He would have been 14 at the time but he told Pycroft that he overheard a remark by the Reverend Charles Powlett who said: "Here I have been thirty years raising our club, and are we to be beaten by a mere parish?" This statement suggests that the Hambledon Club was founded c.1750 but that is doubtful and David Underdown warns against "relying too much on Beldham's memory". Cricket career Beldham's recorded career spanned the 1782 to 1821 seasons and is one of the longest on record by a top-class player. The number of matches he played in cannot be computed because of missing or incomplete match scorecards but even a conservative estimate is well over 250; the CricketArchive database, for example, lists 224 but their list is limited to those matches from which they have a scorecard on the database and there are many more matches without scorecards in which he is known to have played. Using CricketArchive's 224 matches, Beldham scored 8,112 runs in these with a highest score of 144, and took 275 wickets with a best performance of seven in one innings. He held 406 catches and completed 52 stumpings. Farnham and Odiham (c.1782–c.1786) The earliest mention of Billy Beldham seems to be in a reference to two players called Beldum (sic) who represented Farnham Cricket Club in its earliest known match at Odiham on 13 August 1782. Farnham, who won, included J. Wells (probably James Wells), G. Beldum (almost certainly Beldham's elder brother George) and Beldum (no initial), who scored 1 and 16. If the latter was Billy Beldham, he would have been sixteen years old. In October 1782, there was a Beldham (unspecified) in the Odiham team for two matches against Berkshire, and again in May the following year against Maidenhead. No Farnham matches are recorded in 1783, and only one in 1784. That was against Odiham & Alton at the Holt Pound Oval, in which both Billy & George played. This was a new ground in 1784. The Beldhams were commissioned to lay out the pitch by local landowner Lord Stawell (1757–1820), who was a Hambledon Club member and a Farnham player. The match against Odiham & Alton was arranged for 30 July 1784, following a postponement because of bad weather. The teams are known but not the result. The Farnham team included Stawell and the Beldham brothers. A return match was arranged