1876 Hong Kong Cricket Club

Mon, 09/22/2014 - 21:24

1876 Cricket at Hong Kong.

Buy this: the original print is available for purchase at the Brian Seed Fine Art website.  (Affiliate link - Gwulo receives a commission on your purchases at Brian Seed Fine Art.)

Date picture taken
26 Aug 1876

Comments

If you look at the far right edge of this 1886 photo (behind the 'm' of the watermark), you can see the old cricket pitch bordered the sea, and had trees around the edge. Then the building on the left of the pitch would have been the old City Hall.

It's not an exact match, but the engravings were typically made by people who had never actually seen the view they were engraving. Instead they worked from photos, sketches, and in some cases, just a verbal description of the scene! So there's often an element of artistic licence in the finished engraving.

Well spotted  David... behind your watermarked M.   From the information that I could find on the Cricket websites, was the HKCC Pavilion was finished in 1923, but they did have a small pavilion at an earlier date.  The image from the Graphic would have been done from a sketch, it is signed JM in the lower left corner, this is probably the Engraver. 

Long after the votaries of the noble game of cricket have finished their season in England, their brother enthusiasts in the distant colony of Hong-Kong awake from the long monotony of the hot summer, and once more pitch tents and wickets fo their season.  The ground is a very good one, situated between the Queen's Road and the sea.  The fact of its being separated from the road only by the slight paling which we have depicted in our sketch often leads to amusing incidents, especially when there are two regular "sloggers" at the wickets.  One gallant bluejacket, who is so near being capsized by the fears of his "leader", is seated in one of the chairs of the place, which do almost all the duty of hackney carriages in Europe.