CRICKET GENERALLY ESTABLISHED AS A NATIONAL GAME BY THE END OF THE LAST
CENTURY.
Little is recorded of the Hambledon Club after the year 1786. It broke
up when Old Nyren left it, in 1791; though, in this last year, the true
old Hambledon Eleven all but beat twenty-two of Middlesex at Lord’s.
Their cricket-ground on Broadhalfpenny Down, in Hampshire, was so far
removed from the many noblemen and gentlemen who had seen and admired
the severe bowling of David Harris, the brilliant hitting of Beldham,
and the interminable defence of the Walkers, that these worthies
soon found a more genial sphere for their energies on the grounds of
Kent, Surrey, and Middlesex. Still, though the land was deserted, the
men survived; and imparted a knowledge of their craft to gentles and
simples far and near.
Most gladly would we chronicle that these good men and true were
actuated by a great and a patriotic spirit, to diffuse an aid
to civilisation--for such our game claims to be--among their
wonder-stricken fellow-countrymen; but, in truth, we confess that
“reaping golden opinions” and coins, “from all kinds of men,” as well
as that indescribable tumult and those joyous emotions which attend the
ball, vigorously propelled or heroically stopped, while hundreds of
voices shout applause,--that such stirring motives, more powerful far
with vain-glorious man than any “dissolving views” of abstract virtue,
tended to the migration of the pride of Hambledon. Still, doubtful
though the motive, certain is the fact, that the old Hambledon players
did carry their bats and stumps out of Hampshire into the adjoining
counties, and gradually, like all great commanders, taught their
adversaries to conquer too. In some instances, as with Lord Winchelsea,
Mr. Amherst, and others, noblemen combined the _utile dulci_, pleasure
and business, and retained a great player as a keeper or a bailiff, as
Martingell once was engaged by Earl Ducie. In other instances, the play
of the summer led to employment through the winter; or else these busy
bees lived on the sweets of their sunshine toil, enjoying _otium cum
dignitate_--that is, living like gentlemen, with nothing to do.
This accounts for our finding these Hampshire men playing Kent
matches; being, like a learned Lord in Punch’s picture, “naturalised
everywhere,” or “citizens of the world.”
Let us trace these Hambledonians in all their contests, from the date
mentioned (1786 to 1800), the eventful period of the French Revolution
and Nelson’s victories; and let us see how the Bank stopping payment,
the mutiny of the fleet, and the threatened invasion, put together,
did not prevent balls from flying over the tented field, in a far more
innocent and rational way on this, than on the other side, of the water.
Now, what were the matches in the last century--“eleven gentlemen
against the twelve Cæsars?” No! these, though ancient names, are of
modern times. Kent and England was as good an annual match in the last,
as in the present century. The White Conduit Fields and the Artillery
Ground supplied the place of Lord’s, though in 1787 the name of Lord’s
is found in Bentley’s matches, implying, of course, the old Marylebone
Ground, now Dorset Square, under Thomas Lord, and not the present
by St. John’s Wood, more properly deserving the name of Dark’s than
Lord’s. The Kentish battlefields were Sevenoaks--the land of Clout,
one of the original makers of cricket-balls,--Coxheath, Dandelion
Fields, in the Isle of Thanet, and Cobham Park; also Dartford Brent and
Pennenden Heath: there is also early mention of Gravesend, Rochester,
and Woolwich.
Next in importance to the Kent matches were those of Hampshire and
of Surrey, with each of which counties indifferently the Hambledon
men used to play. For it must not be supposed that the whole county
of Surrey put forth a crop of stumps and wickets all at once: we have
already said that malt and hops and cricket have ever gone together.
Two parishes in Surrey, adjoining Hants, won the original laurels
for their county; parishes in the immediate vicinity of the Farnham
hop country. The Holt, near Farnham, and Moulsey Hurst, were the
Surrey grounds. The match might truly have been called “Farnham’s
hop-gatherers _v._ those of Kent.” The former, aided occasionally by
men who drank the ale of Alton, just as Burton-on-Trent, life-sustainer
to our Indian empire, sends forth its giants, refreshed with bitter
ale, to defend the honour of the neighbouring towns and counties. The
men of Hampshire, after Broadhalfpenny was abandoned to docks and
thistles, pitched their tents generally either upon Windmill Downs or
upon Stoke Downs; and once they played a match against T. Assheton
Smith, whose mantle has descended on a worthy representative, whether
on the level turf or by the cover side. Albeit, when that gentleman
has a “meet” (as occasionally advertised) at Hambledon, he must
unconsciously avoid the spot where “titch and turn”--the Hampshire
cry--did once exhilarate the famous James Aylward, among others, as he
astonished the Farnham waggoner, by continuing one and the same innings
as the man drove up on the Tuesday afternoon and down on the Wednesday
morning! This match was played at Andover, and the surnames of most of
the Eleven may be read on the tombstones (with the best of characters)
in Andover Churchyard. Bourne Paddock, Earl Darnley’s estate, and
Burley Park, in Rutlandshire, constituted often the debateable ground
in their respective counties. Earl Darnley, as well as Sir Horace Mann
and Earl Winchelsea, Mr. Paulet and Mr. East, lent their names and
patronage to Elevens; sometimes in the places mentioned, sometimes at
Lord’s, and sometimes at Perriam Downs, near Luggershal, in Wiltshire.
Middlesex also, exclusively of the Marylebone Club, had its Eleven
in these days; or, we should say, its _twenty-two_, for that was the
number then required to stand the disciplined forces of Hampshire,
Kent, or England. And this reminds us of an “Uxbridge ground,” where
Middlesex played and lost; also, of “Hornchurch, Essex,” where Essex,
in 1791, was sufficiently advanced to win against Marylebone, an
occasion memorable, because Lord Frederick Beauclerk there played
nearly his first recorded match, making scarce any runs, but bowling
four wickets. Lord Frederick’s first match was at Lord’s, 2nd
June, 1791. “There was also,” writes the Hon. R. Grimston, “‘the
Bowling-green’ at Harrow-on-the-Hill, where the school played:
Richardson, who subsequently became Mr. Justice Richardson, was the
captain of the School Eleven in 1782.”
Already, in 1790, the game was spreading northwards, or, rather,
proofs exist that it had long before struck far and wide its roots
and branches in northern latitudes; and also that it was a game as
popular with the men of labour as the men of leisure, and therefore
incontestably of home growth: no mere exotic, or importation of the
favoured few, can cricket be, if, like its namesake, it is found “a
household word” with those whom Burns aptly calls “the many-aproned
sons of mechanical life.”
In 1791 Eton, that is, the old Etonians, played Marylebone, four
players given on either side; and all true Etonians will thank us
for informing them, not only that the seven Etonians were more than
a match for their adversaries, but also that this match proves that
Eton had, at that early date, the honour of sending forth the most
distinguished amateurs of the day; for Lord Winchelsea, Hon. H.
Fitzroy, Earl Darnley, Hon. E. Bligh, C. Anguish, Assheton Smith--good
men and true--were Etonians all. This match was played in Burley Park,
Rutlandshire. On the following day, June 25th, 1791, the Marylebone
played eleven yeomen and artisans of Leicester; and though the
Leicestrians cut a sorry figure, still the fact that the Midland
Counties practised cricket sixty years ago is worth recording. Peter
Heward, of Leicester, a famous wicket-keeper, of twenty years since,
told me of a trial match in which he saw his father, quite an old
man, with another veteran of his own standing, quickly put out with
the old-fashioned slow bowling a really good Eleven for some twenty
runs--good, that is, against the modern style of bowling; and cricket
was not a new game in this old man’s early days (say 1780) about
Leicester and Nottingham, as the score in page 41 alone would prove;
for such a game as cricket, evidently of gradual development, must have
been played in some primitive form many a long year before the date
of 1775, in which it had excited sufficient interest, and was itself
sufficiently matured in form, to show the two Elevens of Sheffield and
of Nottingham. Add to this, what we have already mentioned, a rude
form of cricket as far north as Angus and Lothian in 1700, and we can
hardly doubt that cricket was known as early in the Midland as in the
Southern Counties. The men of Nottingham--land of Clarke, Barker, and
Redgate--next month, in the same year (1791) threw down the gauntlet,
and shared the same fate; and next day the Marylebone, “adding,” in a
cricketing sense, “insult unto injury,” played twenty-two of them, and
won by thirteen runs.
In 1790, the shopocracy of Brighton had also an Eleven; and Sussex
and Surrey, in 1792, sent an eleven against England to Lord’s, who
scored in one innings 453 runs, the largest score on record, save
that of Epsom in 1815--476 in one innings! “M.C.C. _v._ twenty-two
of Nottingham,” we now find an annual match; and also “M.C.C. _v._
Brighton,” which becomes at once worthy of the fame that Sussex long
has borne. In 1793, the old Westminster men all but beat the old
Etonians: and Essex and Herts, too near not to emulate the fame of Kent
and Surrey, were content, like second-rate performers, to have, though
playing twenty-two, one Benefit between them, in the shape of defeat in
one innings from England. And here we are reminded by two old players,
a Kent and an Essex man, that, being schoolboys in 1785, they can
respectively testify that, both in Kent and in Essex, cricket appeared
to them more of a village game than they have ever seen it of late
years. “There was a cricket-bat behind the door, or else up in the
bacon rack, in every cottage. We heard little of clubs, except around
London; still the game was played by many or by few, in every school
and village green in Essex and in Kent, and the field placed much as
when with the Sidmouth I played the Teignbridge Club in 1826. Mr.
Whitehead was the great hitter of Kent; and Frame and Small were names
as often mentioned as Pilch and Parr by our boys now.” And now (1793)
the game had penetrated further West; for eleven yeomen at Oldfield
Bray, in Berkshire, had learned long enough to be able to defeat a good
eleven of the Marylebone Club.
In 1795, the Hon. Colonel Lennox, memorable for a duel with the Duke
of York, fought--where the gallant Colonel had fought so many a less
hostile battle--on the cricket ground at Dartford Brent, headed Elevens
against the Earl of Winchelsea; and now, first the Marylebone eleven
beat sixteen Oxonians on Bullingdon Green.
In 1797, the Montpelier Club and ground attract our notice. The name of
this club is one of the most ancient, and their ground a short distance
only from the ground of Hall of Camberwell.
Swaffham, in Norfolk, is now mentioned for the first time. But Norfolk
lies out of the usual road, and is a county which, as Mr. Dickens said
of Golden Square, before it was the residence of Cardinal Wiseman,
“is nobody’s way to or from any place.” So, in those slow coach and
packhorse days, the patrons of Kent, Surrey, Hants, and Marylebone, who
alone gave to what else were “airy nothing, a local habitation and a
name,” could not so easily extend their circuit to the land of turkeys,
lithotomy, and dumplings. But it happened once that Lord Frederick
Beauclerk was heard to say, his eleven should beat any three elevens
in the county of Norfolk; whence arose a challenge from the Norfolk
men, whom, sure enough, his Lordship did beat, and that in one innings;
and a print, though not on pocket-handkerchiefs, was struck off to
perpetuate this honourable achievement.
Lord F. Beauclerk was now one of the best players of his day; as also
were the Hon. H. and I. Tufton. They frequently headed a division of
the Marylebone, or some county club, against Middlesex, and sometimes
Hampstead and Highgate.
In this year (1798) these gentlemen aforesaid made the first attempt
at a match between the Gentlemen and the Players; and on this first
occasion the players won; though when we mention that the Gentlemen had
three players given, and also that T. Walker, Beldham, and Hammond were
the three, certainly it was like playing England, “the part of England
being left out by particular desire.”
Kent attacked England in 1798, but, being beaten in about _half_ an
innings, we find the Kentish men in 1800, though still hankering
after the same cosmopolitan distinction, modestly accept the odds of
nineteen, and afterwards twenty-three, men to twelve.
The chief patronage, and consequently the chief practice, in cricket,
was beyond all comparison in London. There, the play was nearly
all professional: even the gentlemen made a profession of it; and
therefore, though cricket was far more extensively spread throughout
the villages of Kent than of Middlesex, the clubs of the metropolis
figure in the score books as defying all competition. Professional
players, we may observe, have always a decided advantage in respect of
judicious choice and mustering their best men. The best eleven on the
side of the Players is almost always known, and can be mustered on a
given day. Favour, friendship, and etiquette interfere but little with
their election; but the eleven gentlemen of England are less easy to
muster,--
“_Linquenda_ Parish _et domus et placens_
_Uxor_,”--
and they are never anything more than the best eleven known to the
party who make the match. Besides, by the time an amateur is at his
best, he has duties which bid him retire.
Having now traced the rise and progress of the game from the time
of its general establishment to the time that Beldham had shown
us the full powers of the bat, and Lord Frederick had (as Fennex
always declared) formed his style upon Beldham’s; and since now
we approach the era of a new school, and the forward play of
Fennex,--which his father termed an innovation and presumption
“contrary to all experience,”--till the same forward play was proved
effectual by Lambert, and Hammond had shown that, in spite of wicket
keepers, bowling, if uniformly slow, might be met and hit away at
the pitch;--now, we will wait to characterise, in the words of
eye-witnesses, the heroes of the contests already mentioned.
On “the Old Players” I may be brief; because, the few old gentlemen
(with one of whom I am in daily communication) who have heard even the
names of the Walkers, Frame, Small, and David Harris, are passing away,
full of years, and almost all the written history of the Old Players
consists in undiscriminating scores.
In point of style the Old Players did not play the steady game, with
maiden overs, as at present. The defensive was comparatively unknown:
both the bat and the wicket, and the style of bowling too, were all
adapted to a short life and a merry one. The wooden substitute for a
ball, as in Cat and Dog, before described, evidently implied a hitting,
and not a stopping game.
The Wicket, as we collect from a MS. furnished by an old friend to the
late William Ward, Esq., was, in the early days of the Hambledon Club,
one foot high and two feet wide, consisting of two stumps only, with
one stump laid across. Thus, straight balls passed between, and, what
we now call, well pitched balls would of course rise over. Where, then,
was the encouragement to block, when fortune would so often usurp the
place of science? And, as to the bat, look at the picture of cricket as
played in the old Artillery Ground; the bat is curved at the end like
a hockey stick, or the handle of a spoon, and--as common implements
usually are adapted to the work to be performed--you will readily
believe that in olden time the freest hitter was the best batsman.
The bowling was all along the ground, hand and eye being everything,
and judgment nothing; because, the art originally was to bowl under
the bat. The wicket was too low for rising balls; and the reason we
hear sometimes of the Blockhole was, not that the blockhole originally
denoted guard, but because between these two-feet-asunder stumps there
was cut a hole big enough to contain the ball, and (as now with the
school boy’s game of rounders) the hitter was made out in running a
notch by the ball being popped into this hole (whence popping crease)
before the point of the bat could reach it.
Did we say Running a Notch? _unde_ Notch? What wonder ere the days
of useful knowledge, and Sir William Curtis’s three R’s,--or,
reading, writing, and arithmetic,--that natural science should be
evolved in a truly natural way: what wonder that notches on a stick,
like the notches in the milk-woman’s tally in Hogarth’s picture,
should supply the place of those complicated papers of vertical
columns, which subject the bowling, the batting, and the fielding to
a process severely and scrupulously just, of analytical observation,
or differential calculus! Where now there sit on kitchen chairs, with
ink bottle tied to a stump the worse for wear, Messrs. Caldecourt
and Bayley (’tis pity two such men should ever not be umpires),
with an uncomfortable length of paper on their knees, and large tin
telegraphic letters above their heads; and where now is Lillywhite’s
printing press, to hand down every hit as soon as made on twopenny
cards to future generations; there, or in a similar position, old
Frame, or young Small (young once: he died in 1834, aged eighty) might
have placed a trusty yeoman to cut notches with his bread-and-bacon
knife on an ashen stick. Oh! ’tis enough to make the Hambledon heroes
sit upright in their graves with astonishment to think, that in the
Gentlemen and Players’ Match, in 1850, the cricketers of old Sparkes’
Ground, at Edinburgh, could actually know the score of the first
innings in London, before the second had commenced!
But when we say that the old players had little or nothing of the
defensive, we speak of the play before 1780, when David Harris
flourished: for William Beldham distinctly assured us that the art
of bowling over the bat by “length balls” originated with the famous
David; an assertion, we will venture to say, which requires a little,
and only a little, qualification. Length bowling, or three-quarter
balls, to use a popular, though exploded, expression, was introduced in
David’s time, and by him first brought to perfection. And what rather
confirms this statement is, that the early bowlers were very swift
bowlers,--such was not only David, but the famous Brett, of earlier
date, and Frame of great renown: a more moderate pace resulted from the
new discovery of a well pitched bail ball.
The old players well understood the art of twisting, or bias bowling.
Lambert, “the little farmer,” says Nyren, “improved on the art, and
puzzled the Kent men in a great match, by twisting the reverse of the
usual way,--that is, from the off to leg stump.” Tom Walker tried
what Nyren calls the throwing-bowling, and defied all the players of
the day to withstand this novelty; but, by a council of the Hambledon
Club, this was forbidden, and Willes, a Kent man, had all the praise
of inventing it some twenty years later. In a match of the Hambledon
Club in 1775, it was observed, at a critical point of the game,
that the ball passed three times between Small’s two stumps without
knocking off the bail; and then, first, a third stump was added; and,
seeing that the new style of balls which rise over the bat rose also
over the wickets, then but one foot high, the wicket was altered to
the dimensions of 22 inches by 6, at which measure it remained till
about 1814, when it was increased to 26 inches by 8, and again to its
present dimensions of 27 inches by 8 in 1817; when, as one inch was
added to the stumps, two inches were added to the width between the
creases. The changes in the wicket are represented in the foregoing
woodcut. In the year 1700, the runner was made out, not by striking off
the transverse stump--we can hardly call it a bail--but by popping the
ball in the hole therein represented.
[Illustration]
David Harris’ bowling, Fennex used to say, introduced, or at least
established and fixed, a steady and defensive style of batting. “I
have seen,” said Sparkes, “seventy or eighty runs in an innings,
though not more than eight or nine made at Harris’s end.” “Harris,”
said an excellent judge, who well remembers him, “had nearly all the
quickness of rise and the height of delivery, which characterises
overhand bowling, with far greater straightness and precision. The ball
appeared to be forced out from under his arm with some unaccountable
jerk, so that it was delivered breast high. His precision exceeded
anything I have ever seen, in so much that Tom Walker declared that, on
one occasion, where turf was thin, and the colour of the soil readily
appeared, one spot was positively uncovered by the repeated pitching of
David’s balls in the same place.”
“This bowling,” said Sparkes, “compelled you to make the best of your
reach forward; for if a man let the ball pitch too near and crowd
upon him, he very rarely could prevent a mistake, from the height and
rapidity with which the ball cut up from the ground.”--This account
agrees with the well-known description of Nyren. “Harris’s mode of
delivering the ball was very singular. He would bring it from under his
arm by a twist, and nearly as high as his arm-pit, and with this action
push it, as it were, from him. How it was that the balls acquired the
velocity they did by this mode of delivery, I never could comprehend.
His balls were very little beholden to the ground; it was but a touch
and up again; and woe be to the man who did not get in to block them,
for they had such a peculiar curl they would grind his fingers against
the bat.”
And Nyren agrees with my informants in ascribing great improvement in
batting, and he specifies, “particularly in stopping” (for the act of
defence, we said, was not essential to the batsman in the ideas of
one of the old players), to the bowling of David Harris, and bears
testimony to an assertion, that forward play, that is meeting at the
pitch balls considerably short of a half volley, was little known to
the oldest players, and was called into requisition chiefly by the
bowling of David Harris. Obviously, with the primitive fashion of
ground bowling, called sneakers, forward play could have no place, and
even well-pitched balls, like those of Peter Stevens, _alias_ Lumpy,
of moderate pace might be played with some effect, even behind the
crease; but David Harris, with pace, pitch, and rapid rise combined,
imperatively demanded a new invention, and such was forward play about
1800. Old Fennex, who died, alas! in a Middlesex workhouse, aged
eighty, in 1839 (had his conduct been as straightforward and upright
as his bat, he would have known a better end), always declared that he
was the first, and remained long without followers; and no small praise
is due to the boldness and originality that set at nought the received
maxims of his forefathers before he was born or thought of; daring to
try things that, had they been ordinarily reasonable, would not, of
course, have been ignored by Frame, by Purchase, nor by Small. The
world wants such men as Fennex; men, who will shake off the prejudices
of birth, parentage, and education, and boldly declare that age has
taught them wisdom, and that the policy of their predecessors, however
expensively stereotyped, must be revised and corrected and adapted to
the demands of a more inquiring generation. “My father,” said Fennex,
“asked me how I came by that new play, reaching out as no one ever saw
before.” The same style he lived to see practised, not elegantly, but
with wonderful power and effect by Lambert, “a most severe and resolute
hitter;” and Fennex also boasted that he had a most proficient
disciple in Fuller Pilch: though I suspect that, as “_poeta nascitur
non fit_,”--that is, that all great performers appear to have brought
the secret of their excellence into the world along with them, and are
not the mere puppets of which others pull the strings--Fuller Pilch may
think he rather coincided with, than learnt from, William Fennex.
Now the David Harris aforesaid, who wrought quite a revolution in the
game, changing cricket from a backward and a slashing to a forward
and defensive game, and claiming higher stumps to do justice to his
skill--this David, whose bowling was many years in advance of his
generation, having all the excellence of Lillywhite’s high delivery,
though free from all imputation of unfairness--this David rose
early, and late took rest, and ate the bread of carefulness, before
he attained such distinction as--in these days of railroads, Thames
tunnels, and tubular gloves and bridges--to deserve the notice of our
pen. “For,” said John Bennett, “you might have seen David practising
at dinner time and after hours, all the winter through;” and “many a
Hampshire barn,” said Beagley, “has been heard to resound with bats and
balls as well as threshing.”
“_Nil sine magno,_
_Vita labore dedit mortalibus._”
And now we must mention the men, who, at the end of the last century,
represented the Pilch, the Parr, the Wenman, and the Wisden of the
present day.
Lord Beauclerk was formed on the style of Beldham, whom, in brilliancy
of hitting, he nearly resembled. The Hon. H. Bligh and Hon. H. Tufton
were of the same school. Sir Peter Burrell was also a good hitter. And
these were the most distinguished gentlemen players of the day. Earl
Winchelsea was in every principal match, but rather for his patronage
than his play: and the Hon. Col. Lennox for the same reason. Mr. R.
Whitehead was a Kent player of great celebrity. But Lord F. Beauclerk
was the only gentleman who had any claim in the last century to play
in an All England eleven. He was also one of the fastest runners.
Hammond was the great wicket-keeper; but then the bowling was slow:
Sparkes said he saw him catch out Robinson by a draw between leg and
wicket. Freemantle was the first long stop; but Ray the finest field
in England; and in those days, when the scores were long, fielding
was of even more consideration than at present. Of the professional
players, Beldham, Hammond, Tom and Harry Walker, Freemantle, Robinson,
Fennex, J. Wells, and J. Small were the first chosen after Harris had
passed away; for, Nyren says that even Lord Beauclerk could hardly have
seen David Harris in his prime. At this time there was a sufficient
number of players to maintain the credit of the left hands. On the
10th of May, 1790, the Left-handed beat the Right by thirty-nine runs.
This match reveals that Harris and Aylward, and the three best Kent
players, Brazier, Crawe, and Clifford,--Sueter, the first distinguished
wicket-keeper,--H. Walker, and Freemantle were all left-handed: so also
was Noah Mann.
The above-mentioned players are quite sufficient to give some idea
of the play of the last century. Sparkes is well known to the author
of these pages as his quondam instructor. In batting he differed not
widely from the usual style of good players, save that he never played
forward to any very great extent. Playing under leg, according to the
old fashion (we call it old-fashioned though Pilch adopts it), served
instead of the far more elegant and efficient “draw.” Sparkes was also
a fair bias bowler, but of no great pace, and not very difficult. I
remember his saying that the old school of slow bowling was beaten
by Hammond’s setting the example of running in. “Hammond,” he said,
“on one occasion hit back a slow ball to Lord F. Beauclerk with such
frightful force that it just skimmed his Lordship’s unguarded head, and
he had scarcely nerve to bowl after.” Of Fennex we can also speak from
our friend the Rev. John Mitford. Fennex was a fair straightforward
hitter, and once as good a single-wicket player as any in England.
His attitude was easy, and he played elegantly, and hit well from the
wrist. If his bowling was any specimen of that of his contemporaries,
they were by no means to be despised. His bowling was very swift and
of high delivery, the ball cut and ground up with great quickness and
precision. Fennex used to say that the men of the present day had
little idea of what the old underhand bowling really could effect; and,
from the specimen which Fennex himself gave at sixty-five years of age,
there appeared to be much reason in his assertion. Of all the players
Fennex had ever seen (for some partiality for bygone days we must of
course allow) none elicited his notes of admiration like Beldham. We
cannot compare a man who played underhand, with those who are formed
on overhand, bowling. Still, there is reason to believe what Mr. Ward
and others have told us, that Beldham had that genius for cricket, that
wonderful eye (although it failed him very early), and that quickness
of hand, which would have made him a great player in any age.
Beldham related to us in 1838, and that with no little nimbleness of
hand and vivacity of eye, while he suited the action to the word with
a bat of his own manufacture, how he had drawn forth the plaudits
of Lords’ as he hit round and helped on the bowling of Browne of
Brighton, even faster than before, though the good men of Brighton
thought that no one could stand against him, and Browne had thought
to bowl Beldham off his legs. This match of Hants against England in
1819 Fennex was fond of describing, and certainly it gives some idea
of what Beldham could do. “Osbaldeston,” said Mr. Ward, “with his
tremendously fast bowling, was defying every one at single wicket, and
he and Lambert challenged Mr. E. H. Budd with three others. Just then I
had seen Browne’s swift bowling, and a hint from me settled the match.
Browne was engaged, and Osbaldeston was beaten with his own weapons.”
A match was now made to give Browne a fair trial, and “we were having
a social glass,” said Fennex, “and talking over with Beldham the
match of the morrow at the ‘Green Man,’ when Browne came in, and told
Beldham, with as much sincerity as good-humour, that he should soon
send his stumps a-flying.” “Hold there,” said Beldham, fingering his
bat, “you will be good enough to allow me this bit of wood, won’t
you?” “Certainly,” said Browne. “Quite satisfied,” answered Beldham,
“so to-morrow you shall see.” “Seventy-two runs,” said Fennex,--and
the score-book attests his accuracy,--“was Beldham’s first and only
innings;” and, Beagley also joined with Fennex, and assured us, that
he never saw a more complete triumph of a batsman over a bowler.
Nearly every ball was cut or slipped away till Browne hardly dared to
bowl within Beldham’s reach.
We desire not to qualify the praises of Beldham, but when we hear
that he was unrivalled in elegant and brilliant hitting, and in that
wonderful versatility which cut indifferently, quick as lightning,
all round him, we cannot help remarking, that such bowling as that of
Redgate or of Wisden renders imperatively necessary a severe style of
defence, and an attitude of cautious watchfulness, which must render
the batsman not quite such a picture for the artist as might be seen in
the days of Beldham and Lord F. Beauclerk.
So far we have traced the diffusion of the game, and the degrees of
proficiency attained, to the beginning of the present century. To
sum up the evidence, by the year 1800, cricket had become the common
pastime of the common people in Hampshire, Surrey, Sussex, and Kent,
and had been introduced into the adjoining counties; and though we
cannot trace its continuity beyond Rutlandshire and Burley Park,
certainly it had been long familiar to the men of Leicester and
Nottingham as well as Sheffield;--that, in point of Fielding generally,
this was already as good, and quite as much valued in a match, as it
has been since; while Wicket-keeping in particular had been ably
executed by Sueter, for he could stump off Brett, whose pace Nyren,
acquainted as he was with all the bowlers to the days of Lillywhite,
called quite of the steam-engine power, albeit no wicket-keeper could
shine like Wenman or Box, except with the regularity of overhand
bowling; and already Bowlers had attained by bias and quick delivery
all the excellence which underhand bowling admits. Still, as regards
Batting, the very fact that the stumps remained six inches wide, by
twenty-two inches in height, undeniably proves that the secret of
success was limited to comparatively a small number of players.