Lives in Cricket No 37 - William Clarke

56 Chapter Seven Leaving Trent Bridge On 20 March 1846 the following notice appeared in the Nottingham Review : ‘Mr W.Clark, the celebrated slow bowler, is removing from Nottingham and will in future be found on Lord’s Ground.’ Over the past years, historians, myself included, have given the impression that Clarke, unable to obtain a financial return from laying out Trent Bridge Cricket Ground, conceived the idea of creating a team of notable players to tour up and down England. In order to put this scheme into practice he moved to London, where he could negotiate terms with suitable players and arrange fixtures. Ashley-Cooper in his long essay on Clarke, see Nottinghamshire Cricket and Cricketers , page 41, states: ‘The [Trent Bridge] Inn remained Clarke’s home until 1847, when he retired from business and decided to devote all his attention to cricket.’ This remark comes straight from Sutton’s Nottinghamshire Cricket Matches from 1771 to 1853, published in 1853, viz : ‘Clark retired from business as an innkeeper in 1847 and devoted himself to his favourite game.’ If Clarke had moved to Lord’s in 1846, as the newspaper states, but kept the Trent Bridge Inn as his home and business until 1847, one would have thought that he would have played the occasional match on the Trent Bridge Ground in the 1846 season, but his name does not appear in a single game in Nottingham that summer. A further newspaper report in the Morning Post of 21 April 1846 removes any lingering doubts about Clarke leaving Nottingham: ‘On Saturday morning [18 April]….an attempt was made to set fire to premises belonging to Mr Chapman, landlord of the Trent Bridge Inn. … This is the second attempt in twenty-one days to fire the same premises.’ (The fire was in a barn/stables, filled with hay, about 30 yards from the Inn itself.) Twenty or more years ago, the Singlehurst family, whose main branch had been based in West Bridgford, produced the most elaborate family tree, but one of the few gaps was the ‘disappearance’ of Mary Singlehurst, who became Mary Chapman, then in 1837 Mary Clarke. The question arises, ‘Did she move to London with William Clarke in 1846?’ Both William and Mary Clark(e) being such common names it proved too difficult to locate her in London and the surrounding area. In the 1851 census, however, she is living with her son, John Chapman, at his house in Gainsborough. Nothing remarkable about that, except that she is described as a ‘widow’, which could fool very few, since her husband’s name was constantly in the newspapers. It cannot be a coincidence that in 1851, when Clarke’s All-England Eleven played no fewer than 34 three-