The 102 First Class Cricketing Gentlemen of Philadelphia

Martin Chandler | 8:22am GMT 01 February 2026

Published: 2025
Pages: 444
Author: Smith, Steve
Publisher: Private
Rating: 3 stars

All told the Gentlemen of Philadelphia played a total of 88 First Class matches. The first took place in 1878 and was a creditable draw against an Australian side that had just completed a tour of England. Fittingly the last was against Australia as well, thirty five years later. That one was a draw as well, although the Australian visitors were well ahead in that game.

Steve Smith has, in his various recent books, covered a number of those 88 matches, although there are still a few instalments to go before his project is complete. In the meantime he has stopped for breath and changed direction slightly, this one looking not at the matches themselves, but at the 102 men who appeared for the Gentlemen of Philadelphia over that time.

This book is a tad costlier than its predecessors, so I will start by making the point that it is a much more substantial volume, not only extending to as many as 444 pages, but also being in a larger format than any of Smith’s earlier offerings.

For a start the book contains scorecards for each of those 88 matches and, in addition to the details of the players there is an introduction which explains why the game developed as it did in Philadelphia, and there is also a look at each of the grounds in the city where First Class matches were played.

In terms of the references to the players these are more in the nature of a “Who’s Who” than a work of collected biography. The playing styles and roles of each of the 102 are explored with a summary of their cricket careers. For some there is some comment from contemporaries, many taken from John Lester’s A Century of Philadelphia Cricket.

With 102 men involved and only one having been the subject of a previous biography (Bart King of course, who has been the subject of two, one by Smith) it would have taken a phenomenal feat of research to unravel lives outside of cricket of all of these Philadelphian players so Smith has wisely not attempted that, and has confined his efforts to explaining each man’s role in the history of the game in city.

So there are no great revelations to be found in The 102 First Class Cricketing Gentlemen of Philadelphia. There are no family details, nor information about the players working lives (all, of course, were amateur cricketers). Some of them may have gone to make significant lives outside cricket or, at the other end of the scale, may have become embroiled in scandalous behaviour, but that is not the book’s purpose. What it does do however is provide a more than useful companion to the books on Philadelphian cricket that Steve Smith has already published and, of course, those that are still to come and, hopefully, when as he must very soon do he runs out of cricket matches to write about, he can concentrate on research into the lives outside cricket of ‘the 102’ .

The 102 First Class Cricketing Gentlemen of Philadelphia is available on Amazon in hardback or soft cover or at a discounted price from Red Rose Books or directly from the author who can be messaged on X @stevesmith73652