One of the troublous parts of cricket legislation has been the question of the residential qualification of cricketers for their counties, and the manner of defining what bona fide residence is. It has been always recognised, I believe, that a man may play for the county in which he was born, or for the county in which he resides, though for “or” might have been written “and” as recently as 1873. Up to that date a man might, and many men did, play for two counties in one and the same season, under the two qualifications, while it was an understood thing that when those two counties met he represented the county of his birth. There were, however, obvious objections to this dual license, though they only first took shape in the form of proposed regulation in 1868. Five years later it was made law that a man who was doubly qualified must elect at the beginning of each season to play for one of these counties, and for no other. It was undoubtedly an abuse that such a state of things should exist, but it must have been a convenient source of revenue to a few professionals in the days when fees were low and matches few. But the accurate definition of bona fide residence is still a difficulty: in some cases a man has taken a room, or a room has been taken for him, in the county for which he is desired to qualify, and he has, as occasion suited, occupied it for a night or two, while similar evasions or elastic interpretations of the law have existed; but the present solution of the question is probably the best one, i.e. to fall back on the patient and ever-willing committee of the M.C.C., which consents to adjudicate on all such questions as they arise. It should be added that proposals have been made several times, notably by Lord Harris in 1880, that the residential period should be reduced to one year; but though this reduction would have acted well in certain cases, especially in those of Colonial and army players who took up their residence in England, it has been held that objections outweigh the advantages, and the tale of years has not been reduced.
Some men consider that only the qualification of birth should be considered, so that only natives of a county should represent it; but, after all, this qualification is a mere accident as far as the individual himself is concerned; it would act hardly on a man born in a poor county—poor, that is, as a cricket-playing county; it would condemn many a first-class player to take little or no part in first-class cricket, which is the same thing as county cricket, and we might even have the anomaly of a county desiring, owing to its plethora of great players, to put two teams into the competition. As long as one county does not attempt to lure away men from its neighbours, as long as every club keeps its eyes wide open in its quest for its own young blood, and as long as every man feels that it is a primary duty to keep his allegiance to his native county, so long will the present rule be thoroughly satisfactory, and the “sporting spirit” must be trusted to see that the unwritten laws are not transgressed. At the same time, a hard case may readily be stated, the case of the man of true and tried merit, who has only the prospect of a small income and a small benefit as the reward his birth-county can give him, while by naturalising himself with its neighbour he may look for a large pecuniary reward. As a general rule, however, the present system works well: useful men are sometimes overlooked, and allowed, so to speak, to take foreign service as soldiers of fortune, but as the process is largely reciprocal, it reacts, to some extent, on all counties alike. To Yorkshire, and I believe to Yorkshire alone, belongs the credit of having been represented for many years by Yorkshiremen alone; but then Yorkshire is a very big land.
A CURIOUS COUNTY CLUB ADVERTISEMENT.
As soon as cricket became a part and parcel of English sporting life, the contesting sides naturally ranged themselves, in some cases at least, under the political subdivisions of England, viz. the counties, and consequently we find county cricket existing in a form as far back as 1730, when “a great match was played on Richmond Green, between Surrey and Middlesex, which was won by the former” (I quote from T. Waghorn’s Cricket Scores). It is interesting, by the way, to note that two of the keenest rivals of to-day met in friendly combat some 130 years before Middlesex could boast of a county club, while the Surrey Club did not really come into existence till 1845. It may be added that Middlesex had its revenge three years later, i.e. in 1733, and that the then Prince of Wales, a great patron of cricket, was so pleased with the skill and zeal of the players, that he presented them with a guinea apiece. Organisation, classification, championships, and all the paraphernalia of modern county cricket did not exist, of course, in the times when locomotion was difficult and matches consequently few, except among near neighbours; but it may not, on the whole, have been bad for cricket that at the outset many matches were made for money, and that all contests of importance were vehicles for universal and heavy betting. It may seem heterodox to approve of wagers and stakes, when nowadays it is the pride of those interested in cricket that it rises above such things, but it must not be forgotten that customs change with the times; that betting was universal in the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth among all men who wished to be considered “smart”; and also that, but for the support and encouragement given to the game by “sportsmen” and “Corinthians,” it would never have flourished in the fashion in which it flourishes to-day: indeed, there was nothing more absurd in Kent playing Hampshire for 500 guineas, than that the representatives of the two counties should fight a main of cocks for the same sum. We naturally find certain abuses which are due to the betting system, but on the whole, it kept the game alive, and soon quickened it into a more vigorous existence. Money had to be found somehow; gate-money was out of the question in the days when most matches, even the very greatest, were played on village greens or open commons; hence the natural sequence that in the men who found the stakes and laid the wagers cricket found its best and keenest patrons. To the love of betting we may probably attribute the formation of various matches in which curious combinations of numbers were made, or when certain men were played as “given” men, so that the strength of the contending parties might be equalised. Who, however, would care to go nowadays to see twenty-two of Surrey play twenty-two of Middlesex, a game that took place in 1802, and again in 1803? In 1797 we find that England played against thirty-three of Norfolk, and won in a single innings by 14 runs. Again, in 1800, twelve of England play nineteen of Kent, and we find about this period such matches as “Middlesex, with two of Berkshire and one of Kent v. Essex, with two ‘given’ men”; but a special interest attaches to this match, as being the first ever played on Lord’s ground, the old “Lord’s” of Dorset Square, in 1787. Perhaps it is not unfair to conjecture that the original match was to be between the two counties, but that the sides had to be patched up owing to defections. It seems hardly probable that monetary or other reasons would prompt such curious combinations of men and counties. Proper qualification can hardly have been insisted upon; indeed, we find that the famous Hambledon Club, practically Hampshire county, was largely composed of Surrey men who received enthusiastic invitations to visit the famous Broad Halfpenny Down. Harking back to some stray scraps of historical interest, we read that in 1739 Kent, “the unconquerable county,” played England in the presence of 1000 spectators, but the match ended in a fiasco, owing to disputes; indeed, such terminations were not very uncommon when party feeling ran high and betting was rampant. In 1746 Kent again plays England, and wins by a short neck, i.e. by one wicket, while Sussex and Surrey seem great rivals; Surrey, indeed, beats England three years later, and in 1750 loses to Kent by 3 runs, but wins the return by nine wickets. From the names quoted, it is evident that cricket flourished in the south rather than in the north; but cricket was not unknown in the big manufacturing shires, for we find that Manchester and Liverpool were then, as now, desperate rivals, as were Sheffield and Nottingham. Sheffield, indeed, was so strong that it could play, and used to play, the rest of Yorkshire single-handed. In a note to a match played between Hants and England in 1772, we find that “Lumpy,” for England, bowled out Small, “which thing had not happened for some years”! Perhaps “Lumpy” had secured one of those wickets on which he could bowl—
For honest Lumpy did allow
He ne’er could bowl but o’er a brow.
Hence if the wicket had a “brow,” and Lumpy pitched one of his “shooters” on it, Small’s downfall is not remarkable. However, though Hambledon was the best club and Hants the best county, England was too strong to be tackled single-handed. Surrey first met Kent in 1772, and beat the county of cherries and hops, having previously done the same for Hants, though in the latter case the nuisance of “given men” crops up on both sides; yet such games were clearly popular, strength being thereby equalised, for we find numerous matches between Hambledon and England in which the former club was supported by the presence of outsiders. However, the Hambledon Club, “the cradle of cricket,” with its “ale that would flare like turpentine”—what a use to put good “October” to!—“a viand (for it was more than liquor)” that was “vended at 2d. per pint,” collapsed towards the end of the century, and it was many a long year before Hants became great again. Alas, too, for Hambledon cricketers! They were not content to play cricket for love or for glory, but for stakes, the stakes being pints, doubtless of the famous “viand”!