THE LION AND THE LITTLE WONDER…
Parr and Wisden Share Our 200th Anniversary
The ‘Little Wonder’ and the ‘Lion of the North’ – two giants of the early Victorian age of cricket – share their 200th Anniversary with Nottingham cricket.
The Lion, George Parr, was born in Radcliffe on Trent in May 1826 and ‘Little Wonder’, John Wisden, was born in Brighton in September that year.
Both grew up as the county game was being established and widening its scope and both came to be very significant players, on and off the field. At one point, the two joined forces to own and run a cricket ground in Leamington Spa, demonstrating a commercial as well as a cricketing unity.
Like Parr, John Wisden was born into a cricketing family and one that was commercially-minded. His grandfather, Simon, was a blacksmith and his father, Thomas owned a brickyard in Hove.
One of Thomas’s employees was Frederick William Lillywhite – scion of another great cricket dynasty and the ‘Nonpareil’ of English bowlers. Hardly surprising, then, that John grew up immersed in the game.
The first public record of him as a cricketer is a handbill for an 1839 match between Eleven Youths of Lewes and Eleven of Brighton arranged by William Lilleywhite (John was barely thirteen).
A year later he appeared for Brighton Juniors and in 1845 made his First-Class debut, appearing for Sussex against Kent at Brighton. He took nine wickets in that match – 6-46 in Kent’s first innings – as Sussex won by three wickets.
It was as a bowler, right-hand fast underarm, that he initially made his mark and it was not until 1850 that he made the first of his two First-Class centuries, exactly 100, also against Kent. Five years later he made his second ton, 148 versus Yorkshire.
In all First-Class games, John Wisden made 4,140 runs at 14.12 and took 1,109 wickets at 10.32, with a ‘Nelson’ (111) of five-wicket hauls and 39 instances of ten or more in a match.
He took 10-58 for the All England XI (AEE), against XIV of Yorkshire at Sheffield in 1851, but his best bowling performance was for North v South (how a Sussex man came to be in the North side is not clear, possibly because of his links to Leamington) when he bowled all ten of the South’s second innings wickets.
As an occasional wicket keeper, he also took 169 catches and just a single stumping.
Despite his impressive (for that era) record as an all-rounder, it was as a cricket entrepreneur and editor that he really left his mark on the game.
John Wisden’s cricket life and career ran so close – in stats and timings – to that of George Parr that at one point he was even engaged to be married to Parr’s sister Annie; she died before the wedding and Wisden never married thereafter.
He and George Parr probably first met on a cricket field on opposing sides but we know they were team-mates in 1846 representing ‘England’ against Kent at Canterbury. Neither distinguished themselves – Parr made 3 and 0, Wisden 0 and 5 (though JW did take four wickets) – as Kent won by an innings and 3 runs.
This is thought to be John Wisden’s first appearance for an ‘England’ side – remember at this stage we are still thirty years away from the first Test Match – but a fortnight later he was opposing them, playing for Sussex at Brighton.
Wisden and George Parr were in the first ever overseas tour by a group of English cricketers – to Canada and the USA (unlikely as that might seem today) in 1859/60. The squad was made up of Wisden and four team-mates from the United England Eleven (UEE) plus Parr and five others from the AEE (Parr was captain). The full (and occasionally hair-raising) story of this tour is told in Fred Lilleywhite’s diary, a copy of which is in the Wynne-Thomas Library at Trent Bridge.
Parr was not in the side when John Wisden made his debut for William Clarke’s professional All England XI in 1847, top scoring with 45 and taking four wickets as the XVI of Yorkshire were soundly beaten; Parr’s debut had come a month earlier when he made exactly 100 – the first of many such centuries in ‘Odds’ matches – against XXII of Leicestershire at Leicester.
Both Parr, who was to succeed William Clarke as captain and secretary, and Wisden played most of their cricket in the 1840s and 50s for the AEE, UEE or other nomadic sides. Inter county matches were still few (in 1845, Nottinghamshire played just three First-Class games, Parr played five) but the All England XI were playing regularly across the country and almost always against weighted odds, meeting XXII (or similar) sides.
In his book on John Wisden, Stephen Baldwin says that: “By 1851, JW was playing almost all week, every week, for six months”. This sort of schedule inevitably led to clashes of allegiance; when Sussex met Nottinghamshire at Trent Bridge in 1848, JW, Tom Box and Jemmy Dean played for the visitors but the home side were without William Clarke, George Parr and Joseph Guy – all away playing for the AEE (the match was drawn).
Given the stresses of playing for AEE as well as his home county (and other scratch teams), it is unsurprising that in 1852, John Wisden joined with Jemmy Dean to become joint secretaries for a breakaway team that they called the United All England XI (UEE). William Clarke’s dictatorial style of leadership and his fiscal caution (to put it kindly) were prime factors in the split and until Clarke’s death in 1856, relations were strained between the two camps.
By the time of the schism, Parr and Wisden were already partners in the development of a cricket ground at Leamington Spa. The AEE played there in 1848 and contemporary reports were scathing about the state of the ground; Parr was then recruited by Leamington’s cricket enthusiasts to find and prepare a more suitable site, with the aim of staging a better class of cricket.
In 1849, he formed a partnership with John Wisden and in April Bell’s Life announced that: “…this fashionable watering place can now boast one of the finest cricket grounds in England…”
The first match took place there in July, between Leamington – strengthened by the inclusion of JW and George Armitage as professionals – and Worcestershire (Ombersley) Club. Parr did not play, being away with the AEE.
As the Parr and Wisden Ground became the focal point for local cricket, the pair established their own team, recruiting players from the many disparate Leamington teams.
Stephen Baldwin says, “Although Parr had been the one to initiate the project of developing the grounds and the teams to play on it, it was JW who throughout the partnership provided more of the day-to-day support”.
A view borne out by the sole remaining remnant of the ground – a plaque on the wall of The Cricketers Arms in Leamington that reads:
The partnership relinquished its lease on the ground in 1863, by which time Parr was captaining both the All England XI and the Nottinghamshire first team (when it played).
The following year, John Wisden retired from playing but his next move was to cement his name at the forefront of cricket lore. In 1864 he published the first edition of ‘Wisden Cricketers Almanack’, a publishing venture that has grown in scope and reputation and spawned a regular cricket magazine and the annual ‘Cricketer of the Year’ Awards.
In 1913, to celebrate the fiftieth edition of the famed yellow book, there was a special one-off ‘Cricketer of the Year’ – John Wisden himself. (George Parr, incidentally, never got the accolade as it started in 1889, 18 years after Parr’s last recorded match).
If John Wisden’s name is the better known in the 21st century, it was George Parr who bestrode the middle years of the 19th. As captain 
and secretary of the All England XI, captain of Nottinghamshire and a regular member of teams representing England, he, in the words of Peter Wynne-Thomas, ‘…effectively controlled professional cricket in the British Isles. The most powerful man in English cricket’ and he was ‘the only Nottinghamshire player of whom it could be justly claimed that he was in his day the Greatest Batsman in the World.’
His claim to that title is obviously a matter of opinion but the statistics do make a case. Between the decline of Fuller Pilch and the rise (and rise) of WG Grace, Parr was the most consistently successful batter.
His First-Class stats – 6,626 runs at 20.20 with one century, 130 against Surrey in 1859 – might seem meagre by modern standards but he was playing on poorer pitches and, until Grace, his record of 51 half-centuries exceeded most of his contemporaries. It was his consistency that earned him the nick-name of ‘The Lion of the North’.
It was also that case that First-Class cricket made up barely a third of his output; Parr played in more than 400 matches that archivists now call ‘Miscellaneous’, mainly for the AEE. The other teams he represented were many and various.
Present day traditionalists who decry the modern ‘white ball warrior’ touring the world in search of lucrative contracts would do well to look at the nomadic nature of cricketers like George Parr and John Wisden.
In addition to representing Notts, Parr played for three other counties (Surrey, Sussex and Kent), for fifteen other First-Class sides (albeit often one-offs) and a similar number of non-First-Class teams.
His thirty-plus teams pales in comparison to John Wisden; JW also played for other counties (Kent and Middlesex), for twelve other First-Class sides and more than thirty ‘Miscellaneous’ teams – over fifty different teams in all!
Though Parr played a lot of cricket away from his home county, he is firmly part of the legends at Trent Bridge. In his playing days, there was a majestic elm tree just inside the ground on the Bridgford Road side.
Over, through and round the tree, George Parr struck the cricket ball. His colleague, William Caffyn, wrote, “As a leg-hitter Parr will always be best known. His method was to reach out with the left leg straight down the wicket, bending the knee, and to sweep the ball round in a sort of half-circle.”
A branch of the tree was buried with George Parr in the cemetery at Radcliffe when he died in 1891. When the New Year gales of 1976 brought the great tree down, timber was used to make coffee tables to grace the Trent Bridge pavilion, a walking stick and memorial miniature cricket bats.
George Parr is an indelible part of Trent Bridge folklore and in this 200th Anniversary Year, we salute him and his contemporary John Wisden.
May 2026