Peter Steward

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Home of the Lord

One of the great joys about cricket writing is coming up with something unexpected about your home country, state or county.

Often a whisper or a casual comment can send you off at a cricketing research tangent. Such is the case with Thomas Lord.

The name of Thomas Lord may not mean too much but of course Lord’s cricket ground is known throughout the world as the headquarters of cricket – not to mention the home of a rather unspectacular urn that seems to have some meaning in the sport!

So everyone’s heard of Lord’s but few know anything about the man who gave his name to the ground or are aware of the fact that there have been three Lord’s cricket grounds.

Thomas Lord was born in Thirsk, Yorkshire, in 1755 and died in Hampshire 77 years later. He was a competent cricketer, playing for the MCC and a variety of Hampshire sides. His first recorded game was on his own ground on the site of Dorset Square in London in 1787 when he played for Middlesex against Essex.

Lord’s father was a landowner who had his land sequestered for supporting the Jacobite uprising of 1745. As a result the family moved to Diss in Norfolk (hence the local connection to myself) where young Thomas was brought up before moving to London.

In 1787 Lord acquired seven acres of land off Dorset Square under the patronage of the Earl of Winchilsea and the Duke of Richmond. This became the first Lord’s and provided a home for the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) until its lease ran out in 1810.

Thomas Lord didn’t rest on his laurels, however, and obtained an 80 year lease on two fields in St John’s Wood with the first games being played there in 1809. Rather strangely Parliament cut short the lease of this ground by requisitioning the land for the Regent’s Canal which cut through “the cricket square.”

As so often happens a superb Phoenix rose from the ashes as Thomas moved to the present day ground in 1814. It wasn’t plain sailing, however, as the ground soon got into financial difficulties and the man who gave his name to one of the world’s great grounds obtained permission to develop the site for housing.

Fate took a hand as keen cricketer William Ward bought Thomas Lord out for £5,000 and ensured the future of cricket on the hallowed turf. Ward went on to become director of the Bank of England and a Member of Parliament. I wonder how close we were to having Lord’s renamed Ward’s

As for Thomas. He remained in St John’s Wood until 1830 when he retired to West Meon in Hampshire where he subsequently died. Today a village pub is named after him. He is buried in the same churchyard as Russian spy Guy Burgess.