Cricket in Barbados — The Island's Club Game in the 1850s

Cricket arrived in Barbados with the British garrison — the earliest record is from 1806 — and spread rapidly through the island's plantation economy. By the 1820s civilian clubs were established in Bridgetown and cricket was played across the island on matting wickets improvised from sugar-plantation materials. The 1850s saw an organised inter-club competition in Bridgetown with several clubs competing regularly. The game had crossed racial lines to a degree unusual for the era: free black and coloured men played cricket in Barbados in the 1850s, though not yet in the same teams as white players. This tradition of multi-racial participation, constrained by the colour bar of formal representative cricket, was the foundation on which the great Barbadian cricketers of the twentieth century — Worrell, Weekes, Walcott, Sobers — would build.