More Than A Game: The Story of Cricket's Early Years. John Major
the trade of the entire world. The wider world was far away from England’s damp island: it took up to seven weeks to sail to America against the winds, nine weeks to Barbados, and six months to round the Cape of Good Hope en route to Calcutta. But events and sea power were to shape a momentous century. No one could have dreamed what lay ahead.
In the English villages, peasants and craftsmen were finding a wider market for their produce in the towns and cities. Basic crops of wheat, barley and rye went to make bread for the masses. Barley had a wider use: it made malt for the beer and ale that had long been the drinks of England, except in the cider districts of the western counties. Even children drank weak beer, since it was often healthier than impure water. The roads were dire, which restricted the movement of men and materials. Waterways and rivers were used as highways. West Country cheeses were carried to London by sea. When harvests were plentiful, surplus corn was exported. As trade grew, so did profits for the merchants who reinvested in agriculture. The Industrial Revolution lay half a century ahead, and England still enjoyed a truly beautiful landscape. The desecration of forests for timber, coal and housing had not yet begun. Swamps and wildernesses were being tamed for agriculture, and population growth had not yet marred the land with the scars of development.
Other than in a handful of villages, no one was much bothered about the infant game of cricket. Greater events, far away from the cradle of the game, were shaping the future. But cricket was putting down roots. It was still a rustic sport, poorly endowed and, so far as we know, confined to the south of England. Teams had no set number of players. Rules were haphazard, and varied from village to village. Dress was variable. Bats were curved. Two stumps – most likely so-called because the primitive game was played with the stumps of trees as a wicket – were still the norm. Bowling was underarm and along the ground (hence ‘bowling’), Drake-style, but faster. The concept of the carefully-prepared modern cricket square was unknown, and wickets were pitched on bumpy, grassy surfaces that were unpredictable and could cause nasty injuries. It would be another hundred years before anyone wore protective leg or shin pads, even though a serious injury could cost a rural player his livelihood.
In the early 1700s these hardy players had no concept of the changes that lay ahead for their game as they nursed their bumps and bruises. For the eighteenth century would see the establishment of a governing body, albeit self-appointed, the first laws codified, the game spread through and beyond the southern counties of England, scores and records kept spasmodically, and the style of cricket evolve. Even ladies’ teams were formed. Cricket would emerge from its infancy.
Early in the new century the game was adopted by influential patrons, and became a welcome distraction in London. The capital may have been the centre of wealth and the leader in fashion, but daily life was harsh for the majority of its citizens. The London of early cricket was a town of unpaved streets and open sewers, where garbage and bodily waste were tipped from the windows of leaky, broken-down slums in which eight to ten of the poorest people would huddle in a single unheated room. In the worst quarters, decrepit houses quite literally fell down on their dwellers’ heads. In such conditions life expectancy was low and infant mortality huge. Children slept in the streets, clothed only in rags, and no one was safe out at night if the gin shops had been busy in the evening – as usually they had.
For most of the sick, folk remedies were all that were on offer, and superstitious nonsense was widely believed: it was thought efficacious to apply a live toad to the kidneys to treat a urinary infection, or a hanged man’s hands to a cyst. But some tangible improvements to health care were being made. Philanthropists founded hospitals in the major towns and cities. In London, new hospitals – including maternity hospitals – were established to supplement St Bartholomew’s and St Thomas’s, which had served the capital for six hundred years. Guy’s and Westminster Hospitals were born out of private philanthropy, but the demands of healthcare also led to the foundation of St George’s and the London and Middlesex Hospitals, all of which opened their doors between 1720 and 1745. And such a licentious age brought the Lock Hospital into being – it cared for sufferers from venereal diseases. The Foundling Hospital, another new arrival, cared for destitute children and raised funds through a public lottery.
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