Old John Small Dies — The Last of the Hambledon Men, 1826

The Hambledon Club, on Broadhalfpenny Down in Hampshire, had been the leading cricket organisation of the 1770s and 1780s. The transfer of cricket's centre of gravity to London with the founding of MCC in 1787 had begun its decline. By 1810 Hambledon was a shadow; by 1820 a memory.

Small had been retired for nearly thirty years by the time of his death. He continued to make bats and balls in Petersfield, where his sons carried on the family trade. Cricketers visiting Hampshire would call on him as a living monument to the old game.

John Small was born at Empshott in Hampshire in 1737 and was the leading batsman of the Hambledon Club's great years between roughly 1760 and 1790. He was famed for his correct, upright batting technique and is traditionally credited with introducing the straight bat at a time when most batsmen used a curved hockey-stick implement. He played his last important match in 1798 at the age of 61. Small was also a craftsman: he made cricket bats and balls in Petersfield and his shop sign — 'Pray, sir, take a view, all sorts of bats and balls I make' — became one of the famous epigrams of early cricket. By 1826, when he died, the Hambledon Club itself had effectively ceased to function as a senior side, though it lingered until 1836. Small's death symbolised the closing of the era. The Hambledon men — Small himself, Richard Nyren, William Beldham, David Harris, John Small junior, Tom Walker — had defined cricket for two generations; with the patriarch gone, only memory and John Nyren's forthcoming book (The Young Cricketer's Tutor, 1833) could preserve them. The 1820s saw the steady extinction of the old generation: William Beldham would survive until 1862, but the rest were almost all gone by 1830.

John Nyren, son of Richard Nyren the Hambledon innkeeper, would publish The Young Cricketer's Tutor in 1833 — the book that effectively created the legend of Hambledon for posterity. Small's death and Nyren's book together mark the moment at which the Hambledon era passed from living memory into history.