Cricket in Trinidad — Queen's Park and the West Indian Game Takes Root, 1840s

The British Caribbean colonies shared a common cricket culture in the nineteenth century. Each island developed its own club structure independently; Trinidad's Queen's Park Club eventually became the island's dominant cricket institution.

Trinidad had been a British colony since 1797 and cricket had arrived with the garrison. By the 1840s organised club cricket was being played at the Queen's Park Savannah, the great open space in Port of Spain that would eventually house a Test match ground. The plantation system created a social hierarchy in which cricket was initially the exclusive preserve of white landowners and British officials; the Trinidad Cricket Club, founded in the 1840s, admitted only whites. But the Savannah, as a public space, could not be entirely enclosed, and men of colour watched and then, gradually, began to play. The parallels with South Africa's racial cricket divisions a century later were present in embryo. Trinidad's geography — a flat island with several towns and a concentration of population around Port of Spain — meant that cricket spread faster than in some other islands.