William Caffyn's Boyhood at Reigate — Cricket Apprenticeship in the Late 1830s

Reigate in the 1830s was a small market town in Surrey on the road from London to Brighton. The village green held cricket every summer and the All-England eleven would later make Reigate a regular fixture. The Caffyn family lived close enough to the green that the young William grew up steeped in cricket from infancy.

Caffyn was born at Reigate in Surrey on 2 February 1828. His father was a barber and the family lived in the High Street, a few minutes' walk from the village cricket green. By the late 1830s, when Caffyn was around ten, he was already a fixture at the green, watching the village men play and being allowed, when an extra player was needed, to field at long-stop. His memoir *71 Not Out* — published in 1899 when he was 71 — records the cricketing culture of his Reigate boyhood: the village team's annual matches against neighbouring parishes, the visits of the All-England eleven to Reigate (which began in the 1840s), the underarm and roundarm bowlers his father's friends used, and the way the boys of the village imitated the famous men they had read about in the papers. He records seeing Pilch bat as a small boy, and being told stories of Mynn's fast bowling. *71 Not Out* is one of the great Victorian cricket memoirs and is a unique source for the texture of late-1830s village cricket — a world that survives in print only because Caffyn was a boy who would grow up to play first-class cricket and to write about it.

“I was born at Reigate in 1828 and my earliest memories are of cricket on the green.”

“Pilch came to Reigate to play and I, a boy of ten, watched him bat — I never forgot the way he stood at the wicket.”

Caffyn went on to play for Surrey through the 1850s and 1860s, to tour Australia twice (1861-62 with Stephenson, 1863-64 with Parr), and finally to emigrate permanently to Sydney in 1864 to coach the Albert Club. He is generally regarded as the most influential single coach in early Australian cricket and one of the founding figures of the colonial game.