Cricket Balls and the Duke Family
LEIGH HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Cricket Balls and the Duke Family
There should be no doubt about the origin of the Duke cricket ball; it was in Leigh, in 1760. In fact, the Duke family sometimes claimed that they came from the well-known village of Penshurst. However, for eighty years, the balls were made in a wooden boarded outhouse at Paddocks, on the Leigh side of the parish boundary between Leigh and Penshurst at Redleaf.
Duke cricket balls were so good that they were given a Royal Patent in 1775. Manufacture at Redleaf continued until 1841 when a new factory opened in Chiddingstone Causeway, ready for the opening of the railway station the next year. For business reasons, the Duke family extended their activities in 1848 to include the manufacture of bats, stumps and other cricket equipment. In 1920, Dukes merged with Wisden and production at the Causeway factory continued until the mid-twentieth century. In 1962, five cricket ball making firms from the Tonbridge area came together to form Tonbridge Sports Industries with manufacturing still at the Causeway. Since 1987, Duke balls have been produced by British Cricket Balls Ltd. Duke balls are also made overseas from English hides and finished in the UK.
The Dukes provided an important source of employment in and around Leigh. In 1851, the business may have had over twenty employees including thirteen ballmakers and one apprentice resident in Leigh itself. In 1881, two hundred and fifty people in Kent earned a living making cricket related goods, with a hundred and twenty-five in Tonbridge, Leigh and Chiddingstone Causeway. Of these, thirty actually lived in Leigh. Mr Duke employed ‘seventy-two men and one boy’. Most would have been ball makers. Children were leaving school at 10 or 11 years and there were two fully qualified ball makers aged 13 and 14 years respectively in 1881.
Were the Dukes good employers? It is difficult to say. Certainly, in some families sons followed fathers into the trade. And, while it was a job for life for some, it was not for everyone. Some people moved in and out of cricket ball making. William Henry Duke managed the firm from sometime in the 1890s until his death in 1913. But on his 51st birthday, he celebrated with a dinner for 160 employees in ‘the Iron Room’ in Leigh (now replaced by Jessica’s Hall). That industrial relations were not always good is evidenced by strikes between the Wars and even after the last War. Interestingly, while the in-house ball makers were strongly unionised, the bat makers and the out-worker ball makers were not, they stayed at work.
A photograph, dated 1899 shows William Henry Duke alongside Ike Ingram as members of the Leigh Cricket Club. Ike was a cricket ball maker working for Dukes and was involved in making a set of six balls sent to a Melbourne Exhibition where they won first prize. One ball was given to Ike to commemorate his batting success for Leigh and Chiddingstone teams in 1882. Ike also played for Kent, batting and keeping wicket. He scored one century for the county but also played in a match between ‘13 of Kent’ against an ‘All England’ team including W G Grace. (Both had an off-day).
One of the Duke family, Timothy was a prominent cricketer, playing for Kent and England in the late eighteenth century. His son, also named Timothy and described as a cricket ball maker, was the first of the family to be buried in Leigh. Thereafter, three generations of the family were buried against the wooden fence at the west end of the old churchyard, although three of the headstones say they were ‘of Penshurst’.
John Stevens
[Further information on the Leigh Historical Society website; in “We Had Everything . . .” by Chris Rowley pages 314-319 and the book on Leigh Cricket by Nigel Shaw.]