#1815

5 incidents tagged

Cox's Lewes Bat Workshop Becomes Sussex's Equipment Centre — 1815

n/a

1815-09-01

By 1815 the Lewes bat-maker Cox — running his workshop from the High Street — had established himself as the principal Sussex supplier of cricket bats and balls. With William Small's Petersfield workshop continuing to dominate Hampshire and the home counties, Cox's emergence at Lewes confirmed the geographic spread of cricket equipment manufacture and the distinct Sussex style of bat — slightly straighter and lighter than the Petersfield model.

#regency-cricket#underarm#cricket-bat

⭐Mild

Introduction of the Shouldered Cricket Bat — Petersfield Workshop, 1815

n/a

1815-04-01

Around 1815 the Petersfield bat-maker William Small — son of the Hambledon professional John Small Senior — began producing cricket bats with a recognisable 'shoulder', tapering from a thicker blade up to a narrower handle. The design replaced the curved, club-like underarm bat that had been standard since the eighteenth century and is the immediate ancestor of the modern cricket bat shape.

#regency-cricket#underarm#cricket-bat

⭐Mild

Cricket in the British Camp at Brussels — Before Waterloo, May 1815

Officers vs Other Ranks

1815-05-28

On 28 May 1815, three weeks before the battle of Waterloo, officers and other ranks of the British army played a cricket match in a meadow outside Brussels. The Officers won by an innings. The match was recorded in a letter home from Captain Alexander Cavalié Mercer of the Royal Horse Artillery — whose Journal of the Waterloo Campaign is one of the great military memoirs of the period. The fixture is the most famous documented military cricket match of the Napoleonic era.

#regency-cricket#underarm#waterloo

⭐Moderate

Cricket After Waterloo — The Recovery of the Senior Game, 1815

Various

1815-08-01

Six weeks after the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815 ended twenty-two years of Napoleonic war, English cricket began to revive. Six senior matches were played in the rest of the summer of 1815, more than in any of the previous four years combined. Two centuries were scored at the new Lord's. Soldiers returning from the Peninsula and Belgium rejoined the professional ranks. By the end of the season the sport had pulled back from the brink at which it had stood in 1813.

#napoleonic-wars#waterloo#1815

⭐Mild

First Centuries at the New Lord's — Ladbroke 116 and Woodbridge 107, 24-25 August 1815

Middlesex vs Epsom

1815-08-25

On 24-25 August 1815, in a Middlesex v Epsom match at the new Lord's, the Surrey amateurs Felix Ladbroke and Frederick Woodbridge scored 116 and 107 respectively — the first centuries made on the third Lord's ground at St John's Wood. The match was an unremarkable end-of-season fixture, but the dual hundreds, on a pitch barely sixteen months old, showed that the new ground could yield big scores in a way that the old grounds had never reliably done.

#lord-s#felix-ladbroke#frederick-woodbridge