William Clarke's Death — End of the Founder of the All-England Eleven, 25 August 1856

Clarke was already 47 when he founded the AEE in 1846 — late in life by Victorian standards — and the venture was a second-half-of-life triumph. By 1856 he was the most powerful single figure in the English game.

Clarke had been in declining health through 1855 and the early part of the 1856 season. His paraplegia — the standard term then for paralysis of the lower limbs, probably caused by a chronic spinal condition — confined him increasingly to his Wandsworth Road lodgings as the summer wore on.

William Clarke was born at Nottingham on 24 December 1798, learnt his cricket on the Forest racecourse, and in 1830 became captain of the old Nottingham town club. He bowled slow underarm — accurate, often unplayable on rough pitches — and was a shrewd tactician and a sharper businessman. He married the widow Mary Chapman, owner of the Trent Bridge Inn, in 1838, and laid out the Trent Bridge ground that would become Nottinghamshire's home. In August 1846 he founded the All-England Eleven, a touring side of the country's leading professionals who played exhibition matches against odds of 18 or 22 in northern industrial cities. The AEE was an immediate commercial success; Clarke retained the bulk of the gate. By the early 1850s he had become a target of professional discontent, and in 1852 Wisden and Dean led the breakaway that founded the UAEE. Clarke refused to allow the two sides to meet. In the spring of 1856, however, he was already ill, and on 25 August he died at his London lodgings. His funeral was held in London and he was buried at Norwood Cemetery. His son Alfred, summoned from a match at Loughborough, arrived too late to see him alive.

“On hearing about his father's condition, Alfred left the game. However, he arrived in London too late to see his father.”

George Parr of Nottinghamshire, Clarke's chosen successor, took over the AEE within weeks. One of his first decisions was to lift the boycott of the UAEE; the first AEE v UAEE match followed in June 1857 at Lord's. Clarke's widow continued to run the Trent Bridge Inn; the family's commercial interest in the ground passed to Parr's generation.