1776 and a dramatic game of cricket at Tilbury Fort
A cricket match 250 years ago at the Tilbury Fort no Brother would ever wish to umpire
Three prominent Essex Freemasons, Frederick Leistikow, Sir Frederic Senier and Robert Honywood, were all devoted cricketers, and their shared expertise makes them ideal guides to one of the strangest sporting mysteries of the 18th century: a cricket match at Tilbury Fort in 1776 that may have ended in violence.
Frederick Leistikow, the fifteenth Provincial Grand Master, played for Felsted School and the Cambridge Crusaders, Sir Frederic Senier, the twelfth Provincial Grand Master, served more than forty years as President of Leigh‑on‑Sea Cricket Club. Robert Honywood, son of the fourth Provincial Grand Master, represented Oxford University in first‑class cricket between 1845 and 1847. Their enthusiasm for the game invites speculation about how they might have interpreted the extraordinary events reportedly witnessed at Tilbury Fort.
The fort itself, built between 1670 and 1684 to defend the Thames, has a colourful history: mutinies, Jacobite prisoners, mole and rat infestations, and even involvement in bringing down the Zeppelin L15 in 1916. Yet an 18th‑century newspaper claimed its only fatalities came not from war, but from cricket.
A letter published in the London Chronicle in October 1776 described a “great match at cricket” between Kent and Essex on the fort’s parade ground. When Kent fielded a player ‘who should not have been there’, likely a hired professional, common in the gambling‑fuelled world of Georgian cricket.
The Essex side refused to continue. Tempers flared. One Kent player allegedly seized a musket from an elderly garrison soldier and shot an Essex man dead. A melee followed in which the invalid soldier and the sergeant of the guard were also killed. The Essex team fled across the drawbridge; the Kent players escaped by boat.
Modern historians dismiss the story as implausible, noting the absence of records of such a match and doubting that ‘old invalids’ would be armed. Yet Georgian cricket was notoriously unruly, the parade ground was suitable for play, and the Royal Invalids were indeed an armed garrison unit.
If the report is true, Essex may have hosted one of cricket’s most dramatic encounters. One wonders what Frederick Leistikow, Sir Frederic Senier and Robert Honywood would have made of it.
Photos:
Top: Tilbury Fort, Essex, on the north bank of the River Thames October 17th 2018, © pxl.store/Shutterstock,
Botton Left: Sir Frederic Senier, President of the Leigh on Sea Cricket Club 1908 – 1951. Provincial Grand Master 1949-1951, Deputy PGM 1936 - 1949
Right: Coloured print showing a game of cricket at the Artillery Ground, London in 1743. The original was by Francis Hayman R.A.
