Winston Benjamin had a season playing in the same league as my club and they could have had this field as you could hardly lay a bat on him…
At our place he started his run up near the pavilion steps
Benjamin originally burst on the scene in 1985 when he was given a Viv Richards scholarship to England in 1985. He played at Chester Boughton Hall Cricket Club in the highly rated Liverpool Competition and finished the season with 106 wickets at an average of 7.57, a best of 8-20 and five or more wickets on eleven occasions. Chester Boughton Hall finished the season as champions.
On 23 January 1795, during the War of the First Coalition between Revolutionary France and, well, everyone else, a Dutch fleet froze into place in a canal and was captured by a regiment of French Hussars.
In 1818, during the wars of South American independence, a combined republican army came across a small flotilla of Spanish gunboats in the Apure River. General José Antonio Páez personally led a company of cavalry charging directly into the river at the boats, frightening the Spanish sailors into abandoning their ships.
As discussed on Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast.
Apparently the first incident gets spread around on social media under the banner of The Only Time In History Cavalry Defeated a Navy!, but Duncan found the second story while researching the history of South American independence.
