in lollop’d Sandwich, with negligent grace
For the sake of a lounge, not for love of a place
Quoth he, ‘Noble Captain, your fleets may now nick it,
For I’ll sit at your board, when at leisure from cricket.’
Sandwich, who was a Lord of the Admiralty at the time, kept up his cricketing activities alongside his official duties. In June 1751 he organised three matches against the Earl of March for the sum of a thousand guineas, the winner requiring two victories. Both Sandwich and March played in the games, and Sandwich’s team of ‘eleven gentlemen from Eaton [sic] College’ were dressed in silk jackets and velvet caps to add to the spectacle. They also ‘took constant exercise’ to prepare themselves. The result of the first match is unrecorded, but Sandwich won the second and March the third, so the fate of the guineas is unknown. As an added attraction, a further entertainment that appealed to all classes was laid on: there was cockfighting between each match, at which spectators shouted their bets as the blood and feathers flew. It was an odd accompaniment to cricket, but cockfighting remained a hugely popular sport.
Sandwich maintained an active interest in playing cricket until at least 1766, when he was in his late forties. As George Montague wrote to Horace Walpole in October that year:
Lord Sandwich would play at cricket when he was at Sir George’s this summer with his eldest son, against Sir George and the youngest Sir George caught him out left handed before he got one, went in, fagged him fourteen times till the Earl was not able to run any or move, but paid his money and went to bed.
‘Sir George’ was Sir George Osborn, Bart (1742–1818). Sandwich was a tall, vigorous man who when not playing cricket was an active member of the notorious Hell Fire Club. He certainly lived up to its reputation: after his long-suffering wife finally left him in 1755 he had three sons by a mistress who was murdered by a deranged clergyman in 1779.
Cricket had entered the bloodstream of the aristocracy, and a relative handful of patrons, enthusiasts for cricket and betting, did much to popularise the peasant’s game. Until 1750 most teams were known by the name of their home town or parish, or by the identity of their patrons. There are references to a few cricket clubs: in 1718–19 the Rochester Punch Club Society in Kent had been formed, and was playing a London side. A Clapham Club appeared in 1731, and by 1735 there were at least two clubs in London – a Westminster Club that played its home games at Tothill Fields, and an Artillery Ground side, which also played under the loose nomenclature of the ‘London Club’. Another London club was playing home games at Lamb’s Conduit Fields by 1736, and in 1745 and 1747 advertisements in the Norwich Mercury invited ‘lovers of cricket’ to ‘subscribe their names for the ensuing season’. The enthusiasts of Norwich clearly took the game very seriously: spectators were warned ‘not to bring dogs along with them’, for ‘if there was any interruption … by them in the game … all such dogs will certainly be killed on the spot’. The poor animals found chasing the ball irresistible, thus hindering play.
It was a fierce threat from enthusiasts of a game growing in fame. In 1755 cricket would even earn a mention in Dr Johnson’s new dictionary. ‘Cricket’, defined Johnson, is ‘a sport of which the contenders drive a ball with sticks in opposition to each other’ – accurate insofar as it went, but inadequate. Soon the game would be far better-known.
* Jonas Hanway (1712–86) is credited with inventing the umbrella, but this is doubtful: in 1710, two years before Hanway was born, Swift wrote: ‘The tuck’d up seamstress walks with hasty strides/While streams run down her oil’d umbrella’s sides’ (‘City Show’).
* Walpole (1717–91) was the fourth Earl of Orford and third son of Prime Minister Robert Walpole. A sometime MP for Callington, Castle Rising and King’s Lynn, he is most remembered for his letters and memoirs.
* The earlier matches had been played at Westerham on 28 May and at Kew Green on 4 June.
* Kent (Sackville) vs London and Middlesex (Prince of Wales) on 12 and 30 July 1735.
* The Earl of Wilmington, who succeeded Sir Robert Walpole as Prime Minister in 1742.
* Henry Peckham, nicknamed ‘Lisbon’ because of his interest in the wine trade, notably port, was a merchant and three-time Mayor of Chichester. He was the grandfather of Harry Peckham, who was to help revise the Laws of Cricket thirty-three years later.
** The Earl of Tankerville, whose grandson was also to be on the committee revising laws with Harry Peckham.
* At the Artillery Ground, London, and Moulsey Hurst in August, and at Bury Hill on 9 September.
* The injured man was Wood of Woodcote, a member of an avid cricketing family who formed nearly all of the Surrey team that beat Kent at Duppas Hill, near Croydon, in 1731.
* For example, the Prince and Serene Highness of Hesse in June 1746.
* Quoted in Eric Parker, The History of Cricket (1950).
By the middle of the eighteenth century, cricket was poised for changes that would make it the game we know today. It was emerging from its infancy in a small world of contrast and paradox. The fortunate few lived pampered lives. A lady of means would dine in mid-afternoon before going out to the theatre, following which she would play card games at a friend’s house, at which dancing might begin at a late hour with the arrival of the male guests. Her male counterpart could be expected to breakfast late, possibly with friends, and then visit one of London’s two thousand or so coffee houses to gamble, read or discuss business and politics. He might shop before dining in the late afternoon and visit the theatre at around 6 p.m. Wife, mistresses or friends might occupy his evening. From such a society came the patrons of cricket.
But life was very different for most people. Incomes were dreadfully low. Half of all families in England lived on less than £25 per annum. The ‘nearly poor’ families of tradesmen and builders might have £40 a year with which to keep a large family, but £50 a year turned a family into consumers. Many families bought only secondhand clothing, thus enabling them to dress above their income. Clothes might make up half of a man’s net worth, for few owned houses or possessed material wealth. The limit of ambition for most was sufficient clothes and food, and a rented roof. Twenty people died each week of starvation in London. Life expectancy was under thirty-seven years for the population as a whole, but even less for Londoners, with their unhealthy diet and insanitary and
