The Gipsy caravans have truly rolled along some strange byways this time around. Their nomadic path has included visits to Yorkshire, Northumberland, Scotland and more locally to the Cotswolds. As always the multi-coloured caravans are eventually parked up in Gloucestershire!
“Gentlemen, Gypsies and Jesters, The Wonderful World of Wandering Cricket” written by Anthony Gibson and Stephen Chalke was published 3 years ago. The Glos Gipsies (with an “i” and not a “y” as in the title!) were the very first club to be interviewed (the Secretary met up with the authors with all of the clubs records over a pub lunch in Bath), and Anthony Gibson used his piece on the Gipsies as a dummy run for all that followed. Please find below the opening paragraphs of Anthony Gibson’s historical Account:
The Gloucestershire Gipsies were surprisingly late arrivals to the ranks of the county-based wandering clubs. Lord Harris’ Band of Brothers down in Kent had been in existence for 63 years, by the time six ‘gentlemen’ gathered in the offices of the Bristol papermakers, ES and A Robinson (themselves a great cricketing family),in September 1921, and decided to form a County Amateur Cricket Club.
The Gipsies, as they became, were officially constituted at a first General Meeting the following January. Membership would be open to cricketers either born or resident in Gloucestershire - with one important condition: they should be the sort of men who might be regarded as “acceptable guests in the average country house”. If that sounds alarmingly snobbish to a modern ear, those responsible could at least point to the fact that most of their matches would be played on country house grounds, by way of justification.
But there can be no doubt that the Gipsies were very much a ‘county’ club, in every sense of the word. The Duke of Beaufort accepted an invitation to become their first President, supported by his fellow noble lords, Bathurst, Berkeley and Bledisloe among the Vice-Presidents. The club’s chosen colours were old gold and maroon, the same as those on the Gloucestershire coat of arms. And even as late as the 1960s, one poor chap had his membership application rejected on the grounds, first, that he had attended Cheltenham Grammar School, not Cheltenham College, and second, that he only had one initial!
The links with Cheltenham College have always been strong. Among the original list of members (published on the club’s excellent website, www.glosgipsiescc.co.uk there are at least five Cheltenham masters, whilst goodness knows how many Old Cheltonians must have turned out for the Gipsies over the years. On at least one occasion, it may have cost them more than they’d bargained for. In one season, in the early 1930s, the school Bursar agreed to the Gipsies’ use of the College ground only on condition that the debts owed by team members to the school tuck-shop from the previous year were settled!
This being Gloucestershire and the game being cricket, there is inevitably a Grace connection. “Grace, Dr. E.M., Park House, Thornbury” - the name fairly leaps out at one from that early list of members. It wasn’t of course, the famous ‘Coroner’, Edward Mills Grace, WG’s elder brother. He had died in 1910. But it was his son, Edgar Mervyn Grace, the first of the four children that the original EM had with his second wife, Annie, after fathering no fewer than 13 (or possibly 14) with his first wife, another Annie who, not surprisingly perhaps, had died in 1884 at the age of just 40. Edgar Grace’s younger brother N.V.Grace was also a member, as were two of his (Edgar’s) sons, G.F.Grace and yet another E.M, whose son Michael played for the Gipsies for many years in the 1960s and 70s.
All of the Gipsies’ scorebooks have been carefully preserved, and in the very first one, from 1922, you will find the name of K.S.Duleepsinhji - nephew of the great Ranji, who might even have rivalled his famous uncle’s cricketing exploits, had his career not been sadly cut short by illness. He was in the Cheltenham College side which the Gipsies took on in only their second ever match, and although he scored only 4, out of the College’s mammoth 378/6, he made ample amends with the ball, taking 7 wickets with his leg spin, as the Gipsies subsided to a heavy defeat.
Most of the Gipsies’ matches in those more spacious days were two day affairs, often on the country house grounds of which Gloucestershire enjoyed more than its fair share: houses like Badminton, Cirencester Park and Westonbirt, before it became a girls’ school. When the schoolmasters were released for their summer holidays, there was a veritable avalanche of fixtures - ten two day matches in August alone in one glorious summer. What fun it must have been. Good cricket, good company, no doubt lavish hospitality, and all in the most beautiful settings. Those golden days have mostly gone now, along with the country house cricket grounds, but the Gipsies do provide more than an echo of them, in their annual Cricket Week at Stowell Park, the home of their current President, Lord Vestey. Seven matches are played and the festivities reach a climax with the Annual Ball - Black Tie or Gipsy bow tie obligatory just like the old days......