Marsh Ground

Beyond Lambeth Fields lies a meadow that was marsh once and has been drained and levelled, with a long timber stand down one side, and London calls it simply the Marsh Ground. It is the great rugby pitch of the capital. Through the winter season it is the home of the Candlemas Club, whose members are the gentlemen of Westminster's Rise. A penny buys standing room along the rope, a seat on the covered benches costs a shilling, and on match afternoons every boat from Temple Stairs crosses full until dusk.

Its greatest day is the December Match, Oxford against Cambridge, played in the month's second week before some twenty thousand people and a good share of the Houses. Each university chooses its fifteen from among its colleges' sides, and a man who has played in the match carries the name for life in whatever calling he follows. The steward is the Reverend Lucius Wybergh, rector of a Lambeth parish and an Oxford forward in his youth, whose rulings are briefer than his sermons and more listened to; twice he has sent back a bribe of a hundred pounds under seal. This winter, his tenth in the office, both captains are hurt, Oxford's with a turned knee and Cambridge's with a broken collarbone, the London books call the game even, and Wybergh says only that he will count the men on the field.

The ground is not open to everybody. The Mudgate Rivermen, lightermen and stair hands and the side every London boy dreams of, play wherever there is room to be had, and for nine seasons their captain Jem Blackaby has asked to meet the Candlemas Club here and been refused, the Club holding that it does not play tradesmen. The river still tells how its great forward Jem Wharram was once carried off this turf and came walking back onto it while the crowd were still groaning for him.

The money follows the play. Most of London's is laid at the Leaping Hare, at the Fields' Lambeth end, where Mr Ezekiel Bastin keeps his book in the back parlour, while gentlemen write theirs into the Candlemas Club's own betting book. On December Match day David Ashdown marches his whole Society out to the ground at his own expense and puts his money on Oxford whatever anyone tells him, and the walk home across the Fields afterwards is loud, crowded and not always peaceable.