The club may be said to have sprung from the ashes of the White Conduit Club, dissolved in 1787. One Thomas Lord, by the aid of some members of the older association, made a ground in the space which is now Dorset Square. This was the first ‘Lord’s.’ As to Lord, he is dubiously said (like the ancestors of Nyren) to have been a Scot and a Jacobite, or mixed up, at least, in some way with the ’45. Lord was obliged to move to North Bank, and finally, in 1814, to the present ground. The famous Mr. Ward had played at Lord’s before this migration; his first match here was in 1810, and he played, more or less, till 1847, being then sixty years of age. His bats are said to have weighed four pounds. Mr. Ward bought the lease of the ground from Lord in 1825, ‘at a most exorbitant rate;’ and, in 1830, Dark bought the remainder of the lease from him. The first match on our present Lord’s, or the first recorded, was M.C.C. v. Hertfordshire, June 22, 1814. In 1825 the pavilion was burned, after a Winchester and Harrow match. The burning of the Alexandrian Library may be compared to the wholesale destruction of cricket records on this melancholy occasion. In 1816 the Club reviewed the Laws: the result will be found in Lillywhite’s ‘Scores,’ i. 385. ‘No more than two balls to be allowed at practice when a fresh bowler takes the ball before he proceeds.’ A great deal too much time is now wasted over these practice balls. ‘The ball must be delivered underhanded, not thrown or jerked, with the hand below the elbow at the time of delivering the ball.’ The umpire is to call ‘no ball,’ ‘if the back of the hand be uppermost.’ As to l.b.w., the batter is out ‘if with his foot or leg he stop the ball which the bowler, in the opinion of the umpire, shall have pitched in a straight line to the wicket, and would have hit it.’
The names of the Presidents are only on record after the fire. Ponsonby, Grimston, Darnley, Coventry are among the most notable. The renowned Mr. Aislabie was secretary till his death in 1842; in the pavilion his bust commemorates him. Mr. Kynaston and Mr. Fitzgerald, of ‘Jerks In from Short Leg,’ are other celebrated secretaries. In 1868 the Club purchased a lease of 99 years, at the cost of 11,000l. There have been recent additions to the area, and to that celebrated monument, the pavilion.
The Royal Academy Club in Marylebone Fields. (After Hayman, R.A. The property of the M.C.C.)
Lord’s is, as all the world knows, the scene, not only of Club and of Middlesex matches, but of Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, and Gentlemen and Players, which is also contested at the Oval. Winchester used moreover to play Eton here, but the head-masters have long preferred a home and home affair. In other chapters these great matches will be chronicled and criticised.
Summary
The various epochs in the history of the game may now be briefly enumerated by way of summary. First we have the prehistoric age, when cricket was dimly struggling to evolve itself out of the rudimentary forms of cat-and-dog, and stool-ball. This preceded 154-, when we find an authentic mention of the name of Cricket. Just about the end of the seventeenth century it was mainly a boys’ game. With the Augustan age it began to be taken up by statesmen, and satirised by that ideal whippersnapper, the ingenious but in all respects unsportsmanlike, Mr. Pope. By 1750 the game was matter of heavy bets, and scores began to be recorded. The old Hambledon Club gave it dignity, and the veterans endured till quite modern times dawn with Mr. Ward. Then came the prosperous heresy of round-hand bowling, which battled for existence till about 1845, when it became a recognised institution. The wandering clubs, chiefly I. Z. and the Free Foresters at first, carried good examples into the remoter gardens of our country. The migratory professional teams, the United and All England Elevens at least, showed the yokels what style meant, and taught them that Jackson and Tinley were their masters. But the lesson lasted too long. Nothing was less exhilarating than the spectacle of twenty provincial players, with Hodgson and Slinn, making many duck’s eggs, and fielding in a mob. ‘The first ‘ad me on the knee, the next on the wrist, the next blacked my eye, and the fourth bowled me,’ says the Pride of the Village, in ‘Punch,’ after enjoying ‘a hover from Jackson.’ Such violent delights had violent ends. The old travelling elevens are extinct, but railways have ‘turned large England to a little’ field, so to speak, and clubs may now meet which of old scarcely knew each other by name. The Australian elevens have in recent days given a great impulse to patriotic exertions.
Scotch cricket is a thing of this century. Football and golf are the native pastimes of my countrymen, as hurling is of Ireland. The Old Grange Club is the M.C.C. of the North. The West of Scotland and Drumpellier are other clubs of standing. That ever-flourishing veteran, Major Dickens, still upholds the honour of Kelso. The Moncrieffs have been the Wards and Budds of Edinburgh, nor will a touching patriotism allow me here to omit the name of George Charles Hamilton Dunlop. For some reasons Scotland has not been productive of bowlers. Professionals are seldom reared there, nor have amateurs devoted themselves to the more scientific and less popular part of the game. Mr. Barclay has already been commemorated for his speed; a few only will remember Mr. Sinclair and Mr. Glassford, who died young, and very much regretted. Few men have done more for Scotch cricket than Mr. H. H. Almond, head-master of Loretto School, which has contributed several players to the Oxford eleven. An old ‘pewter’ may here congratulate Mr. Almond on the energy with which he kept his boys to the mark, and on the undaunted example which he set by always going in first. The names of Arthur Cheyne, Jack Mackenzie, Edward Henderson, Chalmers, Hay Brown, Leslie Balfour, and Tom Marshall are only a few that crowd on the memory of the elderly Caledonian cricketer. In the Border district, of which more hereafter, the houses of Buccleuch and Roxburgh have been great friends of the game, and that was a proud day for ‘the Rough Clan’ when Lord George Scott scored over 160 in the University match of 1887. Abbotsford, too, has been well to the front, thanks to the Hon. J. Maxwell Scott, and, for some reason, Scotland has been occasionally represented by Mr. A. G. Steel, and the Hon. Ivo Bligh, known to the local press as ‘the Titled Batsman.’ But these are alien glories et non sua poma.