Lives in Cricket No 37 - William Clarke

60 1845. As has been mentioned, Denison writes, ‘The Match was stated to have been made by a gentleman at Manchester.’ Who was this man? Is it a pure coincidence that the second All-England match was played on the ground of Manchester Cricket Club? One of the major amateur supporters of that Club was John Earle. Earle must have been known to Clarke, since both of them played in the Nottingham v Leicester matches through the 1820s, and Earle was a member of the Barrow Club in the north of Leicestershire. Earle left Leicestershire for Manchester where he set himself up in the cotton trade and seems to have flourished. His son, John Henry Earle, was also a keen cricketer and both father and son played for the Manchester team v All- England in September 1846. A search of any archive material relating to Earle and cricket has drawn a blank, so this idea remains just a theory. Moving to the fortnight before the AEE v Sheffield game of 1846, it is instructive to check the appearances of Clarke’s eleven men in the four three-day match sessions in early August 1846, to dispel the impression that the most talented cricketers jumped at Clarke’s invitation to join his team because the top players had very few opportunities to earn money from the game. Alfred Mynn and William Hillyer appeared in all four sessions, whilst Dean, Sewell, Guy and Clarke appeared in three of the four. Pilch, Martingell and Butler played in two; though Dorrinton and V.S.C.Smith made just a single appearance. Adding the three England matches, Mynn and Hillyer played in seven successive matches in the three-and-a-half-week period, beginning with the England v Sussex match on 17 August. Ten of the eleven travelled from Southwell up to Sheffield for 31 August. The odd man out was Dorrinton, who had not played since the England v Sussex match at Brighton finishing on 19 August. The Sheffield and Rotherham Independent , in its long and detailed report on the AEE v Sheffield match, begins by explaining that Mr Felix was absent from the England team due to business, and was replaced by Mr Smith. Butler played for Parr, the latter confined to his bed by illness, or in navigational disgrace, depending on which report one believes. The England team was unchanged for the three matches, though on 29 August the Leeds Times advertised only eight of the actual eleven for the Leeds game, with the names of Felix, Parr, T.Box and F.W.Lillywhite making up the squad. On the suitability of the eleven men to claim that they were equal to any contemporary ‘picked’ eleven and Clarke’s judgement of their talents, the following brief notes provide, I feel, the necessary data: Alfred Mynn was the star attraction. William Caffyn notes in his reminiscences: ‘Mr Mynn was without doubt the most popular cricketer of his day. When I played with him towards the end of his career, he was always the centre of attraction on every cricket field, and the spectators would crowd about him when he walked round the ground like flies round a honey-pot. His immense popularity threw even the superior abilities of Pilch and Parr into the shade. He was beloved by all sorts and conditions of men and he, in return, seemed to think kindly of every one.’ Leaving Trent Bridge