More Than A Game: The Story of Cricket's Early Years - John Major

Скачать книгу

a passion he couldn’t assuage, and at leisure in Margate he once again turned to arranging matches as well as watching them. He helped promote clubs, and was a prominent member of the newly formed Marylebone Cricket Club (see page 106), and when Kent played the MCC at Lord’s in August 1791 the Kentish Chronicle noted that Sir Horace was a spectator and ‘remained the whole day at the ground with his book and pencil’ – presumably either scoring or, just possibly, noting wagers. On 20–22 July 1807, at a game between twenty-three of Kent and thirteen of England at Penenden Heath, near Maidstone, it was recorded: ‘that old amateur of the bat, Sir Horace Mann, was present every day and dined at the ordinary, which was sumptuously furnished and well attended’ (for more on this match, see pages 128–9).

      His cricketing afterlife was not easy: his open generosity exceeded the means with which he could subsidise it. As early as 1767 his uncle was worrying, and with good cause, that he would dissipate his fortune. By the 1780s he was wagering huge sums on matches, borrowing from relatives and raising money against the security of the Linton estate. By 1800 he was heavily in debt to local traders and farmers. As an old man, in 1808, he was declared bankrupt.

      His enthusiasm for the game never dimmed, and John Nyren, writing several decades later, recalled Sir Horace at a match at Hambledon, ‘walking about, outside the ground, cutting down the daisies with his stick – a habit with him when he was agitated’. It is a lovely image, and one with which we might leave the life of the greatest, and most amiable, of the early benefactors. Horace Mann’s kind and generous spirit had done much to promote the early growth of the game. His contribution was immense.

      Sir Horace was not the only patron presiding over the growth of late-eighteenth-century cricket: both the Earl of Tankerville (1743– 1822) and the Duke of Dorset (1745–99) – the third in the great line of cricketing Sackvilles – helped build its popularity.

      Tankerville, an old Etonian introduced to cricket at school, inherited his earldom at the age of twenty-four. He was, according to Nyren, ‘a close and handsome man, about 5' 8'' in height’, with a lively temper that was not always kept in check. After a fracas with a coachman in 1774 he was rebuked in the St James’s Chronicle as ‘renowned for nothing but cricket playing, bruising and keeping of low company’ – a harsh judgement for a man who was at the time Chairman of the East India Company’s Court of Directors. Three years earlier he had married Emma, daughter of Sir James Colebrooke, and settled at Mount Felix, ‘a large plain edifice of no architectural pretensions whatever’ in Walton-on-Thames. Tankerville was a keen sportsman, and maintained a cricket ground at Byfleet that was suitable for practice but inadequate for formal games: these he staged at Laleham Burway or Moulsey Hurst, both of which were within easy reach of Mount Felix. Although never a great player, he was an important sponsor of cricket, most notably of Surrey.

      As a patron, Tankerville employed two of the finest contemporary cricketers to boost his team. Edward ‘Lumpy’ Stevens (1731–1819), son of an innkeeper, was discovered by a cricket-loving brewer, a Mr Porter, and as his skill blossomed he became Tankerville’s gardener at Mount Felix in the early 1770s. Lumpy, as described by Arthur Haygarth, was a ‘thick made round shouldered man’, widely regarded as the premier bowler in England, who according to John Nyren had a capability to ‘bowl the greatest number of length balls in succession … of all men within my recollection’. Tankerville once won a bet of £100 (about £10,000 at today’s prices) that Lumpy could hit a feather placed on the pitch at least once in four balls. Such accuracy made him a legend, and he was deadly on unprepared wickets to any batsman with poor technique. Lumpy remained a top-class bowler well into his fifties, and did not retire until 1789. When he died thirty years later, his old patron Tankerville, in a gesture that speaks well of him, erected a gravestone for Lumpy in Walton-on-Thames churchyard; the two had shared many cricketing exploits, and Tankerville had not forgotten his protégé. Nor had others: the Duke of Dorset commissioned a portrait that can still be seen at Knole. Lumpy was an early cricketing legend.

      Another of Tankerville’s cricketing employees, William Bedster, was a batsman who served as his butler for around five years from 1777. He first appears, misreported as ‘Belsted’, at a game between England and Hampshire at the Artillery Ground. Tankerville had received a severe blow below his knee and was forced, in ‘excruciating pain’ to quit the field. Bedster fielded in his stead and – the laws being elastic at the time – was then permitted to open the batting with Tankerville, who had clearly recovered. They put on 49 between them, a large opening stand for the time. After leaving Tankerville, Bedster played for Berkshire and Middlesex before becoming landlord of a public house in Chelsea.

      As Tankerville was a leading member of the aristocracy, his sporting preoccupation was not universally well regarded at a time when England was at war with the American colonists. An anonymous tract published by John Bew lampoons Tankerville and Dorset. The author was scathing about the two men he calls ‘The Noble Cricketers’, and introduces the insulting poem with the sarcastic observation that it is ‘a testimonial of my regard’. In his preamble he urges the two peers to ‘For God’s sake, fling away your bats, kick your mob companions out of your house and, though you can do your bleeding Country no service, cease to accommodate insult on [top of] misfortune, by making it ridiculous.’ After this pugnacious invective, the poem continues:

      O Muse, relate the mighty cares that fill

      The Souls of D..s.t and of T..k..v.lle,

      From glory far, at Folly’s shrine they fall,

      Scum of St Giles’s, and their Lordships pride

      Where mob-encircled, midst th’ Artillery ground

      Pimps, Porters, Chimney Sweepers grinning round,

      Far from the Cannon’s roar, they try at cricket,

      Stead of their country, to secure a wicket,

      There, mad for praise, they glutton-like devour

      The nauseous flattery, which those Panders pour.

      And lo! their ragged partners of the field

      Seem as well pleas’d the Bat, as Blade, to wield,

      As well on Cakes, as Carnage to regale.

      Whether Tankerville saw these lines is uncertain, but he retired from cricket in 1781 to enter politics, where his behaviour soon aroused controversy. At first all went well: he took a junior position in Lord Shelburne’s brief administration, lost it under his successor the Duke of Portland, but returned to government when the twenty-four-year-old William Pitt the Younger became Prime Minister in December 1783. Two years later, in an attempt to expose corruption, Tankerville

      accused a colleague, Lord Carteret, of using public funds to buy his own personal household effects, but could not sustain the charge, and was dismissed from the government. When a subsequent report, ironically requested by a relative, Charles Grey, later the author of the Great Reform Act, cleared Carteret of wrongdoing, it ended Tankerville’s hopes of a successful political career. He consoled himself by amassing one of the world’s largest collections of seashells.

      After his retirement from politics Tankerville

Скачать книгу