The Old Hundredth

Eric Midwinter on John Minshull

Some two hundred years before the establishment of the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians on, to be statistically and historically precise, 31 August 1769, the very first century was recorded. The batsman was John Minshull. He scored 107 notches. The event occurred, not in the second innings, but in what was called the ‘second hands’. That usage probably derived from the sense of ‘hand’ as a turn at a game, especially cards, that indoor equivalent of cricket for the gambling lords of the 18th century, with a nod in the direction of ‘hand’ as skill. Actually, ‘innings’ was already coming into vogue, as from mid-18th century. It appears to have been a direct borrowing from ‘inning’, the ‘ingathering’ of rents, of reclaimed land, or of a harvest. 

John Minshull was representing one of those gambling lords, no less a personage than the 3rd Duke of Dorset. It was said that the Duke spent over £1,000 annually on cricket, apart from huge and often profitable sums on betting. It also has to be said that not much of this went into John Minshull’s pocket, for, soon after his epoch-making performance, he was engaged by the Duke as a gardener at his Kent estate for eight shillings a week (for pre-decimal illiterates, that is 40np, or just short of £21 a year). 

The business of finding jobs for ‘handy’ cricketers was to have long duration, as was, one might ruefully add, the convention of not overpaying them. At a time when the landed magnates were the chief protagonists, fielding teams to play for exorbitant wagers, the notion of having ‘retained’ as opposed to ‘independent’ players from the manual classes was important, just as grooms doubled as jockeys and footmen as ‘pedestrians’, that is, athletes, for their titled employers. Other examples included Thomas Waymark and Stephen Dingate, recruited as, respectively, groom and barber for the Duke of Richmond; William Bedster and Lumpy Stevens, butler and gardener for the Earl of Tankerville; and James Aylward, who worked on Sir Horatio Mann’s estate, where he was described as ‘the best batsman, but a poor bailiff’. That gives the game away rather, reminding us that sinecures for sportsmen have a long history. 

The Duke of Dorset found time, in a bustling existence, to undertake both political duties, including the ambassadorship in Paris, and exotic amours, for his mistress was the Countess of Derby, causing her husband the Earl of Derby to pen of his rival, inter alia, the couplet: 

Let Bat and Ball th’affronted stone disgrace,
While Farce stands leering by, with Satyr face 

The busy Duke resided at the Sackville family seat, Knole House, Sevenoaks, and Sevenoaks Vine was primarily the estate ground. It was there that the match probably took place. The Duke’s opponents were Wrotham, a village about five miles, as the crow flies, to the north east of Knole House, a distance indicative of the scope of 18th century fixtures. A couple of hours walking or wagoning over poor lanes, and a return journey, with a match encompassed in between, was probably the limit for all but the more important fixtures. However, travel was more efficient than it had been even 40 years previously. The astounding development of a nationwide system of Turnpike Trusts (locally funded stretches of road for which travellers paid tolls) had cut many journeys by as much as two-thirds London to Manchester now took one day rather than three and this must have made more fixtures possible, at a time when most sports were still played locally just among neighbours close at hand. 

Although we might fairly guess that Wrotham were defeated, we do not, in fact, have their scores. In 1959 that diligent cricket archivist, John Goulstone, from whose findings much of our information about Minshull emanates, found the home side’s scores among the Sackville papers. Apart from the Duke, only one ‘gentle’ person, a Mr Bishop, was numbered among the chosen XI, whilst the rest were probably all estate workers, those of the ‘simple’ sort, for ‘simple’ as in Simple Simon designated, not intellect, but social class. The ‘first hands’ recorded 68, John Minshull top-scoring with 18, and the ‘second hands’ a massive 236, with the game completed in a day, it is unlikely that Wrotham made much of a showing. 

If scoring was by notches, by the cutting of a stick with firmer indentations to mark up the fives and tens, why were the scores also logged in written form? The suggested explanation by Rowland Bowen, who considered this game in his seminal Cricket: a History of its Growth and Development throughout the World, is that the two forms of scoring may have overlapped until near the end of the century, just as present-day scorers utilise both book and computer; you can’t be too careful with these newfangled methods. As likely an explanation is that keen sportsmen, like the Duke of Dorset, might have had the record kept for his own personal delectation, rather like keeping a journal, and possibly for analysing ‘form’ (a term borrowed from horse-racing, as an aid to informed gambling). The absence of the opponent’s scores points to this. But it must be stressed that this scorecard almost certainly completed contemporaneously, possibly by the Duke’s amanuensis, is the first of which we are aware that offers the sequence of scoring shots. ‘Notching’, on the contrary, was pleasingly team-focused, in that it compiled the overall total with carefree disregard of any individual endeavour. Batsmen, rather like youngsters playing in the park, kept their own score and solemnly reported it, and where, like Battle of Britain pilots excitedly exaggerating their tally of ‘kills’, they erred in the side of copiousness, there was the long-stop of the notched all-round total. It is not uncommon for batsmen, especially where scoreboards are none too sophisticated, to remember their own scores. William Evans Midwinter is reputed to have kept count not only of his own but of his partners’ scores. 

Even if there had been previous but unrecorded hundreds, it was quite a feat. If one takes William Epps’s The Grand Matches of Cricket 1771 to 1791 as a goodish sample of a little over a hundred matches, there are only four centuries: John Small, 136 in 1775 for the Duke of Dorset’s Hampshire XI versus Surrey on Broad-halfpenny Down; the famous 167 of Aylward, out of a scoring total of 403, made for a Hampshire team against All England, led by the Duke of Dorset, at Sevenoaks in 1777; and, amazingly, the paired centuries of Tom Taylor, 117, and Tom Walker, 102 (and 95, not out, in the first innings) for the White Conduit club versus a Kent XI at Bourne Paddock in 1786. Interestingly, 1769 also witnessed the first known century stand; 128 for the first wicket, T. Sueter and G. Lear for a Hampshire team against Surrey on Broad-halfpenny Down. 

Tiny scores were very much more the norm. A typical encounter was at Laleham Burway in 1777 when, on an August day, the Duke of Dorset’s Hampshire contingent (115 and 187) beat the Earl of Tankerville’s All England combine (143 and 120) by 39 runs. All the games were played out; there were no draws; and certainly for these ‘grand’ games, play continued on subsequent days, if weather or good form dictated; indeed, only two of the Epps’ fixtures had to be abandoned, one after trying for four days, because of poor weather. For most ordinary fixtures, and many ‘grand’ ones, it is clear that a two-innings game could be completed in the day, probably taking five or six hours. It is fascinating to note the consequence of that today, when, with the accumulative dominion of batsmen, perhaps beginning with Minshull’s pristine hundred, four and five days have to be provided for a game which originally took no more than a day, and ghastly stratagems have had to be imported to ensure even one-innings games end within one day. Either by a distinct time or by target limitation (90 minutes; 18 holes) almost every other game has avoided that petering out which became the drawn (as opposed to the tied) match. 

We may try to envision exactly how John Minshull exhibited his prowess. By 1769 two conjoined developments had occurred which enable us hazily to picture him rather differently to a batsman a quarter century before. Then the ball had been bowled, in the stricter connotation of bowls, ‘grubbers’ or ‘sneaks’ in prep-school parlance, along the ground, although any unevenness might have made the ball rear. The batsman, armed with something like a clubbed hockey stick, reached forward, not unlike a hockey player, to strike those daisy-cutters away from the little goal of two stumps and a crosspiece. From about mid-century the habit of pitching or bouncing the ball was met with the vigorous response of a wider-beamed bat, so that the ball could be struck, as in the tennis/racquets genre of games, while off the ground. 

Historically, bowling styles have always overlapped, so the primitive Wrotham attack might have combined bowling and lobbing, but John Minshull probably utilised the modish bat, shaped rather like a giant’s shoehorn. He was a stocky, cumbersome, not terribly fit man, but, ‘as conceited as a wagtail,’ he had the great gift of confidence, and became one of the finest batsmen of his day. He thus contributed to the ongoing ball/bat contest. It was easier to strike the ball now and run ‘notches’—it was easier to get oneself caught; it was more difficult to hit the wickets when bowling—it was more difficult to defend against the accurately pitched ball. 

John Minshull was born in or about 1741, probably in Middlesex. In that less bureaucratic age, he was married (to Amy Grimshir) as Minchin, transmuted to Minshull, and was buried, in 1793 in Kingston-upon-Thames, as Minchen. His short life was neatly bisected by his famed achievement. Now we have hundreds of first-class hundreds; 23 players have made a century of centuries; we have had several 400s and latterly a 500. We may wonderingly echo the thought that must have passed through the anxious minds of those Wrotham fielders, as they chased around in pursuit of Minshull’s lusty hit on that August day in 1769: ‘Where is it all going to end?’

This article first appeared in The Cricket Statistician for Winter 1997. To join the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians, and subscribe to the journal, please visit our website: