6th December 2020 marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Kent County Cricket Club, a fact that we have been trying to celebrate all year, but Covid got in the way.

There had been teams described as ‘Kent’ playing cricket for over a century before that, but creating a club that would cover the whole county and which could attract the support of all interested parties took a mighty long time. Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack in 1870 noted that Kent Cricket Club, founded in 1859, were a roving club without a permanent home and that ‘this is to be regretted and [that] ere long United Kent will be sufficiently fortunate to find a suitable spot for a ground whereon for many years to come may proudly flutter the flag of Kent County Cricket Club.’ At the time, this may have seemed a forlorn hope, but within the year, a solution was found.

The obvious answer to the ground problem was the St. Lawrence Ground, Canterbury, where the annual Cricket Week was already established as a major cricketing and social occasion of the English summer. The problem was that the Beverley Kent Cricket Club, founded in 1835, which ran the Canterbury ground, was very jealous of its Week, and did not want to amalgamate with anybody who might interfere with it. There had already been an attempt in 1865 to bring the two halves together, an attempt spurred on by the parlous financial state of the Kent County Club, rather than from any noble desire to create a club that truly represented the cricketing skills of the whole county. The formal approach by the Kent County Club, based in West Kent, to the Beverley Club that year noted that ‘the cricket of the county might be much improved if an amalgamation of this club with the club at Canterbury could be arranged without interfering with the maintenance of the Canterbury Grand Cricket Week in its integrity’. Despite the flattery of inserting the adjective ‘Grand’ into the description of the Cricket Week, that approach was rebuffed by the Beverley Club. 

However, in 1870, another attempt at joining forces was made. On 13 October that year, the committee of the Kent County Club, still strapped for cash, passed a motion that ‘this meeting is of the same opinion with regard to an amalgamation with the Beverley Club as that expressed in …. 1865.’ That was quickly followed by a meeting on 22 October at the Royal Fountain Hotel in Canterbury – the heartland of the Beverley Club – chaired by a local MP, the Hon. George Milles, the future Earl Sondes, whose family owned the St. Lawrence ground. At this meeting, a proposal was put forward ‘to the subscribers of the Kent County Cricket Club and the Beverley Kent Cricket Club for their consideration’.

The proposal had four points: firstly, that the  two clubs be amalgamated under the name Kent County Cricket Club, with the St. Lawrence Ground as the County Cricket Ground; secondly, that William de Chair Baker, who ran the Beverley Club and who had been the main stumbling block to a merger of the two clubs, should carrying on running the Grand Cricket Week exactly as before; thirdly, that Mr. W. de Chair Baker would be the Hon. Sec. of the new combined club; and fourthly, that a President be chosen alternately from East Kent and West Kent, and a committee consisting of ten men from East Kent and ten from West Kent should have the responsibility of running the club. With a twenty man committee, it’s pretty amazing they ever got anything done.

This proposal, suitably flattering to Mr. de Chair Baker, was reinforced by the personal intervention of Herbert Knatchbull-Hugessen, an East Kent man from Mersham le Hatch, who was given the task of persuading the officers of the Beverley Club to attend the next meeting, when they would discuss and vote on the proposal. As Knatchbull-Hugessen himself wrote a few years later, ‘there was a kind of antagonistic feeling between the two divisions… This feeling was stronger in East Kent, because it was suspected by some that there was a desire on the part of West Kent to interfere with the Canterbury Week, and have the matches at Maidstone.’ Knatchbull-Hugessen’s diplomatic skills were enough to persuade the highly suspicious Baker and the Beverley Club members to agree to attend the meeting, scheduled for 6^th December, at the Bull Hotel in Rochester, just across the Medway in East Kent – a tactful choice by the men from deepest darkest West Kent.

The meeting, chaired this time by the 3^rd Lord Harris, took place in the foulest of weather, described as ‘inclement’ even for December, and several people who would have liked to be there failed to make it. However, there were enough Men of Kent and Kentish Men to provide a quorum, indeed almost a crowd, including Mr. de Chair Baker and his opposite number at the Kent County club, William South Norton. The discussion was vigorous but on the whole friendly, and the four points of the resolution were passed nem con, with just a slight alteration to the first point, as a sop to West Kent and a way of easing de Chair Baker’s paranoia about any potential takeover of Canterbury Week. The final version of that first point read “That the Kent County Cricket Club and the Beverley Kent Cricket Club be amalgamated in one club, to be called the Kent County Cricket Club; and that Canterbury be the headquarters of the club. Matches to be played on grounds to be named by the committee.” This last sentence turned Kent into perhaps the most wandering county club of all, as the new book, “Kent County Cricket Grounds” by Howard Milton and Peter Francis, will confirm.

Before the meeting was out, Lord Harris had been elected the new club’s first President, a compliment he acknowledged by saying that he ‘felt much interested in the game of cricket, and in the County’s position in connection with the game.’ This statement of what Basil Fawlty would no doubt have called ‘the bleeding obvious’ earned him shouts of ‘Hear, hear” and cheers, no doubt mixed with feelings of relief at the great thing that they had achieved, and also possibly that it meant the meeting was now over. As the Kent Herald pithily put it, ‘the meeting then dispersed’.

A bit of politicking, a bit of massaging hurt feelings, and a fundamental desire to do the best for cricket in Kent marked the birth of our county club 150 years ago. Nothing much has changed since then.

And that’s why we hope to be celebrating our special birthday, a bit late, in 2021.