Slindon Cricket Club - 1741 Season

1741 Season

The first written record of the Slindon team is on 15 June 1741 when they played against Portsmouth at Stansted Park, Rowlands Castle, near Havant in Hampshire. Slindon won this match by 9 wickets. It is the earliest report of a match involving Slindon, though the club must have been playing for some time beforehand. The Duke of Richmond in a letter said that "above 5000 people" were present. In a second letter, he gives the result.

On Thursday 9 July 1741, in a letter to her husband, the Duchess of Richmond (1706 - 1751) mentioned a conversation with John Newland re a Slindon v East Dean match at Long Down, near Eartham, a week earlier. This seems to be the first recorded mention of any of the Newland family.

In two subsequent letters to his friend the Duke of Newcastle, a future Prime Minister, Richmond spoke about a game on Tuesday 28 July which resulted in a brawl with hearty blows and broken heads. The game was at Portslade between Slindon and unnamed opponents. Slindon won the battle but the result of the match is unknown. Richmond had been involved in ruckuses of this sort before and Georgian England was an essentially violent society. Tt was quite normal in cricket for the rough to rub shoulders with the smooth.

The poor little Slyndon phrase followed the game against Surrey at Merrow Down on 7 September 1741. Richmond in a letter to Newcastle before the game spoke of "poor little Slyndon against almost your whole county of Surrey". Next day he wrote again, saying that "wee (sic) have beat Surrey almost in one innings".

Soon afterwards, Richmond's wife Sarah, a feisty character in her own right, wrote to him and said she "wish’d..... that the Sussex mobb (sic) had thrash’d the Surrey mob". She had "a grudge to those fellows ever since they mob’d you" (apparently a reference to the Richmond Green fiasco in August of the 1731 English cricket season). She then said she wished the Duke "had won more of their moneys".