Double Headers

14 their ground. Although financial factors were against them, their efforts may well have put them in prime position for consideration when venues away from The Oval were first being sought for Minor Counties matches in 1905, and later for a first-class fixture in 1909. 9 •In the season before the first-ever county match at Reigate in 1905, the ground had had three examinations by some Very Important People in Surrey cricket. In July 1904 Reigate Priory CC played matches first against the Gentlemen of Surrey, whose team included W.T.Graburn who was the Surrey CCC coach from 1892 to 1904, and then two days later against Mr J.Shuter’s XI; John Shuter had been Surrey’s captain in their heyday of the 1880s and early 1890s and was still a major influence at The Oval, being (among other things) Chairman of the Match Committee. Then in September they played against Mr H.D.G.Leveson Gower’s XII; ‘Shrimp’ Leveson Gower was a regular member of the Surrey XI (or as regular as most amateurs of the era) who went on to captain both Surrey and England, and after retiring as a player was a leading cricket administrator and organiser both in Surrey and nationally for the best part of 40 years. Thus the Reigate club was in a strong position to influence some very influential people in 1904, and to judge from subsequent events, they were very successful in doing so. The fact that the Leveson Gower family seat was nearby at Titsey can’t have harmed the Reigate cause either. 10 Whatever the balance among these factors, and perhaps others that we cannot now know, in late 1904 or early 1905 the Priory Ground at Park Lane was selected as the first home venue, other than The Oval, to host a Surrey First or Second Eleven match since 1854. The match – the first of the season for the Second XI – took place on 15-16 May 1905. It was welcomed locally, in principle at least, if not so much in terms of the attendance: “It was an excellent idea – whoever was the originator of it – that one at least of Surrey’s second eleven fixtures should be played in some part of the county 11 , with a view of stimulating an interest in the game generally and in the county team especially. 12 Arising out of this idea Surrey 2nd and Yorkshire 2nd opened their season’s campaign on Monday on the Reigate Priory Cricket Ground – one of the most picturesque spots obtainable. There was not a particularly large 9 For more on Walter Read’s associations with the Priory club, and on the attempts by the club to secure a county match in the later 19th century, see Keith Booth: Walter Read: A class act , ACS Publications, 2011, especially pp. 24-31. 10 The proximity of his family seat may also have had a bearing on Leveson Gower’s selection of the Priory CC ground for first-class matches by his own Eleven in 1924, 1934, 1935 and 1936, as noted on page 32 below. But strangely, he does not mention Reigate Priory CC in the chapter ‘Cricket Clubs I Remember’ in his autobiography Off and On the Field (1953). 11 Kennington Oval had been in the LCC area since 1889, and so was no longer in the administrative county of Surrey. It is not clear whether the newspaper was being a touch sarcastic here, or just using the term “the county” to mean “the non-metropolitan part of the geographical county”. 12 I have speculated earlier that this may have been a factor in the decision to play matches outside metropolitan Surrey; but despite this reference in the newspaper I have traced nothing in Surrey’s own records which corroborates the suggestion, plausible though it is, that this was a principal reason for playing away from London. Surrey in 1909