History of Bucks CCC

game - married versus single. On this occasion the married men triumphed and took home a purse of £100. A more modest prize was at stake in 1774 when Risborough, unusually prominent in early references, met Bucks at Wycombe Rye for a silver cup valued at five guineas and given by the innkeepers of High Wycombe, who no doubt hoped to profit from the crowd drawn to the match. The same year saw Risborough in action against Maidenhead at Lord Le Despencer’s Park at West Wycombe, again for a cup, this time worth five pounds rather than guineas. On 29 May 1775 there was ‘a match of cricket for £50 a side’ at Bray in which there was a victory by 151 notches for Maidenhead, assisted by Lumpy Stevens, the finest bowler of his generation, when they beat Risborough, who had a lesser luminary named Briggs to help them. Later that year there is report of Wendover beating Tring by an innings and a large number of notches ‘although Tring were allowed two famous players from another place’. An article in The Cricketer of 30 August 1924 celebrating Bucks’ outstanding success in minor counties cricket around that time - they had thrashed Surrey Second Eleven by the little matter of 242 runs in the previous year’s Challenge Match - pleads that the history of the county be set in print. It goes on to say, without further substantiation, that ‘matches with Berkshire date back at least as far as 1784, when the counties met at Marlow and Datchet.’ The following year the Reading Mercury announced that on 27 August Berkshire were scheduled to play Bucks for £25 a side on Langley Broom, Berkshire. That same summer the Gentlemen of Hertfordshire were entertained at Nettis Green near Beaconsfield. These appear to be the first references so far uncovered of a Bucks team purporting to compete against another county, but there is no evidence to point to a properly constituted club or selection procedures, and all the indications are that any further matches were few and far between. Haygarth takes notice of Bucks Cricket historians owe an incalculable debt to Arthur Haygarth (1825 - 1903), whose life was devoted to retrieving and publishing details of all matches of note played between 1746 and 1878. His Scores and Biographies , published in 14 volumes, provide a crude gauge of the game’s health. After recording the single match at the Artillery Ground in 1744 Haygarth’s next score is from 1771, but thereafter he shows cricket’s popularity growing steadily through the last decades of the 18 th century. However, decline was around the corner and as the 19 th century dawned Haygarth found fewer matches that merited his attention. Public morale around this time had been lowered by the enclosure of common land, and the rural population had suffered from depressed agricultural wages at a time when the price of grain was high. Those who had left the land and made their way to urban factories in the wake of the Industrial Revolution worked inhumanly long hours. Moreover, in the years before Waterloo, invasion was an ever-present threat. The mood of the people and their other preoccupations make it hardly surprising that the public should have had less taste for the sport of cricket, less time to play it and less approval of those participating in it. By 1820 all this had begun to change. As cricket emerged from its dark age one of the first Bucks clubs to see the light of day was Stoke Green, claiming its foundation as a modest village club in 1815, when it is reputed to have played a game against an eleven from Eton College. A few years later came the formation of some of the county’s foremost clubs - High Wycombe in 1823, Beaconsfield in 1825 and Marlow in 1829 - all pointing to a growing interest in the game in the south of the county. 11 Haygarth takes notice of Bucks