#patron cricket

4 incidents tagged

First Major Match at Bramshill Park — Hampshire Patron Cricket, 1827

Hampshire vs MCC

1827-08-08

On 8-9 August 1827 Hampshire played MCC at Bramshill Park — the seat of Sir William Cope — in one of the last great country-house major matches of the patron era. Cope had laid out a strip on the parkland in front of the house and stocked it for major cricket. The fixture is among the final examples of the eighteenth-century model of patron-funded country-house cricket carried into the new era.

#roundarm-era#bramshill-park#hampshire

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Lord Darnley's Match at Cobham Hall — England v Kent, July 1807

England vs Kent

1807-07-14

John Bligh, fourth Earl of Darnley, hosted a major England v Kent fixture on the lawn at Cobham Hall on 14-15 July 1807 — one of the last great patron-funded country-house matches of the underarm era. The young Ivo Bligh, who would as Lord Darnley a generation later bring the Ashes urn back from Australia, was a child of three watching from the terrace. The fixture is the Cobham Hall ground's most important first-class entry.

#regency-cricket#underarm#lord-s-old-ground

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Sir Horatio Mann's Last Patron Match — Bishopsbourne, July 1802

Kent vs England

1802-07-07

Sir Horatio Mann, the Kent baronet who had been one of the great patrons of late-eighteenth-century cricket, raised his last full England-strength match at Bishopsbourne in July 1802. His finances had collapsed after years of cricket spending; the 1802 fixture was effectively a farewell. Mann died twelve years later largely forgotten, but the Bishopsbourne match marks the close of an era of lordly cricket patronage that had begun in the 1760s.

#regency-cricket#underarm#horatio-mann

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Lord Winchilsea Raises an England XI at Burley-on-the-Hill — August 1800

England XI vs Rutland & Leicestershire

1800-08-12

In August 1800 George Finch-Hatton, ninth Earl of Winchilsea — co-founder of the MCC and the most important patron of late-Hambledon cricket — staged one of his last great country-house matches at his Rutland seat, Burley-on-the-Hill. He brought down a near-Test-strength England XI to play a combined Rutland and Leicestershire side in front of a paying gallery on the lawn below the great house. The fixture is one of the clearest pieces of evidence we have that the patron-led model of major cricket survived into the new century, even as the MCC at Lord's was beginning to absorb its functions.

#regency-cricket#underarm#lord-s-old-ground