Prologue — More Than a Game

A Summer’s Day at Carlett Park — 21 June 1856

On a summer’s day in June 1856, a group of cricketers gathered at Carlett Park, Eastham.

We don’t know the score.

We don’t even know who won.

But remarkably, we do know what they had for tea.

Among the papers of John Torr survives the handwritten menu for the occasion — and it was no ordinary cricket tea.

There was beef and lamb, veal and ham, tongues and salmon, soup, fowl, pigeon pies, pastries, gooseberry tarts and wine jellies.

And somebody had the foresight to write notes against the dishes afterwards:

“Not much eaten.”
“Scarcely touched.”
“Pretty well eaten.”
“All eaten.”

One item received the rather more urgent verdict:

“Not enough.”

It is a wonderfully human document.

The score of the cricket match has disappeared, but the menu survived.

And in its own small way it tells us what this story is really about.

It is about cricket, certainly. But it is also about the people who played it, the families who watched it, the places where they gathered and the community that grew around the game.

From John Torr’s Carlett Park to the cricket ground at Torr Park today, generations of people have come here to play, watch, talk, eat, celebrate — and occasionally complain that there wasn’t enough.

More than 170 years later, cricket is still being played on the same ground.

This is their story.