Earliest Cricket
A match in October 1730 on Datchet Heath (a.k.a. Datchet Common), outside the village of Datchet which is near Windsor, is the first reference to cricket in Buckinghamshire. Note that Datchet is nowadays in Berkshire but was historically part of Buckinghamshire.
In September 1740, a team called "Buckinghamshire, Berkshire & Hertfordshire" played two matches against the famous London Cricket Club at Uxbridge and the Artillery Ground. London won the first "with great difficulty" but no post-match report was found of the second.
In 1759, an All-England team that played three matches against the noted Dartford Cricket Club included a player called Gill of Buckinghamshire, who was the team's wicket keeper. The same player almost certainly featured in another All-England team in 1772.
A number of games involving Buckinghamshire teams are mentioned in newspapers of the late 18th century. Unlike neighbouring Berkshire, Buckinghamshire was never considered first-class.
Read more about this topic: Buckinghamshire County Cricket Club
Famous quotes containing the words earliest and/or cricket:
“Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connection can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived.”
—Jane Austen (1775–1817)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)