Cricket Witness No 5 - Whites on Green

8 Chapter One Early cricket in Swansea Swansea holds a special place in the sporting history of South Wales as the town was the venue during the late 18 th century for some of the earliest organised games of cricket on record. Indeed, the first written record of cricket being played in Wales is contained in a letter from a local gentleman to the General Evening Post in April 1771 bemoaning the fact that young men gathered together on the Sabbath to take part in a variety of sporting pursuits: “football, wrestling, cricket, fighting, jumping and an enormous use of oaths is made their exercise and the pastors of these places generally take too little pains for restraining this vice of profaining the Lord’s day.” 1 At the time, there were around 4,500 people living in the town, which had developed into a thriving port at the mouth of the River Tawe, with its success stemming from the shelter provided to the south-west by the Mumbles headland and the absence of sandbanks clogging up the estuary. Swansea was also in the early throws of industrialisation, utilising the easily accessible seams of coal which outcropped close to the surface in the Tawe Valley. In addition to mining activities, the town had become the focus for copper smelting, as entrepreneurs during the first two decades of the 18 th century realised that with the process to create one ton of refined copper requiring eighteen tons of coal and thirteen tons of ore it was more economic to bring the ores to the coalfields. By the time the first Census was taken in 1801, Swansea had a population of 6,099 and the seven copper smelters in the Lower Swansea Valley produced around 90% of the total UK output. 2 In addition to thriving businesses in the Georgian era, the town of Swansea also held pretensions of becoming a fashionable seaside resort. “In point of spirit, fashion and politeness, the Brighton of Wales,” was how one regional newspaper described the Copperopolis in August 1786. 3 With wealth from the industrial activities plus the dreams of being the Welsh Weymouth, it was no surprise that Swansea was also the location for one of the first formal cricket clubs in South Wales, as evidenced by a notice in the Hereford Journal for May 1785 reminding subscribers to the Swansea club that the first practices of the new season would shortly be taking place, and that members should gather near the Bathing House at Crumlin Burrows. The Bathing House, which was owned by Swansea Corporation, may have been a suitable location for the cricketers to gather, because in addition to changing facilities, there were rooms for dining and dancing. But ten years later the area, like much of the land immediately adjoining