Was Baseball First Played in Walton-on-Thames?

Long before baseball became America’s game, a newspaper report from a wet afternoon in Surrey put a future king on the record playing it. Walton-on-Thames holds one of the strongest documentary claims anywhere to an early game of baseball, discovered not by a historian working from local tradition, but by a researcher combing digitised newspaper archives on the other side of the Atlantic.

The 1749 record

The reference appears in The Whitehall Evening Post for 19 September 1749, in a short item that reads: “On Tuesday last, his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, and Lord Middlesex, played at Bass-Ball, at Walton in Surry; notwithstanding the weather was extreme bad, they continued playing several hours.” It is a plain, unremarkable piece of court gossip by eighteenth-century standards, the kind of item that would ordinarily have vanished into the archive unnoticed. Instead, it has become one of the earliest surviving documentary references to the game of baseball anywhere in the world.

Frederick, Prince of Wales

The Royal Highness in question was Frederick, Prince of Wales, son of King George II and father of the future George III, a prince who never lived to take the throne himself but who moved in the fashionable, sporting circles of Georgian high society. His playing companion, Lord Middlesex, was Charles Sackville, styled Earl of Middlesex, whose family owned Ashley Park in Walton in this period; the game is generally understood to have been played on the Ashley Park grounds themselves, the most plausible private ground in Walton available to a prince and an earl for an afternoon’s sport.

What “bass-ball” was

Eighteenth-century “bass-ball” was not the codified sport that would later develop in nineteenth-century America, but an earlier, looser bat-and-ball game played in England, related to the games that eventually evolved into both baseball and rounders. The Whitehall Evening Post item does not describe rules or equipment, only that the Prince and Lord Middlesex played for several hours despite bad weather, which at least confirms it was a game absorbing enough to hold two aristocratic players’ attention through a wet Surrey afternoon.

The evidence and its limits

The discovery was made in 2013 by the American baseball historian David Block, a researcher for the Society for American Baseball Research, while searching newspaper archives for early references to the game. It is a genuinely well-documented find: the newspaper issue itself survives in library collections in both the UK and the US, and the text is unambiguous about the date, the players and the location as “Walton in Surry.” The one point that rests on inference rather than direct statement is the precise venue within Walton, Ashley Park, which follows from the Sackville family’s ownership of the estate rather than from the newspaper item naming it directly.

It is worth placing the Walton reference in its proper company rather than overstating it in isolation. The earliest known mention of the game in print at all is a rhymed description of “base-ball” in the 1744 children’s book A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, six years before the Walton match; a separate diary entry by William Bray, dated Easter Monday, 31 March 1755, recording a game played near Guildford, is the earliest surviving manuscript reference. The Walton match sits between the two: not the first time the game was ever mentioned, but the earliest known record of a specific, named, dated game actually being played, at a specific location, by named players.

The blue plaque

On 7 July 2019, almost exactly two hundred and seventy years to the day after the match itself, a blue heritage plaque was unveiled at Walton Cricket Club in Ashley Park, on or near the site of the 1749 game. It reads: “The Prince of Wales played in the world’s first recorded game of baseball on 12th September 1749 here in Ashley Park.” The unveiling was jointly organised by BaseballSoftballUK, Walton Cricket Club, the Walton-on-Thames Trading Alliance and the British Plaque Trust’s chairman, Mike Read, giving the story a genuine, visitable landmark rather than leaving it as a piece of archive trivia. The plaque is visible from the road at the cricket ground on match days and beyond.

Why it matters

For a town more often associated with film studios and a Thames crossing, a credible claim to one of the oldest surviving written references to baseball is a genuine international curiosity, the kind of connection that reliably draws interest from baseball historians and enthusiasts in the United States who would otherwise have no reason to know Walton-on-Thames exists. It is also, in its own way, a fitting companion to the town’s Cowey Stakes tradition: another old, well-attested claim about something remarkable happening on this stretch of the Thames, treated honestly rather than oversold.