The Staten Island Cricket Club

Martin Chandler | 8:51am BST 01 June 2025

Published: 2025
Pages: 222
Author: Smith, Steve
Publisher: Private
Rating: 3 stars

Any regular reader of our reviews will have noticed that in recent months Steve Smith has been quietly prolific in his attempts to chronicle North American cricket and, particularly, that of the Philadelphians, in the latter years of the nineteenth century and the first few years of the twentieth.

In a sense this one is more of the same, but the title will raise eyebrows given that Staten Island is in New York and therefore a good eighty miles from Philadelphia. But if the game never quite took off in the same way in New York it did also establish itself in the Big Apple the and indeed it was New York and not Philadelphia that played host to the first ever international fixture, that between USA and Canada in 1844.

So it wasn’t a major digression for Steve to turn his eye briefly towards the coast and produce this book, a brief history of the Staten Island Cricket Club, originally formed in 1872 and, rather more so than its neighbours in Philadelphia, still thriving today.

The book begins with a most interesting potted history of the club and how it and its ground came into existence. There is something similar, albeit rather shorter at the book’s conclusion which brings matters up to date, but the main part of the book is the account of the doings of each of the overseas visitors who give rise to the book’ sub-title, The International First Class cricket XIs 1885 to 1913.

There were as many as fifteen tours over the 28 years in question. Most were from England, but there were three Australian sides, including the last two in 1912 and 1913, and one from Ireland.

The format of the book covers a familiar pattern. There are brief pen portraits of some of the players on both sides, an account of the play and a selection of photographs, including reproductions of the scorecards taken from publications of the day. As in Steve’s other books the period flavour is retained by liberal use of quotations from contemporary reports.

Occasionally the New Yorkers put up a decent show, and I was surprised at the number of matches they played on level terms rather than against odds. But they seldom looked likely to defeat their visitors and the best results they managed were draws.

All of the visiting teams contained some First Class cricketers, but they did vary in strength. By some distance the strongest was Ranji’s side in 1899, a tour already the subject of a detailed account by Steve here. As made clear in that one the way in which the tourists conducted themselves on the trip, and particularly in New York, did not always go down well and the issues that arose are, naturally, fully explained here.

The American players are generally unknowns, although there are a couple of interesting names amongst those who represented the home sides. One was Stewart Lohmann, the older (by two years) brother of the much more famous Surrey and England bowler George, who for a time plied his cricketing trade in the US. Another interesting name is that of the wandering Australian Bert Kortlang, whose fascinating story was so skilfully told by Rob Franks in 2022.

The Staten Island Cricket Club certainly fills a gap in the literature of cricket. Like many such works it will not appeal to too many, but if cricket in North America is amongst your areas of interest it is certainly worth investing in. It appears in a limited edition hardback or paperback and can be obtained from Amazon, Red Rose Books in the UK or Roger Page in Australia.