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

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      For all its primitive nature, London was a vibrant city, and enjoyed greater pre-eminence in the nation than ever before or after in its history. In 1700 it boasted two thousand coffee shops, where the rich smell of roasted coffee offset the stench of unwashed bodies and the reek of tobacco. Coffee shops became a centre of social life, where gossip and news were exchanged. One coffee-house keeper, Edward Lloyd, set up a pulpit for shipping news, and Lloyd’s of London was born. Each shop had its own clientele. The Cocoa Tree Chocolate House attracted Tories, while Whigs would be found at St James’s. Poets favoured Wills Coffee House, and the clergy gathered at Truby’s. Aristocrats played cards at White’s Chocolate House, where professional gamblers waited to fleece them.

London’s streets were alive with vendors selling flowers, milk or newspapers; there were bootblacks, domestic servants on errands and porters carrying everything from letters to heavy burdens. Elms lined many of the streets, but so did household waste and effluent. Residents had to endure the stench of livestock being driven to market – or to the abattoirs on Tower Hill. The animals battled with the fashionable modes of transport: sedan chairs carried by ‘chairmen’ who feared that the new invention of umbrellas would cut their trade,* and hackney carriages drawn by horses. The River Thames was covered with ships, boats and barges of all kinds, and the smell of fish leaving Billingsgate would linger in the air.

      Cleaner air could be enjoyed either by walking beyond London to the rural villages of Hampstead or Kentish Town, or in the ‘lungs’ of the city – Hyde Park, Green Park, Kensington Gardens or St James’s Park, where society strolled in their finery hoping to see and be seen. London drew people in like a magnet, and by 1730 had 6–700,000 inhabitants, compared with only 20–30,000 in Birmingham, Manchester and Sheffield. Dr Samuel Johnson, a native of Lichfield, with a modest population of three thousand, would say of his adopted home: ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.’ It was a tribute to the vibrancy of a town that was, among other things, embracing cricket with enthusiasm.

      It is, perhaps, not surprising that it did so. Leisure for the masses was limited and often violent. Cockfighting was brutal but popular. Bare-knuckle boxing, often in the yards of taverns or in Marylebone fields, competed with cricket as a rising entertainment. It began as a spectator sport in the 1730s, with the great Jack Broughton as the main attraction. Broughton wrote the primitive ‘rules’ of the ring, and was sponsored by the cricket-loving, Scots-bashing Duke of Cumberland, who even built a theatre in which to stage his main bouts. Ahead for boxing lay Daniel Mendoza, Tom Cribb and a long line of champions who would further popularise the sport.

      An even more violent entertainment was execution day at Tyburn. It was a holiday: shops were closed, stands were erected for spectators and the condemned were drawn through the streets in carts. Life was cheap for the very poor, and often the judicial system robbed them of it for modest offences. In the fifty years from 1690 the number of offences carrying the penalty of death by hanging rose fourfold, to 160: sheep stealing, minor theft, any number of offences against property, all carried a capital sentence. The criminal code was barbarous for a nation that was among the least violent in Europe.

      Cricket was not a civilising influence in the bustle of eighteenth- century London – such a Victorian notion lay far ahead. Early cricket sponsors came from dubious sources: pubs and breweries eager to sell their product, and rich patrons attracted by the scope for gambling. These early patrons are elusive figures. Little is known of their character and lifestyle, and such scraps as are available offer only a partial portrait. Nonetheless, early newspapers, court cases over wagers, and memoirs of the great families enable us to piece together some of the jigsaw. The midwives of cricket were a mixed bunch: some mad, some bad, and some idle. All would have vanished into obscurity but for their promotion of cricket.

      At the time the more raffish gentry took up the game, it was growing in popularity in rural areas. The Church, its old enemy, remained as hostile as ever, but the public were warming to the spectacle, and matches often attracted huge crowds. A rough and tumble, or an illegal affray, was a frequent accompaniment to a competitive game or an unsettled bet, and in a violent age that may have been an added attraction.

      All this made news, and the early newspapers – soon to be joined (in 1706) by the first evening paper, the London Evening News – lapped it up. Reports in the Post Boy, the Postman or the Weekly Journal were sparse, but then as now, trivia made good copy, and the size of bets laid and the rivalries between aristocrats were widely reported. Attractive games were advertised by sponsors, often innkeepers keen to attract a thirsty crowd, and tended to be between teams of eleven or twelve players, though there is no clue as to why that number was settled upon. In every (advertised) instance the match was arranged to accommodate a wager:

      These are to inform Gentlemen, or others, who delight in cricket playing, that a match of cricket, of 10 Gentlemen on each side, will be play’d on Clapham Common, near Fox-Hall [Vauxhall], on Easter Monday next, for £10 a head each game (five being design’d) and £20 the odd one.

      Such an advertisement, from the Post Boy of 30 March 1700, is typical, but even the ‘gentlemen’ players were not always regarded with respect. A burlesque poem of 1701 parodied a Tunbridge beau:

      It’s true he can at cricket play,

      With any living at this day,

      And fling a coit or toss a bar,

      With any driver of a car:

      But little nine-pins and trap-ball,

      The Knight delights in most of all.

      Conceiving like a prudent man,

      The other might his honour stain,

      So scorns to let the Publick see,

      He should degrade his Quality.

      ‘He should degrade his Quality’ – this was pure snobbery from the author, who evidently believed that cricket should remain a ‘peasant’s game’. But not all poems were written to mock. Five years later, in 1706, the far more elegant pen of William Goldwin published Musae Juveniles, a collection of poems in Latin, one of which, ‘In Certamen Pilae’, describes a cricket match, giving evidence of the nature of the contemporary game as well as confirming that it was played at Eton when he was a pupil there in the 1690s. Goldwin later became vicar of St Nicholas, Bristol, and his famous poem tells us much about early cricket. His lines reveal that batsmen had curved bats, and the ball was a leathern sphere, thus confirming that early cricket employed the leather casing for balls first adopted by the Romans nearly two thousand years earlier. The umpires (there were two) officiated whilst ‘leaning on their bats’, and the scorers ‘cut the mounting score on sticks with their little knives’. Batsmen could be caught out by a fieldsman who ‘with outstretched palms joyfully accepts [the ball] as it falls’. Finally, Goldwin refers to the ‘rustic throng’, thus telling us that cricket was a spectator sport from the outset, and that its first supporters were rural working men.

      While matches between ‘gentlemen’ were growing in popularity, more impromptu games were also thriving on common land at Chelsea, Kennington, Walworth, Clapham and Mitcham, as well as on rural grounds around the Weald. The rustic cricketers were not always welcome. As the Postman warned on 5 April 1705:

      This is to give notice to any person whatsoever, that they do not presume to play at foot-ball, or cricket, or any other sport or pastime whatsoever, on Walworth Common, without lease of the Lords of that Manor … as they will answer the same when they are sued at law for so doing.

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