MCC began because gentlemen cricketers were tired of being heckled
In the 1780s London's aristocratic cricketers played on open fields in Islington, where the public wandered in and shouted opinions about the play. The gentlemen were not amused. Two of them asked Thomas Lord, a wine merchant and hired bowler, to find a private enclosed ground. The club that moved there became the Marylebone Cricket Club.
The players belonged to the White Conduit Club, itself an offshoot of an older gentlemen's drinking and social club. Their leaders, the Earl of Winchilsea and Colonel Charles Lennox, promised to cover any losses if Lord took the gamble. He leased land from the Portman Estate at Dorset Fields in Marylebone, and the first match on the New Cricket Ground was advertised for 21 May 1787, noblemen against Middlesex gentlemen for 500 guineas a side. By late July the ground was already called Lord's, and the relocated members renamed themselves the Mary-le-bone Club.
Nobody knows the club's exact founding date; even the Victorian cricket historian Arthur Haygarth could not find it. The earliest notice of the Marylebone Club is a newspaper advert for a game against the Islington Club on 30 July 1787. The ground itself moved twice. In 1810 Lord objected to a rent rise and simply dug up his turf and took it with him, and by 1814 the club had settled at St John's Wood, where Lord's remains.
The club's influence far outgrew its origins. From 1788 it took charge of the Laws of Cricket, publishing a revised code that year, and it acted as the sport's governing body until 1909. Even after the International Cricket Council was set up, the MCC secretary ran it for eighty years with the club's president in the chair. MCC organised England's overseas Test tours from 1903 to 1977.
In 1993 it handed global governance to the ICC and domestic administration to another body, though it still holds copyright on the Laws. Today it fields ad hoc teams from roughly 2,000 playing members, and Lord's is marketed as the Home of Cricket.
Source: Marylebone Cricket Club
