A Bat as Wide as the Wicket

On 23 September 1771, amidst the flint and flannel of Georgian Surrey, a bat was raised, not in triumph, but in challenge. It was wider than any before it, and it would change the game forever.

The incident came during a “Great Match” between Hambledon and Chertsey, played for high stakes and higher honour.

At the crease for Chertsey was Thomas"Daddy" White of Reigate, though some whispers still speak of “Shock” White of Brentford. Regardless of which White it was, the bat he brought with him stretched across the stumps like a gatepost, “fully as wide as the wicket itself”.

There was, at the time, no law forbidding it. Cricket was still nascent, its laws written more in gentlemen’s agreement than ink. Yet the Hambledon players, led by their fast-bowling talisman Thomas Brett, saw not innovation, but sacrilege.

Contemporary accounts speak of a bat seized mid-match, spirited away to a carpenter, or perhaps simply whittled down under duress.

Hambledon would win the match by a single run: 218 to Chertsey’s 217. But it was not the final score that endured.

Two days later, on 25 September, the Hambledon Club convened in serious mood. Brett, joined by captain Richard Nyren and batsman-batmaker John Small, drafted a motion that would become immortal; “In view of the performance of one White of Ryegate on September 23rd, that ffour and quarter inches shall be the breadth forthwith.”

And so it was, signed into the minutes, and eventually, into law. Though it would take three years for the rule to find its formal place in the Laws of Cricket, the line had been drawn. The bat’s width was set at 4.25 inches, and there it has remained for more than 250 years.

Brigands' own Guy Ladenburg has become the lastest player to sport a commemorative Broadhalfpenny Down bat. Only 10 were ever made, and all are four and quarter inches wide.