From the moment Samuel Arthur Brain bought the old brewery on St Mary Street in 1882, the family’s story has been running alongside that of Glamorgan cricket.

What began as a brewing venture in Victorian Cardiff became one of the driving forces behind the creation and survival of Glamorgan County Cricket Club.

It starts with a business decision that turned into a cricketing turning point. After acquiring the brewery, Samuel Arthur Brain invited his two nephews, Jack and Sam, both talented cricketers with Gloucestershire and Oxford University, to come and help run the operation.

That invitation did more than strengthen the brewery. It physically brought one of the leading cricketers of the era into the heart of Cardiff’s sporting life. By the mid‑1880s, Jack Brain was no obscure club player dropping down a level; he was a star.

“Jack Brain had a fantastic record with Gloucestershire,” historian and Glamorgan 1^st XI scorer Andrew Hignell recounts.

“He had been tipped to be the great WG Grace’s successor as captain of Gloucestershire. He’d also been in the Oxford University team that beat the 1884 Australians.”

To have that calibre of cricketer suddenly based in Cardiff was transformative. At the same time, local grandees had been wrestling for years with the problem of how to create a county side for Glamorgan.

Since 1859, Sir John Dillwyn-Llewelyn had been trying to pull together a representative team that could one day join the English County Championship, but every attempt had fizzled out.

The missing ingredient, it turned out, was the Brains family.

By 1888, the economic mood was improving, and Jack Brains was settled in Cardiff, playing for Cardiff Cricket Club.

His mere presence gave fresh credibility and momentum to Llewelyn’s long-term vision, as Hignell explains:

“It was as much the presence of Jack Brain in the area in 1888 that led to the formation of Glamorgan on the 6th of July at the Angel Hotel.”

On that July day, Glamorgan County Cricket Club was formally born. Llewelyn took the chair, but the Brain influence was already baked into the club’s DNA. In a sense, the brewery had delivered Glamorgan its captain-in-waiting and its cricketing standard-bearer.

By 1891, Jack Brain was officially at the helm, taking over as Glamorgan captain and holding the role through to 1907.

Those sixteen years were foundational. Under his leadership, Glamorgan stepped up from a loose minor county outfit to a structured, ambitious club with a clear competitive pathway.

“During that time, it was through Jack Brain that Glamorgan entered the Minor County Championship in 1897 and actually became a better team,” Hignell adds.

“We were winners of the Minor County Championship in 1900.”

That progression – into the Minor Counties Championship in 1897, and then to the title in 1900 – was a sporting achievement, but also a statement of intent.

Glamorgan were no longer content simply to exist; they were pushing for status, recognition and eventually first‑class cricket.

At the same time, the Brains were helping Glamorgan think bigger than just league tables.

Together with his Conservative allies in South Wales, Jack drove an audacious bid to bring Test cricket to Cardiff for the 1905 England–Australia series.

Glamorgan narrowly lost the vote – by a single ballot, and on the casting vote of the MCC chairman – to Nottinghamshire’s Trent Bridge.

They fell agonisingly short, but the impression they made on the MCC was lasting.

The improvements to facilities, notably a new pavilion funded through Jack’s efforts, put Glamorgan on a far sounder footing and earned the club regular touring matches against international opposition, albeit under the banner of South Wales, combined with Monmouthshire.

Running through all of this were two guiding principles laid down in those early meetings:

“Glamorgan was set up, number one, to be Wales’s representative in the English County Championship, and number two, to bring international cricket to Wales,” Hignell says.

The Brain family were central to both ambitions. On the field, Jack’s runs, leadership and tactical innovation pushed Glamorgan forward.

Off it, the brewery connection seems to have offered both political and financial muscle, not to mention off‑season work for professionals who might otherwise have struggled to make ends meet.

“He was quite an innovator as well, and also, I’m guessing, helping to provide a little bit of winter employment for some of the professionals,” as Hignell puts it with a smile.

“And I’m sure that some of the thirsty fast bowlers, to actually get a job in a brewery must have been brilliant, an absolute dream!”

The symbolism ran even deeper. Glamorgan’s original club badge was effectively twinned with the brewery’s own.

“Glamorgan’s logo when we were formed in 1888, the logo was actually a mirror image of the Brains logo, the Brains Dragon logo.”

The daffodil would come later, in the mid‑1920s, but for the first generation of Glamorgan cricketers, the connection between county and brewery was visible every time they pulled on a county cap.

Jack’s story ended just as the modern world was about to be torn apart.

“Sadly, Jack Brain died the day before Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and started the First World War,” Hignell adds.

He did not live to see Glamorgan finally win first‑class status in 1921, nor that inaugural Championship match against Sussex at the Arms Park on 18 May 1921, which Glamorgan won.

But his fingerprints were all over it. The structural foundations, the ambition, the relationships with the MCC – they were built in his time.

Crucially, the family’s influence did not end with Jack. Sam Brain and other relatives remained significant supporters and players in the early 1920s, carrying on the connection between brewery and county.

Later generations would reappear in more modern guises, from playing roles to formal sponsorship in the early 2000s through the late Christopher Brain.

Chris Brain served as the President of Glamorgan County Cricket Club from 2005 until 2007, alongside his Chairmanship of Brains Brewery from 1989 to 2009.

During this time, Chris oversaw the move in 1999 from the company’s traditional site in Cardiff, off St. Mary Street, to the southern side of the Cardiff Central railway station and the site of the former Hancock’s brewery, thereby allowing the redevelopment of The Old Brewery into the hugely popular Brewery Quarter.

During his tenure with Brain’s, the company sponsored the Welsh rugby team, was the official beer of the Football Association of Wales and was a shirt sponsor of Cardiff City FC as well as Glamorgan.

Chris was the son of Michael Brain, who represented Glamorgan in 1930 and was the grandson of Sam Brain who played for the Welsh county from 1891 until 1907, besides playing for Oxford University and Gloucestershire.

Indeed, it was for the latter in 1893 that Sam Brain created a world record by completing a hat-trick of stumpings during the match against Somerset at Cheltenham College, with the wicketkeeper making dismissals from three successive dismissals from leg-spinner Charles Townsend.

The centenary of this unique feat was marked in 1993 by the creation of a special limited-edition beer called ‘Hat-Trick Ale’ by Brains.

Looking back across that first half‑century, Hignell is unequivocal about what the Brains meant to Glamorgan.

“Without the influence, both on the field and off the field, without the influence of the Brain family, Glamorgan would have folded, like the earlier teams which had been created by JTD Llewelyn in the late 19th century,” he asserts.

The brewery that anchored a family in Cardiff ended up anchoring a county cricket club as well.

In the formative years of Glamorgan cricket, the Brains did not just pour the pints – they supplied the captain, the vision, the money, the politics, the logo, and, when it really mattered, the staying power.

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