Chilham Cricket Fantasy
In the National Library of Australia, Canberra, hangs a painting, said to show an Australian cricket team on their second test tour, playing at Chilham in August 1878 against “Mr Wilsher's Gentlemen”.
Reputedly by William Andrews Nesfield 1793 - 1881 a famous landscape gardener &, in his early years, a competent water-colourist, the quality of its execution is remarkable for a man aged 85 &, it should be noted, has been done in oil.
A copy can be found at the St Lawrence Cricket Ground in Canterbury, but anyone familiar with Chilham & its history can tell that this picture is not authentic.
Rather than showing the castle as it was in 1878, the painter copied an engraving by William Watts from “Seats of the Nobility & Gentry” showing the scene exactly as it had been in 1785 – including the trees growing beside the keep.
However the painter failed to notice that mid-wicket in 1878 was a huge holm oak, which by then was already a couple of generations old.
Even the shadow across the windows of the house in the 1785 engraving is reproduced with absolute precision in the painting, but evidently the Victorian painter was unaware of big changes to the building during the intervening century. Instead of the long service wing added in 1863 the painter shows us a small pinnacled Jacobean orangery which, by 1878, had vanished.
In the foreground is a crenellated wall, upon which are inscribed the names of all the players & the scores achieved by each team. Like the match depicted, these battlements, though perhaps roughly in line with the sunk wall or ha-ha bordering the park, are pure artistic fancy.
The owner of Chilham in 1878 was not, as is sometimes stated, Lord Harris of Belmont, but another great enthusiast for the game, Col. Charles Stewart Hardy. Hardy's cricket ground was not where the painter imagines, on the sloping crown of the park just south of the house, but far away in the lower park on level ground, where the Colonel had adapted an old pavilion built into the park wall.
Derek Carlaw of Canterbury has proved conclusively that the match never took place; copies of his report are available on request. By the publication of these notes & the report of Mr Carlaw's thoroughgoing research, we aim to debunk this fantasy scene & the persistent legends to which it has given rise.
© Michael H Peters 2008