Catalogue for the auction of
Cricket, Football, Golf & Sporting Memorabilia
To be held on Friday, Saturday & Sunday
29th, 30th November & 1st December 2024
Lot 682
Estimate: £3000/5000
‘On the Tented Fields of the South 1882’. By The Childe (W.F. Buckland) Printed at the ‘Free Lance’ Office, Vulcan Lane, Auckland (New Zealand) 1883. 32pp, Report of a southern tour of the Auckland Representative Eleven with ‘pomes’ in prose and verse, descriptions and scores of the tour. Original light blue paper wrappers with titles in black to front cover, minor age toning otherwise in very good condition. A very rare and early New Zealand cricket publication
Not in Padwick. Franks 687. Rob Franks includes this as number five in his list of the thirty earliest New Zealand cricket publications. One earlier account of an Auckland tour to the south appeared eight years previously. W.F. Buckland, who took this team and acted as umpire had also been on the earlier tour. Franks identifies the author of this pamphlet as Buckland, but there is nothing in the text to confirm this. However, ‘Pavilion Echoes from the South,’ reporting the third Auckland tour, includes the following: “On board we met our boon companion Buckland, known as...‘the Childe’ of 1882.” It is printed in two columns as would be usual for a newspaper printer, and contains descriptions, poems and scores. The team played eight matches, travelling by boat to the south and then up the south island from Dunedin to Christchurch and then by boat again to Wellington, before again crossing the strait to Nelson. Of the eight matches they won seven, losing only to Canterbury. Previously sold by Chris Saunders Books who stated ‘Franks traced two other copies of this work, in the Libraries at Auckland and the National Library of Australia. This is the only copy likely to come on to the market, and as far as I am aware it has never appeared at auction or in a dealer’s catalogue in the UK’.