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

This is a classic illustration of the power of cricket. It can uplift whole communities – whole nations even – or cast them down. And because cricket is played largely in the mind, and reflects the society from which the cricketers spring, it can imprint the character of that nation indelibly upon the minds of those who watch the way in which a national team plays.

When not at The Oval, I spent hour upon hour defending a Brixton lamp-post against the bowling of any passer-by. Only my half-brother Tom and our mutual friend Butch were regulars, and only bad light, in the form of nightfall, stopped play. In 1966 my love of playing the game reached a premature end when a car accident in northern Nigeria left me with a leg so shattered it was almost lost; but that did not mean I would never again pick up a bat.

As Prime Minister, in 1991 I attended a meeting of Commonwealth Heads of Government in Harare and opened the batting in a charity match with the Australian Prime Minister, Bob Hawke. The previous evening Bob had entertained his fellow heads of government with a selection of Australian and trades union songs, most of them unrepeatable, as we shared more beers than was wise. The following morning, since I had not held a bat for years, I had a net before the game. As I looked around the lovely Wanderers ground, I was flattered to see that it was filling with spectators, although my Press Secretary Gus O’Donnell, never one to let hubris pass unchallenged, did wonder aloud whether they might have come to see their local hero Graeme Hick, who was due to bat at number three.

Bob Hawke and I opened to gentle bowling, and began to settle down, with Bob stealing the bowling towards the end of each over. I didn’t mind: it was a joy just to be there. We tapped the ball here and there, and ran our singles. After a few overs the wisdom of the Hawke strategy was revealed: ‘Off you go,’ said the umpire, waving us off the pitch as he added, rather pointedly, ‘It’s time for the real cricketers.’ A roar of applause greeted our departure.

Hawke had scored over 20, while I had less than 10. ‘Did you know we didn’t have long?’ I asked him as we trudged back to the pavilion. ‘Jeez, yes,’ he admitted, a Cheshire-cat-sized grin splitting his craggy features. ‘Didn’t you know, John? Arrh, heck – I thought you did.’ Not for the first or the last time, I noted that Australians play hard.

Our host in Zimbabwe was the President, Robert Mugabe, in the years before he encouraged militants to force out white farmers and steal their property. In 1991, Mugabe talked to me fondly of cricket. ‘It civilises people and creates gentlemen. I want everyone to play cricket in Zimbabwe. I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen!’ From beyond the grave, Lord Hawke would have approved, though he, like me, would have regarded land theft as most definitely ‘not cricket’. Hawke would have disapproved too of the mismatch between Mugabe’s sentiments and the outcome of his policies: his government all but destroyed Zimbabwean cricket.

Forty years after I first visited The Oval, I came to know the Surrey club from the inside. During my years in government The Oval was a sanctuary where cares were put aside. Upon the morrow of defeat in the 1997 general election I bade my farewells to Downing Street and the Queen and headed to The Oval for a leisurely lunch and a soothing afternoon of cricket. Nor did the balm fail me: ‘You had a rough decision, mate,’ called out a gnarled regular, before turning to more important matters. ‘This boy is a good bat.’ Indeed he was: it was a young Combined Universities batsman, Will House, later of Sussex, who played a fine cameo innings. Since leaving office I have been able to step back into the pleasures of cricket as if it had never been interrupted by the rude reality of politics.

No one has ever had a sufficient gift of tongues to do justice to the charm of cricket. In fact we cannot even be sure how – or when – the game began. Folklore tells us that generations now gone would pause as they passed some insignificant village game, simply to see how the next ball fared, and then, uplifted and enlightened, pass on their way. Observation tells us that people do so still. So we know the fascination of cricket from its birth. We know, too, its historic moments and its famous players. But how did cricket come to be built into the warp and weft of the English language? How did it develop into the favourite pastime of a large part of the English- speaking world? Why – in all sport – does cricket possess a literature that no other can match? Why do grown men babble of games they never saw and cricketers who died a hundred years before?

A wet day makes a conversationalist of the most taciturn cricket- lover. One rain-drenched hour at The Oval was filled with a discussion about Don Bradman’s last Test innings, when the great man was bowled second ball by Eric Hollies for a duck in the final Test of the 1948 series. It is a story every cricket-lover knows, and, cheated of cricket, we were debating at which end the Don was batting. Someone turned to Arthur Morris, the former Australian Test batsman, who was listening silently as he sipped a glass of red wine. ‘Surely, you must know, Arthur? Were you in that team?’ asked an ignoramus. Raman Subba Row, the former England batsman, who knows his history, choked. ‘Yes,’ said Arthur, sipping placidly. ‘I was at the other end when Don was out. I scored 196.’

There is a postscript to this story. As Bradman returned to the pavilion he was stopped in the Long Room by Field Marshal Montgomery, once captain of cricket at St Paul’s school, who had famously encouraged his troops to ‘hit Rommel for six’. Montgomery barked at him, ‘Sit down, Bradman, and I will tell you where you went wrong.’ The absurdity of anyone telling the most prolific run-getter of all time how to bat apparently escaped the old soldier. Bradman revealed this vignette in a letter to the Surrey Club many years later; he did not mention whether he had taken the opportunity to criticise the Field Marshal’s battle plan at El Alamein, but probably he did not. This was wise, as Montgomery was never plagued by self-doubt. A man who can say, ‘As God said – and, on the whole, he was right …’ is not a man to be crossed. Bradman was prudent to keep his own counsel. Moreover, he was courteous even when a sharp response was justified.

I discovered this for myself that same rainy day at The Oval. I had never met Bradman, but I did occasionally speak to him on the telephone. As we debated his last innings during one of the showers, Raman remembered it was the Don’s birthday, and someone suggested I phone him with our congratulations. I did so. As we spoke, I described the day’s cricket and the wretched weather. ‘How is it in Australia?’ I asked. ‘Dunno,’ came the reply. ‘It’s two o’clock in the morning here.’

Sir Donald Bradman is from the aristocracy of cricket. He is one of the rare breed of cricketing knights, all of whom are from the upper class of talent. But the honours system is haphazard, ultimately at the whim of subjective judgements and sometimes perverse. In the more class-conscious Victorian age, even W.G. was overlooked. As Prime Minister, I wished to put right some injustices. I could not simply award honours, but I could nominate for the appropriate independent scrutiny committee to adjudicate.* My first nomination for consideration was Harold Larwood, one of England’s greatest fast bowlers, who had been disgracefully treated by the cricketing establishment after the notorious ‘bodyline’ series against Australia in 1932–33. He had been driven out of Test cricket for obeying his captain’s instructions.

The Scrutiny Committee were startled at a nomination for a cricketer who had ceased playing nearly sixty years earlier, and I daresay sucked their teeth before deciding to award Larwood an MBE – below tariff, I thought, but welcome nevertheless. I had a further small list of names, but thought it proper to proceed cautiously, a decision I came to regret, for the Grim Reaper struck before I did, and my other nominations came too late.

When Harold Larwood was awarded his honour, I received a message that he wished to speak to me. I telephoned him in Australia, and learned something of the generous mind of cricketers. Within two minutes he was talking not of himself but of Jack Hobbs and his skill in batting on treacherous wickets. Larwood spoke with affection of Hobbs, as well as awe, and that conversation remains imprinted on my mind for the generosity of spirit it showed. It is a trait that is uplifting in all walks of life.

The statistics of cricket are a total fascination to the aficionado. For years my Cabinet colleague Peter Brooke and I used to pose one another abstruse cricket questions across the Cabinet table, or in restaurants, or on any occasion we met. Peter’s knowledge of cricket is encyclopaedic: who else could name any cricketing parson who scored a hundred before lunch at Bangalore during the Indian Mutiny? My old friend Robert Atkins, an MP once and then an MEP, has telephoned me each Sunday morning for years to discuss the state of English cricket and bemoan the loss of Corinthian values. Sometimes he even talks of politics: he bemoans the loss of Corinthian values there, too. But not every politician is a cricket-lover.

When I was Prime Minister Cabinet met on Thursday mornings, at the same time as Test matches began. In those days Cabinet debated policy and took decisions, so the meeting stretched on until lunchtime. From time to time folded messages would be brought in to me by the Duty Clerk. I would read them before passing them to Robin Butler, the Cabinet Secretary, a descendant of the great Victorian cricketer Richard Daft, and from him they would cross the table to the Chancellor, and later President of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club, Ken Clarke. Grimaces or smiles would follow. These notes drove my Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine, who sat on my left, to distraction. Prime Minister, Cabinet Secretary, Chancellor … was sterling crashing? Was there a crisis? A ministerial resignation? No: they were the Test scores: disbelievingly, Michael filched the notes from my blotter for the Heseltine Papers.

Cricket can be a bridge between opposites. The late Bob Cryer, a very left-wing Labour MP, would always stop to talk cricket with me. John Redwood, a very right-wing Conservative MP, who in 1995 attempted with a great deal of gusto to pitch me out of No. 10, would do the same if, by miscalculation, we found ourselves at the same dining table in the Commons. Even the journalist Simon Heffer, a persistent and hostile critic, was able to summon up a bleak smile if we passed one another at the idyllic cricket ground at Wormsley Park in Buckinghamshire that was Paul Getty’s pride and joy.

Cricket can also bind friendships. When the Conservative Party lost the election in 1997, John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia, and his wife Janette were among my first visitors: as a consolation John presented me with that Australian symbol, a baggy green cap: it is a treasured possession. Four years later I was talking about cricket caps and helmets to the old Australian Test all-rounder Sam Loxton. ‘Helmets,’ scoffed Sam. ‘I didn’t even wear a helmet at Tobruk!’ In 2005, when we met at Lord’s during the Ashes tour, a chortling Sam presented me with an authentic Australian helmet. I was forever grateful we’d talked of helmets, not protectors – although I doubt Sam wore one of those at Tobruk either.

A love of cricket is for everyone. As the great batsman K.S. Ranjitsinhji pointed out early in the twentieth century:

Go to Lord’s and analyse the crowd. There are all sorts and conditions of men there round the ropes – bricklayers, bank clerks, soldiers, postmen and stockbrokers. And in the pavilions are QCs, artists, archdeacons and leader-writers. Bad men, good men, workers and idlers, are all there, and all at one in their keenness over the game … cricket brings the most opposite characters and the most diverse lives together. Anything that puts very many kinds of people on a common ground must promote sympathy and kindly feelings.

That has been my experience, too. A few years ago I was invited to the beautiful island of Barbados to deliver the annual Frank Worrell Lecture. The following evening a galaxy of Caribbean cricketers – Everton Weekes, Clyde Walcott, Garry Sobers, Wes Hall, Charlie Griffith, Richie Richardson – attended a dinner for me at the British High Commission. Cricket conquers all differences, and I – an ex- Conservative Prime Minister – enjoyed some memorable (to me, at least) cricketing exchanges with the old West Indian opener Alan Rae, whose politics were very different. No one cared, and someone on that lovely evening, Wes Hall I think, referred to cricket as ‘the happy game’. You can’t play cricket if you’re unhappy, and you can’t be unhappy if you do play cricket was a maxim that met general approval over the rum punches and the laughter. It has certainly been true in my own life.

In fact, cricket can unlock all the emotions. On the day, after sixteen barren years, that England regained the Ashes at The Oval in 2005, I watched the crowd spontaneously and joyously sing ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. There are precedents for such a display. When Jessop scored a famous hundred to win the final Test against Australia at The Oval in 1902, the spectators hurled their bowler hats to the sky in ecstasy. We may be sure that many were lost. So too at Jack Hobbs’s first innings at The Oval after passing Grace’s record of 126 career centuries in 1925. Amid the applause the Yorkshire captain called for three cheers for Hobbs and then, Yorkshire being Yorkshire, dismissed him for a beggarly eight runs. The emotion displayed that day was affection for a great cricketer. When Boris Karloff, an enthusiastic amateur wicketkeeper, visited The Oval, Surrey weren’t sure what to do with him. He was watching the cricket avidly from the balcony when, in reply to a polite enquiry from an anxious host, he muttered in that inimitable voice: ‘Wonderful. I think I’m dead and gone to heaven!’

Karloff was a character. Cricket attracts them. I was on The Oval balcony with another, Sir George Edwards – then around ninety years of age – when a guest asked the old man, rather pompously, what he remembered of the war and what, if anything, he’d done in it. George smiled bleakly. ‘I helped design the Wellington bomber,’ he said, ‘if that counts.’ I treasure that moment. It was an understatement: George did more than that. He worked with Sir Barnes Wallis on the ‘bouncing bomb’ that destroyed the great German dams but which, in early tests, kept sinking. George, a keen cricketer, knew why. ‘It’s underspin, not overspin,’ he explained. Barnes Wallis relented – and the Dam Busters took out the Möhne, Sorpe and Eder dams with a leg-break.

‘History is bunk,’ supposedly said Henry Ford, who never played cricket. That is not my criticism. A number of fine writers have already told the story of cricket. Is there more to be gained by treading on the old turf? I believe so. There are myths to dispel, neglected areas to be examined, for the history of cricket is often seen in a vacuum, as if it developed unaffected by the turbulent history of the nation that gave it birth. But from its earliest days, to the recent tremors of match-fixing and corruption and the innovation of technology-aided umpiring, the game has held up a mirror to the temper of the nation.

Moreover, what of the cricketers? Too often, they appear in one- dimensional form only: all that is known is their on-field exploits. But what were they like? Who were they? What did they do after the cricket years were over, and their eyes dimmed and their sinews stiffened? What was happening off the field as they played cricket? How was the world changing? How did people live? What were their recreations? Cricketers had a flesh-and-blood existence outside the game, and however imperfectly, I shall try to bring alive the mosaic of times past in order to present a more rounded picture of them and the nature of their lives.

Cricket, once first among English games, is no longer so, as the winter sports of football and rugby grow in popularity. It must fight for its future. Even the cricket season seems to shrink annually as football eats away at both ends of the season. By the autumn equinox on 22 September the season is dead and gone, even though, theoretically at least, the sun is still above the horizon for twelve hours every day. Even the refraction of the sun’s rays, caused by the earth’s atmosphere, which gives the British Isles an extra six minutes of daylight, cannot compete with the commercial imperatives that lengthen the football season.

And yet – cricket is different. It is a team game made up of individual contests. Batsman and bowler are locked in gladiatorial combat. One must lose. Each batsman faces alone the hostile intent of every member of the fielding side, all seeking to dismiss him, with the sole support of his batting partner at the other end of the pitch. He knows his contribution may decide the outcome of the match. And can any other game provide a father figure for a nation to match W.G. Grace, who turned a country-house sport into an international obsession – and who is still recognised by his initials alone nearly a hundred years after his death? No, it cannot. Can any other game offer a pre-eminent genius so far above the normal run of talent as Don Bradman? No, again.

In its first 450 years, cricket has besotted wise men and fools. Its fairy godparents were gambling and drink. Its early enemies were Church and state. And yet, it has brought together beggars and royalty, thrown up a rich array of characters, invaded literature and art, and evolved from primitive beginnings to the sophistication of the modern game.

Although cricket is of the very essence of England, the skills of Bradman and Sobers, of Hadlee and Tendulkar, are evidence that the game has far outstripped the land of its birth. England no longer owns cricket. Like radar, penicillin, electricity, the steam engine, railways, the jet engine, computers and the worldwide web, cricket is an English invention – an export as potent as the English language itself. At one level it is a game and no more; at another it helped cement an Empire and bind a Commonwealth. Its legacy is a fellowship of cricket-lovers across continents and through generations. In the world of sport, it is the greatest story ever told.

It began a long time ago.

* As anyone can now do under reforms I instituted in 1993.

1

The Lost Century of Cricket

But we don’t know how long. The search for the birth of cricket has been as fruitless as the hunt for the Holy Grail: neither can be found.

What is cricket, at its most basic? It is a club striking a ball: so are golf, rounders, baseball, hockey and tennis. So are the ancient games of club-ball, stool-ball, trap-ball, stob-ball, each of which some scholars have been keen to appropriate as ‘early cricket’. The nineteenth-century pioneer historian the Reverend James Pycroft asserts, without proof, that ‘Club-ball we believe to be the name which usually stood for cricket in the thirteenth century.’* His case, however, collapses in the light of later evidence, and the great mid-nineteenth- century cricketer Nicholas Felix (a pseudonym – his real name was Nicholas Wanostrocht) was more likely right when he wrote: ‘Club ball is a very ancient game and totally distinct from cricket.’

The paucity of early mentions of cricket has led to some farfetched assumptions about games that might have been cricket, but probably are not. The poet and scholar Joseph of Exeter is said to have written in 1180:

The youths at cricks did play

Throughout the merry day.

If they did so, no one else noted it for hundreds of years. This claim has other defects, too: the couplet sounds more eighteenth-century than twelfth, and all Joseph’s known writing is in Latin. In any event, in 1180 Joseph was onhis way to the Third Crusade as an official chronicler, and thoughts of ‘youths’ and ‘merry days’ may not have been uppermost in his mind.* We can dismiss Joseph of Exeter. Even less likely is the evidence of an eighth-century monk, Eustatius Constacius, that cricket was played in Florence for the entertainment of Parliament.

Much ink has been spilled by historians over an entry, in 1300, in the wardrobe accounts of King Edward I referring to the sixteen-year-old Prince of Wales, the future Edward II, playing ‘creag’ and other sports with, as some have suggested, his childhood friend the lamentable and doomed-to-a-bad-end Piers Gaveston. It is evident that ‘creag’ is a game, but it requires a mighty leap of faith to claim that it was cricket; the kindest judgement that can be made upon this romantic assumption is ‘not proven’. In any event, could the villainous Gaveston have been a forefather of cricket? I hope not, and fortunately I think not.

Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote of history that ‘It is sometimes fiction. It is sometimes theory.’** In the absence of concrete evidence, of documentary proof, of contemporary records, his maxim holds true of the genesis of cricket. It may have been played under another name earlier than we know, but since its birth is shrouded in legend and mystique, we cannot be certain. The silence of antiquity suggests that the game was not played in ancient times, but does not prove that it was not. It is probable that games such as club-ball were ancestors of cricket, but they cannot be acknowledged as the game itself, and should not be assumed to be so. As the fourteenth-century philosopher William of Occam wrote: ‘Things not known to exist should not be postulated as existing.’ This is a good principle for soundly-based history. Although the mists and myths are enticing, the truth is more prosaic: cricket evolved from instincts and games as old as man himself.

But when? Here we may be on firmer ground. 1598 was a memorable year. The weather was foul that winter, and on 21 December, in a mini-ice age, the Thames froze. A week later, in a snowstorm, men of the Chamberlain’s Company of Actors, led by Richard Burbage and armed in case of unwelcome interruptions, dismantled a theatre in Shoreditch, loaded it onto wagons and transported it through Spitalfields and Bishopsgate to a waterfront warehouse. From there it was ferried across the Thames to be rebuilt on a new site. They called the new theatre the Globe, and the players’ favourite son, William Shakespeare, had part-ownership of it.

That Christmas Shakespeare had a new play, Much Ado About Nothing, which the players performed at Court for Queen Elizabeth I. A similar view might have been held about a contemporary court case over land ownership. Mr John Derrick, otherwise a forgotten English gentleman, testified to a Guildford court that: ‘Being a scholler in the ffree schoole of Guldeford hee and diverse of his fellows did runne and play there at creckett and other plaies.’* W.G. Grace cast doubt on this in his Cricket (1891), and suggested that a local historian may have inadvertently substituted ‘cricket’ for ‘quoits’. It is not clear why he thought this. As Mr Derrick was a coroner, it is likely that his deposition was accurate. And as he was then nearly sixty years of age, he would have been a young scholar around 1550–60, thus giving us a precious date by which cricket was being played.

It is not surprising that cricket attracted little contemporary attention, for greater matters were afoot. Within a few years of the death of Henry VIII in 1547 a mighty struggle for souls was raging as the religion of the state swung from Protestant (under Edward VI) to Catholic (under Mary), and back to Protestant once more (under Elizabeth I). Henry VIII had been sufficiently even-handed to persecute Protestants and Catholics alike, but his children were more discriminating, and burned, hanged or imprisoned only their religious opponents. Predictably, in the midst of the carnage cricket did not get a look-in. Nonetheless, Derrick’s deposition suggests that the game existed, under its current name, during the 1550s, although it cannot have been widespread. It may not have fitted into the lifestyles of the middle and upper strata of society. Behind the mullioned windows men drank beer for breakfast before hunting wildlife on uncultivated heaths and shooting pheasant, duck, partridge and snipe, while their womenfolk gossiped over needlework, wrote letters, read, and supervised the kitchen. Large families were commonplace, but half of all children failed to reach adulthood, and none, it seems, played cricket. The game makes no appearance in Shakespeare,* Jonson or Marlowe, there is no known reference to it in mid- sixteenth-century statutes, nor does it appear in surviving memoirs or letters of the time. Not even Brer Rabbit in his briar patch managed such a low profile. Cricket must have been played only by a minority, probably peasants, and even then spasmodically, to have remained so unnoticed and unrecorded.