Page:Jubilee Book of Cricket (Second edition, 1897).djvu/352

ing directly of the whole university, resident and non-resident—a privileged position from which it could be dislodged by nothing but another decree of the whole university in Convocation.

This was not the only advantage to the O.U.C.C. They had now a ground close at hand. They had lo acres of cricketground in the middle of the Parks, containing a match-ground, with a practice-ground always available. Had they waited much longer they would not have got so much, because planting, football which has immensely increased since 1881, and other interests, would have been too strong. They had what is wanted for the early Oxford season—a hard, fast ground, much more fitted to prepare them for Lord's. They had a pavilion worthy of the club, exactly behind the wicket as at Lord's, and exactly at the same distance from the wickets as at Lord's. This was one advantage which I obtained with great difficulty, in opposition to those who wanted to put the pavilion in every corner of the ground, and everywhere but where every cricketer wants to see the match, and in opposition to those who wished to have it farther behind, in which case much fewer spectators would have cared to sit in it. The club had further the financial success of the step, an advantage which proves all the rest. The club had incurred an expense of about £1000, besides;£100 a-year additional rent. Yet such was the improvement in the finances that the whole thing was done without that most odious of all things, sending the hat round for subscriptions.

Perhaps the best way of showing this new prosperity of the club is to quote the Preface to the Accounts from 1879 to 1882, premising that in 1879-80 we were on the Magdalen, and in 1881-82 on the Parks. It is as follows:—

The accounts of the O.U.C.C. from 1879 to 1882 have been printed together, because a comparison of these four years exhibits the whole financial history of the removal of the club from the Magdalen ground to the University Park. The university paid for laying down the Park ground, and voted £2000 to build the pavilion. But this university expenditure was not of the nature of a grant; it was an outlay of capital, subject to rent. The club pays a rent of £30 for the use of ten acres of ground to the curators of the Park, and another rent of £100 to the curators of the chest for the capital expended on laying down the ground and building the pavilion. Further, the club itself spent, from 1880 to 1882, £164, 3s. 5d. on the improvement of the ground; and in 1881 added an extra expenditure of £835, 5s. to the £2000 expended by the university on the pavilion, which has therefore cost on the whole £2835, 5s. Again, since 1882 the club has rented from the curators of the Park the pasturage of thirty additional acres, together with the