About SNCC

SNCC are a friendly, social group of people who love cricket. We run two Saturday teams, one team on a Sunday, a junior side from an ever-increasing squad of Colts and, from 2014, a Ladies side. The Saturday senior teams play in Division 1 and Division 3 of the Surrey Downs League, whilst the Sunday side plays friendlies.

We have a 100+ strong colts section for junior players which is run by ECB qualified coaches. Our All Stars section (for 5 to 8 year olds) is the largest All Stars centre in centre.

We are always keen to welcome new families and members to the club, particularly from within the village but from any of the surrounding areas.

History

The early history of our Club remains a little uncertain. We have minute-books from 1905, but they are singularly lacking in detail. We have fixture cards from 1926, and dozens of score-books, mostly post-1945. There are a few press cuttings. For more colourful material we are dependent on stories which come down to us by word of mouth, and which gather richness with each retelling.

The Railway Museum at York has a poster announcing the opening of Nutfield Station in 1884. The village of South Nutfield grew suddenly out of almost nothing, masterminded by railway speculator and property developer, Sir Henry Edwards. With a keen sense of priorities, Sir Henry opened the Station Hotel in that same year. The church followed in 1888 and the cricket club in 1893. So our Club is almost as old as the village itself.

We should not suppose, of course, that there was no cricket in Nutfield before 1893. Nutfield claims the distinction of producing two great cricketers in days prior to this. William Lambert was the first man to score a century in both innings of a match at Lords. Our second star was William Martingell, born in 1818, the son of Nutfield’s shoemaker.

Sir Henry Edwards died in 1897. His estate passed ultimately to a Miss Mary Kate Baker, and it was she who gave us our present ground. According to the late Frank Bashford, she was persuaded into this act of generosity by Hubert Butler, a wine merchant who lived at Crab Hill House. The deed, dated 25th August 1903, transferred the ground to trustees, with the instruction that “they shall as they in their absolute discretion think fit permit the said parcel of ground to be used as a cricket field.”