Strathmore Cricket Union: the first 90 years a history 1928-2018

2 Soldiers were able therefore to leave their barracks to sample local ale and fraternise with local ladies, no doubt, but also to appear, for example, on places like the Inch at Perth with a bat and a ball to play a game of cricket. Locals were attracted to watch this entertaining game which differed from golf in that the ball was chased by people who were not batting, and as good relationships prospered between soldiers and civilians, it was only natural that the local young men would begin to wish to learn to play the game. It is otiose (yet a matter of great local pride) to argue which team was founded first. The game had always been strong in Perth, and Kelso in the Borders claim to have been the first in 1821 to play on a place called the Wooden Anna however an announcement in the Aberdeen Journal of 27th March 1798 states that ‘ The anniversary of the Aberdeen Cricket Club is to be held on Monday 2nd April ’, suggesting that the club was already reasonably well established. More locally, Rossie Priory also claim an early origin from the 1820s, but the picture remains patchy and obscure for several decades. Newspapers existed, but very few local areas had a reliable local newspaper to print a report of their games. So to a very large extent, we do not know the extent of local cricket. Rossie Priory is an excellent early example of “big house” cricket where the local Lairds would sponsor the game and even encourage betting on it. Richard S Young’s brilliant book “As The Willow Vanishes” has a detailed account of how this happened in the West of Scotland, in particular. The next boost to cricket comes in the 1850s. There were two reasons for this. One was another military one as Scottish soldiers returned from the Crimean War of 1854-1856 with a new knowledge and increasing interest of the game which they had learned from their English counterparts at places like Portsmouth and Aldershot rather than the less happy hours they spent at Balaclava and Sebastopol, but the other was the huge social phenomenon that swept Great Britain in the middle of the 19th Century. This was, of course, the railway system, which meant that, among other things, one could with far greater ease than ever before travel to other