The Hambledon Club, in the county of Hampshire in England, was a social club that is famous for its organisation of 18th century cricket matches. By the late 1770s it was the foremost cricket club in England. The village of Hambledon is best known as the ‘Cradle of Cricket’. It is thought that Hambledon Club, one of the oldest cricket clubs known, was formed about 1750. Hambledon was England’s leading cricket club from about 1765 until the formation of MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) in 1787.
As one of the players, Martin de Bock, correctly pointed it out, the first cricket ground was actually at Broadhalfpenny Down, some 2 km East of the puzzle location but it was considered to be “too remote” from the village so they moved to Windmill Down, the location of the puzzle.
Hambledon’s great days ended in the 1780s with a shift in focus from the rural counties of Kent, Sussex and Hampshire to metropolitan London where Lord’s was established as the home of the new Marylebone Cricket Club in 1787. However, for the decade up to 1793, Hambledon remained a meeting place for like-minded Royal Navy Officers such as Captains Erasmus Gower, Robert Calder, Charles Powell Hamilton, Mark Robinson, Sir Hyde Parker and Robert Linzee. In May 1791 Lord Hugh Seymour became president of the club but soon afterwards these officers all returned to sea.
Membership declined during the 1790s. On 29 August 1796, fifteen people attended a meeting and amongst them, according to the official minutes, was “Mr Thos Pain, Authour of the rights of Man”! It was certainly a joke for Thomas Paine was then in France, having left England in 1792 shortly before being convicted of seditious libel in absentia. The last meeting was held on 21 September 1796 where the minutes read only that “No Gentlemen were present”.
Those who found it before the hint:
- Paul Voestermans
- Phil Ower
- Garfield
- Martin de Bock
- Eloy Cano
- Lighthouse
And after the hint:
- Graham Hedley
- Centaurea (Welcome!)
- Bernd