The Beehive

Category: Entertainment

Meeting Point for the start of the walk
Well loved pub with decent food and good ales. It takes its name from the Beehive Tea Gardens and was adjacent to the Montpelier Cricket Club. On the 9th and 10th of August 1796, a cricket match took place here between a team of one-legged pensioners and a team of their one-armed counterparts. The two teams were drawn from among war veterans at the Greenwich Hospital, and the match between them was arranged by two "noble lords" who had a bet of 1000 guineas on the outcome. The one-legged Greenwich Pensioners (93 and 104) defeated their One Armed counterparts (41 and 53) by 103 runs. A note in Frederick Lillywhite's "Scores and Biographies" adds: "This match is inserted merely as a curiosity, and to show that such matches were played even at this early period. It afterwards came off at different times at the Beehive, Walworth, Kennington Oval, etc, but the scores are not inserted in this book because not of sufficient merit."