The Hilversumsche Cricket Club was founded on June 1, 1883 and is celebrating 141 years. The Hilversumsche is as old as the Royal Dutch Cricket Association, who we helped establish. The Hilversumsche is also one of the rarities in our cricket world in the sense that the club does nothing but cricket and does not practice winter sports.
If there has been a club with ups and downs in its history, it’s the Hilversumsche. After a good start we dozed a point, but recovered led by Henri van Booven, the player who has put such a huge effort in Dutch cricket. In 1911 Hilversum again promoted to the first class and at that time had a superb venue with excellent pitch. How should the Hilversum members have feld when in 1915, the second year of World War I, the owner of the field, in connection with the increasing scarcity of food, decided to grow potatoes on the field. The field was plowed, with pitch and all. Hilversum has played together with the Stichtsche Cricket Club for some years and even ceased to exist from 1942 to 1954. Then it went back up and the club had an excellent period , with an promotion to the first class in 1982.
The Hilversumsche CC has shared the fields with the Hilversumsche Hockeyclub for decades,the fields which they owned, until the fields were expropriated for housing in 1967, including the club house with thatched roof at the Raaweg. From 1967 to the early nineties the club played at the hockey club Be Fair (now Spandersbosch) at Sportpark Crailo. After the arrival of the golf club, cricket was passed on to the korfball club just down the valley. With the coming of the largest wildlife crossing (Crailo) in the world in 2006, the cricket and golf club where again moved to the buffer zones on both sides of the wildlife crossing, for the Cricketclub a reunion with Spandersbosch.
In 2010, the municipality voted against its own policy, and aproved the construction of astroturf hockeyfields near the wildlife crossing, making a move to the Rugby Club Hilversum(Sportpark Berestein) necessary. Unfortunately sharing the rugby club house was not an option, so the Hilversumsche CC in 2014 arrived at HC & FC Victoria 1893. No coincidence, the Hilversumsche Cricket Club in 1918, has played a cricket season already once before at Victoria. The “C” in the name reminds us of this period.