Controversies in 1838

4 incidents documented

Trent Bridge Cricket Ground Opens — Nottingham, 1838

Nottinghamshire

1838-05-26

William Clarke laid out a cricket ground on land behind the Trent Bridge Inn at Nottingham in 1838, the year after his marriage to the inn's proprietor, the widow Mary Chapman. The ground hosted its first major match in May 1838 and grew through the nineteenth century into one of cricket's great Test venues — and the only major Test ground in the world founded by a single individual on commercial initiative.

#trent-bridge#william-clarke#nottingham

⭐Mild

Nicholas Wanostrocht 'Felix' — Schoolmaster, Batsman and Author

Kent, Gentlemen of England

1838-06-01

Nicholas Wanostrocht — universally known by his pen-name 'Felix' — was the most cultured cricketer of the 1830s. The son of a Kent schoolmaster of Belgian descent, he ran a school in Camberwell, played for Kent as a left-handed amateur batsman of the first rank, painted, wrote, invented the catapulta bowling-machine, and would later produce the classic instructional text *Felix on the Bat* (1845).

#nicholas-wanostrocht#felix#kent

⭐Mild

Married vs Single — Women's Cricket Match, 1838

Married women vs Single women

1838-08-13

Through the late 1830s the rural Married vs Single women's cricket match — a tradition dating from at least the 1740s — continued to be played in several English villages. The 1838 fixture, reported in the Sporting Magazine, is one of the better-documented examples of women's cricket in a decade in which the men's first-class game was rapidly professionalising and the women's tradition was carrying on alongside.

#womens-cricket#married-vs-single#1838

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William Caffyn's Boyhood at Reigate — Cricket Apprenticeship in the Late 1830s

Reigate village cricket

1838-06-01

William Caffyn — later one of the great Surrey professionals of the 1850s, member of both the 1861-62 Stephenson and the 1863-64 Parr tours of Australia, and eventually the most influential coach in colonial Australian cricket — was a small boy at Reigate in the late 1830s, learning his cricket at a village green where his father ran a barber's shop. His memoir *71 Not Out* (1899) preserves a vivid picture of the cricketing world of his late-1830s boyhood.

#william-caffyn#reigate#surrey