For my American and Mexican friends, “Howzat?” is what a bowler in a cricket match shouts to the umpire when the bowler believes that the batter is out.
When Jan and I were first married and living in Takoma Park, Maryland, we played tennis at a local high school. One day, we came across some bemused Americans watching West Indian men playing cricket. We explained to the Americans, as best we could, what these people were doing, but I suspect that they understood very little. Years later, in 2016, I was being driven around Houston by a young American colleague who asked me to explain the mysteries of cricket to him. This took some time, so we agreed to continue the conversation over dinner. Before we met at the restaurant, I searched the Internet and, to my surprise, discovered a Houston cricket league, mostly played by men of South Asian origin.
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| Sano International Cricket Ground |
Recently, in The Guardian I came across a town in Japan called Sano, about 90 miles northwest of Tokyo. Sano is well-known for its ramen restaurants, but also happens to be, since 1984, the location of the head office of the Japan Cricket Association (JCA). There are ten cricket associations in Japan from Hokkaido in the north to Kyushu in the south. According to the JCA website, there are 200 teams, 3,000 players and 15,000 participants (I am not sure what the distinction is between players and participants) in a country of 128 million people. Clearly, Japanese cricket is the very definition of a minority sport.
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| Cricket at the Yokohama Country and Athletic Club |
Cricket was first played in Japan in June 1863. A Royal Navy team played a team of British Yokohama residents, captained by a Scot, James Campbell Fraser. Some players wore revolvers as they played, while others kept firearms within easy reach. The British Chargé d’ Affaires had warned British residents that they would be attacked by samurai on 25 June, but since the British government would not indemnify traders against losses, the businessmen refused to leave, unlike their servants and Japanese inhabitants of Yokohama, all of whom fled. The Royal Navy put men ashore to protect British subjects, and since they and the businessmen had nothing to do, they agreed to play a cricket match. Apparently, the Navy team won, but no details of the score survive. And since no samurai attack materialized, peace and calm soon returned to Yokohama.
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| James Campbell Fraser |
The first cricket club in Japan, the Yokohama Cricket Club (now the Yokohama Country & Athletic Club) was founded in 1868. Ernest Price and a few other cricket enthusiasts met that year in the dining room of a Scottish tea merchant, James Pender Mollison (born in Glasgow in 1844, died in Kamakura in 1931), who had previously lived in Shanghai and played at the Shanghai Cricket Club. In the first match, Mollison opened the bowling and the batting – he was clearly an all-rounder.
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| J. P. Mollison |
Cricket came to Mexico long before a leather ball met the willow of a cricket bat in Yokohama. Cricket accompanied British commerce after Mexico’s independence in 1821 had ended Spanish monopoly trade policies. Businesses from the USA, Britain and other European nations hurried to Mexico to seek profit from mining, farming and other businesses. In 1827, the Mexico Union Cricket Club (MUCC: now the Mexico Cricket Club, or MCC) was established in Mexico City by British and other foreign merchants and diplomats. Two early members were the British brothers Daniel (joined 1828) and Lewis Price (joined 1835). Daniel and Lewis ran an import-export business in Mexico City and the Gulf Coast port city of Veracruz. In February 1838 the club met at an AGM where a committee was formed to revise the rules of Mexican cricket. The rules agreed were those of the Marylebone Cricket Club in London (recently revised in 1835 to permit a new over-arm bowling action), amended as required by local circumstances. The Marylebone club’s rules stipulated that an over consist of four balls (today it is six), but a Mexican over consisted of twelve. The Mexican rules also provided for teams of fewer than five (the standard number was eleven). Other rules specified the required attire. Since this included a hat, the Mexican rules a hat law: should a fielder stop a ball with his hat five runs would be added to the opposition’s score.
In 1827 the membership of the club was 27, a mix of merchants and diplomats, mostly British, but some German miners also joined. One member particularly infamous in Mexican history was the US Chargé d’Affaires, Joel Roberts Poinsett, who wielded the American big stick with vigour both against Mexico’s government and America’s commercial competitors, such as the British merchants with whom Poinsett played cricket on Sundays, substituting a bat for a big stick. By 1837 and 1838 the first Spanish names appeared in the membership list: R. González, J. M. Chávez, A. Tagle and T. Durán, perhaps the first Mexicans ever to play the game.
In 1864, a British traveller, Henry Bullock, described a game. The ground, in a village called Nápoles (now a neighbourhood of Mexico City), was a meadow ‘as hard as iron’ surrounded by cactus hedges. Nápoles was favoured by foreigners as a location for their country houses and estates, and was conveniently reached by tram. The players, a number of whom were over 60, assured Bullock that Mexico’s turbulent politics had never disturbed their cricket, even when shooting could be heard in the nearby hills. The best player that day was a Mexican, who had been educated at Bruce Castle School in Tottenham, north London. Bullock noted that while the ladies attended church, the men played cricket, supplied by a firm called Blackmore with beer, for ‘Cricket is nothing without beer’. The season ran from October to March, April to September being the rainy season.
At the time of Bullock’s visit, Mexico was an empire ruled by the Austrian Maximilian, imposed by Napoleon III. It seems that Maximilian (who came to a sticky end, executed by a Mexican firing squad in June 1867) was a cricket fan, since he appears in a photograph taken by a Belgian photographer, François Aubert, in 1865.
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| Aubert's photograph of Maximilian at the 1865 cricket match. Maximilian is said to be in the centre. I cannot identify him, however. |
In 1868, after the restoration of the Mexican government of President Benito Juárez, an English-language newspaper began publication in Mexico City. The Two Republics included reports of cricket matches of the MCC. They were still played on Sundays in Nápoles by two teams, the Blues and the Reds, which were rarely able to muster a full complement of eleven players. On 31 October the MCC played a combined team of Barron, Forbes & Co., the Railway Company and the Gas Company. Players were to take the 7am train from Calle San Bernardo and Calle Cadena. Play started at 9am sharp, to be interrupted by breakfast at 1pm, and stumps drawn at 4pm. The MCC lost the match by a substantial six wickets.
Two Mexicans played that day, a Mr. Mora and J. M Trigueros, the latter a member of a prominent sporting family, who scored 64 of his team’s 269 runs. Trigueros later founded the Victoria Cricket Club, whose members were, in part, Mexican students at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios (School of Arts and Trades), and some non-Mexicans. At this point, international politics brought cricket to a halt. Unable to reach agreement over foreign interference in Mexico, the British government terminated diplomatic relations in 1867. Many MCC members left the country, but the club was able to muster seven players for one last game to play Victoria’s ten. MCC won by 32 runs and ten wickets, but did not play again until the resumption of Mexican-British diplomatic relations in 1884.
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| Dining Room of the Reforma Athletic Club, 1920s? |
The revival of cricket was a consequence of the return of foreign business interests to Mexico under the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (a period known as the Porfiriato: 1876-1910) whose regime encouraged foreign investment. Soon there were clubs in Pachuca, a silver mining town where British miners had first arrived in 1824. Many were from Cornwall. They brought with them their pasty, still baked in Pachuca to a Mexican recipe. There was also another MCC: the Monterrey Cricket Club in northern Mexico. In 1887 a match between a Mexico City team and a Pachuca team ended with a win for Mexico City by 27 runs and eight wickets.
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| Reforma Athletic Club, 1920s? |
The three Pachuca teams joined together in 1895 to form the Pachuca Athletic Club, and clubs popped up in parts of Mexico that seemed most unlikely places for the extensive areas of grass required for cricket. In 1992 there was a club in Mérida, on the Yucatán peninsula. Even in the desert of Coahuila bat was heard to strike ball when a Scottish cattle rancher, David McKellar became the founding president of the Santa Rosa Athletic Club whose team was known as Los Rancheros. On 4 July Los Rancheros played a team of English railway workers from Ciudad Porfirio Díaz. McKellar’s team won by 65 runs, but his sporting career came to a violent end. Local Mexican ranchers objected to his fencing off his land and water sources. On 29 July they ambushed him and shot him dead.
Cricket flourished in the parts of the republic where British businesses were active. There were a number of teams in the capital: Mexico Cricket Club, Mexico Wanderers, British Club, United Railway Men, Read and Campbell Cricket Club, Pearson and Son, Mexico Gas and Electric Light Company, and a Canadian eleven. And the teachers of the English school in San Cristóbal, just outside the city, joined the workers of Pearson and Son, who were building a great canal to drain the Valley of Mexico to prevent regular flooding of the capital, to found the San Cristóbal British Cricket Club.
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| Pavilion of the Reforma Athletic Club, Avenida de la Reforma, Mexico City, c.1900 |
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| Cricket team of the Reforma Athletic Club, early 20th century? The only Mexican seems to be the figure at the far left. |
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| Thomas Phillips, founder of the Reforma Athletic Club |
However, the most prestigious cricket club in Mexico was established in Mexico City, when, on 16 March 1894 Thomas R. Phillips called a meeting to discuss the foundation of the Reforma Athletic Club to play lawn tennis, cricket and other sports. The club took its name from the location of its first sports round, on the Avenida de la Reforma, on the site now occupied by the Rufino Tamayo Museum. The club moved to two other sites, before settling at a location in Naucalpan some 14 kilometres northwest of downtown Mexico City. The Reforma’s website proudly notes that in 1896 the club formed the first national football team, whose players were: M. S. Turner, Robert J. Blackmore, Charles Blackmore, Claude M. Butlin, Ebenezer Johnson, Ted Bourchier, P.M. Bennett, C.D. Gibson, Vicente Etchegaray, Julio Lacaud, Robert Lock, and Phillips who was also the team’s trainer. Some of the team’s members also played for the Reforma’s cricket team, and it was the cricket players that organized the first sports league in Mexico in March 1900. The first football league kicked off later, in 1902, but proved to be much longer-lived. The cricket league ended in 1909, while the football competition is now Mexico’s professional league
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| Reforma Athletic Club Football Team, 1901 |
Claude Butlin, who had played football and cricket for the Reforma club, was one of Mexico’s most outstanding sportsmen. In addition to football, he played cricket, rugby, Basque pelota, golf, cycling and hockey. He scored Mexico’s first ever point in a Davis Cup tennis tournament. Butlin, born in Sri Lanka in 1872 or 1877, arrived in Mexico in 1890. He died in 1940, the proud owner of 450 trophies
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| Claude Butlin with his trophies |
Another significant figure in the history of Mexican cricket is Luis Amor, a Mexican sugar plantation owner, educated at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, who was captain and treasurer of the Mexico Cricket Club (MCC). His brothers Alejandro, Víctor and Pablo, also educated at Stonyhurst, played for the club. At the annual general meeting in December 1900 the MCC elected as Honorary President the Finance Minister, José Yves Limantour, one of the most powerful figures in the Mexican government. Clearly the Amor brothers had friends in high places.
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| Aerial view of the contemporary Reforma Athletic Club, Naucalpan, Estado de México |
The Reforma continues to be the leading cricket club in Mexico, although there are now teams in several cities. The Asociación de Cricket de México aims to have a club in every state in the republic and to make cricket the number one sport for girls (I assume that weaning boys off football is too great a challenge) by 2030. Judging by the names mentioned in match reports and the accompanying photos, the majority of players are of South Asian origin. However, there is a national women’s cricket team, whose captain is Caroline Owens, which suggests that Mexican girls may not be flocking to the sport.
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| Cricket match at the Reforma Athletic Club, possibly 1920s |
I have not yet discovered the precise Japanese or Spanish equivalent of Howzat?, but by studying reports of matches in Mexico I have picked up. Much of the basic vocabulary is English (hat trick, maiden over, over, wicket). Other terms are Mexicanizations of English terms: fildeador for fielder, portador de wicket for wicket keeper, abridor for opener. But a serious cricket fan might be rather shocked to learn that bowling is lanzamiento (throwing) and a slow bowler is a lanzador lento. [For my American and Mexican friends, a bowler must never throw a ball.] An ingenious invention is unir una sociedad (to form a partnership: literally to incorporate or consolidate a business partnership or corporation).
My best guess at Howzat? Is one of the following: cómo estuvo? (how was it?), or more colloquially in Mexican Spanish qué hubo?, or more colloquially still qui húbole? (roughly, what went on?). A phrase which would surely perplex a Mexican is the translation of the English “he was caught at deep square leg”: le agarró en la pierna cuadrada profunda. To the uninitiated this conjures up images of a player with a rather basic prosthetic leg being tackled rugby-style.
For a readable history of Mexican cricket see Craig White’s The Golden Age of Mexican Cricket:
https://www.playingpasts.co.uk/articles/team-sports/golden-age-of-mexican-cricket-part-1/
https://www.playingpasts.co.uk/articles/team-sports/golden-age-of-mexican-cricket-part-2/
See also Michael P. Costeloe, “To Bowl a Mexican Maiden Over: Cricket in Mexico, 1827-1900. Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 26, no. 1: 112-124; and William H. Beezley. Judas at the Jockey Club and Other Tales of Porfirian Mexico, Lincoln: Unversity of Nebraska Press, 18-19, 22
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