Victorian
For much of the nineteenth century, the sixteenth of June brought Leigh Green to life. The annual fair was a fixture of village life, an occasion when the green filled with stalls, visitors and, above all, cricket. Its end came in 1873, when the fair was formally abolished, and the story of how that happened is a revealing glimpse into the changing attitudes of the Victorian age.
The legal route to abolition had been opened two years earlier. The Fairs Act of 1871, introduced in Parliament by Samuel Morley, gave the Home Secretary the power to put an end to fairs that had outlived their usefulness. It was a significant piece of legislation, reflecting a widespread feeling that many old charter fairs had drifted from their original trading purpose into little more than occasions for disorder. Morley, who would later play a direct part in Leigh's own story, was both a Member of Parliament and, as it happened, the owner of the tolls of Leigh Fair.
Cricket had always been at the heart of the Leigh fair, and the local newspapers of the day recorded its matches with interest. The Maidstone Journal, reporting on 6 June 1826, told of a game played at that year's fair between the clubs of Lamberhurst and Leigh. The stakes were considerable: the winning side would take a prize of twenty pounds, a substantial sum for the time. Wickets were pitched at ten o'clock, and the match formed a centrepiece of the day's festivities.
Eight years later the tradition was still going strong. The Maidstone Gazette and Kentish Courier, in its edition of 24 June 1834, described a fair match between the Leigh and Edenbridge clubs. On that occasion the bowling duties fell to Duke and Woodhams, whose names survive only because the press thought the contest worth recording. These reports give us almost all we know of the fair's sporting life, but they confirm that the cricket was no casual afterthought. It was an established part of the proceedings, drawing teams from across the surrounding district to compete on the green.
By the early 1870s, however, the fair itself was fading. The Maidstone and Kentish Journal noted on 24 June 1872 that the event had dwindled to almost nothing. Even the cricket that year was a reduced affair, involving the workmen of Messrs Myers rather than the established village clubs of earlier decades. What had once been a lively annual gathering had become, in the eyes of many local people, a remnant best done away with.
The campaign to end it came in 1873, and it was led by the two men with the clearest interest in the matter. Samuel Morley, the MP who held the tolls, joined forces with John Maxted, Leigh's non-conformist minister, and together they applied to have the fair banned. The application was reported in the Tunbridge Wells Standard on 6 May of that year. The practical work was carried out by Mr Palmer, a solicitor of Tonbridge, who made the formal application to Tonbridge Petty Sessions. What he sought was the discontinuance of the fair on its traditional date of 16 June.
Support for the move was gathered locally. John Maxted collected signatures for a memorial, a petition demonstrating that respectable opinion in the parish favoured abolition. When the case came before the magistrates, evidence was heard from those who knew the fair at first hand. David Killick gave his view that the fair was unnecessary, while a witness named Sales spoke with the weight of long experience, having lived in the locality for twenty years. Their testimony evidently carried conviction: the magistrates agreed to represent the case to the Secretary of State, setting in train the formal process that the 1871 Act provided.
The outcome came quickly. The Maidstone and Kentish Advertiser reported success on 5 June 1873. The abolition order covered the whole parish of Leigh, within the Tonbridge Petty Sessional Division of Kent, and it bore the signature of H. A. Bruce, who was then Secretary of State for the Home Department. In accordance with the proper procedure, public notice of the abolition was given in the London Gazette, and with that the fair that had enlivened Leigh Green for generations passed into history.
Seen from the present day, the abolition of 1873 can look like a simple tidying away of an outworn custom. The evidence suggests it was more nuanced than that. The fair had genuinely declined by 1872, its crowds gone and its cricket reduced to a friendly among local workmen, so the magistrates were confirming a change that had already happened on the ground. Yet something of real character was lost with it. The reports of 1826 and 1834 describe a green alive with competition, where teams from Lamberhurst, Edenbridge and Leigh played for meaningful prizes before an appreciative crowd. That sporting tradition, at least, was a genuine part of the village's heritage, and its connection with the fair dates back to the earliest records we possess.
The account of the fair's end and its cricketing heyday was written by Joyce Field for the Parish Magazine, published in June 2026, and it remains the fullest telling of the story. It reminds us that the Victorian reformers who abolished the fair were not simply suppressing festivity; they were responding to an institution that had already lost its purpose. Still, for anyone standing on Leigh Green today, it is worth remembering that on the sixteenth of June each year, for much of a century, that ground rang with the sound of bat and ball, and that the village's summer day was once the sporting highlight of the local calendar.