Lives in Cricket No 37 - William Clarke

32 Chapter Four Onward and Upward In 1829 the Nottingham Club, for the first time, arranged home and away fixtures with both Sheffield and Leicester, plus a revival of the Town v County fixture on The Forest – perhaps a further indication that William Clarke had assumed the leadership of the town club. Clarke appeared mainly as a batsman in the 1829 games, the main attack being Redgate, Barker (both fast round-arm) and the Mansfield cricketer John Hilton, described by Sutton as ‘the most remarkable of all bowlers’, but we have no elucidation as to why. He bowled slow round-arm. Clarke scarcely bowled at all. On 21 February 1830 the last of William Clarke’s children, Alfred, was baptised at St Nicholas’ Church, Nottingham. The eldest child, Frances, had died in 1827, but Alfred had two living brothers and two sisters – John (b 1823), Matilda (b 1824), William (b 1826) and Jane (b 1828). Alfred was to become a useful county cricketer, but nowhere near as prominent as his father. The only Nottingham match of the season was with Sheffield on their new ground at Hyde Park – for 100 sovereigns. Prior to the game, a practice match was organized on The Forest between the Nottingham first eleven and the next twenty-two; Clarke’s innings of 27 was the highest in the match and again the first-eleven bowling was dominated by Barker and Redgate who bowled down 12 wickets between them. In the match at Hyde Park, Clarke repeated his feat of the highest innings, 59, but his colleagues failed against the bowling of Marsden, who took ten wickets bowled in the match and scored 48. Sheffield won by 41 runs. It was Clarke’s first fifty in ‘first-class’ cricket. The brief Nottingham Club programme for 1830 was repeated in 1831. Nottingham’s first eleven opposed T.Heath and twenty-one selected by him from the town and neighbourhood. The eleven made 121, with wides contributing 23 – an indication of round-arm being employed – whilst Heath’s team were all out for 88. As a prelude to the Sheffield match at Hyde Park, Clarke, Jarvis and Barker challenged three of Sheffield (namely Smith, Rawlins and Marsden) to a single-wicket match. Barker bowled down five of the wickets and caught the sixth: Sheffield made eight and 13. Nottingham scored 31 (Clarke 12, Jarvis 12, Barker 7). Exactly why the Nottingham v Sheffield match was arranged for Hyde Park for a second successive year is, I assume, a matter of money: the proprietor, who was the son-in-law of Mr Steer who ran the Darnall ground, could charge admission, which Nottingham, at home, couldn’t. The owner of the ground