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The Early Years

Cricket has been played on this beautiful ground for around 80 years. It has been enjoyed by guests invited by the owner, those who were originally working on the Cokenach Estate and the villagers of Barkway and the surrounding villages and towns.

In 1919, the ground was commissioned to be laid by the then owner of Cokenach Estate, Douglas Crossman. He was a member of MCC and used the services of the Lords groundsmen to prepare the square, to exactly the same size as the famous North London square, which originally provided ten playing strips.

Crossman, like many other ‘estate’ owners was a cricket fanatic and held invitation matches against other estate sides and ‘Gentlemen’s’ teams, including the Duke of Norfolk’s Xl.
Matches were played most Saturdays in the summer, but never on Sundays. The Estate employed a full time groundsman to look after the ground.


During the 1920’s & 30’s, there were three pitches in the parish of Barkway. They were Cokenach, Barkway village and one on the Newsells Estate across the road owned by Sir Humphrey de Trafford.

Eighty four year old Chris Byatt who worked on the Cokenach Estate, recalls that in the late 30’s and through the war years, Douglas Crossman hired the services of a professional cricketer, Cliff Smith of Middlesex, to coach the staff.

Training would take place two evenings per week and if you valued your job you did not miss training. There was no question of a match fee, you were there by invitation, so everything was supplied.


The team was captained by the Estate’s Land Agent Farnell Watson and the Estate Manager’s 10 year old son Fraser Field was the scorer.


Throughout the 1930’s the Ground was frequently used by Hertfordshire for their County matches.


The small pavilion on the Ground did not serve as changing rooms, players changed in one of the garden’s many outbuildings and then walked over a bridge which traversed the moat in the south-west corner of the garden. The pavilion served purely as somewhere to keep the kit, to hang your blazer and sit down to enjoy the teas provided by the head cook of Cokenach House.

During the war years, the Barkway village cricket club, and pitch, had fallen by the wayside. The cricket ground at Newsells Park had been turned over by the occupying Land Army, into vegetable production as part of the governments ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign. Shorn of his pitch, Sir Humphrey de Trafford had agreed with his neighbour Douglas Crossman to amalgamate all three teams and to play at Cokenach.

Douglas Crossman had suffered a number of family tragedies, his first son died in the Great War and his wife shortly after. Crossman re-married and had another son, Thomas. Fraser Field, recalls that ‘Tommy’ was being groomed to take over responsibility for the Estate and Fraser to take over from his father as Manager. Sadly, Thomas was killed in action towards the end of the second world war and it was generally accepted that Douglas Crossman died, quite suddenly in 1945 at the age of 70, of a broken heart.