All-England Eleven v United All-England Eleven — The First Annual Fixture, Lord's, June 1857

The AEE-UAEE split of 1852 had divided the leading professionals of the country. Clarke's refusal to permit a fixture had cost both sides money and limited the appetite for top-level cricket. His death in August 1856 made reconciliation possible at once.

Parr was the natural intermediary: a Nottinghamshire batsman trusted by both factions, he had stayed loyal to Clarke but was on cordial terms with the rebels. Wisden, ten years his senior, agreed to the fixture without preconditions.

William Clarke had refused throughout his life to allow the AEE to play the rival UAEE that Wisden and Dean had founded in 1852. With Clarke's death on 25 August 1856 the obstacle was gone, and George Parr, his Nottinghamshire successor as AEE captain, immediately agreed to a fixture for the following summer. The MCC offered Lord's; the date was set for 1 June 1857. The AEE side included George Parr (captain), Alfred Diver, H.H. Stephenson, Julius Caesar, Cris Tinley, George Anderson, Ned Willsher and John Jackson. The UAEE was led by Wisden and included Jemmy Dean, Jem Grundy, William Caffyn, John Lillywhite, Tom Lockyer, Will Mortlock and Will Martingell. The match was a low-scoring affair on a typically rough Lord's strip; AEE won by five wickets. A second meeting later in the summer, also at Lord's, was likewise won by AEE. The crowds were heavy on each day, exceeding the gates of any other professional fixture in the country, and the financial success of the meeting ensured that the match would be played annually thereafter. Between 1857 and 1869 the two sides met nineteen times, almost always at Lord's; AEE won the bulk of the early fixtures.

“From 1857 to 1866 the matches between the AEE and the UAEE were perhaps the most important contests of the English season — certainly judged by the quality of the players.”

The fixture became a fixture in every sense. The leading professionals from across the country played in front of the largest crowds of the English season at Lord's each June, and the gate receipts subsidised both organisations through the 1860s. The match also helped to revive Lord's, which had been losing primacy to the Oval through the early 1850s.