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1849-04-01
Frederick Lillywhite, son of the Nonpareil, brought out the first edition of his Guide to Cricketers in the spring of 1849. The annual ran for eighteen consecutive editions until 1866, contained fixture lists, club addresses, players' birthdates and laws, and was the model that John Wisden's 1864 almanack was designed to compete with.
All-England Eleven vs local sides
1849-08-01
Between 1847 and 1849 the All-England Eleven extended its fixture list from the north and midlands into the West Country, the Welsh borders and East Anglia. Visits to Manchester, Bristol, Derby, Newcastle, Norwich, Stourbridge and dozens of other towns turned cricket from a southern English diversion into a recognisably national game and triggered a wave of local club foundations.
Sussex / All-England Eleven
1849-08-01
John Wisden of Sussex — five feet four and weighing under nine stone — broke into first-class cricket in 1845 as a fast roundarm bowler and within four years was a fixture in the All-England Eleven. By 1849, aged 23, he was being talked of as the most promising young bowler in England; the publishing empire and the all-ten-bowled feat would come later.
Nottinghamshire / All-England Eleven
1848-07-01
George Parr of Nottinghamshire, who would later succeed William Clarke as captain of the All-England Eleven and lead the second English tour of Australia, emerged in the late 1840s as the most powerful leg-side hitter in English cricket. By 1849, aged 23, he was the leading batsman in the AEE and the natural heir to Clarke's professional empire.
Calcutta CC / Parsi cricketers (Bombay)
1848-12-01
Cricket in 1840s India was concentrated in two cities. In Calcutta the Calcutta Cricket Club, founded in 1792 (the second-oldest cricket club in the world after MCC), continued as a European-only institution. In Bombay the Parsi community, having watched cricket on the Esplanade for decades, took up the game seriously and founded the Oriental Cricket Club in 1848 — the first organised non-European cricket club outside Britain.
All-England Eleven vs local 18s and 22s
1847-09-01
In its first full season after foundation, William Clarke's All-England Eleven played a programme of fixtures across the north and midlands — the first systematic national cricket tour ever organised. Sides of 18 or 22 local players were engaged at Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle, Birmingham, Liverpool, Stockton and Derby; the eleven won the great majority of fixtures and drew crowds of three to five thousand at most venues.
All-England Eleven vs local 18s/22s
1847-07-01
From the foundation of the All-England Eleven in 1846 every fixture the eleven played against a local side was contested at odds — eighteen, twenty-two or occasionally even more local players against the AEE's eleven. The format kept the contests competitive for spectators and for promoters' returns; it remained the standard structure of touring cricket for the next forty years, including the first English tours of Australia in the 1860s.
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1846-08-31
In late August 1846 the Nottinghamshire lob-bowler William Clarke, then a 48-year-old professional working as the practice bowler at Lord's, gathered eleven of England's leading professional cricketers and founded the All-England Eleven. The travelling side that resulted would, over the next two decades, take first-class standard cricket to every corner of the British Isles and create the commercial template for professional touring.
Nottinghamshire / All-England Eleven
1846-08-01
Joseph Guy of Nottinghamshire — a graceful right-handed batsman whose style Lord Frederick Beauclerk likened to 'cricket of the most gentlemanly kind' — was a charter member of William Clarke's All-England Eleven in 1846 and one of the leading professional batsmen of the 1840s.
Tasmania vs Victoria
1846-12-16
On 11-12 February 1851 the first inter-colonial cricket match in Australia was played between Tasmania (then Van Diemen's Land) and Victoria at Launceston, but the cricket culture from which it grew had been put together in the 1840s — with the Melbourne Cricket Club founded in 1838, the first match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in 1853, and Sydney clubs playing each other from the early 1840s. Cricket was, by the end of the 1840s, the dominant summer game in every Australian colony.
All-England Eleven
1846-09-01
William Clarke paid his All-England Eleven professionals between £4 and £6 per match plus travelling expenses through the late 1840s — at a time when a skilled labourer earned around £1 a week. The pay was generous by the standards of the day, but Clarke kept the gate as promoter and the disparity between his earnings and his players' would, by the early 1850s, drive a series of breakaways and the eventual foundation of the United All-England Eleven.
Kent / All-England Eleven
1846-08-15
Alfred Mynn's near-amputation at Leicester in 1836 — when, having batted on with a leg blackened by repeated fast roundarm blows, he was reportedly carried back to London on the roof of a stage coach — passed into cricket folklore through the 1840s. By 1846 the story was retold at every Mynn match, and the Leicester injury had become as much a part of his identity as his bowling and single-wicket dominance.
Various
1846-09-15
Single-wicket cricket — an older form of the game in which two or three players a side competed under simplified rules, often for purses of £100 or more — flourished alongside the modern eleven-a-side game through the 1840s. Alfred Mynn was champion of England at single-wicket from 1838 to 1846 and his title-defence matches drew crowds and betting comparable with the Gentlemen v Players match.
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1845-08-22
On 22 August 1845, around a hundred Surrey cricketers met at the Horns Tavern in Kennington and resolved to constitute themselves as the Surrey County Cricket Club. The meeting confirmed the lease of a market garden at Kennington — what would become the Oval — and laid the foundations for one of the strongest first-class counties of the next two centuries.
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1845-05-01
Nicholas Wanostrocht, the schoolmaster who played first-class cricket for Kent under the pseudonym 'Felix', published Felix on the Bat in 1845 — the first systematic coaching manual on batting, illustrated with his own lithographed plates. It defined the technical vocabulary of forward and back play that English coaching would use for the next century.
Sussex / All-England Eleven
1845-07-15
Tom Box of Sussex was the leading wicketkeeper in England through the 1840s — keeping wicket without the pads, gloves or specialised gear of later eras and standing up to the fast bowling of Mynn, Redgate and the young John Wisden. He played first-class cricket for 25 years and dropped only one stumping chance in his entire career, according to the Lillywhites' near-contemporary count.
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1845-06-01
Alongside Felix on the Bat, the Lillywhite family published the Companion to the Bat in 1845 — a short instructional pamphlet on batting and bowling that ran in successive editions through the 1840s and 1850s and helped to establish the Lillywhite name as the dominant force in cricket publishing before Wisden.
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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.
Canada vs United States
1844-09-25
On 24-25 September 1844, the United States and Canada played a two-day cricket match at the St George's Cricket Club's ground at Bloomingdale Park in New York City. Canada won by 23 runs in front of an estimated 5,000 spectators and gate-takings reckoned at $120,000 in side bets — making this not only the first international cricket match but the first international sporting fixture of any kind, predating the first Test by 33 years.
Sussex / All-England
1844-07-01
By the early 1840s William Lillywhite, the Sussex bricklayer who had pushed roundarm bowling into the law book in 1828, was past 50 but still the most accurate bowler in England. Engaged at Lord's as practice bowler from 1844, he played first-class cricket until 1853 and, in his final decade, embodied the bridge between the underarm cricket of the eighteenth century and the overarm game his son John would help bring in.
Gentlemen vs Players
1844-07-01
Through the 1840s the Gentlemen v Players match at Lord's was the showcase fixture of the English summer — amateurs against professionals, the best of the country against the best of the country, with the professionals winning more often than not. Alfred Mynn straddled the two teams as the great amateur player; Fuller Pilch led the Players' batting; the fixture was the model that all later representative cricket was built on.
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.
Kent / All-England
1842-08-01
Alfred Mynn of Kent — six feet one and weighing more than twenty stone — was the dominant fast roundarm bowler of the early 1840s and the best all-round cricketer in England. His annual displays at Lord's, Town Malling and Canterbury, his peerless single-wicket record (he was champion of England 1838-46), and the carrying-off of his amputated leg in 1836 had made him the first popular cricket folk-hero of the Victorian age.
Kent
1842-04-01
Fuller Pilch's £100-a-year retainer with Kent, agreed with the proprietor Thomas Selby in the late 1830s, was the largest professional cricket contract of its day. By 1842 Pilch was the central figure in the Kent eleven; the move from Town Malling to Canterbury as the county's principal venue, completed by 1847, was built around his presence.
Kent vs England
1841-08-23
Fuller Pilch, by general agreement the leading batsman in England, scored 153 not out for Kent against an England eleven at Town Malling in August 1841. It was the highest individual score made in a major fixture for several years and confirmed Pilch as the dominant batsman of the pre-Grace generation.
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1840-06-01
Nicholas Wanostrocht ('Felix'), the Kent batsman and schoolmaster, patented in 1837 the catapulta — a mechanical contraption that propelled a cricket ball at a batsman by means of a sprung Indian-rubber arm. The first bowling machine in cricket history, it was demonstrated at Lord's, used at Felix's school for batting practice, and described in his 1845 manual.