is ‘not proven’. In any event, could the villainous Gaveston have been a forefather of cricket? I hope not, and fortunately I think not.
Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote of history that ‘It is sometimes fiction. It is sometimes theory.’** (#ulink_c1d62f92-92fb-577d-9935-d134c3981da5) In the absence of concrete evidence, of documentary proof, of contemporary records, his maxim holds true of the genesis of cricket. It may have been played under another name earlier than we know, but since its birth is shrouded in legend and mystique, we cannot be certain. The silence of antiquity suggests that the game was not played in ancient times, but does not prove that it was not. It is probable that games such as club-ball were ancestors of cricket, but they cannot be acknowledged as the game itself, and should not be assumed to be so. As the fourteenth-century philosopher William of Occam wrote: ‘Things not known to exist should not be postulated as existing.’ This is a good principle for soundly-based history. Although the mists and myths are enticing, the truth is more prosaic: cricket evolved from instincts and games as old as man himself.
But when? Here we may be on firmer ground. 1598 was a memorable year. The weather was foul that winter, and on 21 December, in a mini-ice age, the Thames froze. A week later, in a snowstorm, men of the Chamberlain’s Company of Actors, led by Richard Burbage and armed in case of unwelcome interruptions, dismantled a theatre in Shoreditch, loaded it onto wagons and transported it through Spitalfields and Bishopsgate to a waterfront warehouse. From there it was ferried across the Thames to be rebuilt on a new site. They called the new theatre the Globe, and the players’ favourite son, William Shakespeare, had part-ownership of it.
That Christmas Shakespeare had a new play, Much Ado AboutNothing, which the players performed at Court for Queen Elizabeth I. A similar view might have been held about a contemporary court case over land ownership. Mr John Derrick, otherwise a forgotten English gentleman, testified to a Guildford court that: ‘Being a scholler in the ffree schoole of Guldeford hee and diverse of his fellows did runne and play there at creckett and other plaies.’* (#ulink_9d230fbe-3706-51eb-9365-e9e4a041d34d) W.G. Grace cast doubt on this in his Cricket (1891), and suggested that a local historian may have inadvertently substituted ‘cricket’ for ‘quoits’. It is not clear why he thought this. As Mr Derrick was a coroner, it is likely that his deposition was accurate. And as he was then nearly sixty years of age, he would have been a young scholar around 1550–60, thus giving us a precious date by which cricket was being played.
It is not surprising that cricket attracted little contemporary attention, for greater matters were afoot. Within a few years of the death of Henry VIII in 1547 a mighty struggle for souls was raging as the religion of the state swung from Protestant (under Edward VI) to Catholic (under Mary), and back to Protestant once more (under Elizabeth I). Henry VIII had been sufficiently even-handed to persecute Protestants and Catholics alike, but his children were more discriminating, and burned, hanged or imprisoned only their religious opponents. Predictably, in the midst of the carnage cricket did not get a look-in. Nonetheless, Derrick’s deposition suggests that the game existed, under its current name, during the 1550s, although it cannot have been widespread. It may not have fitted into the lifestyles of the middle and upper strata of society. Behind the mullioned windows men drank beer for breakfast before hunting wildlife on uncultivated heaths and shooting pheasant, duck, partridge and snipe, while their womenfolk gossiped over needlework, wrote letters, read, and supervised the kitchen. Large families were commonplace, but half of all children failed to reach adulthood, and none, it seems, played cricket. The game makes no appearance in Shakespeare,* (#ulink_5970632f-2ab6-5c6c-9aaf-42e1d69c1b52) Jonson or Marlowe, there is no known reference to it in mid- sixteenth-century statutes, nor does it appear in surviving memoirs or letters of the time. Not even Brer Rabbit in his briar patch managed such a low profile. Cricket must have been played only by a minority, probably peasants, and even then spasmodically, to have remained so unnoticed and unrecorded.
Or, sometimes, mis-recorded. A contemporary reference to the England of Queen Mary reads as follows:
They make there, divers sort of puppet works or Babyes, for to bring up children in vanitee. There are made likewyse, many kyndds of Bales, Cut-Staves, or Kricket-Staves, Rackets, and Dyce, for that the foolish people should waste or spend their tyme there-with, in foolishness.
This reference to ‘Kricket-Staves’ is a real trap. The text was written by a Westphalian, Hendrick Niclaes, who lived in England during Queen Mary’s reign, where his name was anglicised to Henry Nicholas. A deeply religious man, a Protestant, who disapproved of pleasure, he founded a sect that gained a foothold in Cambridgeshire and Essex. For this initiative he was imprisoned by Queen Mary and released by Queen Elizabeth, following which he sensed the tenor of the times and wisely returned home to Cologne. Niclaes was theauthor of religious tracts, and it is one of these, Terra Pacis, published in Amsterdam – probably in 1575, but written earlier – and translated from its original Base-Almayn (Low German being his native tongue in Westphalia), which contains the reference to ‘Kricket-Staves’. But it is a mistranslation: the original word was ‘kolven’, meaning ‘clubs’: Niclaes was referring to one of the many forms of club-ball. Despite this, the English version of Terra Pacis does have a legitimate claim to fame. It was thought to have inspired John Bunyan as the former tinker lay in Bedford prison eighty-five years later, when he began The Pilgrim’s Progress, his enduring allegory of travel ‘from this world to that which is to come’. If so, Herr Niclaes deserves an honoured footnote in the histories of religion and of literature – but not of cricket.
As young John Derrick enjoyed his boyhood cricket, England was astir. The mid-1500s were years of peril: England’s relationship with its northern neighbour Scotland had broken down, reawakening the dangers of a Franco–Scottish threat to the realm. The economy was weak, the coinage debased, the Protestant–Catholic dispute unsettled, Puritanism was emerging and there were dangers aplenty on every front. It was an age calling for great men and great deeds, and Elizabeth was lucky: Cecil and Walsingham guided policy, and, when not wreaking havoc on our enemies, Raleigh, Drake and Hawkins stood guard on England’s shores, while Marlowe, Jonson and Spenser joined Shakespeare in pouring genius onto parchment.
In the midst of this tumultuous century an unknown rural genius, somewhere in the Weald of south-east England, tweaked some ancient game and cricket was born. As anonymous as his ancient forebear the inventor of the wheel, he would have gained immortality had his name become known. Alas, it did not, though his shade can rest content that he built a game for all time.
Primitive cricket was a pastime for the grassroots of English life, and was unburdened by the sophistication of years to come. It did not have eleven players a side. Nor were there two umpires. No one wore whites. There were no recognised field placings. Rules of play were haphazard. There were no six-ball overs. Runs were recorded by innumerate peasants who cut notches on a stick. Accepted laws lay far in the future. But the essentials of the game were already evident. A player with a bat, oddly misshapen by today’s standards, defended a crude wicket, squat and without a middle stump, against another player with a ball who ‘bowled’ underarm and attempted to break the wicket to ‘put out’ the batsman.
We can conjecture more. The ‘batsman’ faced the bowler more square-on than side-on, with the ‘bat’ held well away from his unprotected legs; with that stance he must have hit the ball mainly on the leg side. The theory of ‘side-on’ batting, with the left elbow pointing down the wicket, was far away – as indeed was side-on overarm bowling, with the lead arm used for balance and as a direction-finder. Such refinements were over two hundred years away from this crude sixteenth-century forerunner of the game we know today.
The Elizabethan age died in the early hours of 24 March 1603, and James VI of Scotland succeeded to the English throne as James I. It was a turbulent time, during which resistance to the absolute rule of kings was to grow, and with it the demand for greater liberty. Some antipathy had begun to emerge in Elizabeth’s reign, but she was wise enough to know when to offer what was desired before it was forced from her – on the question of monopolies, for example. James had no such gift, and his errors of judgement paved the way for revolution. He was graceless and merciless towards his opponents, among whom were the adherents of the infant sect of Puritanism, which had plagued him in Scotland. His response was to persecute them,* (#ulink_76478527-a878-5128-9bfd-5cf19869d1ff) but they grew in strength and he grew in unpopularity. A cinder was smouldering that would lead to revolution.
The new Stuart age of the seventeenth century opened a lost century for cricket. Other interests prevailed. Wigs were coming into fashion. Hamlet, the greatest of all ghost stories, made its debut in 1600, and the East India Company was founded, to become in time a building block of the greatest empire the world had ever seen. Nonetheless, cricket was spreading slowly. Its cradle was Kent, Sussex and Surrey, but it rarely merited public attention, and what scraps we know of it come from court hearings, inquests, church records and the pitiful number of letters and diaries that have survived the years.
It was a bloody age for the birth of a graceful game. Two years into the new reign of James I, in 1605, Guy Fawkes and his coconspirators were hanged, drawn and quartered for conspiring to blow up Parliament: it was thought not to be cricket. Or, more likely, cricket was not thought of at all, for the game is not even mentioned in the Book of Sports (1618). It was known to the authorities, however, and frowned upon, although playing it at the wrong time attracted only minor penalties. But penalties there were.
The Church, refreshed by the new King James Bible (1611), was severe on defaulters. Sunday was for worship, and perhaps a day of rest. It was not a day for enjoyment. Cricket, when the Church was not condemning it as ‘profane’, was deemed to be fun, and fun was not to be had on the Sabbath. A string of cases in Sussex and Kent opens a window on seventeenth-century attitudes and casts a searchlight on the infancy of cricket.
On Easter Sunday, 1611, Bartholomew Wyatt and Richard Latter chose cricket in preference to divine service at Sidlesham church in Sussex, outraging the churchwardens. The Archdeacon too was furious. Such a heinous sin merited punishment, and at a consistory court held in Chichester Cathedral the two men admitted their guilt, and were fined twelve pence and ordered to pay penance. They did so, but a greater penalty was to come. A year later, both men were married in Sidlesham on successive days, but for one of them there was to be no happy ever after: the new Mrs Latter died within three months, and Richard Latter by 1616. It was, thought the faithful, divine retribution.
The unfortunate Richard Latter was very likely related to the Latters of the adjoining parish of Selsey, and thirty-one years later the travails of young Thomas Latter provide a further indication that the game was passed down the generations. Thomas had hit Henry Brand of Selsey on the head ‘with a cricket batt’, testified Henry’s sister Margaret at Arundel quarter sessions in January 1648. It is unclear whether the cause of the fatal injury was malicious or accidental, but since Margaret accepted twenty-six shillings’ compensation for her brother’s death it is likely that it was no more than a mishap. It is not known if the episode dampened the Latter family enthusiasm for cricket, but it would not be surprising if it had. It must have been terrifying to face the quarter sessions accused of causing a death.
This was not a unique case. Twenty-four years earlier, at nearby Horsted Keynes in 1624, Jasper Vinall died in a bizarre accident. He and his friend Edward Tye were playing cricket when Tye hit the ball straight up in the air and attempted to hit it again as it fell. As he did so, Vinall, seeking to catch the ball, ran in behind his back and was struck heavily on the forehead by the flailing bat (value ½d, as the inquest noted). The coroner’s jury acquitted Tye of malice and brought in a verdict of misadventure – proper in law, no doubt, but death by enthusiasm would have been more apt. The moment of taking a catch at cricket is one of total absorption and pure joy, and in that exultant mood poor Jasper was robbed of life.
Although the Church was generally prickly about cricket, there were exceptions. The ‘old churchwardens’ of Boxgrove, Sussex – Richard Martin Senior and Thomas West – were in hot water in 1622 for ‘defending and mayntayning’ the playing of cricket by their children.* (#ulink_b2fe3784-2802-5cbe-b3e8-cd5dc7f6ac92) Their arraignment in the church was clearly the end of a long saga, for the children had apparently been given ‘sufficient warning’ to desist and had ignored it; even worse, they played in the churchyard and ‘used to break the church windowes with the ball’. It was also contended that ‘a little childe had like to have her braynes beaten out with a cricket batt’, although there was no evidence that such an incident had occurred. Nonetheless, a zealot thought it might, and the charge sheet was lengthened. The intriguing element of this case is the fathers’ encouragement of the game, which suggests that they too had played cricket as children – probably around 1580–90.
The Church authorities continued to look on with disapproval. It seemed evident to them that not only was the game a thoroughly bad influence on godliness, it was thoroughly dangerous as well. Miscreants continued to be punished. In 1628, East Lavant in Sussex was a hotbed of mischief. At an ecclesiastical court in Chichester on 13 June, Edward Taylor and William Greentree were charged with ‘playing at cricket in tyme of divine service’. Their defences differed. Taylor admitted that he was ‘at a place where they played at cricket both before and after evening prayers but not in evening prayer time’. It did him no good: he was fined twelve pence for non-attendance at church and ordered to confess his guilt before the entire congregation of East Lavant church on Sunday, 22 June, in the following terms:
Whereas I have heretofore highly displeased Almighty God in prophaning his holy Sabbath by playing at Crickett thereby neglecting to come to Church to devine service. I am now hartily sorry for my said offence desiring you here present to accept of this very penitent submission and joyne with me in prayer unto Almighty God for the forgiveness thereof saying Our Father which art in heaven …
Greentree was more brazen. He denied the offence until the court heard evidence to the contrary from the churchwarden. Faced with this deposition, Greentree offered a partial confession that ‘he hath bene some tymes absent from Church upon the Sabbath day in tyme of divine service and hath bin at cricket with others of the parishe’. He was sentenced to return to court on 20 June, but no further records survive.
The ritual of apology must have made some members of the congregation very uncomfortable, for eight other men from the same village faced a similar charge only one month later. All received similar sentences, and the rigmarole of public penance was repeated, although the evidence suggests that it was not very effective.
By the 1630s the joyless spirit of Puritanism began to creep over the land. Its nature is exemplified in the life of the Reverend Thomas Wilson, an extreme Puritan who was appointed to the living of Otham, near Maidstone, in 1631. Forty-one years later his biography was written by an admirer, George Swinnock, who wrote of Maidstone: ‘Maidstone was formerly a very prophane town, insomuch that I have seen Morrice dancing, Cudgel-playing, Stool-ball, Crickets, and many other sports open and publickly on the Lords Day … the former vain sinful customes of sports were reformed before his coming.’* (#ulink_526b5f61-7783-55e9-afed-8f1cea2e31a9) The Reverend Wilson’s career was mixed. He was suspended from his living in 1634 by the vehement anti-Puritan Archbishop Laud (1573–1644), and left Otham for Maidstone, accompanied by some of his flock. The warm welcome he received from like-minded souls suggests that Maidstone was not entirely populated by ‘prophane’ lovers of fun.
A further biography of another Puritan, Richard Culmer, by his son, also named Richard, reveals that he was suspended as Rector of Goodnestone, Kent, in 1634 for refusing to read the Book of Sports. Known as ‘Blue Dick’ for his eccentric habit of wearing a blue gown, the vengeful Reverend Culmer denounced the alleged informant who caused him to be suspended at Goodnestone so fiercely that he was imprisoned in the Fleet Prison for libel.** (#ulink_10e9518c-427f-53c5-8225-42f7ba237a12) Around 1639 this joyless cleric was made assistant to the Reverend Austin of Harbledown parish, near Canterbury, where he rapidly became detested for seeking to suppress Sabbath sports and drunkenness. The parishioners of Harbledown were made of sterner stuff than those who had issued apologies so lamely in other places. In Harbledown, instead of penance, the cricket-loving parishioners provoked ‘Blue Dick’ by ‘crickit playing before his door, to spite him’. I daresay they succeeded.
But ‘Blue Dick’ was not easily swayed from his convictions. He reproved the cricketers privately, and then – since this had no effect – publicly. The cricketers remained defiant, but cunning replaced provocation and they moved their game to ‘a field near the woods’ in a remote part of the parish that was well away from prying eyes. It did not work. A suspicious Culmer sent his son to investigate, but Richard Junior was forced to retreat rapidly, followed by a hail of stones thrown at him by the irate cricketers. Time draws a veil over how, or whether, the stand-off was resolved.
The Reverend Culmer does not disappear from history – nor does his fanaticism. In 1643, in true Puritan style, he was appointed to destroy ‘irreligious and idolatrous’ monuments in Canterbury Cathedral. This was a task to his taste, and he set to with a will and wrecked much of the fifteenth-century stained glass with his own hands. Later, he conspired to have the rector of Minster ejected from his living and was himself appointed to it: at once he began to squabble with his new parishioners. His behaviour became ever more eccentric, and on one occasion he swarmed up the church steeple by night and removed the cross from the spire. The local parishioners were by now used to the exploits of their rector, and simply observed that to finish the job properly he should have pulled down the entire church, since its ground shape was itself a cross. The Reverend Culmer may stand forever as an icon of religious intolerance, and given the tenor of the times, his cricket-loving parishioners were lucky that he proved so ineffective.
The Puritan ambition, even pre-Cromwell, to create a devout nation gave power to the Church that was too often misused by fanatics. Social conditions added to the influence of the clerics. In the first half of the seventeenth century, the entire population of England was a mere 4 to 4½ million, of whom nearly 80 per cent lived south of the Humber, mostly in parishes of four to five hundred souls. The members of these small communities looked to their cleric and their squire for social and moral guidance, and rarely travelled beyond their own village. Most people were poor. Incomes were low and rents were high. Hardship was a daily reality. But where life was wretched, an early Poor Law existed to bring relief from distress. The Privy Council encouraged justices of the peace to find work for the poor so that the worst poverty was confined to the anciens régimes of Continental Europe.
In 1638 the Honourable Artillery Company was presented with land at Finsbury in London that would in time become one of the most famous of the early cricket grounds. Intriguing mentions of cricket abroad now begin to appear from time to time: Adam Olearius’ Voyages and Travels of Ambassadors (1647; English translation 1662) suggests that in Persia (now Iran) a form of cricket was played. If so, it has yet to enter the sporting bloodstream of the nation, and it is hard to imagine Mullahs and Ayatollahs looking any more kindly on the game than did seventeenth-century Puritans. It is more likely to be a confusion in the translation.
In England, cricket-lovers continued to be prosecuted, the court hearings they faced being among the handful of mentions of the game during the seventeenth century. More Sabbath-breakers faced the archdeaconry court in Midhurst, Sussex, in 1637, when eight players were fined and ordered to make public penance. It is a tribute to cricket that it survived such disapproval.
If the misbehaviour of parishioners shocked the Church elders, they were dumbfounded when one of their own, the Reverend Henry Cuffin, was charged in 1629. Cuffin, a young curate of Ruckinge, Kent, and presumably as godly as his cloth, was censured for playing cricket ‘in very unseemely manner with boyes and other very meane and base persons of our parrishe to the great scandal of his Ministerie and offence of such as sawe him play at the said game’. His defence was a stiletto in the ribs of those who peppered the charge with the unsuitability of the curate consorting with ‘very meane and base persons’. Not so, said Cuffin, he had been playing with ‘persons … of repute and fashion’. And moreover, he added that he ‘doth diligentlie serve the Cure of Ruckinge’. It is not clear whether Reverend Cuffin would have accepted the charge meekly if he had been playing with the peasantry, but the presence among his fellow cricketers of ‘persons of repute’ made him belligerent in his defence. There is no record that he was censured, fined or ordered to make public penance, but the whole episode, apart from casting a light on the class-consciousness of the time, tells us that the peasants’ game was moving upmarket.
A few years earlier, in 1625, an ill and near senile King James I had died unlamented, and his son, more talented and fitted for the throne in every way but one, succeeded him as Charles I. But his one defect was fatal – a stubborn determination to exercise absolute rule in an age when the spirit of the nation was for greater democracy. Charles did not seem to care, or perhaps even to notice, that his behaviour was draining support from the monarchy. He caused offence to friend and foe alike, making no effort to humour Parliament or people. He courted widespread disapproval by marrying a Catholic, Henrietta Maria of France, agreed only reluctantly to the Petition of Right, and declined to address grievances. He made promises only to break them. He persecuted the Puritans, who were mutilated, imprisoned and forced to flee the country.* (#ulink_ffec56ce-ffd9-5e92-a3e7-7140a4053a62) But the cropping of ears, branding of bodies and slitting of noses increased dissent rather than deterring it. The struggle became severe, culminating in the Civil War, the execution of the King in 1649 and the birth of the Commonwealth with Cromwell at its head and Puritanism as its faith.
Oliver Cromwell is one of the great figures of English history, and he held a special fascination for me as by far the most illustrious Member of Parliament for my own constituency of Huntingdon. He and I are the only Members from that seat – thus far – to head a government. Cromwell became leader after a civil war in the country; I became leader as a civil war erupted within the Conservative Party. In each case, our enemies were implacable. Cromwell, General of the New Model Army and Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, was said by his foes to have enjoyed a boisterous youth. Whether this is true or not, his adult life was uneventful until, in his forties, he was propelled to the forefront of English life. As a private man he was commonplace. As a General, he was superb. As Lord Protector, his virtues and failings were on a grand scale; he can be mentioned with justice alongside Caesar and Napoleon.
The downside of Puritanism was that it robbed the Church of charity and put a premium on cant and piety. The prigs were in control. Lives were disrupted. Theatres were closed. Drama was stigmatised. The arts were restrained, and an anti-clerical feeling took root that would one day welcome the restoration of the monarchy. During the years of the Commonwealth poetry was the only art that prospered, thanks to the mighty imagination of Milton. It is an anomaly that Milton was a supporter of Puritanism: he was so by default, in his opposition to the excesses of an autocratic King. But neither his blindness, nor his gout, nor his many disappointments and hardships, could dim his advocacy of the liberty of the press and the elimination of prejudice, or his belief in taxation by the people, not the crown. He did not advocate the freedom to play cricket, or even deign to notice the game. Milton’s nephew Edward Phillipps was, however, familiar with cricket. In a poem written in 1658, entitled ‘Treatment of Ladies as Balls and Sports’, he wrote: ‘would that my eyes had been beaten out of my head with a cricket ball the day before I saw thee’. He was not always so averse to women, his preferred recreation being more basic: ‘Ellen, all men command thy eyes/ Only I command thy thighs,’ he wrote in ‘The Art of Wooing and Complementing’ (1655).
The Church, in its rigorous crackdown on Sunday cricketers, was a mild pre-echo of a Puritan ethic that sank deep into the British soul. It is, after all, not all that many years ago that professional cricket was prohibited on Sunday, as the spirit of the Lord’s Day Observance Society held sway with much of contemporary opinion. Puritanism was tough on recreation, and it is unsurprising that cricket was targeted: the austere piety of the Puritans’ beliefs, and their determination to make people devout, was bound to be in conflict with the exuberant joy of a ball game.* (#ulink_25955e72-28b0-58d4-b80e-2bc631ea9766)
But the courts did not always convict. At the Kent assizes held at Maidstone on 27 July 1652, six men of Cranbrook were accused of playing ‘a certain unlawful game called cricket’, but were acquitted as, to the horror of the Church, the justices ruled that the game was not unlawful. It was a rare blemish for the killjoys that was soon to be corrected at Eltham, Kent, in 1654, when seven players were fined two shillings each by the churchwardens for playing on the Sabbath. Four parishioners of Hunton, Kent, were similarly charged in 1668. Even after the restoration of Charles II and the end of Puritan government in 1660, some of the old attitudes still prevailed. In May 1671 Edward Bound was held to be ‘in contempt of the law of England’ and ‘a bad example to others’ for playing cricket on a Sunday. However, he was luckier than earlier miscreants, and was exonerated under the General Pardon Act.
Cricket remained largely an amusement of village peasants. There are mere glimpses of the game through the lost seventeenth century. In 1611, Randle Cotgrave’s French–English dictionary translated ‘crosse’ as ‘a cricket staffe’ and ‘crosser’ as ‘to play at cricket’, thus fuelling the occasional claim, surely erroneous, that ‘criquet’ is of French origin. Nor is it the case, as often claimed, that ‘criquet’ was played in France in 1478 before spilling across the Channel. There is no medieval text identifying ‘criquet’ as a game, since it was not: ‘criquet’ was, and is, the French name for an insect similar to a grasshopper, just as ‘cricket’ is in English. Moreover, an examination of the original text that has misled historians shows that the word ‘criquet’ was not actually used at all: it was in fact ‘etiquet’, meaning a ‘small stick’. The text reads: ‘une lieu où en jouoit a la boulle pred’une ataché ou etiquet’ (‘a place where people were playing at boulle near a stake or peg’ – ‘boulle’ probably being the game of boulles, or a forerunner of it, which to this day remains so popular in France).* (#ulink_dd813299-64f3-5a2f-9596-dc2b3f4daf9d) A further indication that cricket did not originate in France comes from a Swiss visitor, César de Saussure, one hundred years later, who reported, ‘The English are fond of a game they call cricket.’** (#ulink_5e96d5ea-c732-5d85-b9a0-a43e0920d61b) The English, not the French.
Even in the midst of Church and state persecution cricket began to take root, although, as with the earlier John Derrick case, it is sometimes only legal action that preserves a record of it. In May 1640,as the Civil War drew nearer, civil disputes still exercised the courts. A suit of trespass was brought in the King’s Bench Division in which the plaintiff, Robert Spilstead, alleged trespass on his land near Chevening, Kent, during which cattle did ‘bite the sprouts and young shootes thereof and … tread and consume his grasse’, and the defendants, Robert Shell and Michael Steavens, ‘did spoile and subverte his ground with carriages’ as well as ‘take and carry away 400 of hoppoles’. In response, the defendants pleaded that the rector of Chevening owned the tithes of all the woods growing in the parish, and that they were merely farming them for him. A complicated argument about boundaries and jurisdiction then followed in which, to support his case that the damaged coppice was within his ownership, Spilstead gave evidence that ‘about 45 years since there was a football playing and about 30 years since a cricketting* (#ulink_0f166dc2-e086-5818-930b-a1cde27d43ee) betweene the Weald and Upland and the Chalkehill’.
There is evidence that cricket may have begun climbing up the social scale by the 1640s, notwithstanding the distractions of the Civil War. On 29 May 1646 four gentlemen of ‘prophane’ Maidstone – William Cooper, Richard Marsh, Robert Sanders and Walter Francklyn – lost a game of cricket on the open common at Cox Heath, three miles south of the town, to two young Royalists, Thomas Harlackenden and Samuel Filmer. The nature of the game – and the politics of the victors – must have brought the Reverend Thomas Wilson close to apoplexy but it aroused great excitement in Maidstone. A bet on the outcome was laid – cash for candles, and when the loser failed to hand over the candles, court action followed.
Early fiction began to notice cricket, and it is one of ‘the games of Gargantua’ in an English translation of the works of Rabelais. But fiction can mislead as well as inform, and it did so with confident assertions that cricket was played in venerable colleges by the mid- seventeenth century. Although it is possible that it may have been, it is by no means certain. A reference to cricket at Winchester College in 1647 is based on an undated Latin poem, ‘De Collegio Wintoniensi’, by Robert Mathew, a scholar who left the college that year. It relates how boys climbed a hill to play a game involving a ball (‘pila’) and bat (‘bacillo’) which may have been cricket, but he makes no mention of that name. A later reference to cricket at Winchester, circa 1665, is total fiction. It derives from a purely conjectural account of a boy’s schooldays in W.L. Bowles’s The Life of (Bishop) Thomas Ken, published in 1830, which imagines how

our junior, ‘the tear forgot as soon as shed’, if it has ever for a moment been on his youthful cheek, is at ease among his companions of the same age; he is found, for the first time, attempting to wield a cricket bat; and, when his hour of play is over …
This piece of nineteenth-century fiction was seized on as evidence that cricket was played at Winchester and Eton in the mid- seventeenth century. This could be so, but fiction cannot be accepted as bona fide evidence.* (#ulink_bfa70452-9596-570a-b3f2-d9aef626a20c)
Nor can faulty memory. Writing about the genesis of club cricket, the Cricketer Spring Annual of 1933 records: ‘Fifty years ago, an aged villager, close on 90 years … recollected seeing an old print, then hanging in a wayside cottage, showing “Cricket on ye old Green”, and giving an approximate date of 1685.’ This cannot be correct, since prints of cricket matches became available only in the 1740s, so even if this unlikely tale has a basis in fact, the picture referred to could not date before the middle of the eighteenth century.** (#ulink_84572135-0d35-5a20-9381-1997c79a091a)
I am puzzled, too, by Altham’s assertion in The History of Cricket that ‘with the restoration [of Charles II in 1660], in a year or two it became the thing in London society to make matches and to form clubs’. If Altham is right I can find no evidence of it. So far as I can determine there is no record of a cricket match being played in London before the 1700s, and no mention of a club until 1722, sixty- two years after the Restoration.
Not that life was dull during the reign of Charles II. Popular history recalls the King as a merry monarch, easy-natured and lascivious, and a welcome antidote to the pious Puritans. Charles would have agreed with the American George Nathan that ‘Women and Englishmen are actors by nature,’ since he lifted an old prohibition and permitted women to act on the stage. Prior to his edict, women’s roles had been played by soft-featured young men, fearful that their voices would break and their careers be over. The way was open for Margaret Hughes, probably the first legitimate professional actress, who became mistress to Charles I’s nephew Prince Rupert, and went on to gamble away a fortune.
More famous names soon followed, including ‘a mighty pretty woman’ (according to Dr Johnson, a keen observer), who had probably had a relationship with the notorious libertine and poet Lord Rochester when very young. ‘Nelly, my life, tho’ now thou’rt full fifteen’, rhymed Rochester, before becoming more explicit. Nell Gwynne made her debut in Dryden’s The Indian Emperor at the King’s Theatre in 1665, and was soon to catch the King’s eye. Cricketers should be grateful she did, for as we shall see, descendants of Charles II and Nell were to play an important part in the history of the game.
By 1660 the Puritans were universally loathed, and the bells rang to welcome home the King. An ultra-Royalist House of Commons, eager to restore power to Charles, invited him home from exile. The loyal populace lined the streets in welcome, and soon cheered and roared as thirteen regicides of Charles I were brutally done to death. To satisfy the mob the half-rotted corpses of Cromwell and Thomas Ireton were dug up to be spat on and hanged. Three of the regicides had been captured in Holland, and handed over to face execution by one of the most unprincipled adventurers in English history. George Downing, an itinerant preacher, became a chaplain in Sir Thomas Fairfax’s Puritan army before worming his way into Cromwell’s favour. As Scoutmaster General– Cromwell’s top spy – in Scotland he was well paid, and he invested his money wisely. He married well, too, into the powerful Howard family, and was appointed British ambassador to The Hague, to which his Letter of Credence was written by Milton: ‘A person of eminent Quality, and after a long trial of his Fidelity, Probity and Diligence, in several and various negotiations, well approved and valued by us.’
In The Hague Downing spied on Royalists, including the future Charles II and his sister, the Princess of Orange. But his loyalties were elastic, and upon Cromwell’s death this Puritan favourite turned coat and became an avid Royalist. The cynical and worldly Charles exploited him as his own spy, and later, for services rendered, appointed him a Baronet. But nothing was ever straightforward with Downing. After a while he fell out of favour, was committed to the Tower of London, released, and then turned to speculative building. One street, on the edge of what was once known as Thorney Island, near Whitehall, still carries his name – Downing Street.
The nation’s fondness for the King did not last once his greed and self-indulgence became common knowledge. Within a few years the great diarist Samuel Pepys was noting of an alliance formed with Holland and Sweden that it was ‘the only good public thing that hath been done since the King came into England’. Nor did anything match it in the years that followed, and it is fortunate that the nation never learned that its dissolute King was willing to take a pension from its arch-enemy, the King of France. Yet even without that knowledge, faithful Royalist support began to crumble. Events did little to help the King. For the average Londoner life was miserable. Grime was everywhere, as every household, shop and factory burned coal. Clothes, rarely changed, went grey, then black. The plague of 1664 – the fifth in under fifty years – and the Great Fire of London two years later devastated the City.
To public dismay, in 1673 the King’s brother James married a Catholic, Mary of Modena. In 1678 Titus Oates developed the fantasy of a Popish plot by Jesuits to murder the King and burn London. The dissolute Parliament, in which Members were bribed and corrupted, was finally dissolved after eighteen years and a new Commons, hostile to the King, elected. Thrice dismissed, it was thrice re-elected. Charles died in 1685, muttering, ‘Let not poor Nelly starve,’ but with no words of comfort for his country, and his brother came to the throne as James II.
In the midst of these dramas there are mentions of cricket, which was now beginning to attract spectators. The quarter sessions in Maidstone on 28 March 1668 were attended by Sir Roger Twysden, who observed in his notebook: ‘there was no great matter of consequence. A question was started whether an excise man could exact money from a poor person [who] at an horse-race or kricketing sold a bushel or two of malt made into drinks.’ The Justice waived the excise duty on ‘kricketing’, which must have brought more agony to the Thomas Wilson school of morality – as must a further decision to allow the sale of ale to spectators. Sport and alcohol were about to begin a long-term relationship. So too were sport and gambling. In July 1697 ‘a great match at cricket was played in Sussex; they were eleven of a side, and they played for fifty guineas apiece’. In the seventeenth century that was a large sum of money – but it would soon be dwarfed.
The game was growing more popular. Thomas Lennard, who became Lord Dacre just before his eighth birthday, was an early spectator. In 1674 he married Anne Palmer, an illegitimate daughter of Charles II and the Duchess of Cleveland, and as son-in-law to the King was further ennobled as Earl of Sussex. His wife, only twelve years old at the time of her marriage, had such a wild temperament that by the age of fifteen her husband had removed her from Court to Hurstmonceaux Castle in Sussex. In June 1677, no doubt seeking a few quiet hours, the Earl drew £3 from his accounts to attend ‘the crekitt match at Ye Dicker’, a stretch of common land near to the castle.
It seems the young Countess was not seduced by cricket, because later that same year she deserted her husband to join her mother in Paris. Here life looked up for her when she was seduced by the British ambassador, the future Duke of Montagu. In the early 1680s she returned to her husband, with whom she had little in common. A few years later Sussex supported William of Orange in the 1688 Revolution, while she sided with her uncle, the deposed King, James II, then in exile at St-Germain. It must have been a real Jack Spratt marriage, for their views differed on every matter. Nor would she have been pleased when the Earl’s extravagance and gaming losses compelled him to sell his estates.
But, so far as we know, their relationship never led to ‘riot and battery’. This was the conviction obtained against Thomas Reynolds, Henry Gunter and a widow, Eleanor Lansford, for battering Ralph Thurston while ‘being only spectators at a game of cricket’. The cause of the assault is not known, but it is most likely to have been a dispute over a bet: if so, they would have been wiser to have paid up, as did Sir John Pelham, Bart, who lost 2s.6d. in ‘a wagger about a cricket match at Lewis’ in 1694.
Five years later, philosophers were muscling in on the game. The text in 1699 of The World Bewitched, by Edward Ward, contains a dialogue between two Astrologers and the Author, in which it is asserted that: ‘Quoits, cricket, nine-pins, and trap-ball will be very much in fashion, and more tradesmen may be seen playing in the fields, than working in their shops.’
As the seventeenth century came to a close, the British navy was carrying traders, missionaries and the game of cricket to many parts of the world – a naval chaplain on HMS Assistance, Henry Teonge, recorded a game of ‘crickett’ near Aleppo as early as 6 May 1676. In England, the game was widening its appeal. Cricket was moving beyond its base camp around the Weald. London, then the greatest city in Europe, was beginning to appreciate it. Noble families were beginning to patronise the game. Spectators, gamblers and publicans welcomed it as a vehicle for their interests. The press – then, as now, with a London bias – newly freed from censorship, was on hand to publicise it, or more typically the antics of prominent supporters and the size of their bets on matches.
For cricket, money was to be the root of all progress. As the eighteenth century dawned, most of the wealth of England was in the hands of a small number of families, who by and large had few time-consuming responsibilities and ample leisure in which to enjoy their good fortune. The age of the patron was not far away.
* (#ulink_b8aab15c-f274-5df8-a697-033125073920) In this he echoes the eighteenth-century historian Joseph Strutt, who suggested that ‘the manly exercise of cricket’ originated from club-ball.
* (#ulink_912bb838-1bf5-5712-b986-8eb9e0b14ecc) He later produced an epic on the Crusade entitled Antiocheis.
** (#ulink_78cc45eb-4500-54a4-953a-5f2c4cf0f59f) Macaulay was never short of opinions. When he was a precocious toddler, his aunt enquired after a minor ailment and drew the reported response: ‘I thank you, Madam, for your solicitous inquiry. The agony has somewhat abated.’
* (#ulink_928cff20-abd6-53be-91a7-d9f0742db22b) The relevant extract from the deposition is shown in full, as the works of some early historians, notably H. S. Altham’s classic A History of Cricket (1926), contain errors of transcription. Altham also refers to Derrick as ‘Denwick’.
* (#ulink_a5ed5c70-24e7-54a5-b300-d45bdc9078f0) But see Coriolanus, Act I, Scene I: ‘What’s work, my Countrymen in hand?, Where go you, with bats and clubs?’ The game is unlikely to be cricket.
* (#ulink_4d928c7b-3e4b-5455-8ae3-5f8a5607a646) At a conference at Hampton Court between Anglicans and Puritans in January 1604, James backed the Anglican bishops. Shortly afterwards, a hundred Puritan ministers were dismissed from their livings.
* (#ulink_9fe04b60-906e-5935-8f1c-11f701753583) The children were William Martin, Richard Martin Junior and Raphe West, playing with two friends, Edward Hartley and Richard Slaughter.
* (#ulink_3e1409ae-2a0a-5bd1-bc02-e4ef2ea58cb4) Some historians mistakenly attribute the damning of Maidstone to Wilson himself rather than Swinnock, for example David Underdown in Start of Play (2000), and Derek Birley in The Willow Wand (1979) and A Social History of Cricket (1999).
** (#ulink_553f2937-19fc-582c-aa5f-798dddcf39aa) If he was imprisoned for libel, the offending denunciation should have been written. However, I can find no record of it: possibly ‘libel’ was used sloppily, and the offence was actually slander.
* (#ulink_6db3f02f-7834-560d-ba60-7491970d5fe4) For example, in 1637 the Star Chamber sentenced three Puritan writers to imprisonment and to have their ears cropped for libelling bishops.
* (#ulink_6b28921f-9f9c-5b66-a8e7-6b4b0716f9f8) In Ireland, the Major-General banned ‘krickett’. ‘Sticks’ and ‘balls’ were ordered to be burnt by the common hangman; the players were not.
* (#ulink_53536f86-110b-590b-b94d-207c588c3905) See Leonard Hector, ‘The Ghost of Cricket Walks the Archives’, Journal of theSocietyof Archivists, Vol. IV, No. 7, 1973, pp.579–80.
** (#ulink_53536f86-110b-590b-b94d-207c588c3905) Quoted in, for example, Derek Birley’s excellent The Willow Wand (1979).
* (#ulink_e9a9bb17-db4b-5650-ad75-8ed4cc21cba0) A term especially associated with the Sevenoaks–Tonbridge area until the nineteenth century.
* (#ulink_82d06167-9e8a-5635-87d7-8a40be73f489) Although it has been, for example in H.S. Altham’s The History of Cricket and Ashley Mote’s The Glory Days of Cricket (1997).
** (#ulink_74ba7b98-6f75-5943-8027-dba183954b7a) Nonetheless, the date of 1685 appears in David Underdown’s Start of Play.

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