Great Cricket Matches 1772-1800

Accordingly, in this book teams organised by the Hambledon Club are usually titled Hampshire. This remains the case even when, after about 1783, a number of very talented players emerged from the western end of Surrey and were drawn to the Hambledon Club (itself evidence that the club’s reach extended far beyond its eponymous home). While the evidence is not clear-cut, the club minutes seem to imply that these players, despite coming from just over the county boundary, should be regarded as eligible to play in county matches in which the club was engaged. In this connexion it may be significant that the Surrey side, which might have been expected to claim these players, had been in abeyance since 1779 and did not resume until 1788. Sobriquets, aliases, and other issues of player identification It was common for leading players of this period to acquire familiar sobriquets or nicknames by which they were widely known: ‘Buck’ (Peter Stewart), ‘Silver Billy’ (William Beldham) and so on. Sometimes these appear in place of the player’s real name even in formal scores, and in the case of ‘Lumpy’, the leading bowler in England when our scores begin in 1772, this practice is universal. However, all players are shown in this book under their real names, even though this means that Lumpy features more prosaically as Edward Stevens. A similar issue arises with amateurs, especially during the later part of our period, who often appear under aliases. Probably they did not want it to be evident in the newspapers that they were playing cricket when they doubtless should have been otherwise engaged. These aliases can present a significant problem with identifying the participants in matches, but it is believed that most of them have been pinned down. And from a safe distance of over two centuries, one can say with confidence that taking an active part in the development of important cricket was almost certainly a more rewarding and worthwhile activity than whatever else they were supposed to be doing. A large number of lesser players (and one or two more significant ones) are known only by their surname, without even an identifying initial. In some of these cases, however, the player’s place of origin, or home club, is known and this is indicated in a footnote against his first appearance. While we believe that most players have been identified, there remain some particularly knotty problems: in particular, the two players named John Wood, one from Pirbright (Surrey) and the other from Seal (Kent), who both played in the 1770s. We have, at least provisionally, assigned each appearance to a specified player, giving our reasons in the footnotes. 24 Edward Stevens, ‘Lumpy’, firmly established as the leading bowler in England when scores begin to be regularly preserved in 1772. Knole House Estate.