With these few lines, the Kentish Gazette of Tuesday, August 25th., 1835, reported the arrival of the Beverley Cricket Club – and its first victory. The return match did not, in the end, take place as announced, being "prevented by the incessant rain". ^[1] However, it was rearranged for the following Thursday, and the Kent Herald was able to report a second Beverley victory – "after a well-contested game" and "at a late hour" – in the Club's first home fixture. ^[2]

Two other matches are known to have been played in this first season. Both were against the Minster Club and both ended in defeat. Minster won the first encounter by five wickets and the second, at Canterbury, by 90 runs. (Minster 99 and 90; Beverley 66 and 33.) The Kent Herald's report of the latter match commented that "from the reputation of the Beverley club, considerable interest was felt respecting the result of the game; but the very accurate bowling of Mr. James White soon destroyed their hopes of success". It concluded: "bets ran very high against the Minster party, and no small sum of money must have exchanged hands". ^[3]

The founder of the Club was John Gerrard Andrewes Baker, a young man of eighteen, who had just left Eton and was then at Trinity College, Cambridge. The 'Beverley cricket ground' was almost certainly the field behind the Bakers' house – Beverley House, now known as the Manor House – in St. Stephen's (Hackington), then a small village on the outskirts of Canterbury. ^[4] The family was a distinguished one. John's father, the late George Baker, was the son of John Baker, M.P. for Canterbury from 1796 to 1797 and from 1802 to 1818, and he had also been to Trinity before becoming a lawyer and Recorder of Dover. John's mother, Mary Ann, who still lived at the House, was the daughter of Gerrard Andrewes, Dean of Canterbury from 1809 to 1825. Although John Baker played a few games for the Club in the early years and was the Treasurer in 1843, his career in the Church took him away from the district. He was ordained in 1839 and spent the years from 1843 until his death in 1880 as Vicar of Southill and Old Warden in Bedfordshire. It was thus his younger brother, William de Chair Baker, a mere eleven years old in 1835, who went on to become the leading figure in the Beverley Cricket Club – and indeed in Kent cricket – for nearly half a century. ^[5]

The precise motive for the Beverley's foundation is not known, but it probably amounted to little more than the enthusiasm of an undergraduate and his friends to play at home the game they enjoyed at school and university. Baker himself was not an outstanding cricketer. At Eton he did not play for the College team, but he may well have participated in games there, particularly with the 'Sixpenny', a club formed for Lower Boys by John George Boudier in about 1830. ^[6] In this period, games at schools were only casually organized, with the boys, rather than the masters, taking the initiative. This background makes it less surprising that Baker and his friends should arrange their own cricket when they left school. It may not be entirely a coincidence, too, that a cricket club had been formed at Chartham earlier in the year. ^[7] The connection is with Frederick Fagge, a younger son of the Rev. Sir John Fagge of Mystole, and the Chartham Club's first President. Fagge was a notable cricketer at Oxford University and had already played a match for a Kent side. He appeared frequently for the Beverley in its early years, was the Club's secretary in 1838, and was to marry the Bakers' sister Rose. ^[8] No doubt these three young men – and at twenty Fagge was the eldest – already knew each other well and had discussed the formation of cricket clubs.

The establishment of a club in Canterbury at this time was not particularly surprising, as the sport was rapidly growing in popularity throughout the country in the 1830s. Coincidentally, the Sporting Magazine commented directly on this in August 1835: "It is impossible to give even an epitome of the various Matches which have taken place in different parts of the country – they would alone occupy a moiety of our pages; it is only necessary, therefore, to add that the manly game has increased, is increasing, and ought to be encouraged, as a medium of social intercourse among neighbours, and as a mean of preserving the athletic sports of our ancestors in all their pristine excellence." ^[9] Rowland Bowen explains this development by arguing that "the need for a club arose when you wanted to organize a programme of home and away matches with other and more distant places and this did not become practicable until the railways arrived. ^[10] In Canterbury, the railway had arrived in 1830, but the local coach services may have been more significant for the cricketers. Even in the 1840s, the railway proved important in bringing the crowds to matches rather than in transporting the teams to fixtures ^[11] At all events, circumstances were particularly favourable for this new venture.

A photograph of the Beverley sign board, now at the Old Beverlie, St. Stephen's.

       Perhaps the best clue to the origins of the Club is to be found in the famous Beverley sign board. Now in the Old Beverlie Inn, it was apparently designed by the Baker brothers and Fagge in the early years of the Club. The two cricketers portrayed are obviously gentlemen, and are usually taken to be William (on the left) and John Baker. The 'coat of arms', which shows a tankard and a table with a bottle and glasses, quartered with bats, balls and stumps, emphasizes the relationship between cricket and conviviality (as do the crossed pipes above). In the background, the cathedral and city on the left and the Canterbury and Whitstable railway on the right point to the importance of Canterbury as a social centre in an age of rapidly improving transport. Finally, the Latin motto 'Nulli Secundus' is another reminder that cricket at this time was becoming a game for gentlemen – that is, for those who had received a classical education. ^[12]

             The opposition in the first two matches confirms this impression. Lord Sondes, another Old Etonian, was "the great patron of cricket in Kent at this time" and a well-known organizer of matches for the gentlemen of Kent. ^[13] In July 1835, for example, he had taken his Lees Court side to Hemsted House, Benenden, home of the West Kent M.P. Twisden Hodges, for a match involving players such as the Mynn brothers, the Wenmans and Fuller Pilch, and watched by "at least 6,000 spectators, including all the rank and fashion of the neighbourhood". ^[14] "Too much praise cannot be given his Lordship for his patronage to this manly and scientific game", gushed the Kent Herald ^[15] Sondes' family continued to be closely associated with Kent cricket – as landlords of the St. Lawrence ground and as Presidents of Kent C.C.C. – for the rest of the century. In both the social and cricketing senses, therefore, the Bakers' enterprise had started at the top.