The 'Old Buffers' — Hambledon Nostalgia in the 1830s

Hambledon's heyday had been the 1770s and 1780s, when the village club regularly took on All-England sides on Broadhalfpenny Down and won. The club broke up in the 1790s as cricket's centre of gravity moved to Marylebone in London. By the 1830s the surviving Hambledon men were elderly.

The Hambledon Cricket Club, the most famous of the eighteenth-century English cricket clubs, had effectively dissolved in the 1790s. By the 1830s its great players were old men. William Beldham — known as 'Silver Billy' for his white hair and his stylish batting — was in his seventies and farming at Tilford in Surrey. John Nyren, son of Hambledon's captain Richard Nyren, was in London and dictating his memoirs. Tom Walker, Tom Sueter, John Small the elder were dead; David Harris had died in 1803. The surviving veterans were treated as living monuments. Cowden Clarke's transcription of Nyren's memories — published as *The Cricketers of My Time* in 1833 within *The Young Cricketer's Tutor* — was the major literary product of this nostalgia. James Pycroft, who would later write *The Cricket Field* (1851), interviewed Beldham at Tilford in the late 1830s and recorded his memories of Harris's bowling, of the Bat and Ball Inn, of the great matches on Broadhalfpenny Down. The 'old buffers' — affectionate Victorian slang for the surviving veterans — became a fixture of cricketing journalism, their memories endlessly repeated in match reports and almanacs.

“I never expect to see such cricket as they played at Hambledon.”

Beldham died in 1862 at the age of 96, the last living link to the Hambledon era. Pycroft's *Cricket Field* (1851) and Nyren's earlier *Cricketers of My Time* preserved the memories. The Bat and Ball Inn at Hambledon survives today as a pilgrimage site for cricketing historians.