History of Bucks CCC

Paravicini was a leader, and the newspaper reports of the day are fulsome in their praise of his cavalier approach to the game. By all accounts he was a fun-loving man. The 1891 Census suggests that he was of independent means living with a bachelor brother and no shortage of servants, but later that year he married Lady Marcia Cholmondeley and by the end of the decade he had three young sons. The family lived by the Thames at Datchet, where a perennial hazard was the risk of flooding, and there are even reports of the river rising high enough for roach to find their way into the piano. Another mainstay of the early campaigns was Charles Cobb, who had been a prominent Free Forester in the days before the County Club was formed. Cobb was a wicket-keeper of exceptional ability who exceeded a stumping a game over a 45-match career. It is a measure of his class that after his retirement it becomes more difficult to identify his successors from newspaper match scores and 20 matches elapsed before another stumping was recorded for Bucks. Cobb was also a useful batsman, usually in the middle of the order but quite often as an opener. He retired with a batting average of 24.47 and a top score of 111, his only century, which came against Berkshire at Aylesbury in 1898. Another who began a distinguished career for Bucks in 1896 was Charles Gresson. Educated at Lancing, he was an opening bat. Less of a dasher than some of those who surrounded him, he was the key man to dislodge in the 1890s, never missing a match until 1900 when he was away for two years fighting in the Boer War. He returned for the 1902 season and continued to play until 1907, taking over the captaincy for almost the whole of the 1904 season, for most of which de Paravicini was unable to play. Gresson’s outstanding season was 1899 when he scored 658 runs at an average of 65.80. He never quite matched this weight of run-scoring again, but ended his career with 2,978 runs at 27.57, and his record included three centuries. The first professionals The trio of professionals who played regularly in the first seasons were Jack Saunders, George Nash and Mat Wright. Saunders was a batsman who went in first wicket down. He had played a couple of matches for Middlesex in 1891 and went on to play for Bucks in every championship match until his retirement at the end of the 1900 season. A career average of 22.19 suggests that his overall contribution was a little disappointing, and he certainly had some poor years culminating in a return of only 134 runs from 12 completed innings in the final season before the committee decided not to retain his services. However, there were brighter moments, and Saunders has the distinction of being the first man to score a championship hundred for the county. This came when he made 114 against Northamptonshire in 1896 in the first match played on the County Ground at Aylesbury. It was the first time any Bucks batsman had passed fifty in a championship match, and Bucks’ score of 339 speaks volumes for the quality of the Aylesbury pitch at this time. Jack Saunders was not a regular bowler, but he was a reliable slip fielder and very occasionally kept wicket. The bowling was almost exclusively the preserve of the other two professionals, George Nash and Mat Wright. In 1895 they sent down just over 90% of all the deliveries bowled by Bucks. In the eight matches of 1896 the figure was just over 80%, the following year 81%. Thereafter injury and illness to Nash gave others more of a chance, but it had been quite common for the two professionals to bowl unchanged throughout an innings and sometimes an entire match. Naturally they ended up with the lion’s share of the wickets, and it was the deadly combination of Nash and Wright that was the most crucial ingredient in Bucks’ early successes. Their figures, even by the standards of the age in which they played, are remarkable: 23 The first professionals