A very English home run

It may seem as probable as a game of cricket in the Bronx, but the Cotswold town of Chipping Norton was once the unlikely home of British baseball, reveals Ben Lerwill

- Ben Lerwill

CHIPPING NORTON comes with preconceptions. This town in Oxfordshire is synonymous with a particular kind of Cotswolds lifestyle: it has an old tweed mill, a princely little theatre and a semi-mythical ‘set’ that includes everyone from Jeremy Clarkson and the Camerons to Blur’s Alex James. None of whom live in the town itself, but that’s beside the point. Chippy holds cachet.

It also holds surprises, one of which is more Uncle Sam than SamCam. In the early 20th century, the town became the British hub for baseball. This claim to fame that, in 1926, saw the town’s ‘brawny Oxfordshire youths’ beating a select group of London Americans in front of hundreds of fans at Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge stadium, meant home runs were being hit here until as late as the 1960s.

The arrival of baseball into the Cotswolds —a move akin to bowling spin in the Bronx— was largely down to one man. Fred Lewis was born in Market Street in the summer of 1879. The son of a builder, he constructed his own legacy by founding the Chipping Norton Scout Group in his late twenties. It was when he was looking for a suitable team sport for the group, in 1909, that Lewis stumbled across an old handbook describing what he considered the perfect egalitarian option.