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

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

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

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

Swift as the falcon, darting on its prey,

He springs elastick o’er the verdant way;

Sure of success, flies upwards; with a bound,

Derides the slow approach and spurns the ground.

Prone slips the youth, yet glories in his fall,

With arm extended shows the captive ball.

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

In that same year there were tricky hurdles for Lord John to face off the field. Two days after his mistress Frances Leveson-Gower gave birth to his child at Woburn Abbey, her irate parents compelled them to marry. Sackville’s cricketing friend the Prince of Wales soothed the ruffled in-laws and offered to make up Lord John’s allowance from his father to £800 a year, which was accomplished by appointing him a Lord of the Bedchamber. It was a much-needed sinecure, for lack of funds was a constant burden for this impecunious second son. He had hoped to inherit the Sussex estates of his elderly great- uncle Spencer Compton,* (#ulink_c5e34013-9949-5c8b-a5fa-32a24655d050) valued at £3,000–£4,000 per annum, but upon his expected benefactor’s death he received nothing. His great- uncle may have feared the money would be squandered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To the Duke of Newcastle he added that Sergison was ‘attended by Lisbon Peckham* (#ulink_b98d41cb-f509-5b94-a111-9b20671502c0) and four or five of the Chichester Tory’s, butt did not ask for one vote, and I don’t believe could have made one if he had asked. I got Tanky** (#ulink_6b2730c8-8914-545b-94c8-feccc90ebca6) to come in order to swell and look big at him but Sergison never appeared before us, butt went off as soon as we came.’ So he may have done, but the episode was not over, as a further letter to Newcastle on 29 July revealed: ‘have you heard that Sergison treated his people the night of the cricket match at Portslade and that there was a bloody battle between them and the Slyndoners but the last came off victorious tho’ with some broken heads’ – a reference to the match attended by Newcastle and Sir William Gage.

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

But Richmond has more information for us yet. In 1745 he was one of the backers of three games between Surrey and Sussex,* (#ulink_fdec4c13-cbf1-5574-9ab6-ae27f549c158) the accounts of which are preserved in the Sackville manuscripts at Maidstone:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such diversions whetted the Prince’s appetite for the game. At Moulsey Hurst in June 1735 he backed Surrey and other country men against London in an eventful contest. London’s finest bowler, a Mr Ellis, dislocated his finger and was replaced by the famous Cook of Brentford. It was a bad day for fingers, for one of the Prince’s team also damaged a digit, retired for a while and then returned to the crease, but failed to score many runs.* (#ulink_82f8842e-8cfb-5faa-ae69-91aa2001195e) The London team won, with Mr Wheatley, a distiller, and a Mr Dun leading them to victory.

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

Although the Prince was more frequently a spectator than a player, often bringing distinguished guests with him,* (#ulink_7dde9281-a989-5d43-bc02-6a22f6058c5b) in a game at Cliveden, his home in Buckinghamshire, sometime in 1749 he received a heavy blow on his side from a cricket ball. When he died two years later while dancing at Leicester House, that blow was widely thought to be the cause of the abscess that killed him. Following the wretched Jasper Vinall (see page 24), his was another death attributed to cricket. It is probable that his father did not miss ‘poor Fred’, and another of his late mother’s assessments of him echoes through the ages: ‘My dear firstborn is the greatest ass, and the greatest beast in the world, and I heartily wish he was out of it.’

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

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

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

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

You see in the papers that Lord Sandwich has won his match at cricket against the Duke, but what I think the best part of the story is not told here. The Duke, to procure good players on his side, ordered 22, who were reckoned the best players in the Country, to be brought before him, in order for him to choose 11 out of them. They played accordingly, and he chose 11. The other 11, being affronted at the choice, challenged the elect to play for a crown a head out of their own pockets. The challenge was accepted; and they played before the Duke and the elect were beat all to nothing.* (#ulink_d8eee61f-f32c-50ce-a7ca-221e1807217e)

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

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

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

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

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

Next in lollop’d Sandwich, with negligent grace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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