Minor Counties Championship 1895

4 THE MINOR COUNTIES CHAMPIONSHIP 1895 INTRODUCTION This book contains the match scores, a statistical review and the full averages, both county by county and by player in alphabetical order, for the inaugural season of the Minor Counties Championship. BACKGROUND TO THE FORMATION OF THE MINOR COUNTIES CHAMPIONSHIP The Second-Class Counties Championship 1888-1893 With the increasing interest being taken in the 1880s in the First-Class County Championship, counties below first-class rank were keen to enhance their performances and work towards entering the competition. To help encourage this, the editor of Wisden published a ‘Second- Class Counties Competition’ table starting with the 1888 season. In that year the table covered 10 counties – Derbyshire, Essex, Hampshire, Hertfordshire, Leicestershire, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Somerset, Staffordshire and Warwickshire. Cheshire were included in the table for the following year, but Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Northamptonshire were omitted after the 1889 season. Somerset did not appear after 1890 on gaining entry to the First-Class County Championship in 1891. The table was headed by Leicestershire in 1888 and 1891, by Warwickshire in 1889 and 1892, and by Somerset in 1890. Derbyshire and Leicestershire were joint leaders in 1893. Though there was no formal management committee responsible for running the competition and it was not formally recognised by the MCC, the results played a role in facilitating the entry of Somerset to the First-Class Championship in 1891 and of Derbyshire, Essex, Hampshire, Leicestershire and Warwickshire in 1895. This latter year saw the expansion of the First-Class Championship from 9 to 14 teams. The five teams entering the Championship in 1895 used the 1894 season in part to prepare for the competition, and no Second-Class Counties Competition table appeared in Wisden for 1894. The Formation of the Minor Counties Cricket Association In the Autumn of 1894, Paul Foley, the Secretary of Worcestershire, sent a circular to all those counties that would not feature in the First-Class County Championship in 1895. The circular was on the subject of ‘the classification of the smaller counties’ and was sent to the 18 non- first-class county clubs of Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Cheshire, Devon, Durham, Glamorgan, Herefordshire, Hertfordshire, Lincolnshire, Monmouthshire, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Wiltshire, and Worcestershire. At a meeting held at Lord’s on Tuesday 11 December 1894, prior to the annual meeting organised by the MCC for county secretaries to arrange fixtures, representatives of 16 non- first-class counties approved a resolution “That a second-class county cricket competition for the second-class cricketing counties be instituted and be open to all county cricket clubs arranging a programme of four home and away county matches. The method of scoring shall be the same as adopted in the first-class county championship competition”. Herefordshire and Shropshire were the only two counties not to respond to Paul Foley’s circular. It was decided