Somerset Cricket — The Western County Finds Its Feet, 1860s

Somerset's delay in reaching first-class status — not until 1891, two decades after most other counties — reflects the county's social structure: genteel, agricultural, amateur in culture, without the industrial working-class cricket public that sustained Lancashire and Yorkshire.

Cricket in Somerset in the 1860s was a decentralised affair: Wells, Taunton, Bath and Bristol (though Bristol was effectively Gloucestershire's territory, dominated by the Grace family) each had their own clubs and their own traditions. The county had no powerful patron on the scale of Kent's Lord Harris or Surrey's F.P. Miller, and no permanent county ground. What it had was a rich amateur cricket culture among the Somerset gentry and clergy — the Church of England's proliferation of cricket-playing vicars was a constant source of players — and a professional tradition in the mining and agricultural communities. All-England Eleven fixtures in Somerset towns through the 1840s and 1850s had demonstrated that cricket could draw large crowds in the West Country. The formal foundation of Somerset CCC in 1875 gave this diffuse tradition an institutional focus.