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#john nyren

5 incidents tagged

⭐Mild

The 'Old Buffers' — Hambledon Nostalgia in the 1830s

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1834-09-01

Through the 1830s a small group of surviving Hambledon veterans — William Beldham 'Silver Billy', John Nyren and a handful of others — were the last living link to the great Hambledon era of the 1770s and 1780s. Cowden Clarke's transcription of Nyren's recollections (1833) captured their world for posterity, and the 'old buffers' became a fixture of cricketing nostalgia for the rest of the Victorian period.

#hambledon#old-buffers#william-beldham
⭐Mild

John Nyren's *The Young Cricketer's Tutor* — First Major Cricket Book, 1833

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1833-04-01

In April 1833 the publisher Effingham Wilson of the Royal Exchange brought out *The Young Cricketer's Tutor*, written by the elderly Hambledon player John Nyren and edited by his friend Charles Cowden Clarke. The slim duodecimo combined a manual of technique with a memoir of the great Hambledon men of the 1770s and 1780s and is generally regarded as the first significant book in cricket literature.

#john-nyren#young-cricketers-tutor#charles-cowden-clarke
⭐Mild

John Nyren's Nostalgic Hambledon Writings — *The Cricketers of My Time*, 1833

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1833-04-15

The second half of John Nyren's 1833 *Young Cricketer's Tutor* — bound in as the appendix *The Cricketers of My Time* — was the first sustained piece of cricket prose ever written. Across some sixty pages Nyren remembered the great Hambledon men of the 1770s and 1780s with affection and precision, and in doing so created the literary mode — nostalgic, particular, character-driven — that has shaped cricket writing ever since.

#john-nyren#the-cricketers-of-my-time#hambledon
⭐Moderate

Death of David Harris — Hambledon's Greatest Bowler Dies at Crookham, May 1803

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1803-05-19

On 19 May 1803, in the village of Crookham in north Hampshire, David Harris died at the age of 48. Hambledon's incomparable underarm bowler — described by John Nyren as 'masculine, erect and appalling' — had not played a major match since 1798, his career destroyed by gout. With his death the last great bowler of the Hambledon era passed into history, just as Lord Frederick Beauclerk and the new MCC generation were taking control of cricket.

#david-harris#hambledon#underarm-bowling
⭐Mild

John Nyren's Boyhood at the Bat and Ball — Future Hambledon Memoirist, 1800s

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1800-06-01

While the Hambledon Club drifted into village obscurity through the 1800s, the boyhood of John Nyren — son of the old captain Richard Nyren, raised at the Bat and Ball Inn opposite Broadhalfpenny Down, taught the game by his uncle Richard Newland of Slindon — was already laying the foundation for the most influential cricket memoir ever written. Three decades later that boyhood would reach print as The Young Cricketer's Tutor (1833).

#john-nyren#hambledon#broadhalfpenny-down