The fact of the matter is, we know little but gossip of how the cricket world went before the year 1786, when Bentley takes up the running and records the scores. A sad fire occurred in the M.C.C. Pavilion—at that time the Club played where the Regent’s canal now runs, after being built out of Dorset Square—and burnt all the old score books—irreparable loss.
Mr. Pycroft made an excursion into the home of the Beldhams, and brought out much valuable gossip, along with the unhandsome criticism on Nyren. “In those days,” says Beldham—1780, when Mr. Beldham was a boy—“the Hambledon Club could beat all England, but our three parishes around Farnham at last beat Hambledon.”
“It is quite evident,” adds Mr. Pycroft to this, “that Farnham was the cradle of cricket.”
Something that Beldham and others may have said to Mr. Pycroft may have made this fact “quite evident” to him, but I cannot see that he has transmitted any such evidence to us. This much, however, I think we may say with confidence, that all that was best of cricketing tradition and practice in the south of England—that is to say, as far as was in touch at all with its influences—clustered in the little corner of Surrey in which the parish of Farnham is. But that is not to say that there were not other nuclei of cricket in the north and elsewhere, and I think there is evidence to lead us to think there were other centres, perhaps less energetic.
The “county” boundaries were not so rigid in those days. “You find us regularly,” says Beldham to Mr. Pycroft—“us” being Farnham and thereabouts—“on the Hampshire side in Bentley’s book,” and it is quite true.
Then, from this little nucleus, cricket in the south extended. Beldham had a poor opinion of the cricket of Kent at first. Crawte, one of the best Kent men, was “stolen away from us,” in Beldham’s words. Aylward, the hero of the 167 runs, was taken, also to Kent, by Sir Horace Mann, as his bailiff, but “the best bat made but a poor bailiff, we heard.” Sussex was a cricketing county from an early date, but Beldham had a poor opinion of its powers likewise.
The elements of the nucleus formed round Farnham were disseminated, as much as anything, by the support that certain rich and influential people gave the game. We have seen how Sir Horace Mann stole away Aylward. Other great supporters of the game were Earl Darnley, Earl Winchelsea, Mr. Paulet, and Mr. East—all before the centuries had turned into the eighteens.
“Kent and England,” says Mr. Pycroft, “was as good an annual match in the last as in the present century.” But in those days, as even his own later words show us, “Kent,” so called, sometimes had three of the best All England men given in, even in a match against “England.” They were not so particular then—what they wanted was a jolly good game, with a good stake on it.
“The White Conduit Fields and the Artillery Ground,” Pycroft goes on, “supplied the place of Lord’s, though in 1817 the name of Lord’s is found in Bentley’s matches, implying, of course, the old Marylebone Square, now Dorset Square, under Thomas Lord, and not the present, by St. John’s Wood, more properly deserving the name of Dark’s than Lord’s. The Kentish battlefields were Sevenoaks—the land of Clout, one of the original makers of cricket balls—Coxheath, Dandelion Fields, in the Isle of Thanet, and Cobham Park, also Dartford Brent and Pennenden Heath; there is also early mention of Gravesend, Rochester, and Woolwich. The Holt, near Farnham, and Moulsey Hurst, were the Surrey grounds.