Winchester v Harrow at Lord's — The Match Before the Pavilion Burned, July 1825

Public schools cricket was an established institution by 1825. Eton v Harrow had been played at Lord's since 1805, intermittently. Winchester had been waiting in the wings; the 1825 fixture was its first appearance at the headquarters of the game.

Both schools fielded teams of senior boys. Charles Wordsworth, then 18 and shortly to go up to Christ Church, played for Harrow; he would later credit the experience as a foundation of his commitment to varsity cricket.

Winchester College had been playing organised cricket since the eighteenth century but had not before played Harrow at Lord's. The first such match took place on 28 July 1825 and ended in the late afternoon. Charles Wordsworth, the Christ Church-bound Harrovian who would two years later instigate the Oxford v Cambridge fixture, played in the Harrow side. The match details are sparse because of what happened that night: after dark, the original pavilion at Lord's caught fire and was completely destroyed. The MCC's scorebooks, correspondence and trophies — including, presumably, the detailed scorecard of the match just played — were lost in the blaze. The cause of the fire was never definitively established but the most common explanation was an unattended pipe or candle. Thomas Lord lost £2,600 in subscriptions held in the pavilion, none of which were recovered. The pavilion was rebuilt within months. The Winchester-Harrow fixture itself did not become annual: it was played intermittently over the next decades and is still played today, but never with the regularity of Eton v Harrow. The 1825 date is thus the first match of a long but minor fixture, and the last evening of the pavilion that had stood since 1814.

The fire caused permanent damage to cricket's documentary record. Arthur Haygarth, beginning his Scores and Biographies project in the 1840s, had to reconstruct early scorecards from press accounts and private papers because the MCC's central archive was gone. Winchester v Harrow continued to be played intermittently and is one of the longest-running schools fixtures in cricket.