Cricket History at Wadhurst
Highlights of the first two centuries 1758 – 1958
Wadhurst Cricket Club is uniquely fortunate in having enough surviving written records to allow club members to plot its fortunes with reasonable accuracy over a period of nearly two and half centuries since the game is first mentioned here.
That first mention occurs in the diary of Walter Gale, schoolteacher and itinerant inebriate from Mayfield. The date is 2nd August 1758 and the diary reads:
“The Wadhurst gentlemen came to play at cricket with those of Mayfield,
when the former beat the
latter by 106.”
In ‘The Story of Wadhurst’ p.116 (A.A.Wace 1923) the date is given as 2nd August 1751, but this an error; there is a 1751 game in the Diary only it is between ‘the gamesters at Burwash and Mayfield.’ The diary is quite complex to read and has pages missing for many years, but the above quoted entry for 1758 is correct for Wadhurst.
Through the late 1700s and into the early Victorian era a variety of press notices about Wadhurst matches have the score given in notches, not runs. This describes the first method of match scoring whereby the scorer cut a notch in a stick for each run, every tenth notch being cut deeper as a counting aid. When the other side batted the first side’s notches were herringboned with the opponents score, when both were equal the scorers stood up thus notifying the match status to the spectators.
Other interesting entries include one dismissal as ‘Shambled out’. No modern cricket authority, even Lord’s, can offer a translation of this. In these days of curved bats and two stumps, the matches were played at Church Field, which is identified as running back behind the church.
The Wadhurst Georgian cricketers acquired a notable reputation and were invited to play against prestigious opposition. In 1790, playing in an invitation team against the Prince Regent’s XI at Brighton, the Wadhurst apprentice tailor Silas Cooper, took 8 match wickets, beating Prinny’s team by 3 wickets. As his ability progressed so did his reputation and in 1805 he was at Lord’s (when it was at Dorset Square) playing in an invitation team against ‘The Twelve Best Players in England’. Cooper took eight wickets in the first innings and secured his place in cricket history at the highest level, then he modestly returned to Wadhurst and, with his brother John, ‘our famed bowlers’ steadily continued routing local opposition.
The Victorian era is dominated by Wadhurst stalwart Jacob Pitt. He was mine host at the Greyhound from about 1855 to his death in 1898. His earliest mention was in 1838 when he ‘scored 72 from his own bat and not out, his batting was excellent!’
Almost every press comment about him suggests he ‘should be tried in County matches’ but he never played at that level. But he was a leading player in a Wadhurst team that did when they beat the county of Sussex in the 1860s; subsequently at most club dinners Mr.Pitt sang a song he composed glorifying that victory. (The club has yet to trace that epic composition.) The Greyhound during his ownership was a mecca for cricketers, such as Alfred Mynn ‘the Lion of Kent’; Edgar Willsher the controversial bowler whose action changed the laws, he was Pitt’s brother-in-law; and Walter and William Quaife, Jacob’s nephews from his sister Frances in Newhaven. Both the brothers transferred their allegiance to Warwickshire after a dispute with Sussex;
Walter became the first Sussex batsman to record over 1000 runs in a season (1887), William while at Warwickshire went on to represent England (1899, 1901, 1902) also being named Cricketer of the Year 1902.
Jacob Pitt died on 10 February 1898 and his funeral attracted extensive press comment, and most of Wadhurst to his funeral; his gravestone still stands near the west door of the church. (And the private path he created to the then new cricket field of today still runs beside the Greyhound.)
The Wadhurst cricketers were formalised into a club in the early 1870s, an exact date has yet to be determined. Being a ‘club’ means having a written constitution, written rules and elected committee members, but some cricket clubs still like to date their ‘club’s’ foundation date as the date of their earliest press mention.
The only authority for Wadhurst becoming a registered club is again The Story of Wadhurst’ (p.116) where the author states that the club was founded when the local Wadhurst men Arthur Wace and William Watson Smyth were at Cambridge together.
This provides a date bracket of 1871 to 1873. At about the same time the newly formed club took the decision to move its pitch out of Church Field and down to the field where it is today. To start with the wicket was aligned down the slope. The field was ‘lent by Mr.Cheesman’.
In its new location the club played and prospered up to the First World War some leading players/personalities being Frank Austen the auctioneer, Harold Boorman father of Cecil the great 1930s to 60s player, Herbert le May the hops merchant, Mr.F.Larcombe who taught generations of Wadhurst folk and Mr.O.T.Corke general town provisioner.
After the war the club reformed to try and restore sporting normality to the Wadhurst social scene. The conflict left heartbreaking gaps in the first team sheets put up in the porch of the Queen’s Head, the new HQ for the club provided by Mr.George Tulley. Under the presidency of Mr.A.E.Parke, a newsprint merchant, and the chairmanship of Mr.E.Leete, the decision was taken in 1922 to level the field to provide a better playing surface, and to rotate the wicket around to its present alignment across the slope. The project was officially completed on Saturday 10th February 1923. The embanked area on which the pavilion currently stands shows the original field surface elevation, while under the nearby great oak a presumed smugglers pond was drained.
Just previous to this work the whole field had been incorporated together with the Memorial Hall as part of a charitable trust in memory of the war dead of Wadhurst, and on 25 June 1921 the inaugural meeting of the Trustees of the ‘Hall and Field’ took place. The club continues today as an integral part of this charity and members are reminded that they play each year on what is in fact a registered war memorial.
Another component part of the new Trust was a groundsman to care for the field and this was George Meech. In the 1920s and 30s Mr.Meech upheld the Wadhurst tradition of ‘famed bowlers’ by taking over 100 wickets in four consecutive seasons 1926,27,28,29. His son Harold, still an avid Wadhurst supporter, has the presentation ball awarded to his father for a feat still unparalleled in the club. Another great player from the inter-wars period was Charles Butler Grace, youngest son of ‘W.G.’
He had business interests locally and played for Wadhurst from about 1924 to 1935.
He provides the Wadhurst club with the unique record in club cricket of topping the bowling averages in 1932 by bowling underarm. Called lob bowling, underarm was a legally allowed form of first class bowling at that time, a fair number of first-class players were exponents. Harold Meech can, at the time of writing, still recall watching C.B.Grace bowl his underarms at Wadhurst. Interestingly, Grace relegated to second in the averages for that year Cecil Boorman, another possible Wadhurst contender for county recognition.
The year 1934 was when the first functional cricket pavilion was built, prior to then something on the lines of an enlarged kiosk had been the only amenity available, it stood where the present Bowls club pavilion now is. In fact the Bowls Club pavilion was built at the same time as the cricket one due to the philanthropy of Mr.A.E.Parke, one of the club’s most outstanding Presidents. The old cricket pavilion structure was retained to form the nucleus of the present building when it was enlarged after the Second World War.
In respect of the latter conflict the club was kept open by the arrival of the boys from Brockley School, evacuated to Wadhurst from south London during the Blitz. Their teams used the pitch regularly between 1942-44. Few of them thought they would make another trip here forty years later to commemorate the original event as in 1984 the modern school XI fought out a tightly contested match which Wadhurst just managed to win. Just a few of the original old boys came down too and some met the Wadhurst families they billeted with in the war.
The immediate post-war decades for the Wadhurst club were dominated by the exploits of Cecil Boorman and Johnny Burgess, arguably the two finest all-rounders the club has seen. Both regularly played in invitation XIs against the county, and Johnny still holds the distinction of being the only club member on record to have achieved the ‘double’. This he did in 1952 in the match v. Hastings Civil Service when his batting and bowling scored the necessary 45 runs and 4 wickets to give him the ‘double’.
By a very strange quirk of fortune the ownership of the Greyhound was taken over in 1954 by Maurice Tate of Sussex and England fame. His time there mirrored that of the great Jacob Pitt with the bar decked out with mementos from his Test and County cricket days, and frequent gatherings of cricket personalities. He died in Wadhurst a couple of years later and his grave is just a pitch-length away from Jacob’s in the churchyard.
The bi-centennial of cricket at Wadhurst was crowned in 1958 by the winning of the Landau Cup, a much sought-after knock-out trophy competed for by many local teams. Wadhurst beat their long-time antagonists Cousley Wood in the final, scoring 94 a.o. and then bowling out ‘the Wood’ for 58.
Following On
The modern era of Wadhurst club cricket
(to be added)