Whalley

Whalley Cricket Club was probably formed about 1855, although the game was played some time before that in a field known as Sheep Hey on the north side of the village just off the Clitheroe Road. The club moved to its present premises in 1860, which soon became one of the best known grounds in Lancashire.

The club has no official record of its history but is fortunate to possess a number of committee minute books, the oldest of which begins with Annual General Meeting held at the Swan Hotel in March 1871. There are also three scorebooks in which are recorded matches between the All England XI and the 22 of Whalley in 1864, 1865 and 1866 and the first ever Roses Match in 1867.

Whalley Cricket Club flourished in the 1870's with an active secretary/treasurer in Rev. Sam Norwood, headmaster of the local grammar school. The number of fixtures gradually expan­ded from eight in 1872 to twenty-seven in 1879, including games in the Isle of Man and in Glasgow against the Western Club. The Club engaged its first professional from outside the area in 1878, choosing P. Murphy of Barnsley from 44 applicants who responded from all over the country to an advertisement in the Sporting Life. He took 9 wickets and hit 188 out of a total of 253 in an early season game but by June had been dismissed for absenting himself from duty without permission.

Whalley were founder members of the Ribblesdale League and have missed only one season, 1902, when the club was expelled for refusing to comply with a change in the rules. They were the dominant force in the league until the first World War, winning the championship nine times, including three times in succession 1909-11, for which they were presented with an illuminated scroll which still hangs in the pavilion. The most memorable championship was perhaps that of 1904 when the title was shared with Clitheroe after a tied play-off at Great Harwood. The successes were built on the slow left arm bowling of professional Jack Usher, the batting of James Peters Snr., who scored 50 against every club which ever played in the league except Blackburn Railway Clerks who had only one season in the league, and of J.H. Ramsbottom, League President from 1906 to 1956.

The present pavilion was built in 1923 and paid for in a most unusual way. Final costs greatly exceeded estimates and so, to raise the necessary funds, a week of social events culmina­ting in a monster bazaar was arranged. £2,100 was made, an astonishing sum at a time when the average weekly wage was below £5, and all the bills were well and truly paid for.

Prominent in this effort was the Green family, successive members of which were associated with the club for over a hundred years. The best known was Leonard Green who captained Lancashire to three County Championships in 1926-8 and returned to Whalley to help them to the Ribblesdale League championship in 1929, 1930 and again in 1945. In that season, like all others during the war, Whalley fielded an all ­amateur eleven - until the final game when Roly Jenkins of Worcestershire and later England was engaged and ensured victory with his leg breaks.

The post-war period was a quiet one for the club until fortunes were restored around the bowling combination of Jim Rudd and profes­sional Geoff Hall. The League and Cup double was achieved in 1971 under the captaincy of Alex Anderson. A little later the club embarked upon the bold policy, inspired by succeeding skipper John Slinger, of signing prominent profes­sionals, beginning with Ken Snellgrove straight from the Lancashire squad in 1975. He was followed at various intervals by Faroukh Engi­neer (Lancashire and India), Hugh Page (South Africa), Rick Darling (Australia) and Laxman Sivaramakrishnan (India). Although the league was won in 1976 and the Ramsbottom Cup in 1981, Darling and Sivarama in particular were hampered by soft wickets. Rick Darling set a League record of eight consecutive innings of over 50 runs but Sivarama, unfortunately, was not able to reproduce the form which had undermined England in India only months earlier. At Padiham, in the first match of the season where the sub-tropical conditions he had just left certainly did not prevail he fielded with the help of a pair of hastily purchased fisher­man's hand warmers. He never really seemed to recover and, despite great encouragement from the rest of the team and some occasional magic moments, he eventually left before the season ended.

It was the signing of a local cricketer as professional, Roger Watson of Church, which brought back success. The League was won by a wide margin in 1990 after the Ramsbottom Cup had been won the year previously in the most exciting and improbable finish in the trophy's history. Padiham required only two runs to win off the last seven balls with four wickets left but a superb run-out by skipper John Wharton and a magnificent last over by Brian Brown saw Whalley tie the match off the last ball and win the Cup by virtue of losing fewer wickets.