Old Hambledon Hands Gather at the Bat & Ball Inn — Broadhalfpenny Down, August 1808

By 1808 the Hambledon Club was a memory. Its leading patrons were dead or scattered; its great matches were a quarter-century gone.

The Hambledon Club had effectively ceased to function around 1796 but its surviving members remained in regional cricket and in personal contact. The August 1808 gathering — proposed by Sueter and held over a single afternoon — brought together perhaps a dozen veterans. They drank, recalled matches and played a short single-wicket game on the old Broadhalfpenny strip. John Nyren, then twenty-four and the son of Hambledon's old captain, was present and took notes. Those notes — kept for twenty-five years — became the foundation of his The Young Cricketer's Tutor (1833), the most important Regency-era cricket memoir.

“We sat in the parlour at the Bat and Ball, and the names came back like the names of dead kings.”

Several of those present — including Walker — would die within a few years. Nyren's memoir, when published in 1833, became the canonical account of Hambledon.