Somerset County Cricket Club: Rise to First-Class Status

The Early Years of Somerset County Cricket Club

Somerset County Cricket Club was founded in 1875 but struggled to establish itself amongst the leading cricketing counties over the subsequent decade. For four seasons, from 1882 until 1885, the county side is considered by modern records to have been of first-class status, though contemporary publications were not unanimous in that classification.^[1]

Nonetheless, even those publications that had counted Somerset among the first-class counties agreed that the club no longer deserved it after 1885, due to a string of heavy losses and matches in which Somerset could not field a full team of eleven players.^[2][3]

Revitalization Under Henry Murray-Anderdon

Meetings were held at the club, and Henry Murray-Anderdon took over as secretary. Under his leadership, Somerset made significant improvements to their home ground, the County Ground, Taunton, until Murray-Anderdon was satisfied that "opponents will want to come here and play".^[4]

In addition to improving the ground, the secretary targeted university players to add talent to the team, such as the brothers Lionel and Richard Palairet, Vernon Hill, and Sammy Woods, and added two professional bowlers, George Nichols and Ted Tyler.^[5]

The Path to the County Championship

In 1890, Somerset played thirteen fixtures against other county sides, winning twelve and tying the other against Middlesex. Nichols and Tyler claimed over 200 wickets between them, and Somerset won the 'Second-class County Championship'.^[6]

In August 1890, the County Cricket Council, which was responsible for the classification of county sides at the time, kept Somerset among the second-class counties for 1891. At the council's annual general meeting in December of that year, Herbie Hewett, the club captain, and Thomas Spencer, the joint secretary, were among the voices which led the County Cricket Council to dissolve, allowing each county to arrange its fixtures.^[7][8]

Admission to the First-Class Ranks

The next day, a meeting of the county secretaries at Lord's unanimously voted for Somerset to be admitted to the first-class County Championship. Somerset scheduled a twelve-match fixture list, consisting of home-and-away fixtures against six of the eight other first-class counties:

• Gloucestershire
• Kent
• Lancashire
• Middlesex
• Surrey
• Yorkshire

During a subsequent gathering in Taunton, Spencer explained that the decision to restrict their fixture list to twelve matches—which meant they did not face either Nottinghamshire or Sussex—was primarily a financial decision.^[9] In their preview of the season, Cricket: A Weekly Record of the Game described this as "a sufficiently heavy task", which was "onerous enough to try thoroughly their capacity to maintain a place in the front rank".^[10]