Lives in Cricket No 37 - William Clarke

9 Tracing Clarke’s Early Life 20 January 1785 John Clarke (of East Leak [sic]) and Mary Bamford of this parish St Peter’s Church is marginally closer to Bunker’s Hill than is St Mary’s. With the baptism registers of the period so sparing with their detail, I feel that John Clark and Mary Bannister are, based on the trade directories, the most likely parents, but even so it is impossible to extend the family of William Clarke beyond his two parents because there is no way of telling which children were born to which of the five sets of John and Mary Clark(e)s resident in Nottingham. The first census which provided researchers with such detail was not undertaken until 1841, so there are no alternative sources to the baptismal registers prior to the earliest detailed census. Over recent years a number of members of the Clark(e) clan have contacted Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club claiming that they are related to William Clarke, but none has produced any convincing evidence. The most positive claim came from the descendants of William Clarke (1846-1902) and his brother Samuel (b 1829) from Old Basford. The former played occasionally for Nottinghamshire from 1874 to 1876. They claim that William Clarke was their uncle, but through family ‘tradition’. A.W.Shelton, a long-standing member of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club’s Committee and keen historian, spent both time and money in the months prior to the 1938 centenary of the Trent Bridge Ground researching the Clarke family, and more recently these researches have been extended by John Goulder and David Gretton, but with no breakthroughs regarding the famous cricketer’s immediate ancestors. Turning from the Clarke family itself to the town in which young Clarke spent his childhood and youth, it was a place of considerable turmoil, not to say misery. The population increased on average by 500 a year between 1801 and 1851, to a total of 25,000, yet the space in which the citizens lived remained unaltered; houses were crammed between houses and behind houses, hundreds of back-to-back dwellings were erected and people were sandwiched more tightly into the older properties. Due to the Inclosure Acts little or no building was allowed outside the confines of the town walls. Not until the second half of the nineteenth century was building permitted in the immediate countryside to the north and south of the town. For example, the Meadows area, which ran south towards the River Trent, was built on; to the north the Hyson Green development took place. The latter resulted in the 77 acres of The Forest Racecourse/cricket ground being encircled by bricks and mortar: the cricket ground was the venue for most of the major matches played by the Nottingham Club since records began in 1771. When Clarke first played on The Forest ground, he walked half a mile through fields before he reached the ground itself. Nottingham was a town expanded during the first sixty years of the eighteenth century by its manufacturing of lace and hosiery through the use of framework knitting machines. However, at the time of Clarke’s birth the Napoleonic Wars had cut off the lucrative continental market for goods produced in Nottingham. As a result the wages of the knitters sank