Lives in Cricket No 37 - William Clarke

did well, with 7,000 attending the second day’s play. Nottingham won by 125 runs. Clarke bowled down five and scored 18 and 17. One of the great matches of the season at Lord’s was England v The Bs – despite his obvious ability, Barker was not in the Bs eleven and no Nottingham men were seen in the Players v Gentlemen side of that year. In 1832, for a third year in succession, the Nottingham v Sheffield game was played at Hyde Park. The Nottingham Review , which in 1831 had in its Nottingham v Sheffield report the bald statement: ‘Clarke bowled well’, did, in 1832, become slightly more effusive: ‘Clarke never bowled better and it would have been hardly possible for him to have given straighter balls as he would in every instance with, we believe, one exception, have taken a wicket – it took Tom Marsden one hour to get seven in the first innings and an hour and a half to get 18 in the second.’ Economically 1832 was a bad year, perhaps the first downturn since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, hence perhaps the rioting in major towns. In view of the comment on Clarke’s bowling, it is worth looking at the printed scorecard, which credits Clarke with just one wicket, out of 20, bowled down – one assumes that many, if not most, of the eight Sheffield wickets that fell in the first innings, other than bowled, must have been taken by Clarke. Nottingham won by 153 runs. The report concluded with: ‘Clarke did not bowl in the second innings, having to return to Nottingham owing to a serious illness in the family.’ The growing importance of William Clarke as the organizer of Nottingham cricket is further emphasized by the note in the Nottingham Review of 24 August 1832: ‘Tom Heath of Nottingham challenges anyone from Leicestershire for £10 to £20 – Apply Clarke’s, The Bell Inn, Angel Row, Nottingham.’ The first Nottingham game of note in 1833 is a single-wicket match, Three of Nottingham v Three of Sheffield. Marsden completely dominates the proceedings taking all six Nottingham wickets, including Clarke for none in both innings and then Marsden scores 12. The Nottingham trio are dismissed for 7 and 3 – all ten runs being scored by Jarvis, the third of the trio; Barker also recorded a pair. The unusual aspect of the game was the location, described as ‘On the New Ground, Hulme, near Manchester’. It supposedly lasted three days and certainly scoring was painfully slow. Marsden faced 280 balls (70 overs) for his 12, whilst Jarvis in his second innings faced 111 balls for 3 runs. Was the match financially rewarding for the owner of the new ground? The single foreign fixture by the Nottingham Club was against a twenty of Ripon, York, Wetherby, Bedale, Thirsk and Harewood (or in another version, Yorkshire bar Sheffield). The last time that Ripon had been involved was a twelve-a-side contest (Clarke’s debut) in 1816, Nottingham winning by an innings. The game in 1833 was drawn owing to a dispute that arose when Strickland of the twenty was judged ‘run out’. From the historical viewpoint, the Nottingham Club eleven included two amateurs. Nottingham had included one of the amateurs, George Rothera, in the 33 Onward and Upward