EDWARD LAW

ARMS, CRESTS & MONOGRAMS

CRICKET

Cricket related crests are scarce enough. Although most villages would have had a cricket team in the second half of the nineteenth century few would have had funds to spare for crested notepaper.

If one had expected to find crests for overseas cricket that of a Paris cricket club would not have been among them. The attractive crest of the Leinster club is less unexpected. Many Irish gentry were educated in Britain and village and country house cricket was widely played down to the second world war.

The crest on the left above is identified as the Bullingdon Club on a sample of the output of Spiers & Son at the Bodleian library. The attractive example on the right has not been identified.

Finance would not have been a problem for Waterlow & Sons' cricket club, and the large and handsome crest would have served as an advertisement for the firm's printing activities. Lillywhites were major cricketing publishers in the nineteenth century. They published Lillywhites Cricket Scores and Biographies in 1862 and the Cricketers Companion and Annual from 1865 down to 1900. Aquila Clapshaw started making cricket bats at Turnham Green in 1780, and the successors to that business continued to trade down to the 1970's.

John Wisden (1826-1884) was another Victorian cricketing publisher. The Cricketers Almanack which he founded in 1864 has appeared annually ever since.

Above are crests for some of the county cricket clubs: the left hand crest of the Sussex County Cricket Club appears to have been stamped from a cracked die.

Further crests have been noted for R Daft, Cricket Depot, Nottingham, as well as for several other cricket clubs: Butterflies; Crusaders; Harlequins; Nadder Valley; and Zingari.

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Page created 21 February 2011