“Best of luck tracking down more information” was the understated reaction of an early cricket enthusiast on hearing about my project to write a biography of Valentine Romney, the famous Kent cricketer active in the decades prior to 1750. Trawling through archives for unpublished cricket references within that period is not generally regarded as a wise allocation of time.
From the start, I was determined that this would be a research-led project, rather than simply overlaying new text on old findings. Much of the new research is of low level interest to the mainstream of cricket history. But there are two nuggets which may engage early cricket historians with the questions they raise, only tentatively answered in my booklet.
Both exist amongst archive resources well trodden by past researchers but somehow missed. One was discovered by the simple device of turning over a single-page manuscript, the other by working around the occasional lapses of digital search technology in reading the typeface of 18th-century newspapers.
The Sackville team lists
The “Sackville of Knole mss” held by Kent Archives in Maidstone includes an item catalogued as “Bills of Lord John Sackville (1739-1743).” The contents appear as uninteresting as they sound, a small pile of scrappy papers, mostly shopkeepers’ accounts. A banker’s receipt dated July 1743 stands out for its immaculate script and floral signature, as befits a deposit of £240 placed at Hoare’s Bank in London.
A researcher specialising in the lives of the Georgian aristocracy, or the economics of their great houses, might have barely glanced at the two columns of handwritten names on the reverse of this document, perhaps an aide memoire regarding servants. For a cricket historian, the names stand out on stalks, Newland, Long Robin, Sawyer, Cutbush and, of course, Romney. The two columns each contain eleven names, almost all are renowned cricketers.
This is Lord John Sackville in action as one of the great patrons of cricket between 1735 and 1745. There are a handful of matches in this period for which all 22 players are named, recorded in a newspaper report or scoresheet, but none documented in this personal way. The names include Lord John’s friend, Lord Sandwich, a keen cricketer but not previously listed in this exalted company, reinforcing my argument that he merits greater recognition in cricket’s history.
My booklet also suggests that the names are in batting order and that the match concerned took place in 1744, a year after the date of the bank receipt, but consistent with reports of an otherwise unexplained fixture in that summer. There is no certainty in these views.
The Apology to the Honourable Artillery Company
The status of Valentine Romney as a cricketer and a man relies to a considerable degree on the lines describing him in CRICKET: An Heroic Poem written by James Dance in 1744. My booklet takes a close look at this work, drawing attention to its polemical characteristics which, combined with its rushed publication, may have caused a lot of trouble.
The principal venue for cricket at that time was the Artillery Ground in Finsbury. The relationship between the Honourable Artillery Company and the cricket fraternity was strained, leading eventually to the series of private cricket grounds laid out by Thomas Lord, a generation later. James Dance goes over the top in describing the Artillery Ground:
A Place there is, where City Warriors meet,
Wisely determin’d, not to fight, but eat.
Three days after publication of the poem in July 1744, a newspaper reported that the Artillery Company was “determined to prosecute in the severest manner the author of CRICKET.” When the cricket historian, F.S.Ashley-Cooper, republished the poem in 1922, he wrote that “no action was taken, the threats proving as harmless as the poet’s remarks.”
To the best of my knowledge this verdict has remained intact. My booklet reveals a more complete version of this story through the discovery of a full length apology by Dance published in a newspaper two weeks later. For the remainder of that summer, relations between cricket promoters and the Artillery Company were notably improved.
An awkward twist in this tale is that the eloquent text of the apology is not very apologetic. Was Dance relying on the non-literary military men not reading beyond the headline? Was it all a joke from the start?
The search engine of the otherwise wonderful 17th and 18th-century Gale/Burney Newspapers Collection fails to read “CRICKET” in the headline of the Daily Post. The text of the apology does not include the word “cricket”, despite stretching to 325 words. These two quirks have kept Dance’s apology hidden from modern researchers. I found it by searching for “Artillery Company” in the belief that the insult demanded some form of closure.
A hefty caveat to this article relates to the uncertainty inherent in any claim to publishing cricket references for the first time. Nearly 300 years of written material, directly and indirectly about cricket, is too much for digitisation to capture, let alone the time-honoured way of perusal and memory.
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The Life of Valentine Romney by William Gunyon, published 1st May, 2026; 62pp pbk, fully illustrated. A limited edition of 250 numbered copies.
For illustrations and more comment, see pp34, 35 & 40 for the Sackville document, and pp43 & 57 for the Apology.
Other findings include: the omission of four lines in the first edition of CRICKET: An Heroic Poem; a portrait of Alan Brodrick in a museum in California; additions to the list of 18th-century pubs in Kent with cricket names; and the high incidence of clandestine marriages of couples from Romney’s home parish of Meopham in Kent.
To order a copy for £10 including p&p in the UK, and receive payment details, please email your postal address to bill@treadsoftly.net