Lives in Cricket No 37 - William Clarke

46 versus William Clarke and ten of the Town and County. (The Rancliffe Arms was a Nottingham pub which for several years fielded a strong cricket side.) Clarke achieved little, though his side won by a fair margin, the most successful player being Butler Parr whose ‘batting and stumping was very much admired’. The only two matches in Sutton’s book for 1839 were two single-wicket contests at Trent Bridge. George Jarvis was beaten by Isaac Johnson of the Rancliffe Arms club; later Isaac Johnson and George Butler (Mansfield) were beaten by Butler Parr and Henry Crook. The Nottingham Review of September 13 announced that the annual Town v County match would be played at Trent Bridge the following Monday – the teams are listed, but no report appears; perhaps the game was rained off? However, it indicates that Clarke had wrested this principal local fixture off the Forest Ground. By 1840 the old Forest Ground was almost completely overshadowed by Clarke’s Trent Bridge. He organized three genuine inter-county games, home and away with Sussex and away against Kent. No fewer than five amateurs were included in the Notts team that Clarke took to play Sussex and then immediately afterwards Kent, in June. The letters to the ‘Nobility and Gentry’ had borne fruit in financing the week’s adventures in the south of England, but as a result professionals of greater talent had to be omitted. Sussex won by an innings and 59 runs! The amateurs included T.B.Charlton, son of William Charlton of Chilwell Hall, and Edwin Patchitt, who, at the age of 23, as a clerk to the county magistrates, had the unenviable task of reading the Riot Act proclamation in front of the infuriated mob who burnt down Nottingham Castle. He was a solicitor and in the 1850s was Mayor of Nottingham. T.B.Redgate was also a solicitor, latterly living on a small estate near Weston, Newark (he was no relation Fate Takes a Hand The Trent Bridge Inn, in about 1840, at the time of Nottinghamshire’s first inter-county match, against Sussex, on the adjoining cricket ground. Nearly 1,600 first-class matches have now been played there, including 60 Tests.