Lives in Cricket No 37 - William Clarke

24 Chapter Three The 1820s On Monday, 10 October 1831, the mob, who had been rioting through the town for a day or so, suddenly took up the cry ‘To the Castle’ and by the time a detachment of Hussars had been summoned and had arrived in the Castle Yard, Nottingham Castle was ablaze and beyond saving. The Castle, built between 1674 and 1679 by the first Duke of Newcastle, was nothing more than a blackened shell; it had been completely gutted. It would be amusing to speculate that the mob had destroyed the castle because the Duke and the other major landholders in Nottinghamshire had done nothing to help the Nottingham Cricket Club during the period between 1825 and 1828 when the team had produced a series of poor results – it had been the nobility of the Dukeries who had originally introduced cricket into the County. The first reference to the game in Nottinghamshire had been of the Duke of Kingston practising cricket at Thoresby in 1751. The speculation, however, has no basis in fact, for the mob had been infuriated by the slow passage of the great Reform Bill through the House of Lords. The area, though, seems not to have been underrepresented in Parliament. (At the time, the town of Nottingham elected two members of Parliament. The two members elected in April 1831 were Sir Thomas Denman, and General Sir Ronald Crawford Ferguson. The county also sent two members.) I should add that the Dukes of Newcastle had long since ceased to use the Castle as their residence and it was let to a number of tenants at the time of the riot. It is, however, true that the wealthy landowners of the county, with the exception of the Charlton family of Chilwell, had nothing to do with the success or failure of the Nottingham team in the 1820s and 1830s. In the period mentioned, 1825 to 1828, Nottingham had lost five out of six major matches and Sheffield had taken over as the outstanding cricket club of the Midlands – as noted in Chapter One, Nottingham had beaten the ‘far famed’ Ripon Club in 1816 and England in both 1817 and 1818, then gradually faded. With regard to the absence of support from the nobility and landed gentry, it is worth contrasting the Nottingham side of the 1820s with the professionals of the same decade in London and the south-east. The occupations of the cricketers are very revealing. The fourteen principal Nottingham players comprise five innkeepers, six lacemakers, a farmer, a weaver and a lime burner. The large majority, perhaps all, of these fifteen would, by today’s definition, have been described as self-employed. I