London County Cricket Club

This article is about the turn-of-the-20th-century cricket club. For the 18th-century London club, see London Cricket Club. For the war-time representative team, see London Counties cricket team.

WG Grace in the colours of London County, painted by Albert Chevallier Tayler.

London County Cricket Club was a short-lived cricket club founded by the Crystal Palace Company.[1] In 1898 they invited WG Grace to help them form a first-class cricket club. Grace accepted the offer and became the club's secretary, manager and captain. As a result, he severed his connection with Gloucestershire CCC during the 1899 season. The club played first-class matches between 1900 and 1904.[2][3]

The club's home ground was Crystal Palace Park Cricket Ground in south London. Some of the leading players of the time played matches for the club while continuing to play for their usual teams, among them CB Fry, JWHT Douglas, Albert Trott and Ranjitsinhji. The increase in the importance of the County Championship, Grace's own inevitable decline in form (given that he was over fifty years old) and the lack of a competitive element in the matches led to a decline in attendances and consequently meant the team lost money.[4] The final first-class matches were played in 1904 and the enterprise folded in 1908.

In 2004 the club was relaunched by former Essex, Somerset and Leicestershire wicketkeeper-batsman Neil Burns as a mentoring organisation for the development and support of cricketers.

  1. ^ History of the Crystal Palace Company Archived 2007-02-08 at the Wayback Machine
  2. ^ Alan Gibson: The Cricket Captains of England (1989), p57.
  3. ^ Christopher Martin-Jenkins: The Wisden Book of County Cricket (1981), p441.
  4. ^ Cricket 1908