As the new cricket season starts, a long-running mystery that defeated historians of cricket has at last been solved by close examination of the early history of the Chronicle and another newspaper that for a few years used its title, writes Barry Shurlock…

 

AIDAN Haile is one of a band of cricket enthusiasts who are not content with watching current matches but also want to delve into the earlier days of the game, when it was fast becoming the national sport.

It had long been played in some form or other before the Hambledon Cricket Club was founded in 1750 on Broadhalfpenny Down alongside a drover’s inn, The Hutt, which became the Bat & Ball Inn. It is often said that the rules of the game were laid down here, but cricket historians regard this as a myth.

The club, however, did become the foremost cricket club in England before the MCC was formed at Lord’s in the late 1780s. It is said to have played All England XIs on 51 occasions in the latter part of the eighteenth century and won no less than 29 times.

All this is well documented, but Aidan and his colleagues are also interested in the lesser matches that were played in the early days throughout Hampshire and elsewhere – wherever a suitable piece of ground could be found. Many matches involved the local innkeeper, who sold food and drink.

One historian of cricket was Frederick Ashley-Cooper, who apparently never watched or played the game, but managed to write 103 books and pamphlets on it, and a huge number of articles. He was also a major contributor to Wisdens Cricketers’ Almanac, whose 2023 edition is about to be published.

Another renowned cricket historian, PF Thomas (pseudonym HP-T), researched the game in the early years, before the Hambledon Cricket Club. Both he and Ashley-Cooper used the work of an earlier writer Henry Waghorn and his classic books, The Dawn of Cricket and Cricket Notes, Scores &c from 1730-1773 (including two poems!). 

With all of this you might think that there was little to discover, but in the 1930s surgeon George Buckley, in private practice in Weston-Super-Mare, and his brother made a search of the newspaper collections of the British Museum, the Bodleian Library and 35 provincial libraries. This led to Fresh Light on 18th Century Cricket, published in 1935, and a sister book on pre-Victorian cricket two years later.

Cricket historians have long regarded these as ‘the final word’, but there has always been a problem with references to the Hampshire Chronicle. In short, seven items said to have been published in 1781-2 could not be found!

This is where Aidan stepped in, determined to solve the mystery. His credentials as a cricket historian are impeccable. He has prepared an index for Wisdens for 1985-2012 and continues to index later editions (bloomsbury.com/uk/discover/wisden). He is also a cricket consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary and has even played the game – for the Midland Bank Cricket Club in Kent, where he was a bank manager.

Like all others, when he accessed the Chronicle for 1781-2 online on the British Newspaper Archive he found that Buckley’s notes did not make sense. Later, he searched Oxford libraries online (SOLO) and discovered that the Bodleian Library had one edition of the Chronicle for May 1, 1784 that appeared to be wrongly titled. It was called The Hampshire Chronicle, or Portsmouth, Winchester and Southampton Gazette.

It was a eureka moment that suggested that at the time there were two papers entitled The Hampshire Chronicle! This was confirmed on the Hampshire Record Office catalogue online.  Even the archivists did not know that their Chronicle collection contained some copies of a ‘rogue’ newspaper with the same title that had been published between 1778 and 1785.

As it happens, the story had been uncovered some years before by Oxford academic Dr Christine Ferdinand who in 1997 published a scholarly book on the provincial newspaper trade and a man called Benjamin Collins.

The story of the rescue of the Chronicle from a near-death experience in 1778 by Collins in partnership with Winchester printer John Wilkes was told last week (Chronicle April 4, 2023). Only six years after starting the paper schoolmaster, James Linden, went bust and Collins and others rushed in to save the day.

In fact, Collins must have been delighted that someone he regarded as an upstart had gone to the wall. As a hotshot publisher with a reputation in literary London and owner of the Salisbury Journal it was his opportunity to regain the market he had once commanded in Hampshire.

Unfortunately for Collins, Linden was not a push-over. He might have lost control of the paper he had started, but he regarded it as having been ‘stolen’ and promptly started it again. Hiding flimsily behind the imprint of ‘D. Linden and Co’, he started a rogue Chronicle, at first in Southampton and later in Portsmouth. And it continued to come out until in 1785 a fire at the printworks in Portsmouth put an end to it.

This tumultuous period in the Chronicle’s history seems to have got buried until Dr Ferdinand resurrected it in the context of Benjamin Collins and then Aidan rediscovered it in his investigation of the mystery cricket reports.

The reports themselves are for local games played mainly in and around Portsmouth. In 1781 there were matches between the ‘Officers of the Cinque Ports lying at Hilsea Barracks’ and Portsea Island on Southsea Common and also against ‘Officers of the Bucks Militia’ on Hilsea Green.

Stakes could be high, like those for a game of young cricketers ‘none to play who are more than 16 years old’ between Hambledon and ‘Petersfield and Buriton’ for 500 guineas a side.

At the ‘Red House near Kingston Church’ two teams of victuallers played each other, whilst ‘married men’ competed with the ‘bachelors of Portsmouth Common’ for the honours.

Then in the following year, 1782, an extremely important report appeared in the rogue Chronicle. It recorded that in June the Hambledon Club had played its first game on ‘Windmill Downs’ called the ‘new Broadhalfpenny adjoining the town of Hambledon’. Although the new site was more convenient, and the club continued play there until 1795, it lacked one important facility – a pub!

Aidan’s research has appeared in a recent issue of a key journal for cricket history, The Cricket Statistician. As he lives in Yorkshire it is difficult for him to consult editions of the rogue Chronicle which are likely to be found in Hampshire collections and he is therefore calling on cricket fans in the county to seek out and trawl editions of the paper between 1783 and its demise in 1785.

He explained: ‘Buckley only covered 1781 and 1782 and since the rogue paper The Hampshire Chronicle, or Portsmouth, Winchester and Southampton Gazette continued to appear until September 1785 I reckon that there are about 230 editions that have not yet been examined. They almost certainly contain entries that will add significantly to the early story of the game.

‘Local grass-roots games have been rather ignored by cricket historians but they were the vast majority and were where some of those started who were later to become famous.’

Aidan can be contacted at: aidanhaile1@hotmail.co.uk.

On Tuesday April 18 at 7 pm (7:30 pm on Zoom), Barry will be presenting a talk, 'The Hampshire Chronicle - 250 years of News', to the Friends of Winchester Cathedral in the Paul Woodhouse Suite on. To book, visit: friends@winchester-cathedral.org.uk, or call: 01962 857245 or 857244.

barryshurlock@gmail.com

 

 

CAPTIONS

Aidan Haile

The Cricket Statistician

The Bat & Ball Inn, Hambledon

Site of the ground of Hambledon Cricket Club

Early cricket, played in London in 1784. Image: Illustrated London News, 1931

 

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