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#broadhalfpenny down

5 incidents tagged

⭐Mild

John Nyren's Nostalgic Hambledon Writings — *The Cricketers of My Time*, 1833

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1833-04-15

The second half of John Nyren's 1833 *Young Cricketer's Tutor* — bound in as the appendix *The Cricketers of My Time* — was the first sustained piece of cricket prose ever written. Across some sixty pages Nyren remembered the great Hambledon men of the 1770s and 1780s with affection and precision, and in doing so created the literary mode — nostalgic, particular, character-driven — that has shaped cricket writing ever since.

#john-nyren#the-cricketers-of-my-time#hambledon
⭐Mild

Hambledon's Final Village Match — Broadhalfpenny Down, August 1811

Hambledon vs Petersfield

1811-08-24

On 24 August 1811 Hambledon village played Petersfield on Broadhalfpenny Down — the last village fixture played there before the ground was given over almost wholly to grazing. The match marked the close of continuous cricket on the most famous strip in the eighteenth-century game. Cricket would not be regularly played at Broadhalfpenny again until the late nineteenth-century revival.

#regency-cricket#underarm#hambledon
⭐Mild

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

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1808-08-15

In August 1808 a small group of surviving Hambledon Club veterans gathered at the Bat & Ball Inn at Broadhalfpenny Down — the inn that had served as the club's headquarters in its great years — for an informal reunion. Beldham, Walker, Aburrow, Sueter and a handful of fielders met for the day; a young John Nyren attended and made the notes that would become the basis of his 1833 memoir.

#regency-cricket#underarm#hambledon
⭐Mild

The Hambledon Club Reforms — Village Cricket Restored, 1800

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1800-08-01

Four years after its last grand-club meeting, at which 'no Gentlemen were present', the Hambledon Club reformed in 1800 as a village cricket club. Stripped of the naval officers and London patrons who had made it a national power in the 1770s and 1780s, the rebuilt club played local matches around Broadhalfpenny Down and Windmill Down through the early 1800s. It was the quiet, modest survival of cricket's first great institution after its glory had passed.

#hambledon-club#1800#broadhalfpenny-down
⭐Mild

John Nyren's Boyhood at the Bat and Ball — Future Hambledon Memoirist, 1800s

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1800-06-01

While the Hambledon Club drifted into village obscurity through the 1800s, the boyhood of John Nyren — son of the old captain Richard Nyren, raised at the Bat and Ball Inn opposite Broadhalfpenny Down, taught the game by his uncle Richard Newland of Slindon — was already laying the foundation for the most influential cricket memoir ever written. Three decades later that boyhood would reach print as The Young Cricketer's Tutor (1833).

#john-nyren#hambledon#broadhalfpenny-down