Cricket After Waterloo — The Recovery of the Senior Game, 1815

Cricket at the start of 1815 was at its lowest ebb in a century. The Middle Ground had been abandoned, the new Lord's was untested, the professional ranks were depleted, and gentleman patrons had spent four years preoccupied with politics and the war. Only Beauclerk, William Ward and a handful of MCC committeemen had kept any senior cricket going at all.

Through the spring of 1815 — even before Waterloo — Beauclerk and Aislabie had been arranging private matches at the new Lord's. Wellington's victory in June removed the last obstacle. By the second week of July the touring fixture list was already lengthening.

The Napoleonic War had reduced senior cricket to three private matches between 1811 and 1813. The 1814 season — the first at the new Lord's — had seen perhaps four or five senior fixtures, but the war was still on. The decisive change came with Waterloo. The British Army's return from the continent through the late summer and autumn of 1815 freed both manpower and money for civilian sport. Of the six senior matches recorded in the rest of the 1815 season, at least three were played at the new Lord's; the others were arranged at private grounds in Kent, Sussex and Hampshire. The most consequential single match was the Middlesex v Epsom fixture on 24-25 August 1815 in which Felix Ladbroke and Frederick Woodbridge each scored centuries — the first centuries on the new Lord's pitch. Ladbroke's 116 and Woodbridge's 107, made on a flatter and better-prepared surface than any pre-war ground had offered, signalled that batsmanship was about to enter a new era. Lord Frederick Beauclerk played in three of the six matches; E.H. Budd, returning from his enforced wartime layoff, played in two. The young Algernon Greville, later private secretary to the Duke of Wellington, made his senior cricket debut. Investment money returned to the sport: the MCC's accounts for 1815 show a substantial improvement over 1813. The fixture list for 1816 was already being arranged before the 1815 season ended.

The 1816 season expanded further. Lambert returned to form. Osbaldeston resumed his single-wicket challenges. The MCC committee tightened Law 10 against roundarm. By 1819 the Gentlemen v Players match had been revived after a thirteen-year gap. The cricket of the 1820s — the William Ward 278, the rise of Sussex roundarm, the founding of new county clubs — depended directly on the 1815 recovery.