Lives in Cricket No 37 - William Clarke

25 The 1820s have studied a similar survey of southern professionals by checking the occupations, where known, of cricketers who represented the Players, in the annual Gentlemen v Players match staged at Lord’s. The only northern player picked in the decade was Thomas Marsden of Sheffield, who began as a brickmaker, and at the end of the decade, Fuller Pilch from Norfolk. The former, probably with his earnings as the major Sheffield cricketer, moved on to be an innkeeper: the remainder of the Players came from the London area, or Kent, Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire. Five of the players were gamekeepers or bailiffs in the pay of amateur cricket enthusiasts; there were a number of tenant farmers; three players, Sparks, Bentley and Caldecourt were employed at Lord’s; another was employed at Eton College. One of the few players who mirrors the Nottingham men is George Brown, with a tailoring business – it is worth noting that he moved on to take the tenancy of the Prince’s Cricket Ground in Brighton, which he held from 1831 to 1840 where, just like William Clarke a few years later, Brown found running a cricket ground was not a profitable enterprise. The Nottingham Club comprised local tradesmen and artisans, but there is no extant documentation to clarify who ran the Club, or indeed how it was organized. Reading between the lines and the odd scrap of anecdote in match reports, it would seem that the two principal figures from 1813 to 1830 were Thomas Warsop and Joe Dennis: the paragraph in Chapter One regarding the 1815 match and Dennis’s financial involvement strongly suggests that Dennis led the side in that contest. Warsop, whose bowling style Clarke was reputed to have copied, is described as ‘a very affable well-spoken man, by far the most gentlemanly of all the county players.’ His last Nottingham match was in 1823 and he is noted elsewhere for his ‘generalship’. It would be fair to assume that Warsop captained and most probably managed the Nottingham team until 1823, when gout caused his retirement; after this Dennis took over the dual role, though he had led the team in some early matches. The headquarters of the Nottingham Club would have been at that time the various inns run by Dennis – he moved from the Duke of York, York Street, to the Horse and Groom in St Peter’s Square and finally the Eclipse in Chapel Bar. A stroke forced him to retire from playing in 1829 and the captaincy was taken over by Clarke; at the same time the headquarters of the Cricket Club moved to the Bell. There is a dramatic description of Dennis’s final illness: ‘He (Dennis) was at Clarke’s house, the Bell in the Market Place, when he had another stroke, was carried on Clarke’s back to his own house (about 150 yards) and died there very soon afterwards.’ His death occurred on 16 November 1831 and he was buried in St Mary’s two days later. From Dennis’s career one might infer that the organizer of Nottingham cricket ideally needed a public house in the centre of Nottingham – was this in Clarke’s mind when he took over the Bell, having married the landlady’s daughter? From the early nineteenth century major cricket in the north of England, as has been noted, centred very largely on the Nottingham, Sheffield and Leicester sides; in the south a variety of promoters from the landed gentry