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It’s anniversary day in the world of Olympic cricket. Raise a glass to the 12 plucky members of the France side that on August 20, 1900 collected the silver medal in the only Games that has yet held a cricket tournament.

Tournament may be laying it on a bit thick. Only four teams entered initially but both Belgium and the Netherlands dropped out leaving just France and England, otherwise known as Great Britain.

The French side, dressed up as a Paris XI, was drawn largely from ex-pat Brits from the Standard Athletic Club while the GB team was better known as the Devon & Somerset Wanderers, a side centred on Castle Cary CC who supplied five of the side.

They did, however, have the advantage of two players with experience of the county championship, both of them with Somerset, although no one should get too carried away by this.

Alfred Bowerman, from Broomfield near Taunton, played one match for Somerset in the summer of 1900 against Lancashire. His second and final game came five years later against Middlesex: in his four innings he scored a princely eight runs.

However, he did top score in the Olympics with 59 in Great Britain’s second innings.

The other  was Barnstaple-born Montagu Toller, who had played for WG Grace’s team in 1895 before turning out for Somerset in six matches during the 1897 season. Again, something of a failure with 77 runs and a top score of 17. Given that he was a quick bowler, it is odd that he bowled just once for his county, picking up a single wicket.

That didn’t prevent him from going off his full run in the two-day two-innings match at Vincennes Velodrome. He didn’t bowl in the first innings as FW Christian took seven wickets to dismiss France for 78. However, he opened in the second innings and took 7-9 as the French crumbled to 26 all out and a 158-run defeat.

All credit to J Braid, batting at no. 12, who wagged the tail in the first innings to make 25, the top-score in the match for any of the French batters.

It was comfortable enough for the GB side although reports suggests that the last wicket only fell late on the second day.

It was not initially marked down as part of the Olympic Games which was a sprawling summer-long affair, rather lost against the grandeur of the World’s Fair which ran from April 14 to November 12. It was only in 1912 that this titanic tussle was upgraded to ‘Olympic final’.

It seems silver medals and a statuette of the Eiffel Tower were given to the victors and bronze medals to the French.

No one knows quite what happened to those that travelled back to Castle Cary but the Standard Athletic Club in the leafy environs of Meudon, south of Paris, is the proud owner of the bronze medal awarded to their former member Arthur McEvoy, who took three wickets in the match and scored 1 and 0. Sadly, he was just 36 when he died in 1904.

Rather incredibly, the club purchased the medal on eBay in 2022 and it now resides in the clubhouse.

It is highly doubtful that France will be in Los Angeles to ‘defend’ their silver medal but as cricket steps back up on the Olympic podium after 128 years away, they can be proud of the part they played in the evolution of the great game.

Please raise a glass in their missionary memory.

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France v Great Britain, Velodrome de Vincennes, August 19-20, 1900

Great Britain: 117 (Frederick Cuming 38, CBK Beachcroft 23; W Anderson 4 wickets, WT Attrill 2 wickets) and 145/5 (Alfred Bowerman 59, CBK Beachcroft 53; F Roques 2 wickets)

France 78 (J Braid 25, R Horne 15; FW Christian 7 wickets, Alfred Powlesland two wickets) and 26 (W Anderson 8, J Braid 7; Montagu Toller 7-9, Alfred Powlesland 3-15)

Result: Great Britain won by 158 runs

+ Teams were 12-a-side

++ There was no toss

Full scorecard

@Barney Spender 2026