History of Bucks CCC

have to wait ten years for the next published mention of the game. On 8 September 1740 it was reported that ‘a match was played between the gentlemen of London and eleven gentlemen of Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Hertfordshire, which was won by the former with great difficulty.’ A return match was to be played on the Artillery Ground, the principal venue for the great matches in the 1740s. It was on this ground, in 1744, that Kent played All England in what was long believed to be the first match for which the full scores have been preserved – it is, in fact, the second. On 17 August 1741 the Northampton Mercury advised its readers that the gentlemen of Northants were to play those of Buckinghamshire for 20 guineas a side in the Cow Meadow near Northampton ‘with wickets pitched at 10 and the game to be played out.’ Demonstrating how the game was spreading its tentacles away from London, this is the first year in which newspaper references have been found of cricket matches in Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire. The earliest notices to be uncovered of matches in Hertfordshire are from newspapers of 1732 and 1737. The first match to be mentioned in Oxfordshire, relating to the University, is from 1727, exactly a hundred years before the first Varsity Match. To place these dates in context, we are still some decades from the first authenticated mention of matches at Hambledon, so often misleadingly referred to as the cradle of cricket. Though cricket was probably played on Broadhalfpenny Down from 1756, the Hambledon Club itself may not have been formed until 1767 and its period of greatest prosperity was in the 1770s and 1780s. In fact, the game’s progress in Hampshire was surprisingly slow given its proximity to Sussex, and the first reference to a match in the county does not come until 1749. So even if Bucks could not claim to compete with Hambledon in the quality of the matches played, the game may have been establishing itself in the county at an earlier date. It was more common in publications of these early years to find notices of matches about to take place rather than reports on their outcome. An exception to this was in July 1761 when Wesburn Green near Beaconsfield became the first recorded venue in the county for a match on what was to become a popular pretext for a competitive 10 First evidence of cricket in Bucks Cricket at the Artillery Ground in 1743