Cricket in Clapham and Patching
The first reference relating to cricket being played by Patching was reported in the Sussex Weekly Advertiser on 22 July 1771 when Hurst played Patching and Portslade at Hurstpierpoint. Clapham and Patching were the runners-up in the Nind Challenge Trophy in 1897. The trophy had been presented by Mr. P.W.Nind for the East Preston Cricket League. Clapham and Patching Cricket Club remained a difficult side to beat into the early 1900s. In 1914 the Club played in the six-a-side Blauw Tournament at East Preston when the performances of Arthur William Fitzroy Somerset and Arthur Plantaganet Francis Cecil Somerset brought about a win for Clapham and Patching. The organisers took exception to this and the Competition was not repeated again for over half a Century.
In the 1930s the Club, which was then known as Patching and Clapham Cricket Club, was linked with the former Durrington Cricket Club and played on a pitch behind the Coach and Horses and used a Southdown Coach as a pavilion. During the course of the Second World War the pitch at Frog’s Hole, Clapham deteriorated into an overgrown field and it took two weeks to relocate the cricket square. The Club constructed a hut to use as a pavilion and this existed until 1978 when the Village Hall was constructed. The freehold of the Ground was owned by the Duke of Norfolk’s Estate and when offered to the Club for £11,000 in 1974 the Chairman rejected the offer without consulting the Club Committee. The Village Hall Management Committee purchased the ground with a covenant that safeguarded the future of cricket at Frog’s Hole in perpetuity.
The village pitch name, Frog's Hole, relates to the large number of frogs that inhabited the wet surroundings. Some romantics have erroneously suggested that the name derives from a nearby prisoner of war camp that existed for the French soldiers during the Napoleonic Wars.
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Famous quotes containing the words cricket and/or patching:
“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)
“For my people lending their strength to the years: to the gone
years and the now years and the maybe years, washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching dragging along never gaining never reaping never knowing and never understanding;”
—Margaret Abigail Walker (b. 1915)