Richard Newland ( 11 September 1713 – February 1778) was an English cricketer of the mid-Georgian period who played for Slindon and Sussex under the patronage of Charles Lennox, 2nd Duke of Richmond. He also represented various England teams and, in some matches, led his own select team. The eldest of three cricketing brothers, he is generally recognised as one of cricket's greatest early players and has been called a pioneer of the sport.
Newland is cricket's earliest known left-handed batter. He is remembered as a great all-rounder who was proclaimed "The Champion" in a famous poem by James Love. Despite his fame, nothing is known of his bowling arm, style or pace except that he used an underarm action. The actual length of Newland's career is unknown and has been the subject of speculation by some writers, but there were 21 senior matches between 1743 and 1751 in which he definitely appeared: 14 eleven-a-side and seven under single wicket rules. In 1745, he made a score of 88 which is the highest individual innings on record until the 1760s.
Newland was an uncle of Richard Nyren, who became captain of Hambledon in the 1760s and 1770s. Newland is said to have been his nephew's mentor. In 1900, the historian F. S. Ashley-Cooper included Newland among his choice of four outstanding 18th-century players, along with John Frame, David Harris and John Small.
Family and background
Richard Newland was born in 1713 (the parish record reads, born and baptised September 11th 1713) at Slindon, Sussex. His parents were Richard Newland Sr of Slindon and Elizabeth Newland (née Hammond) of Eartham, Sussex. They married in 1704 and had ten children, five brothers and five sisters, all born in Slindon. Newland Sr was a yeoman farmer and Richard Jr became one too. Two of Newland's brothers, John (1717–1800/1804) and Adam (born 1719), also became well-known cricketers. One of the sisters, Susan, married Richard Nyren of Eartham and their eldest son Richard became the famous captain of Hambledon in the 1770s. It is said that Newland taught his nephew to play cricket. Susan and her husband were also the grandparents of John Nyren, who wrote The Cricketers of My Time.
Newland's history has been complicated by the existence of a namesake surgeon who became his brother-in-law after he, the cricketer, married the surgeon's sister Mary. The cricketer's dates have been confirmed as 1713–1778 and his surgeon brother-in-law's as 1718–1791. The dates and other details have sometimes been confused in cricket records. It follows that Richard Nyren had two uncles called Richard Newland.
The earliest recorded mention of the Newland brothers is in a letter dated 9 July 1741 from the Duchess of Richmond to her husband, Charles Lennox, 2nd Duke of Richmond. She mentions a conversation with John Newland about a Slindon versus East Dean match played a week earlier at Long Down, near Eartham. The first definite mention of Richard Newland in surviving sources is as captain of an England team playing against Kent in a single wicket three-a-side match at the Artillery Ground on 11 July 1743, when he was 29 or 30 years old.
According to David Underdown, an ancestor called John Newland was a steward in the local manor house at the end of the sixteenth century. The manor belonged to the Kempe family who were Roman Catholics and, in the seventeenth century, Jacobites; they even had a priest hole in the manor house. Richard Newland Sr was a churchwarden, a position of respectability in Georgian times which meant he was, as Underdown puts it, "a solid member of the village community". Despite this apparent respectability, Underdown points out that Slindon was, like most Sussex villages, a violent place with smuggling connections. The Slindon team included Edward Aburrow Sr (alias "Cuddy"), who played as a bowler and was the village tailor. He gained a reputation for smuggling, though it is more accurate to say that he was jailed in 1745 for bearing arms whilst landing "prohibited goods" at Elmer's Sluice on the Sussex coast. In 1749, Newland himself and his brother John were among a group of men indicted for assaulting one Griffith Hughes, though all were discharged, and this incident too may have been connected with smuggling.