Lives in Cricket No 37 - William Clarke

37 Broadbridge and Lillywhite were the Sussex round-armers, Barker and Redgate were Nottinghamshire’s. Several commentators have made the point that Clarke, as captain, tended to hog the bowling and not know when to rest, but in this case, and in the return fixture, he did not put himself on to bowl – a very unusual situation. However the report on the Brighton game states: Barker is a good hand at every department of the game – bowling fielding and batting. He delivers his balls with great swiftness, their force being added to by his height and the spring which he gives before doing so. His strength must be very great to enable him to undergo such exertion as he did on this day. Redgate’s bowling was at first tremendous and hardly to be resisted but evidently slackened as the day advanced. On the whole we prefer the bowling of Barker to Redgate. Barker took six wickets, Redgate four on the first day, with Sussex all out for 94. In the second innings Barker and Redgate shared the wickets and Nottinghamshire (so called, rather than Nottingham) won by two wickets. They required seven to win with eight wickets down at the second day’s close. The one adverse comment in the Nottingham papers was: ‘Nottinghamshire have no good wicket-keeper, several players taking this place.’ The return match on The Forest was immortalized by William Howitt in his book Rural Life in England . His vivid description of this match and the whole atmosphere of cricket on The Forest was reprinted in detail in F.S.Ashley-Cooper’s Nottinghamshire Cricket and Cricketers in 1923 and again in Christopher Lee’s history of Sussex cricket From The Sea End (1989). A brief extract will convey the whole: Along each side of the ground ran a bank sloping down to it, and it, and the booths, and the tents at the ends were occupied with a dense mass of people, all as silent as the ground beneath them; and all up the hill were groups, and on the race-stand an eager, forward-leaning throng. There were said to be twenty thousand people, all hushed as death, except when some exploit of the players produced a thunder of applause. … But nothing was so beautiful as the sudden shout, the rush, and breaking up of the crowd, when the last decisive notch was gained. There is a very full report of this historic game in the Nottingham Review . Again Clarke did not bowl and apart from a few overs from Billy Good, Barker and Redgate formed the attack. Unfortunately for Sussex Lillywhite was unable to play, a great loss to them. Nottinghamshire’s batting was saved by Billy Good who made the highest score in both innings and was 20 not out when Notts won by three wickets. These two Sussex matches were the only two external matches played by Nottingham in 1835. The nomenclature of the Nottingham side perhaps requires some explanation. A Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club did not exist – in fact in 1835 there were no organizations claiming to be a ‘County Cricket Club’, even in Sussex and Kent, the two counties that had regularly played matches for the past decade. The Nottingham Review of 24 April 1835 First Matches with Sussex and the Consequences