The Staten Island Cricket and Baseball Club

Poring over musty old pages in the library is an adventure in search of the information you need, but it is also dangerously diverting, as the eye passes over headlines that seem infinitely more interesting than the ones you are looking for. Digitisation has made the possibilities for the unexpected even greater, since you can now find them while musing at your desk.

Such a diversion occurred last year when I was working through a microfiche at the Richmond Historical Village on Staten Island in New York. Reading the Staten Islander for 1886, I could have sworn I read the words "Staten Island Cricket Club". In the US? In the nineteenth century? The pursuit of the fate of the ill-fated United Labor Party disappeared, and off I went on a journey.

The British introduced cricket to North America in the early eighteenth century, and its popularity grew to the extent that an international match between the United States and Canada was held in New York in 1844. Twenty thousand people watched it, with considerable betting going on. English sides toured throughout the rest of the century on a commercial basis. Normally the American sides were allowed extra players, up to twice as many, to compensate for the difference in standards.

By the early twentieth century P. G. Wodehouse could write, in Psmith, Journalist, of "the cricket-playing section of the United States", and the 1917 John Barrymore film Raffles the Amateur Cracksman has the Staten Island cricket ground as its backdrop.

In the US? In the 19th century? The pursuit of the fate of the ill-fated United Labor Party disappeared and off I went on a journey.

There is still a Staten Island Cricket Club. It was founded in 1872 (though, it has been argued, even earlier) and was originally called the Staten Island Cricket and Baseball Club. The early members were migrant officers of the British armed forces. It has played cricket every year since, and the club believes it is the oldest continuous, though not the oldest, cricket club in the United States.

The original ground was at Camp Washington, near the island's St George ferry, and it is also where the club hosted the first tennis match held in the United States. Lawn tennis was "discovered" by Mary Ewing Outerbridge in Bermuda while on holiday. She brought a tennis kit, nets included, back to New York in 1874 and found a home for it on the Staten Island cricket club's grounds. In 1880 the club held "the tournament for the championship of America".

In 1886 the club moved a couple of miles to what is now Walker Park, where it remains. The original ground was redeveloped for major league baseball, but without success. The New York Metropolitans played there for a few years, and briefly the New York Giants, who now play in the National League as the San Francisco Giants.

The club, which had 500 members, had impressive facilities and served as a social club as much as a sporting one. Lacrosse, croquet, soccer and football were also played there. There were bars and restaurants, as well as a Ladies' Outdoor Amusements Club. Cricket was a sport for the wealthy; this was an area that still had fox hunting in the late nineteenth century.

As the century went on, however, baseball started to take over. Part of the problem was that while cricket was becoming more professional elsewhere in the world, in the United States it remained an amateur game for the well-off.

Among the touring teams hosted by the club were the Gentlemen of Ireland, various English teams including Dick Daft's XI, an Oxford and Cambridge side, the West Indies and the Australian Test team. Many famous cricketers have appeared there: in the nineteenth century W. G. Grace, Lord Hawke and Prince K. S. Ranjitsinhji; in the twentieth, Sir Donald Bradman, Sir Everton Weekes, Sir Garfield Sobers, Allan Border and a young Geoffrey Boycott.

In 1906 the name of the club was changed to the Staten Island Cricket and Tennis Club, and it changed again in 1931 to the Staten Island Cricket Club.

The late twentieth century saw attempts to revive cricket in the United States as a sport for the twenty-first. It was recently portrayed in Joseph O'Neill's novel Netherland, in which, after 9/11, a New York banker takes up cricket and starts playing at the Staten Island club.