Page:The Hambledon Men (1907).djvu/148

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102
THE HAMBLEDON MEN

near Luggershall, in Wiltshire, Nyren (J. or R.) played for Mr. Assheton Smith against the Earl of Winchelsea, and made 2 and 2. For the Earl, Beldham made 30 and 22, and David Harris took ten wickets, including Nyren's. In the match England v. Hambledon, on Windmill Down, in September, 1787, J. Nyren (J. this time) made 3 and 1; and for Hampshire against Surrey, at Moulsey Hurst, in June, 1788, he made 3 and 9, and was bowled by Lumpy both times.

And here the name drops out of Lillywhite until 1801, when John was thirty-six and established in London in business. Thenceforward it occurs many times in important matches, until his last match in 1817. To these games I come later, merely remarking here that Nyren's new club was the Homerton Club, then the most famous next to the M.C.C. About 1812 it moved from Homerton to the new Lord's ground, amalgamating with the St. John's Wood Club, and afterwards with the M.C.C. itself.

John Nyren married in 1791, the year of Richard Nyren's departure from Hambledon. His bride, Miss Nyren writes, was 'Cleopha Copp, a wealthy girl not quite seventeen, of German parentage, highly educated, and wonderfully energetic. Three days after the birth of her first child, at Portsea, she got up and went downstairs to interpret for some French priests who had emigrated from France owing to the Revolution there being no one else who could speak to them in French. Her mother, Mrs. Copp, was a pioneer of work in the East End of London; she took a large house at West Ham at her own expense, and gave fifty young French female refugees employment in lace making, chiefly tambour work; employing a Jesuit priest to give them instruction two or three times a week.'

Until 1796 John Nyren, whose wife had provided him with a competency, lived at Portsea; in that year he moved to Bromley, in Middlesex; later to Battersea; then to Chelsea, where he had a house in Cheyne Walk; and finally to Bromley again, where he died.