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1845-08-22
On 22 August 1845, around a hundred Surrey cricketers met at the Horns Tavern in Kennington and resolved to constitute themselves as the Surrey County Cricket Club. The meeting confirmed the lease of a market garden at Kennington — what would become the Oval — and laid the foundations for one of the strongest first-class counties of the next two centuries.
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1845-05-01
Nicholas Wanostrocht, the schoolmaster who played first-class cricket for Kent under the pseudonym 'Felix', published Felix on the Bat in 1845 — the first systematic coaching manual on batting, illustrated with his own lithographed plates. It defined the technical vocabulary of forward and back play that English coaching would use for the next century.
Sussex / All-England Eleven
1845-07-15
Tom Box of Sussex was the leading wicketkeeper in England through the 1840s — keeping wicket without the pads, gloves or specialised gear of later eras and standing up to the fast bowling of Mynn, Redgate and the young John Wisden. He played first-class cricket for 25 years and dropped only one stumping chance in his entire career, according to the Lillywhites' near-contemporary count.
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1845-06-01
Alongside Felix on the Bat, the Lillywhite family published the Companion to the Bat in 1845 — a short instructional pamphlet on batting and bowling that ran in successive editions through the 1840s and 1850s and helped to establish the Lillywhite name as the dominant force in cricket publishing before Wisden.
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1845-07-04
On 4 July 1845, four young Cambridge graduates dined at the Blenheim Hotel in Bond Street and founded I Zingari — Italian for 'the gypsies' — as a wandering amateur cricket club without a home ground. The first such club in cricket, I Zingari pioneered the country-house touring tradition that became the dominant form of amateur cricket for the next century.