England
1916-08-01
Although first-class cricket stopped in England between 1915 and 1918, schoolboy cricket — including the Eton-Harrow and Oxford-Cambridge fixtures, where age and conditions allowed — continued in modified form through the war, providing a thread of continuity through four otherwise empty seasons.
Eton vs Harrow
1829-07-01
After several years of escalating crowd misbehaviour and post-match excess, the headmasters of Eton and Harrow agreed in 1829 to suspend their schools' annual cricket match at Lord's. The fixture, which Lord Byron had played in for Harrow in the inaugural game of 1805 and which had been annual since 1822, was not played again until 1832. The interruption is the only voluntary suspension in the long history of the oldest schoolboy fixture in the world.
Eton vs Harrow
1822-08-02
The Eton v Harrow cricket match, first played at Lord's in 1805 with Lord Byron in the Harrow side and resumed in 1818, became an annual fixture from 1822 — the foundation date of what would become the longest-running schools cricket fixture in the world. The annual rhythm, briefly interrupted by the 1829-31 ban, has otherwise survived almost unbroken to the modern era.
Eton College vs Harrow School
1818-07-30
Thirteen years after the inaugural 1805 meeting at Thomas Lord's old ground in Dorset Square — the match in which Lord Byron had played for Harrow with a runner — Eton and Harrow met again at the new Lord's at St John's Wood in July 1818. The rematch restarted what would, from 1822, become the longest-running annual schoolboy fixture in cricket. By the late nineteenth century Eton v Harrow at Lord's was one of the great social occasions of the London summer.