#amateur cricket

6 incidents tagged

Charles Kortright — The Fastest Bowler of the Era and the Man Who Wouldn't Walk for W.G. Grace, 1890s

Essex, Gloucestershire

1898-07-01

Charles Jesse Kortright of Essex was generally considered the fastest bowler of the Victorian era — quicker, contemporaries said, than Tom Richardson or Arthur Mold. He never played a Test, but his 1898 confrontation with W.G. Grace at Leyton produced one of cricket's most-quoted exchanges: when Grace declined to walk despite being plumb out, Kortright eventually uprooted two stumps and remarked, 'Surely you're not going, Doc? There's still one stump standing.'

#charles-kortright#fast-bowling#essex

⭐Moderate

C.B. Fry Arrives — Oxford Captain, Long-Jump Record-Holder, Sussex Debutant, 1894

Oxford University, Sussex

1894-05-21

Charles Burgess Fry was 22 in 1894, an Oxford undergraduate who had broken the British long-jump record (23 feet 5 inches in 1892) and equalled the world record (23 feet 6½ inches on 4 March 1893). He was elected Oxford cricket captain for 1894 and made his first-class Sussex debut the same summer, beginning a partnership with Ranjitsinhji that would dominate English batting for fifteen years and produce a man often cited as the greatest all-round Englishman of his era.

#cb-fry#1894#oxford

⭐Mild

I Zingari Founded — The First Wandering Amateur Club, July 1845

n/a

1845-07-04

On 4 July 1845, four young Cambridge graduates dined at the Blenheim Hotel in Bond Street and founded I Zingari — Italian for 'the gypsies' — as a wandering amateur cricket club without a home ground. The first such club in cricket, I Zingari pioneered the country-house touring tradition that became the dominant form of amateur cricket for the next century.

#i-zingari#1845#wandering-club

⭐Mild

The Oxford v Cambridge University Match — Cricket's Oldest Fixture Takes Shape, 1840s

Oxford University vs Cambridge University

1843-06-15

The annual cricket match between Oxford and Cambridge universities, first played in 1827, became a fixed feature of the Lord's calendar through the 1840s and was rapidly elevated into one of cricket's premier social occasions. For the amateur upper classes who governed cricket through the MCC, the University Match was the annual proof that the game belonged to education and breeding — a counterweight to the professional All-England Eleven's dominance of the popular market.

#roundarm-era#early-victorian#1840s

⭐Mild

Varsity and Eton-Harrow — The Schoolboy and University Cricket of the 1840s

Eton vs Harrow / Oxford vs Cambridge

1843-07-08

Through the 1840s the Eton-Harrow public school match and the Oxford-Cambridge varsity match were the two fixed amateur fixtures at Lord's each summer. They were the social events of the London season as much as cricket matches, drawing crowds of well-dressed spectators in carriages around the boundary; their amateur ethos was the moral counterweight to the professional cricket of the AEE.

#eton-vs-harrow#oxford-vs-cambridge#varsity-match

⭐Moderate

Lord Frederick Beauclerk's Decade — The Cleric Who Ran Cricket, 1810s

MCC and various private elevens

1815-07-01

By the time of the Battle of Waterloo, Lord Frederick Beauclerk — illegitimate descendant of Charles II, vicar of St Michael's, and tactical ruler of the MCC committee — was the leading amateur cricketer in England and the richest gambler in the game. Through the 1810s, with senior cricket reduced by the Napoleonic War to a handful of fixtures a year, Beauclerk's private elevens carried the sport. He earned an estimated 600 guineas a year in betting, banned his enemies from Lord's, and bowled a slow underarm so accurate that one contemporary called it 'the most dangerous in England'.

#lord-frederick-beauclerk#mcc#amateur-cricket