More Than A Game: The Story of Cricket's Early Years

MORE THAN A GAME

The Story of Cricket’s Early Years

JOHN MAJOR

To Norma, Elizabeth, James and Luke

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

1 The Lost Century of Cricket

2 The Early Patrons

3 The Later Patrons

4 The Men Who Made Cricket

5 Cricket Spreads: Early Roots

6 The Round-Arm Rebellion

7 The Mandarins of Lord’s

8 The Rise and Fall of Single-Wicket

9 The Missionary and the Mercenaries

10 Wider Still and Wider: Cricket Goes Abroad

11 The Birth of the Ashes

12 The Boom in Leisure: Competition for Cricket

13 The Cricketers and the Counties

14 The Chroniclers and the Scribes

15 The Autocrats

16 The Grand Old Man and the Backroom Boy

17 Your English Summer’s Done

AFTERWORD

APPENDIX 1: ‘Articles of Agreement by & between His Grace the Duke of Richmond and Mr. Brodrick (for two Cricket Matches) concluded the Eleventh of July 1727’

APPENDIX 2: Rules of the White Conduit Club

APPENDIX 3: ‘Laws for Single Wicket’ (1831)

APPENDIX 4: Important Single-Wicket Matches 1800–1848

APPENDIX 5: W.J. Prowse, ‘In Memoriam, Alfred Mynn 1807–1861’

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INDEX

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Illustrations

Charles Lennox, second Duke of Richmond, a keen gambler with a lifelong love of cricket. Mezzotint by John Faber Jr, after John Vanderbank. (Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, London)

Sir William Gage, whose estate Firle in East Sussex was one of the cradles of eighteenth-century cricket. (Courtesy of the Firle Estate Trustees)

Cricket being played in 1743 at the Artillery Ground in Finsbury, London. (The Roger Mann Collection)

Lionel Sackville, first Duke of Dorset, one of the great early patrons of the game. Portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1717. (Private Collection, © NTPL/John Hammond)

Charles Sackville, second Duke of Dorset. Portrait by Rosalba Carriera. (Private Collection, © NTPL/John Hammond)

Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, an enthusiastic early patron of cricket. Portrait miniature by Gaetano Manini, 1755. (© Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford/The Bridgeman Art Library)

The Duke of Cumberland, a better judge of a soldier than a cricketer. Portrait by David Morier. (© Private Collection/Philip Mould Ltd/The Bridgeman Art Library)

A match at Moulsey Hurst, on the banks of the river Mole in Surrey. (The Roger Mann Collection)

‘Lumpy’ Stevens, the most deadly underarm bowler of his day. (The Roger Mann Collection)

Sir Horace Mann, the most amiable of cricket’s early benefactors. (The Roger Mann Collection)

John Frederick Sackville, third Duke of Dorset, the third in a line of great cricketing patrons. Portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1769. (Private Collection, © NTPL/John Hammond)

The Countess of Derby plays cricket with other ladies at The Oaks, in Surrey, in 1779. (The Roger Mann Collection)

John Nyren, whose memories of Hambledon have given us a vivid picture of early cricket. (The Roger Mann Collection)

An eighteenth-century cricket match, possibly at Hambledon. (The Roger Mann Collection)

A page from a sketchbook by George Shepheard, showing some of the Hambledon cricketers. (The Roger Mann Collection)

The Bat and Ball Inn on Broadhalfpenny Down, Hambledon. (The Roger Mann Collection)

‘Silver Billy’ Beldam joined the Hambledon club in 1785, and lifted the art of batting to a new level of style and elegance. (The Roger Mann Collection)

Lord Winchilsea, a key founder of the MCC who encouraged Thomas Lord to acquire its first ground. (The Roger Mann Collection)

Cricket Played by the Gentlemen’s Club, White Conduit House, Islington in 1784. (The Roger Mann Collection)

An engraving, after Thomas Rowlandson, depicting a match between the ladies of Hampshire and Surrey at Newington in 1811. (The Roger Mann Collection)

The canny Yorkshireman Thomas Lord, who left the world’s most famous cricket ground as his memorial. (The Roger Mann Collection)

William Ward, a central figure in securing Lord’s place as the headquarters of cricket. (The Roger Mann Collection)

Benjamin Aislabie, first Secretary of the MCC. (The Roger Mann Collection)

Lord Frederick Beauclerk: avaricious, ill-tempered, hypocritical, and adept at bending the rules. (The Roger Mann Collection)

Fuller Pilch, the finest batsman of his day, and ‘single-wicket champion of England’. (The Roger Mann Collection)

John Wisden, the founder of the Almanack and a fast round-arm bowler. (The Roger Mann Collection)

The Scorer, by Thomas Henwood (1842). (The Roger Mann Collection)

Alfred Mynn and Nicholas Felix before their famous single-wicket contest in 1846 for the title ‘champion of England’. (The Roger Mann Collection)

William Clarke, the finest underarm bowler of them all, and the founder of Trent Bridge cricket ground. (The Roger Mann Collection)

Clarke’s All-England Eleven of 1847. (The Roger Mann Collection) The All-England Eleven on the move in 1851, by Nicholas Felix. (The Roger Mann Collection)

George Parr, who succeeded Clarke as leader of Nottinghamshire and the All-England Eleven. (The Roger Mann Collection)

The first English overseas touring team. George Parr’s men gather on deck before their 1859 voyage to North America. (The Roger Mann Collection)

H.H. Stephenson’s English team arrives in Melbourne on Christmas Eve 1861. (The Roger Mann Collection)

Tom Hayward and Robert Carpenter, two fine Cambridgeshire batsmen of the 1860s. (The Roger Mann Collection)

Arthur Haygarth, whose Cricket Scores and Biographies is the bedrock of our knowledge of the years 1744 to 1878. (The Roger Mann Collection)

The 1880 Australians, the first visitors to play a Test match in England. (The Roger Mann Collection)

Charles Alcock, whose immense backstage contribution to cricket warrants a higher place in the mythology of the game than history has yet given him. (The Roger Mann Collection)

Alfred Shaw, who bowled the first over in Test cricket. (The Roger Mann Collection)

Edward Mills Grace, W.G.’s elder brother and one of the most formidable cricketers of his day. (The Roger Mann Collection)

W.G. Grace poses with Harry Jupp of Surrey. (The Roger Mann Collection)

Three of the remarkable Studd brothers, two of whom played Test cricket for England. (The Roger Mann Collection)

‘The Demon’ – Frederick Spofforth, the first of the great Australian bowlers. (The Roger Mann Collection)

The Hon. Ivo Bligh led the English team which recovered the Ashes in Australia in 1882–83. (The Roger Mann Collection)

Lord Harris batting at Lord’s for the Lords and Commons Eleven against the touring Canadians in 1922. (The Roger Mann Collection)

The Ideal Cricket Match, by Sir Robert Ponsonby Staples (1887). (The Roger Mann Collection)

A.S. Wortley’s portrait of W.G. Grace. (The Roger Mann Collection)

The Surrey batsman W. E. Roller on his way to bat at The Oval, painted by his brother George in 1883. (Reproduced by kind permission of Surrey County Cricket Club. © The Oval Cricket Ground/Wingfield Sporting Gallery/The Bridgeman Art Library)

The noted stonewaller William Scotton. (The Roger Mann Collection)

The formidable Lord Hawke, while captain of Yorkshire. (The Roger Mann Collection)

Arthur Shrewsbury, one of the greatest batsmen in Victorian England. (The Roger Mann Collection)

Gentlemen vs Players at Lord’s (1895). (The Roger Mann Collection)

Albert Trott, the only man to have hit a ball over the pavilion at Lord’s. (The Roger Mann Collection)

Ranjitsinhji enchanted spectators with his wristy technique, and his torrent of runs for Sussex and England. (The Roger Mann Collection)

Stanley Jackson, the first man to score five centuries against Australia in England. (The Roger Mann Collection)

The mightiest of all of cricket’s great entertainers, Gilbert ‘the Croucher’ Jessop. (The Roger Mann Collection)

Victor Trumper: the majesty of his batting left spectators awe-struck. (The Roger Mann Collection)

William Murdoch, C.B. Fry and W.G. Grace at Crystal Palace in 1901. (The Roger Mann Collection)

Kent vs Lancashire at Canterbury by Albert Chevallier Tayler (1906). (The Roger Mann Collection)

Sydney Barnes, regarded by many as the finest bowler of all. (The Roger Mann Collection)

A.E.J. Collins, the Clifton College schoolboy who scored 628 not out in a house match in 1899. (The Roger Mann Collection)

Preface

All my life cricket has been a joy. My sister taught me the game when I was very young, and it met a need that has never gone away. She would bowl to me as I clutched a tiny bat and tried to defend the wicket chalked on our garage door. I was rather embarrassed by my sister’s tutelage until I learned that W.G. Grace had been taught under the eagle eye of his mother. That made me feel better, but not play better.

I have only a dim recollection of those early days, and of watching the local village side whilst my father enjoyed a game of bowls. He preferred Drake’s game to Hutton’s; but I turned my back on the bowling green and my eyes to the cricket square.

There was no coaching at my primary school, but we did play cricket. I can still relive one incident that has the power, over half a century on, to bring a hot flush of embarrassment to my face. It was a game in which for the first time I wore full whites, pads and gloves, and had my own bat. I was expected to score runs, and that made me even more nervous – caring too much rarely produces the best outcome, as I was to learn later in life. I strode to the wicket, took guard, carefully looked at the field placings, and prepared for the first ball. I played forward and felt the ball hit the middle of the bat. But the boy at first slip appealed, and the umpire/teacher squinted down the wicket, raised his forefinger theatrically and gave me out, leg before wicket. I was mortified, and without thought, stuttered, ‘But, but, I hit it!’

Uproar ensued. ‘Out,’ snarled the umpire/teacher. ‘Out. Off’ – he was now waving his arm like a windmill – ‘Off you go.’ He was right, of course, that I should not have questioned his decision. He was not right to mutter ‘Bloody boy,’ as, head down, I walked off, shamed and burning with injustice. That teacher’s angry face is imprinted forever on my mind; it is not a happy memory. But not even he could turn me away from cricket.

We are led to believe that our character is formed in our earliest years. I believe that. Joy and pain are at their sharpest when they are new. I remember trying to hide my deep disappointment that my parents were never able to see me play cricket. They had many reasons not to do so – chronic ill health, worry, the struggle to make modest ends meet when the week outran the money. They were old, too. When I was six my father was seventy, and my mother closer to fifty than forty. Both smoked, and their poor health was made worse by the foul habit. It would kill my mother in the end, but for many years before that, hacking coughs and shortage of breath were a daily occurrence. And they were exotics: our neighbourhood did not house many ex-trapeze artists, gauchos, jugglers, card-sharps or speciality dancers, and even as a boy I knew my parents were not to be judged by the usual criteria.

Once, I was certain they would come. Our school team was due to play close to our home, and I wrote out instructions for my parents on how to get there – out of our gate, turn right, then right alongside the brook, a further turn right where I went bird-nesting, and there we would be, in a field to the left. I was captain, and set a field with myself at cover-point and midwicket so that I had a clear view of the entrance gate, but neither of my parents came. My father had been doubtful anyway. He was losing his eyesight, although as a nine-year-old I was not aware of that. And my mother, who had gamely promised to come, was too ill with her interminable bronchitis. As I carried old Dr Robinson’s prescription to the chemist the following morning, I vowed I would never smoke.

Years later, Alec Bedser told me that his mother never saw him, or his twin Eric, play cricket. Not that Mrs Bedser was without opinions. When Alec took eleven wickets in his first Test match at Lord’s, the press asked for her views of her son. ‘Which one?’ ‘Alec,’ they said. ‘Why Alec?’ ‘He’s just taken eleven wickets in a Test on his debut,’ they explained. Mrs Bedser was forthright: ‘That’s what he’s paid for, isn’t it?’

As a child, cricket entered my bloodstream, and it has given me a lifetime of enjoyment and solace. Yet there are pessimists about the game. As long ago as 1932, C.P. Snow was moaning: ‘These days, a man of taste can only go to an empty ground and regret the past.’ The same dreary view can often be heard on county grounds today, as hindsight flourishes with the aid of rose-tinted spectacles.

I have never understood why we see the past as a Golden Age. It’s a false image. There was little golden about Victorian England, when children were sent scurrying up chimneys to clean them. Or Restoration England, when every portrait shows a closed mouth because a smile would have revealed rotten or blackened teeth. A cool analysis of the past will temper the rosing of the spectacles. The same is true of cricket: there have been many golden days, but the aspic of old photographs can hide the worst of times as well as the best.

As a game, cricket is complex. People who have never played are apt to say, ‘I don’t understand it.’ Much the same was said about the Impressionists, although there was nothing complicated about their art: as Claude Monet put it, ‘I simply looked at what the universe had to show us and used my brush to give an account of it.’ So too with cricket: it delights the eye and touches the soul. Part of this is physical: the smell of linseed oil on willow, the feel of ball on bat, the pleasure of holding a shiny new red ball, the clatter of disturbed stumps, the snick and catch that turns heads, and, on the best of days, the scent of newly-mown grass under the warmth of the rising sun. There is no cricketer alive who has not enjoyed these sensations, and cherished the memory of them. Lucy Baldwin, a fine cricketer and wife of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, put it well: ‘The crack of bat against ball amid that humming and buzzing of summer sound is still to me a note of pure joy that raised haunting memories of friends and happy days.’ Romantic tomfoolery? Perhaps. But cricket is that sort of game, and it would lose much of its charm if it were not.

One does not have to be talented to be besotted by cricket, as a thousand village games prove each summer. I first saw this at school. One boy, whose anonymity I shall protect, practised in the nets for hours – and often, I suspected, in front of a mirror – for every batting movement ended in a pose of classical perfection. No cricket whites were ever more neatly pressed, or pads or boots whiter, or bat more beautifully oiled, and when, head high, he strode out to the wicket, he oozed class and confidence. Alas, the image was false: he put so much into the elegance of every stroke that he overlooked the need to hit the ball, and all too soon would turn in surprise to look at his shattered stumps. He left the crease swiftly yet gracefully, nodding in congratulation to the bowler, head still high, bat tucked under arm, pulling off his batting gloves as if, for all the world, he was returning to the pavilion in triumph.

He was never downhearted. As he took his pads off, he would tell us all that he had been beaten ‘in the flight’ or ‘off the pitch’; and, theorists all, no one suggested he had, again, just missed a straight one. He knew the theory of cricket. He knew the statistics. He knew the spirit in which the game should be played, and he revelled in it. Runs or not, it was joy enough for him to be on a cricket pitch. I don’t know if he ever read A.A. Milne, but his poem had him exactly right:

But what care I? It’s the game that calls me –

Simply to be on the field of play;

How can it matter what fate befalls me,

With ten good fellows and on egood day!

I was so lucky that cricket was played at my grammar school; it was, with rugby, the only activity that made the experience bearable. During one game the pitch was positioned within striking distance of some enticing windows, and the temptation to put the ball through one of them was irresistible. The prize was to be a pint of illicit beer – I was only fourteen at the time, and such devilment appealed. A cross-batted heave missed the main target but did crash through an adjacent church window. The tinkle of glass brought a great cheer. It was enough: a triumph was celebrated.

Not long afterwards a heavier drink, scrumpy, caused more trouble. I drank a little too much, and as I travelled home it began to extort its revenge. I arrived safely, but when my father opened the door I was on my knees barking at him. I thought it was funny. He did not. Only my mother’s intervention saved me from being banned from cricket.

I was no cricketing prodigy, but nor was I a complete mug. I had my days, and they remain precious memories: 50 runs in a house match, with the winning hit a straight four that whistled past the bowler’s nose; 33 runs scored in three overs to win a game on a day when every hit seemed to find the boundary; 7 wickets for 9 runs, including a hat-trick, in a Colts game, when four of the runs scored off me were an edge that, half a century on, I still know that an even half-alert fielder should have caught in the slips. A meagre return for my love of the game, you might think, but only if you don’t know cricket. Runs, wickets and catches are all very well, but they don’t capture the fun of it all, the camaraderie, the hopes, the mini- triumphs and disasters, the wins, defeats and close finishes, the sunny days and the wet ones, all memories every cricketer locks away for the dark months when the summer game is in hibernation.

When my father finally lost his eyesight and all his money in the early 1950s, our family were uprooted from our modest bungalow in Surrey to two rooms of a multi-occupied Victorian relic in Brixton. The accommodation lacked finesse, but it was within walking distance of the Kennington Oval at a time when Surrey had the greatest county team of them all. I camped out at The Oval during the summer holidays as a devoted spectator. It cannot have been so, but memory insists that the sun always shone and Surrey always won. And what a feast they offered. Peter May’s bat rang like a pistol shot, and the suffering ball bounced back from the pavilion pickets before a fielder had even moved. May’s batting once got me into a frightful scrape.

I had borrowed my father’s precious gold stopwatch to time how long it took a May off-drive to reach the boundary, and in pressing the stop button it slipped from my fingers and smashed open on the terracing. The innards sprang out. The watch looked terminally sick. So did I as I confessed all to my father. ‘Tell me,’ he said, gingerly holding the watch by a broken spring, ‘about Peter May.’

May was one of many great players in that Surrey team. Tony Lock, menace shining from his bald pate, bowled the unplayable ball and caught the impossible catch. Jim Laker ambled gently to the wicket, but his off-breaks spun and spat at the batsman. The thin man, Peter Loader, was fast as a whippet; and Alec Bedser, the great medium-pacer, stately as a galleon, tormented batsmen with nagging accuracy and a leg cutter no other bowler has ever matched. Decades later he told me he discovered the leg cutter by accident, and had taken two years to perfect it. ‘It’s a leg spinner, really,’ he confided, ‘but you need these to bowl it properly.’ Thereupon he held up the enormous Bedser hands and chuckled. These were golden days of sun and shadows, Tizer and sandwiches, and I shall never forget them.

The 1950s were also a time of massive immigration to England from the West Indies, and many of the new Britons settled in Brixton. The house we lived in was for a time multi-occupied and multi-racial, and it provided a good primer on poverty for a future Conservative Prime Minister. I knew the immigrants as neighbours. I lived with them. I played with their children. I shopped with them in Brixton market. I saw them for what they were: men and women seeking opportunity and a new life in a land immeasurably more wealthy than the ones they had left behind.

Others, more fearful, more suspicious, saw them in a harsher light. They feared for their jobs and their livelihoods. They were frightened of possible turmoil in their neighbourhoods. Bigots and foolish men inflamed these fears. Pessimists predicted trouble. Brixton became a powderkeg of racial discontent. People waited for it to blow. Waited for the riots, the lawlessness. They waited in vain. The new Britons settled in. The dire predictions of conflict proved to be wrong.

In my youthful innocence, I wasn’t surprised. Instead of inciting fear, the bigots and pessimists should have gone to The Oval, where, when the West Indies played, it was carnival time: the atmosphere was noisy and full of fun as the crowd enjoyed glorious days of cricket. For those in the packed ground the painful reality of life in Brixton was put aside, even though at close of play it was still there. Prejudice and hardship were daily companions to the new Brixtonians. Dr Johnson, who knew London two hundred years earlier, had it right: ‘This mournful truth is everywhere confessed/Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed’.

Slow rises worth – but it did rise. And the West Indians’ cricket, the way they played and the way the team conducted themselves in victory, did much to help. A few years earlier they had taken on England at her own game, in her own country, at the very headquarters of cricket. And they beat her on merit. Perhaps no win in cricket ever had such social significance as Ramadhin and Valentine’s destruction of England at Lord’s in June 1950. A big hundred by Clyde Walcott set it up; it was then won by the charm and guile of the cricketing sophisticate’s delight: the art of great spin bowling. It was intelligent cricket – the West Indies out-thought England as well as outplayed them. As a result, all West Indians walked a little taller in their tough lives because their national cricket team had lifted their morale. No wonder the calypso rang out in celebration: ‘Cricket, lovely cricket’, indeed!