Cricket

Cricket was played for a short time at Brown when Richard J. Chorley, who was educated at Oxford, was a member of the Geology Department. The cricket club he formed fielded a team of six seniors, four juniors, and a sophomore in 1957. The team, captained by Henry Thompson ’57, traveled to Harvard and Yale to take part in informal games governed by time limits and followed by cocktail parties. The game with Harvard ended at the approach of evening, with the Brown team ten wickets down and Harvard having batted only once. The short-lived cricket experiment ended with the departure of Chorley in 1957. An earlier brief encounter had taken place in 1862, when the Brown Paper announced, “We are glad to record the appearance among us of a new game ... Some advocates of ’Muscular Christianity’ ... have introduced Cricket into Brown. Every pleasant afternoon witnesses the watering of the Campus with perspiration ... We look forward to the day when the ’Brown Eleven’ shall go forth in all the glory of flannels and spiked shoes, ’conquering and to conquer.’ Our only objection to this otherwise excellent game is with regard to its heathenish nomenclature.”