1
What mighty Contests rise from trivial Things.
Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock
As an innkeeper, George Smith knows everything there is to know about the morning after. But when he stirs on 19 June 1744, he senses something different.
First light is filtering through his garret window. The hour is being chimed at St Mary-le-Bow, although he is not alert enough to count the exact number. Down below, in Chiswell Street, a cart rumbles over the cobbles. In the courtyard of his inn, the Pyed Horse, he hears a barrel being rolled. Good, young William must be already astir.
When George stretches, a stream of recollections is undammed. Apart from his head, his right shoulder is a bit sore, but he does not feel bad, considering . . . Considering what a long, hot day in the City of London it had been . . . Considering what a cricket match it had been . . . Considering what his profits would be!
Thousands upon thousands of folk poured through his inn yesterday, to buy tickets for the Kent v England match and enter the ground of the Honourable Artillery Company next door. Members of the august Company have their own entrance, and do not have to pay for entry.
Thinking of the tickets makes George smile. It was a clever idea, when sketching a few players on the face of the ticket, to give them all shadows. Roll up, roll up – it’s going to be a sunny day!
George remembers why his shoulder is sore, and it’s not from batting or bowling. He had to send William to the inn’s stables to fetch a whip when the crowd spilled on to the field of play. He cracked the whip to force the spectators back over the rope. There was some disorder – and the HAC committee are bound to haul him in and tell him it must never be allowed to happen again, forsooth. But it is not as if the Riot Act had to be read.
A pity Kent won – so narrowly, too. It was hardly George’s fault. It is true he scored only nought and eight runs for England, but he was so busy all day in supplying fine wines, victuals and viands to the gentlefolk, ales and pies for the rest, not to mention cracking the whip.
Then, as if ten thousand spectators were not enough, he had to cater for royalty. If the HAC committee knew that His Royal Highness Frederick, the Prince of Wales, was going to attend, and his younger brother, the Duke of Cumberland, why did they not let George put up a special tent? He could also have increased the price of a ticket from twopence to threepence, or more, because spectators had these royal personages to view into the bargain.
What a finish, too! If only Thomas Waymark had held on . . .
George sees again the ball hit up into the sky, when Kent’s last pair had three runs still to make for victory. What steadier man in the whole realm to take that catch? Poor old Tom. He had been the groom for the Duke of Richmond. This morning he might be sleeping in the kennels.
The Bow bells chime the half-hour.FN3 George opens his eyes, stares at the ceiling – and sees the future of cricket at the Artillery Ground. Matches of three or five players a side are all very well, but they do not last the whole day, as Kent v England had. Teams must be eleven a side in future. Matches must also consist of two innings per side when there is sufficient time and daylight at the height of summer. Besides, it is in the spirit of Englishmen, fair and true, that a fellow should be given a second chance, as he was after scoring nought.
And if he could fill the Artillery Ground with ten thousand folk for one grand match, he can do it again. Since the Great Plague, and the improvements in clearing the streets of rubbish and beggars and ne’er-do-wells, many men have moved to live in London. They have money to spend, too: some are making handsome profits out of trade with France and the West Indies – ‘the middling sort’, as they are called. Royalty, gentlefolk and this new middling sort, they all want entertainment, and they are prepared to pay good money to watch cricket. Boxing, bear-baiting, cock-fighting and horse-racing do not have a venue to accommodate ten thousand people and charge them as they enter, like he does.
George sits up in bed. If he increases the cost of admission from twopence to sixpence, and ten thousand folk buy a ticket – or eight thousand, because Company members have to be admitted free – then sixpence multiplied by eight thousand equals . . . equals . . .
‘William! Come hither, boy! And bring pen and paper, prithee!’
Kent v England at the Artillery Ground on 18 June 1744 is the first cricket match for which an entrance ticket survives; and the first for which a match report survives; and the second for which we have a scorecard. This evidence, together, gives us a detailed picture of why the playing and watching of cricket was so attractive, even in its infancy, to English people.
While the first surviving ticket was printed for George Smith, his age unknown, the first match report was written by James Dance, when he was 23. At the same age, I covered my first Test series, the Ashes of 1977, and my first England tour. One is eager to play shots at 23, and see how far one can push irreverent wit.
The parallels, I should add, do not extend much further. His father, George Dance the Elder, was the architect who at that time was designing the new Mansion House as the Lord Mayor of London’s residence. At 18, James Dance had achieved a precocious hat-trick. He had gone up to St John’s, Oxford, and a few months later down again; he had joined Lincoln’s Inn; and he had married Elizabeth Hooper, daughter of a customs officer. While none of those ventures quite worked out, Dance had shown an early sign of finding his niche when he had defended the prime minister with what the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls ‘a smart poem’. Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, had been ridiculed in anonymous verse, which was suspected of being composed by Alexander Pope, the most acerbic of satirists, and Dance had come up with a witty riposte. It did not lead to a career in Downing Street, where Walpole had been granted a residence at Number Ten by King George II, but it had marked him as a young man of promise.
Having been one of the ten thousand spectators at the Artillery Ground that day – did he ask George Smith for a free press pass? – Dance was inspired to write a poem of three hundred lines. Unlike most match reports, which have to be finished a few minutes after the close of play, Dance had several months for composition, and he made the most of the extra time to give full rein to his irreverent wit. He chose the mock-heroic style, along the lines of Pope’s two famous poems, The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad, which had people rolling in the aisles – provided they were not the butts. The barbs Pope hurled in The Dunciad at the House of Hanover were more vicious than anything published about the royal family in our litigious age.
Dance was also a player himself, in more than one sense. He played cricket for the Richmond club, although none of his scores survives. At the Richmond Theatre, he worked as an actor, playwright and manager; David Garrick, most celebrated of actors and known to watch cricket, was to invite Dance to Drury Lane to play Falstaff in what was considered his finest role. Dance also acquired a mistress: the actress known as Catherine de l’Amour. And while living up to his real surname by leading his wife and children a merry dance, he took the pseudonym of James Love, presumably to identify with his mistress. It was under this name that his Cricket: An Heroic Poem was published in 1745.
We do not know whether Catherine was French or if she simply adopted ‘de l’Amour’ as an exotic stage name. Either way, I suspect James Love is teasing her in his poem when he launches into ridicule and takes his first potshot at France, as one of those European countries which do not play cricket. He calls the games that French people play ‘Eunuch Sports’, a barb worthy of Pope. Primarily, Love has billiards and bowls in mind.FN4 In a footnote, Love says that billiards is ‘Frenchifi’d’ and played by ‘Beaus of the first Magnitude, dress’d in the Quintessence of the Fashion’ – veritable fops! In the eyes of Love, the only proper sport apart from cricket is tennis: real tennis, the sport of kings, as lawn tennis was not invented until the nineteenth century.
Remember that what Smith is introducing is nothing less than the commercialisation of leisure, an historic moment in the western world; whenever we buy a ticket to watch sport, we are following in the footsteps of Smith’s customers who went through his Pyed Horse into the Artillery Ground. In 1744 the parameters of formal sport are only just being explored. Military fighting is still on the agenda – the last battle on British soil was to take place the following year, never mind excursions overseas – so what form should peaceful sport take in developing manly prowess? Love is defining the parameters, or trying to, when he scorns ‘puny’ billiards and bowls.
Love next takes aim at the Honourable Artillery Company – always safer to ridicule institutions or foreign countries, rather than individuals who can jeopardise one’s career prospects. King Henry VIII had founded it for the defence of the realm, and even today the HAC is the City headquarters for the British Army Reserve, or Territorial Army formerly. But in the two centuries following its foundation, the members of the Company seem to have become less than fit for purpose. Their records for February 1744 mention a procession to celebrate the 17th anniversary of the accession of King George II, and even though war was in the air and austerity the order of the day, each member afterwards was still entitled to ‘a pint of wine’. Love takes aim at these fat-cat city-slickers who have let their military training lapse, and fires:
A Place there is, where City-Warriors meet,
Wisely determin’d not to fight, but eat.
Where harmless Thunder rattles to the Skies,
While the plump Buff-coat fires, and shuts his Eyes.
A hit, a veritable hit! These ‘warriors’ are intent on feeding, not fighting. They are ‘plump’ and close their eyes – even though their ordnance is composed of blanks.
More ridicule comes when Love dedicates his poem to Lord Sandwich. He bows and scrapes so obsequiously, and lavishes so much mock-heroic praise on him, the effect is absurd: ‘With the greatest Diffidence I presume to lay this imperfect Poem at your Lordship’s Feet.’ After expressing nothing less than ‘Veneration’, Love goes on: ‘Far be it from me . . . to attempt a Description of your Lordship’s exalted Qualifications: Those Excellences which every Englishman is sensible of, but no one can express.’ Come on! This is the Lord Sandwich whose claim to fame is inventing a snack. After his death, and a long ministerial career, this epitaph was proposed: ‘Seldom has any man held so many offices and accomplished so little.’ (The Sandwich Islands ceased to be named after him and were instead called Hawaii.)
Love was impecunious – he had a wife, children and mistress to support – so I suspect he wrote this grovelling dedication to wheedle a few guineas out of his lordship. Modern naval historians claim that Sandwich was not entirely useless, and reformed the Admiralty to some effect, but Love goes so far overboard as to hail him as ‘the Cicero of the Age’. He signs himself at the end of this dedication as ‘Your Lordship’s Most Devoted, Most Obedient, and Most Humble Servant.’ You would have thought Sandwich would have splashed out and ordered a few extra copies. Had his lordship bought one for each of the children of his mistress, never mind his other relatives, he would have swelled sales of the book by at least nine.
As Love loves a lord more than most, for sound financial reasons, another peer to receive his utmost deference is Lord John Sackville, who played for Kent in this match. Sackville had issued the original challenge: Kent would play the best cricketers in the rest of England in two fixtures, home and away. Sackville was the son of the first Duke of Dorset and had therefore grown up playing cricket on the ground in the family estate at Knole Park, near Sevenoaks. His elder brother, the Earl of Middlesex, played cricket too, but he was not involved in this game, because he had more pressing duties as Master of the Horse for the Prince of Wales.
Mistresses were commonplace in Georgian society, and Sackville was not to be left out. On the last day of 1743, he had had a son by Lady Frances Leveson-Gower, sister of the Duchess of Bedford, out of wedlock. Two days later, however, on 1 January 1744, Sackville had been compelled to marry the mother of his child.
Sackville, now 30, held several offices of state, but without the income to match. He was an equerry to George II’s wife, Queen Caroline; and Lieutenant of Dover Castle (his father was Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports); and he had been the MP for Tamworth since the age of 21. To his partial rescue came Frederick, the Prince of Wales, granting him an annuity of £800 a year. But Sackville needed more besides: hence, perhaps, the challenge of these two cricket matches for a stake of one thousand guineas a side.
Of Sackville’s scandal, Love breathes not a word. An explanation could be that he feared his own mistress would be exposed by a reviewer in the public prints. Instead, he lays on flattery like clotted cream whenever he mentions Sackville. He is not only ‘Illustrious’, he is ‘Swift as the Falcon, darting on its Prey’ and ‘pants for mighty Honours, yet to come.’ Such deference must have resulted in a few more sales.
George Smith, as a commoner, does not receive quite the same veneration. But when Love pokes fun at him, he does so fairly gently. In one of his witty footnotes, Love refers to him as: ‘Mr Smith, the Master of the Ground, who, to his immortal Honour, and no inconsiderable Advantage, has made great Improvements, and been perhaps a principal Cause of the high Light in which CRICKET at this Time flourishes.’
Smith was therefore the major figure in cricket’s infancy. He was in charge of the best ground in England, and the ticketing, and the catering, and the security; and he was a player selected for England, or ‘the Counties’, as Love called them. They sure don’t make all-rounders like Smith any more.
Love records for us one of the ‘great Improvements’ which Smith made. The Artillery Ground was the first cricket ground known to have its playing area marked out by a boundary rope. (An advertisement of 1731 advertises a cricket match on Kennington Common that will be ‘roped out’, but no report has been discovered to confirm that it happened.) Smith seems to have started doing so before 1744, his invention stemming from the necessity of containing a large crowd in a small space. The contemporaneous painting of a cricket match at ‘the Mary-le-bone Fields’ depicts spectators scattered over a wide plain – the area that became Lord’s being then open country. Where did Smith get several hundred yards of rope? Living close to the Thames, he would not have had far to go to a chandler’s. In any event, Smith was so ahead of his time that a boundary rope was not used at Lord’s until the second half of the nineteenth century.
Wide o’er th’ extended Plain, the circling String
Restrains th’ impatient Throng, and marks a Ring.
Another Improvement which Smith made – another first at any rate – was to charge for admission. The Artillery Ground was the first sports ground in post-Roman Britain to do so. It was surrounded by streets, buildings and the graveyard where Daniel Defoe and John Bunyan are buried, so by restricting public access to it through the courtyard of the Pyed Horse, Smith could charge twopence a head. Or maybe more . . .
Love does not ridicule the other cricketers in this match. Thereby he set a fine example as the first cricket correspondent. Being a player himself, he must have known just how sodding difficult the game can be at times.
And because Love played the game himself, his enthusiasm when he describes the start of a cricket season is palpable almost three centuries later:
When the returning Sun begins to smile,
And shed its Glories round this sea-girt Isle;
When new-born Nature deck’d in vivid Green,
Chaces dull Winter from the charming Scene:
High panting with Delight, the jovial Swain
Trips it exulting o’er the Flow’r-strew’d Plain;
Thy Pleasures, CRICKET! all his Heart controul;
Thy eager Transports dwell upon his Soul.
So here we are, close to the summer solstice, the perfect time of year for a long day’s cricket. The stage is perfect, too, or at any rate the best in existence, as Thomas Lord has yet to be born. Let the cricketers enter – and what a fine sight they make, especially when compared with the normal denizens of the Artillery Ground, those members ‘plump’ and cowardly:
The Stumps are pitch’d. Each Heroe now is seen,
Springs o’er the Fence, and bounds along the Green,
In decent White, most gracefully array’d,
Each strong-built Limb in all its Pride display’d.
‘Fence’ may be poetic licence for the rope. Or it may be that the cricketers changed in the main building of Armoury House, then jumped over a wooden fence in front of it, while the rope restrained spectators on the other three sides of the ground.FN5
Here we also have cricket’s first reference to costume. The players in this match dressed in white, and it was a bit of a trend-setter, for the next 233 years, until the advent of World Series Cricket. Ladies dressed the same: on 26 July of the following year, when XI Maids of Bramley played against XI Maids of Hambledon (the Hambledon in Surrey near Godalming), they all dressed in white, augmented by blue ribbons in the hair of the Bramley players and red ribbons for the Hambledon team. Stripes have come, been, gone and returned, on shirts and caps, but white was the dominant colour from the outset – a decision that could only have been made in an era of many servants to do the laundry.
The consequences have been unquantifiable yet, I would argue, considerable. White clothes do make a man, or woman, more ‘gracefully array’d’ than he or she would be in clothes or uniform of another colour. White suggests purity, too; or so the priesthood thinks. This has shaped our image of cricketers. I believe we have come to expect them to behave better on and off the field, if only slightly, than players in other team sports who do not wear white. I suspect, too, that more match-fixing and spot-fixing have been perpetrated in coloured uniform, in limited-overs cricket, than when the clothing has been white.
As informatively as a match brochure, Love proceeds to talk us through the stars of the forthcoming show, starting with the England captain, Richard Newland. Love, in a footnote, calls him ‘a famous Batsman’: so, as another first, Newland inaugurates the sequence of players who have been hailed as the best batsman in England. The same footnote says that Newland comes from Slindon in Sussex and is a farmer by profession, although he used the money he made out of cricket to train as a surgeon and practise a different kind of cut. Aided by two of his brothers, Newland was the pillar of the Slindon team that lost only one of more than 40 matches in the 1740s.
In his poem, Love tells us that Newland is left-handed – and by my reckoning, if we take into account the players of the Hambledon era portrayed by John Nyren in The Cricketers of My Time, about a third of the known batsmen in the eighteenth century were left-handers. I can only deduce that they enjoyed the same advantage – of having a right-arm bowler bowling the ball across them, rather than at the stumps – as left-handers now. But stern and inflexible Victorian mores set in, demanding conformity, so that Baily’s Magazine observed in 1870: ‘There is not now a first-class left-handed batsman in England.’ Hence the first left-hander to score a century for England, Frank Woolley, did not do so until 1911–12 in Australia. The same conventions shackled Asian batsmen until the professional, post-Packer era.
The second cricketer Love introduces is Bryan, his first name unrecorded. Bryan comes from London and is a bricklayer by trade: a strong fellow, as we shall later see. In mock-heroic vein, echoing Homer, Love imagines Newland and Bryan hearing about the challenge issued by Lord Sackville, on behalf of Kent, to the rest of England – and laughing as they carouse. How dare these cricketers of Kent issue such a challenge, which reaches ‘Great Newland’s Ear’:
Where, with his Friend, all negligent he laugh’d,
And threatened future Glories, as they quaff’d.
If this seems a far cry from the modern team talk in a huddle, with the captain stressing the importance of bowling in the right areas and fighting together, Newland does exhort Bryan before the start:
Let Us with Care, each hardy Friend inspire!
And fill their Souls with emulating Fire!
The match commences at noon – or so it was scheduled, and wealthy patrons who came to bet did not expect to be made to hang around. Kent take the field, led out by their captain. (Love makes no mention of a toss, or of a bell, a feature of Christian culture, so one would have been ready to hand.)
And here comes what is, to my mind, the most amazing fact in the history of English cricket.
Bear in mind this is the mid-eighteenth century. Oliver Cromwell’s revolution was less than a century before, and few people wish to return to a republic, provided the monarch is bound to some extent by Parliament. In general, therefore, the social hierarchy is strict. If you are an aristocrat, you command; if a commoner, you obey. This applies in the army, the navy, the government, the Church – and in cricket. The captains chronicled to this date have been dukes, nobles, knights. (When the first Laws were drawn up, for the match in 1727 between the Duke of Richmond’s team and Mr Alan Brodrick’s team, the latter was the heir to Viscount Midleton.)
Yet, when Kent take the field, their captain is revealed to be not Lord Sackville at all. It is the Duke of Dorset’s gardener.
Love does not explain the rationale behind this decision. But he implicitly approves it, because he describes this gardener, Val Romney, in most eloquent terms as an outstanding physical specimen, with almost divine attributes. Yes, cricket’s first poser comes from Kent:
Bold Romney first, before the Kentish Hand
God-like appear’d, and seiz’d the chief Command.
Judicious Swain! Whose quick-discerning Soul
Observes the various Seasons as they roll.
Well-skill’d to spread the thriving Plant around,
And paint with fragrant Flow’rs th’ enamell’d Ground.
Conscious of Worth, with Front erect he moves,
And poises in his Hand the Bat he loves.
Romney was employed as the head gardener at Knole Park (‘Well-skill’d to spread the thriving Plant around’), and combined this work with playing cricket when the Duke desired: he was one of the first semi-professionals. The year before this match he had represented Three of Kent against Three of All-England at the Artillery Ground, and although he had not been captain, Kent had won by two runs: so he had experience as well.
Above all, however, the captaincy was awarded – surely by Sackville, who had captained Kent previously and had issued the challenge – to Romney on merit. We can surmise that it was because Sackville was desperate to win the game and the stakes, and thereby fund his domestic life. But the fact remains that the social hierarchy was overturned at this early point in cricket’s evolution, and while there were interregna when amateurs of little merit captained county teams, including Kent, the principle was established in the sport as a whole that the best man to be captain should and would be captain. It may be an exaggeration to think so, or maybe not, but it is at least conceivable that cricket might have been no more than a niche sport in upper-class English life, like polo or fives, but for this decision and the precedent it set.
This match was the second of the two fixtures: it was Kent’s away match, after the home leg had been staged at Coxheath three days earlier, on the Friday. The result of this first leg is unrecorded. We could guess that Kent had lost, under Sackville’s captaincy, and it was as a reaction that Romney was promoted. It matters not. Romney was now in command, Sackville under him; and Love gives us the impression that Sackville was happy with this appointment, because he ‘Attends with ardent Glee the mighty Play’r’, i.e. Romney.FN6
Love next introduces us to Kent’s opening bowler, William Hodsoll.FN7 Look, dear reader, at how tough and strong this fellow is – and be amazed at the speed he bowls! It is such an attractive theme for any cricket correspondent: all hail this new bowler, arguably the fastest on earth. In a footnote – straight up, no mockery – Love informs us that Hodsoll is a tanner by trade, from Dartford in Kent, as well as a formidable bowler:
Brisk Hodsoll next strides on with comely Pride,
Tough as the subject of his Trade, the Hide.
In his firm Palm, the hard-bound Ball he bears,
And mixes joyous with his pleas’d Compeers.
Love describes Hodsoll’s bowling action when he delivers the first ball of the match: ‘then pois’d, and rising as he threw,/ Swift from his Arm the fatal Missive flew.’ What sounds like a bending of the knees would have given Hodsoll some momentum for his forward thrust in delivery. Love does not say whether he had a run-up, but the implication is not, because of an earlier couplet about Hodsoll and his opening partner John Mills, a gamekeeper from Bromley:
Hodsoll and Mills behind the Wickets stand,
And each by Turns, the flying Ball command;
Of Hodsoll’s pace, Love gives a vivid impression. Remember that nothing in Georgian London was faster than a runaway horse. Even from a standing position, Hodsoll – tough as a tanner – bowls with startling speed, which Love embellishes with all the hyperbole he can command:
Nor with more Force the Death conveying Ball,
Springs from the Cannon to the batter’d Wall;
Nor swifter yet the pointed Arrows go,
Launch’d from the Vigour of the Parthian Bow.
It whizz’d along, with unimagin’d Force,
And bore down all, resistless in its Course.
To such impetuous Might compell’d to yield
The Bail, and mangled Stumps bestrew the Field.
Let us suppose Hodsoll could bowl at 60 mph: even though under-arm, such bowling on a rough pitch would have been a test of physical bravery.FN8 David Harris, the finest bowler of the Hambledon era at the end of the eighteenth century, was known to grind a batsman’s unprotected fingers against the bat: ‘Many a time have I seen the blood drawn in this way from a batter,’ wrote John Nyren in The Cricketers of My Time. But whether it is Hodsoll or Dennis Lillee, Malcolm Marshall or Dale Steyn, who knocks ‘mangled’ stumps out of the ground, the sight is cricket’s most dramatic.
The ball, then as now, weighed between five and six ounces. The ones used in this match might even have been manufactured by the Duke family, and therefore the make England still use in Tests at home: we know that in 1780 Duke’s supplied cricket balls to the Prince of Wales, who became King George IV. ‘The great secret of it is to wind the thread round an octagon piece of cork,’ wrote the diarist Joseph Farington after seeing the Duke’s cottage industry in Penshurst in 1811. ‘When the Ball is perfectly formed with Cork and thread . . . they put on the Leather cover which is made of Bull Hide.’FN9
In no other English sport is a ball put into play more quickly by a human being, without the aid of an implement, than it is by the pace bowler. (In baseball, the fastest pitchers have historically delivered the ball 5 to 10 per cent more quickly than the fastest bowlers.) Love contrasts this speed of action with ‘puny Billiards, where, with sluggish Pace,/ The dull Ball trails . . .’ Bowls is equally dull, in Love’s opinion, because the bowl ‘wanders to the Goal’.
The colour of the ball was red, or ‘crimson’ in Love’s more flowery vocabulary. It remained so until the late 1970s and the introduction of floodlit cricket, when white balls were tried, and orange, and pink. On my visit to the Duke’s cottages in Penshurst, shortly before it moved to modern premises and mechanisation, the handful of remaining craftsmen said a cricket ball was red simply because that was the colour of one of the few natural dyes to which their predecessors had access in the eighteenth century: no reason other than that. (Artificial dyes were largely the invention of the chemist William Perkin in the 1850s.) Aesthetic considerations, however, have surely contributed to keeping the ball red for the best part of three centuries: against a green background, the ‘crimson rambler’ has inspired many a poet apart from Love.
But the length of a cricket pitch has not changed one inch since 1744. It remains 22 yards, or one chain, which points to the sport’s agricultural origins: a chain is said to be the shortest distance in which a horse pulling a plough can turn around. The weight and size of the cricket ball have also stayed the same, while the width of the bat has not altered since 1771. Yet male human beings in England and elsewhere have grown taller. The first national census was not until 1801, but the HAC’s minutes for 1744 record their committee’s decision that all sergeants in future must be at least five feet six inches tall, which suggests the average height of the time. Nowadays an international bowler below six feet is rare. Cricket’s measurements have not changed, yet the height of cricketers and their bowling speeds have increased considerably.
The effect of never having had to alter these basic measurements of pitch, bat and ball has surely been considerable, albeit at a subconscious level. Cricket is known as a conservative sport, reluctant to change. To some extent, this must be the consequence of there having been no need to alter the essential elements, and the mindset it breeds.
Hodsoll’s first over consists of four balls, as laid down in the Laws of 1744. The over was increased to five balls in the 1880s, and six in the 1890s, and grew to eight in Australia in the twentieth century. My interpretation is that four balls made for sufficient interest for one over when pitches were bad, before they were prepared by rolling and mowing. It was excitement enough if two balls shot along the ground, another hit a bump and went over the two stumps, and the next passed between them (the third stump was not added until the Hambledon club legislated in 1776). After four such balls, the striker, umpires and spectators must have felt it was time for a breather.
Once the mechanical mower had been invented in the 1840s, four balls could be blocked, and the average over would have come to seem rather dull and abrupt. Furthermore, the bowler was forced to use his wits, and needed more scope to bait his trap. He might want to set a batsman up with four or five quicker balls, then a slower one, or by spinning five balls one way and the sixth the other.FN10
Mills bowls the second over of this match, from the opposite end to Hodsoll. This simple act of routine, of switching ends after each over, has given cricket an essential variety which baseball has never enjoyed. Fielders, in moving from end to end or side to side, are given a change of scene. Spectators have to shift their focus every few minutes when the bowling switches to the other end and is directed at the other batsman. It was a brilliant invention, and not only for reducing the wear and tear on parts of the pitch by half. It saved a cricket match from the ever-increasing dullness of middle practice. It promoted variety and the scope for drama: how much excitement has been generated simply by the batsman trying to take a single off the last ball of an over to keep the strike? We would have missed all such action if Mills had bowled from the same end as Hodsoll, at the same striker.
Hodsoll takes three quick wickets and Mills two, all of them bowled, to make their opponents reel. England have lost their first five wickets for only three runs, or as Love reports: ‘three Notches only gain’d, five Leaders out.’ I estimate we have to multiply by four or five to get the equivalent number of runs in today’s terms. Even by this reckoning, though, a score of 15 for five wickets was the worst of starts. (The first surviving scorecard, of Slindon v London a few days earlier, also records bad starts, with most of the runs scored by the middle order.) Love adds the gloss: ‘The Odds run high on the Side of KENT.’ In the poem itself, he mentions the betting which went on around the field or ‘the Plain’, a term connoting that of Troy, where the Greeks had heroically fought:
But while the drooping Play’r invokes the Gods,
The busy Better calculates his Odds,
Swift round the Plain, in buzzing Murmurs run,
I’ll hold you Ten to Four, Kent.—Done Sir.—Done.
Hereabouts Richard Newland comes to the wicket. In a prosaic note, Love writes: ‘Bryan and Newland go in; they help the Game greatly.’ In verse, he sings that Bryan and Newland ‘pant to redeem the Fame their Fellows lost./ Eager for Glory . . .’
During his innings, Newland, we are told, displays his ‘Prowess’ and his ‘strenuous Arm’. Even against under-arm bowling, batting appears to have had aesthetic possibilities.
Bryan, meanwhile, winds up and hits five runs with one shot: perhaps our equivalent of 20 off a single ball! He uses arms made powerful by bricklaying: physical strength, even in cricket’s infancy, was an influential factor.FN11 We can almost hear the bedlam as Bryan sends the ball flying into the crowd:
. . . he wav’d his Bat with forceful Swing,
And drove the batter’d Pellet o’er the Ring.
Then rapid five Times cross’d the shining Plain,
E’er the departed Ball return’d again.
This rallying stand for England between Newland and Bryan is ended straight after Bryan’s shot for five, when we have the first recorded instance of a big hit going to a batsman’s head.
Beware, unhappy Bryan! oh beware!
Too heedless Swain, when such a Foe is near.
Fir’d with Success, elated with his Luck,
He glow’d with Rage, regardless how he struck,
Here we have the first recorded stumping or, as Love phrases it in a note: ‘Bryan is unfortunately put out by Kips’. Love adds: ‘Kips is particularly remarkable for handing the Ball at the Wicket, and knocking up the Stumps instantly, if the Batsman is not extremely cautious.’ Thus we are in at the start of cricket’s longest-running tradition: excellent wicketkeeper/batsmen from Kent. Ned Wenman, in the Kent side of the 1840s, was the first keeper to cope with round-arm bowling; Edward Tylecote, in the 1880s, was the first keeper to score 50 in a Test; Les Ames was the prototype of the modern keeper/bat, in that he scored more than 100 first-class hundreds; Godfrey Evans was a prototype, too, in bouncing around, being vocal and keeping his fielders energetic; Alan Knott still wins votes as the best wicketkeeper of all time, and popularised the sweep in England; Paul Downton and Geraint Jones maintained the lineage, although the first left Kent and the second went there; and Sam Billings assumed their mantle. Another Kent keeper, Derek Ufton, told me he was watched at Canterbury by Fred Huish, who was the first to make 100 first-class dismissals in a season (he did it twice just before the First World War). Huish and Hopper Levett, another fine keeper, offered advice to their successors, so there was a degree of mentoring;FN12 and the pitches in Kent are true enough for batsmen and keepers to perfect their craft. But I can offer no further explanation for why Kent should have produced this unique sequence, rather than a neighbouring county like Essex, Surrey or Sussex, other than this mentoring and a snowballing sense of tradition.
After Bryan’s dismissal, England collapse again; the harassed Smith is dismissed for nought. They are all out for 40, the equivalent of 160 or so, with their captain Newland left stranded on 18 not out. Now, all stand please, ladies and gentlemen, for His Royal Highness Frederick, the Prince of Wales, fashionably late, and his younger brother, very soon to be nicknamed ‘Butcher Cumberland’.
‘Keep politics out of sport’ was the cry of those who supported South Africa’s apartheid government and cricket team in the 1970s. Irrespective of the ethics involved, if any, the cry itself was irrational. Politics are by definition the affairs of the city, literally, or the community; and the cricket match on 18 June 1744 was part of the affairs of London, or even the country, and the politics of the day.
What Frederick did at this cricket match was to set an example which was to be copied, unwittingly, over the coming centuries. After the CIA and MI6 combined to rig the general election in British Guiana in 1953, to stop Cheddi Jagan becoming prime minister, those wanting to protest went to the Test match between West Indies and England at Bourda to demonstrate in February 1954. When Benazir Bhutto went to the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore during the first Test between Pakistan and England in 1977, she was there to protest against the imprisonment of her father; and most of the 50,000 spectators did not attend in order to see Mudassar Nazar score the slowest Test century. When Sri Lanka played their first Test in England, in 1984, Tamil spectators ran on to the field to bring their cause to the attention of the British public. All were following in Frederick’s footsteps.
Frederick went to watch the Kent v England match to demonstrate his Anglophilia and his credentials as a man of the people. He was, by birth and upbringing, German. So what better way to make himself popular than to commission Thomas Arne to write an opera including the song that has been number one among English patriots ever since, ‘Rule, Britannia’, and to patronise the quintessentially English sport?
The first Fred to use cricket to spread his popularity nationwide, but not the last,FN13 had grown up in Hanover. His father, the Elector of Hanover, was German, which did not matter in English eyes until he became King George II as well in 1727. Many of his new subjects were appalled by his boorishness: the king seemed to be interested only in fighting and hunting. His court spoke French. Worse still, he began to use the taxes he raised from the British people to finance the European wars in which he had become involved as the Elector of Hanover. He was the last British monarch to lead his or her army into battle, at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743.
Fred was left alone in Hanover after his father and mother had gone to London to manoeuvre their way towards the throne. Nothing of the original Herrenhausen Palace remains, as the RAF did a thorough job in the Second World War, but we can see where Fred first played cricket. As a boy he had cricket bats sent from England, but there was nowhere for him and his brother to play in front of the palace: the Grosser Garten – ‘the greatest treasure that the city possesses’, according to a local guidebook – had been laid out in the seventeenth century by the Electress Sophia, after she had visited Versailles. This Baroque garden is so filled with flowers, fountains, statues and mazes of hedge that 22 yards of unadorned turf do not exist.
Turning left out of the Herrenhausen, however, Fred would have entered a different, more natural world where, after a few trees had been cut down, there would have been open space for the boys to run around. We might even regard Fred as the first person to have used cricket as an emotional surrogate. As one might guess, George and Queen Caroline were not a touchy-feely couple. The Georgians, indeed, have been called the most dysfunctional of Britain’s royal families. If Caroline had more social accomplishments than her husband, she was still ridiculed by Alexander Pope as a dunce. And the extent of her maternal instincts can be judged from her opinion of Fred: ‘My first born is the greatest ass, and the greatest liar, and the greatest canailleFN14, and the greatest beast, in the whole world, and I heartily wish he was out of it.’ (To which Fred, no doubt, replied: ‘Love you too, Mumsy.’)
By the time he arrived in England in 1728, aged 21, Fred seems to have been pretty damaged and manipulative. If his mother’s verdict sounds harsh, we have the testimony of Lord Hervey, who recalled Fred as ‘never having the least hesitation in telling any lie that served his present purpose.’ This tribute, however, followed their falling out over a mistress they had shared. On the humanitarian side, Fred was to visit the woman who had rowed Bonnie Prince Charlie over the sea from Skye, Flora MacDonald, after she had been imprisoned in the Tower of London, and he obtained her release from his younger brother’s clutches.
England in the 1740s, as always, was divided between being European and insular. Italian opera had been the fashion; now the growing taste was for Handel and songs in English. The father was frittering away taxpayers’ money on fighting in the War of the Austrian Succession. The son allied himself with William Pitt the Elder, Paymaster-General and the most popular politician in the land after his attacks on George II.
Fred is the first person known to have presented a prize to the winners of a cricket match: all those who hold the World Cup aloft can thank him for the trend he set. He was a poor cricketer himself, but that did not stop him becoming one of the first county captains when he led ‘Surry’ against a team from Kent on Kennington Common in 1732, next to what has become the Oval. He was the first royal to understand the advantage of seeing, and being seen, at a cricket match – an endorsement that can only have added to cricket’s popularity, for if royalty was going to take an interest in this new sport, so would the newspapers and their readers.
In reply to England’s total of 40, Kent in their first innings score 53. For their lead they have to thank their captain Romney, who leads from the front by scoring 11, and Kips, who top-scores with 12. Just as Richard Newland is the only batsman to reach double figures in both innings for England, so is Kips for Kent. In addition, he does not concede a bye in the match, whereas in the other surviving scorecard from 1744 byes were quite numerous – unsurprisingly, as keepers before Wenman wore no gloves. If Love had written his match report for a newspaper and I had been subbing, I would have been tempted to go for the headline: ‘No byes, Mr Kips’.
After seven of England’s batsmen made a duck in their first innings, every one gets off the mark in their second. The deficit of 13 is cleared and England go into credit as Waymark scores nine notches, and Newland holds the middle order together again with 15. Even Smith finds time to contribute eight runs to England’s growing lead. ‘The Strokes re-eccho o’er the spacious Ground,’ Love reports.
Here we have the first reference to the game’s most enduring sound, that of bat on ball. In those days it was not always leather on willow, because hard wood was originally used for bats: a single piece, perhaps with some form of strapping like leather around the rough-hewn handle. It was not until the nineteenth century that willow was universally preferred for being lighter, if less durable. Yet Love was clearly delighted with the sound, as generations have been ever since. The sound of bat on ball, however, is not inherently euphonious: no single sound is, until placed in the context of other notes. Thus willow on leather has become delightful to us by association – with cucumber sandwiches, pastoral settings and memories of summers past.
For the batsman, another sensation is involved: that of touch. This pleasure in timing the ball – hitting it with the meatiest part of the bat – is unappreciated by those who have not played the game (it never ceases to please me on the rare occasions I middle one). In 1728, a Swiss French traveller, César de Saussure, visited England and observed the game in A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I and George II: ‘The English are very fond of a game they call cricket . . . They go into a large open field, and knock a small ball about with a piece of wood. I will not attempt to describe this game to you, it is too complicated; but it requires agility and skill, and everyone plays it, the common people and also men of rank.’ It is a fair summary, except that ‘knock’ does not begin to convey the sensory pleasure of batting – unlike ‘stroke’, a term used by Love and all subsequent reporters.FN15
Now comes some shameless grovelling by Love. Richard Newland hits a ball in the air, and who should be underneath it but Lord John Sackville? Sackville does not simply catch it like a normal fielder (or ‘Seeker-out’ in Love’s terminology). Oh no. Sackville, as we have already been informed, is not only ‘Illustrious’ and ‘Sure of Success’ but also ‘Swift as the Falcon, darting on its Prey’. At least Love has the decency to admit in a fawning footnote: ‘It is hop’d that tho’ this Description may a little exceed the real Fact, it may be excus’d, especially as there is a great deal of Foundation for it.’
In the event, after all Love’s bombast, Sackville secures this crucial catch to dismiss Newland, who has top-scored again. Of England’s 110 runs in the match, Newland scores 33 for once out. In front of the huge crowd, Sackville has held his nerve (something he would fail to do a couple of years later).
England are thus dismissed for 70. Hodsoll has taken a minimum of eight wickets in the game and probably more: in the scorecard, if a batsman is out caught, only the fielder’s name is recorded, not the bowler’s. Kent are left to score 58 to win the match, the honours, the stakes and any bets their players may have laid.
It might be anachronistic to use the word ‘pressure’ in describing Kent’s second innings, as the analogy with physics had yet to be made. But the same phenomenon that we know today was at work. Love testifies that Kent’s batsmen ‘wildly pant, and almost own they fear’; that is, they almost admit or acknowledge the fact that they fear.
A close run-chase was therefore just as exciting in cricket’s infancy as now. These are the moments when spectators watch most closely – even if some members of the batting side cannot – and a player’s mental fibre is thoroughly examined. More than two centuries ago, the psychology of cricket was studied, especially that involved in the run-chase. When John Nyren – the son of Richard Newland’s nephew – wrote The Young Cricketer’s Tutor, he advised: ‘If your party go in the last innings for a certain number of runs, always keep back two or three of your safest batsmen for the last wickets. Timid or hazardous hitters seldom do so well when the game is desperate, as those who, from safe play, are more confident.’ Nyren offered his old Hambledon teammate Tom Walker as an exemplar of the right temperament: ‘his skin was like the rind of an old oak, and as sapless’ and he was ‘the coolest, the most imperturbable fellow in existence’. (Walker, Nyren added, was also the first to try bowling with his arm at shoulder-height.)
So many of Kent’s batsmen succumb to fear as they chase that, when their last pair come together, they still need at least five runs to win and maybe more (the scorecard does not record the score at the fall of wickets). One batsman is Hodsoll, who has enjoyed a grand day with his eight or more wickets, and must have had an all-rounder’s confidence. His partner in this tenth-wicket stand is John Cutbush, exact age unknown, but older than the 26-year-old Hodsoll.
And the pressure is not only on Kent’s last pair; it is also on mine host, George Smith. Thousands of spectators, not all sober, are surging forward to gain a closer look. Already, Love has told us:
But if encroaching on forbidden Ground,
The heedless Croud o’erleaps the proper Bound;
Smith plies, with strenuous Arm, the smacking Whip,
Back to the Line th’ affrighted Rebels skip.
Can we see Smith dashing to the boundary’s edge at the end of an over, grabbing the whip from young William and plying it again to force the spectators back over the rope? Smith may not have middled many shots when he batted, but he’s making up for it now.
When Kent’s score reaches 55 for nine, with three more runs wanted for victory, a catch goes up. It is Hodsoll, I suspect, who goes for glory; Cutbush is a clockmaker from Maidstone and knows a bit more about timing. Or in Love’s felicitous phrase:
The mounting Ball, again obliquely driv’n,
Cuts the pure Æther, soaring up to Heav’n.
After a very long day, of four innings, we have arrived at the climax. The England fielder underneath this ball soaring up to heaven is Waymark. He has a reputation for being excellent in this department, an athlete who had won purses of fifty guineas in single-wicket and double-wicket matches, to supplement his earnings from the Duke of Richmond. As Love tells us:
Waymark was ready; Waymark, all must own,
As sure a Swain to catch as e’er was known . . .
At this moment, the lesson is proved that in sport uncertainty is all – and what more agonising uncertainty than a cricket match which boils down to the last pair in a nip-and-tuck run-chase? Finally, after Waymark has waited and waited, Love keeps us in suspense no longer:
The erring Ball, amazing to be told!
Slip’d thro’ his out-stretch’d Hand, and mock’d his Hold.
Waymark drops it.
Does one of the England fielders go up to Waymark, put an arm round his shoulder and console him? ‘Never mind, Tom, just concentrate on the next ball.’
Or does one of the Kent batsmen have a go at him? ‘Don’t worry, mate – they’ll still be talking about your mistake in three hundred years.’
Hodsoll and Cutbush, in any event, knock off the last three runs to win the match for Kent by one wicket. Or, in the words of Love:
And now the Sons of Kent compleat the Game,
And firmly fix their everlasting Fame.
Sure enough, George Smith was hauled in front of the HAC committee. He was admonished for the ‘great disorder’, and doubtless reminded that any repetition might lead to the loss of his lease at the Artillery Ground.
But Smith had seen the possibilities for cricket and its future growth as a mass spectator sport. He bounced back and offered another of cricket’s firsts: ‘a ring of benches that will hold at least 800 persons’. This was the first stand at a cricket ground.
In 1747, Smith was allowed to increase his price of admission to sixpence. Rumours abounded that Smith was promoting the sport to his not ‘inconsiderable Advantage’, as Love had phrased it. But he responded warmly by offering to open up his accounts to prove he was not cashing in extortionately: ‘The Town may be certain that the taking Six-pence Admittance is out of no avaricious Temper. Two-pence being greatly insufficient to the Charge that attends the Matches, which Mr Smith is ready and willing to make appear to any Gentleman.’
Smith had a point about not being avaricious. In the following year, 1748, he was declared bankrupt. The HAC committee was listening, however, and must have appreciated his worth: Smith kept going at the Artillery Ground until 1752, when William Sharpe took on the lease. Smith headed west, to take over the Castle Inn in Marlborough. He is not known to have played any more cricket. He died in 1761, age unrecorded, his epitaph to be written in Start of Play by David Underdown, Emeritus Professor of History at Yale: ‘George Smith was the indispensable middleman in the organization of London cricket at mid-century.’
Smith’s legacy was that the connection between cricket and publicans was established. As landlord of the Bat and Ball Inn, and captain, Richard Nyren was the most important person in the Hambledon club in the 1780s, organising everything. Thomas Lord, prominent in the wine trade, found that building his own ground was an inspired way of finding customers for his wines. In Australia, as we shall see, a landlord was at the heart of the first cricket club for native-born Australians. In the Anglo-Saxon world, publicans enabled the sport to grow by providing a changing area, a venue for selection and committee meetings, and above all perhaps food and drink. Because cricket consumes the longest time of any team sport, refuelling is essential in the course of all but the shortest matches – and mine host can do that as part of his job, profitably.
A year after this historic match, the country did not have much time for sport. War had been in the air throughout 1744, and not just war but invasion. Bonnie Prince Charlie had been raising troops on the continent, and the threat from the exiled claimant to the throne may have been underestimated. When he was in Rome in 1743, Read’s Weekly Journal had used cricket imagery in its report: the Bonnie Prince had been practising his batting ‘but the Chevalier being of a weakly Constitution soon gave it over and contented himself with being a Seeker-out [i.e. fielder]; which an arch wag was heard to say was the fittest for him, he having been a Runner from his Cradle.’ Ouch.
When the Bonnie Prince invaded England in 1745, King George II chose his younger son to lead the army, not Fred. Their relationship had broken down. Fred had not only Pitt the Elder on his side, but Lord Sandwich and popular opinion. George had been increasingly hated for wasting taxpayers’ money, but the threat of invasion rallied people around him. On 16 April 1746, the Duke of Cumberland won the Battle of Culloden. Scots prisoners, tried for treason, were hanged, drawn and quartered on Kennington Common.
While this war was going on, Love had Cricket: An Heroic Poem published by W. Bickerton of ‘the Temple-Exchange in Fleet-Street’ at the price of one shilling. Sales were insufficient to enrich Love and his wife, children and mistress. He went on to make his career in the theatre, as did Catherine de l’Amour, except that when she played in Edinburgh she was seduced by James Boswell, Dr Johnson’s biographer. Love – loveless? – died in 1774.
The victorious captain, Val Romney, was well treated for his efforts on the cricket field. The Duke of Dorset’s accounts refer to a Christmas present of two guineas for Romney in his retirement. Lord John Sackville maintained his interest in cricket for a while. His letter of September 1745 survives, when he told the Duke of Richmond that he had selected the wrong wicketkeeper: ‘I wish you had let Ridgeway play instead of your stopper behind, it might have turned the match in your favour.’
Sackville had two more children; and Fred appointed him a Lord of the Bedchamber in 1745. But all was not well with Sackville: perhaps as the second son, with a long-lived father and scant prospect of inheriting the duchy, he found little to motivate him. Without a portrait to guide us, we should be wary of reading too much into his mind. For certain, his later life was shocking. In 1746, when the 2nd Foot Guards were ordered overseas, Sackville – their commander – deserted on the very day they were due to sail.
Sackville’s younger brother was to have the rare distinction, for an officer, of being court-martialled for cowardice after a battle in France. So Sackville was not the only member of his family to suffer a crisis of confidence. And did this unease first manifest itself on 18 June 1744 when Romney, not Sackville, captained Kent? We know he was confident enough to take the vital catch that dismissed Richard Newland, and to score five runs in his first innings. But had the prospect of continuing to captain Kent, when so much money was at stake, been too much for his nerves?
To minimise the scandal, Sackville was declared insane. He was sent to Switzerland, where he was seen wandering around in rags, and muttering about his younger brother’s cowardice, before dying in 1765. He never became the Duke of Dorset; but his son did. As the third Duke of Dorset, he became the British Ambassador to France, and introduced cricket in the Champs-Elysées in the mid-1780s. He was planning a cricket tour of France until overtaken by events beyond his control.
The growth of cricket from its base in south-east England was spasmodic. When Dr Johnson published his dictionary in 1755, he defined it vaguely as ‘A sport, at which the contenders drive a ball with sticks in opposition to each other’; and he did not list such a basic term as ‘wicket’. Horse-racing took over as the fashionable sport, and silks were invented to identify the owners. Most of all perhaps, cricket’s first great patrons faded away, including Fred. He died in 1751, before he could succeed to the throne, from an abscess which was likely to have been caused when he was hit by a cricket ball. One proposed epitaph suggests he was not widely mourned: ‘Here lies Fred, who was alive and is dead.’
The seed, however, had been planted. In the nineteenth century, cricket was to grow into England’s most popular sport, with W.G. Grace the first sporting star, and it would remain so until it was surpassed by association football. Love was not wrong when he hailed cricket’s place in British, or more accurately English, life:
Hail CRICKET! Glorious, manly, British Game!
First of all Sports! be first alike in Fame!
As I see it, the match between Kent and England in 1744 had appealed to every one of the five main senses – in addition to all the camaraderie that had been engendered during the day, among the players in each team, between the two sides, and in the capacity crowd.
The eye, of both player and spectator, had been delighted by the spacious setting of the Artillery Ground in the otherwise congested City of London – the rus in urbe – and by the athletic skills of Newland, Kips, Romney, Hodsoll and others.
The ear, of both player and spectator, had been delighted by the sound of bat on ball, and stimulated by the cheering and shouting at the climax. The batsman’s sense of touch had been delighted when he had middled the ball, like Bryan; so too the fielders’ tactile sense when they had caught the leather ball cleanly, unlike poor Waymark.
Everyone’s sense of smell had been delighted by the fresh June grass, in contrast to the rubbish and ordure of the surrounding streets; and, no doubt, by Smith’s fine victuals. The sense of taste, especially of Kent’s victorious players and their supporters, would also have been delighted long into the night at the Pyed Horse.
A sport so gratifying, for those who played and those who watched it, was bound to have a future.