More Than A Game: The Story of Cricket's Early Years

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 WeeklyJournal 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 MusaeJuveniles, a collection of poems in Latin, one of which, ‘In CertamenPilae’, 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 Deviland 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.* (#ulink_2b810fa5-421a-5d4a-a23a-933a8860febb) 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.* (#ulink_fb62964f-4201-50ac-aea1-bbf9bca2fe78) 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,* (#ulink_89d6af0d-9900-5ac0-82ae-2b4957d2723b) 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.