Notes on Pre-Victorian Cricket in Wales
Martin Chandler |Published: 2025
Pages: 24
Author: Hignell, Andrew
Publisher: Museum of Welsh Cricket
Rating: 3 stars
Following on, as promised, a month after the first monograph from the Museum of Welsh Cricket we have the second. Once more it is written by Andrew Hignell, a man we have to thank for more than forty publications on various aspects of Welsh cricket, the majority of them full length books*.
The story of cricket is one I have read several times. Locations in Hampshire and Sussex and the other counties of southern England loom large in all the history books. But I realised as soon as I opened the booklet that I had no knowledge at all of the early history of cricket in Wales.
That the game developed a few years later in Wales did not surprise me, nor that the earliest records are from Swansea, and it wasn’t a surprise to learn that, in a social context, cricket grew up in Wales in much the same way as it did in England, developing from other games.
From my earliest years I recall reading about club ball and stool ball in England. There is mention of club ball in Wales as well, but Bando and Trap-cat were new ones on me. All in all there are fifteen pages of narrative in this attractively illustrated booklet as well as a series of interesting tables to take the story of cricket in the Principality up to 1836.
*We have reviewed a number of Hignell’s previous books;
Jack Mercer: A Bowler of Magical Spells
Glamorgan Cricketers 1889-1920
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