The Character of Cricket Read online

  Summer Fields won the toss and batted, but despite Mr Alington’s orders the wickets fell steadily until at number eight, Christopher Hollis, later a well-known Member of Parliament, author, wit and poet, strode to the wicket. ‘As a general rule,’ said Hollis, ‘I was the most impatient of batsmen. I hit out wildly, usually succumbing to a very early ball and, if my luck happened to be in, making a few but making them very quickly.’

  Under orders from his skipper, G.O.B. Allen, and Mr Alington, Hollis put his head down and blocked away for two hours and eighteen runs – an obdurate performance of almost unprecedented tedium for prep school cricket. His only aberration was a leg-side four off Jardine himself. When they were finally dismissed there were only twenty minutes of play left and the result was a draw.

  At the end of the game Jardine was, in the words of one Stow brother, ‘in floods of tears’. The other Stow looked sage. ‘And that really meant something in those days,’ he said. ‘Nowadays you’re in tears if you’ve lost your pencil.’

  Fifty years later, after two world wars and the bodyline tour which he dominated, Jardine bumped into Hollis and the two men shared a drink. Both remembered the epic Horris Hill-Summer Fields encounter of 1914, and Jardine was prepared to forgive Hollis on the grounds that he was acting under orders. But he never forgave Mr Alington.

  More than seventy years after the event the Summer Fields game is still the most important feature of the Horris Hill calendar. But 1914 has not been quite forgotten.

  There are 160 boys in the school, and on the afternoon I called each single one was playing cricket. They play cricket six afternoons a week, for as Jimmy and Sandy Stow pointed out, there is no more effective way of getting that number out in the fresh air and out of mischief.

  The two Stows and I wandered across the croquet lawn and past the dovecote towards ‘The Top Field’, the First Eleven ground which had been cleared from bracken and gorse in the 1890s. On the junior ground scores of little boys in grey flannel bags batted and bowled.

  ‘Peterson and Wood!’ shouted Sandy Stow at two boys, ‘Move away from the batsman or you’ll be hurt.’ He turned to me apologetically. ‘You have to make it clear to them,’ he said, smiling, ‘that it’s a hard ball and a lethal bat.’

  At the corner of the Top Field little boys turned and wheeled, youngish masters demonstrated leg breaks and forward defensive shots, and one boy was summoned to talk to us because his name was Powell and his grandfather had been headmaster when I was at Sherborne. He was very polite, stood at attention with his hands at his side and said ‘sir’ repeatedly.

  It was a pretty ground, surrounded by trees and with a small wooden pavilion presented by a parent. The following weekend Jim Swanton’s ‘Arabs’ were due – a highlight of the season when the pitch is ringed with cars and picnics. The Stows told some funny stories about Swanton, especially about him captaining R.W. V. Robins. When someone hit a dolly at Swanton, Robins shouted, ‘Ten to one on the ball’, and Jim dropped the catch and stomped off in dudgeon, leaving instructions that Robins was not to be put on to bowl under any circumstances. According to the Stows it was weeks before they spoke again.

  The wicket had been beautifully prepared – close cut and rolled again and again. There wasn’t a mark on it. Nor a daisy nor a weed of any kind.

  Ian Peebles was an old boy. And H.A. Pawson. And A.G. McDonnell, who wrote England their England. Hubert Doggart was a father. So was ‘Charlie’ Fry, C.B.’s grandson, and R.E.S. Wyatt, who was remembered for taking the father’s match so terribly seriously. He scored more than fifty and obviously did not want to be out.

  They take their cricket seriously at Horris Hill, but it can be taken too seriously. They don’t like chaps to be big-headed. The Stows remembered a boy called Lee who got the second scholarship at Winchester and was captain of the eleven. Just after he’d won the scholarship the school played West Downs – old rivals like Summer Fields. Lee made a hundred and took six wickets, including a hat-trick. In the bus on the way home he was inclined to be a little bumptious and noisy. The master in charge responded in the prescribed Horris Hill fashion: ‘Shut up Lee!’, he said, ‘I don’t know what on earth you’ve got to be so pleased about.’

  Cricket is compulsory at prep schools, and prep school cricket is as good as ever it was. By contrast I spent several bleak summer mornings watching my son play cricket with the London Oratory Under-13 side.

  At first glance their grounds are at least as impressive as those of Horris Hill. The flat acres of Barn Elms running along the Thames opposite the Fulham football ground are lush, regularly mown and attractively treed.

  The Oratory is not the only school entitled to play here. The grounds are owned and run by the Inner London Education Authority, which means that any one of the ILEA schools in the south-west of London can use it. In practice, however, it is the Oratory home patch.

  The Under-13s were not as cultured and coached as the Horris Hill boys. Unless they play for a local club they tend to play no more than once or twice a week, because the cramped school grounds behind the Chelsea football ground only have room for two nets and Barn Elms are a bus ride away. But the captain, Greg Neame, was a useful all-rounder who played for the London schools in his age group; Hamish Gunasekera, whose father was almost the only other regular parental supporter, bowled quite fast and batted stylishly; and the others weighed in successfully enough. Some games, notably the one in which the Oratory dismissed Gunnersbury for 19, were over almost before they began.

  The greatest contrast between Horris Hill and the Oratory is in the wicket. Writing in the Oratorian, Mr Matthews, the Oratory cricket master, commented on a Barn Elms wicket that ‘looked as if, and played as if, it had been prepared three days before.’ He told me that the Barn Elms wickets were so bumpy that it wasn’t safe to play a First Eleven game on them.

  I thought of all the care, all the rolling and mowing and dressing that went into the wickets at Horris Hill and Harrow, of the importance their coaches attached to getting boys to learn how to play safely off the front foot. And I reflected also that tomorrow’s professional cricketers will not be coming from schools like Horris Hill and Harrow but from state comprehensives like the Oratory. Perhaps the ILEA doesn’t approve of cricket. I dare say they think it’s sexist and elitist. At all events it is a pity. Barn Elms is a great fifty acres of flat grass on a prime site. With a sightscreen or two and a heavy roller; a proper slip-catching machine; perhaps some parental enthusiasm... with all these the Barn Elms grounds could be as good as anything at Harrow or Horris Hill. As it is they’re second-rate – proof that in a socially divided society you can’t have real equality of opportunity even at cricket.

  Bristol

  I was more than usually apprehensive about Bristol cricket ground because of the David Foot-Alan Gibson school of cricket writing. Mr Foot and Mr Gibson sometimes appear to have lived all their lives on West Country cricket grounds and they both write interestingly about more than the cricket. David Collier, Gloucester’s secretary, had suggested I visit Bristol during the Australians’ match in July so that I could savour ‘the character and atmosphere of the ground during a festival’. Other county secretaries tended to suggest I see them when there was only a man and a dog on the ground, so this was refreshing advice. On the other hand somewhere between Sunningdale and Bracknell I got to David Foot’s report in the Guardian and read, ‘The Bristol ground was full of billowing canvas, appearing far more intimate and carnival-like than usual.’

  I was immediately dispirited. I was going to get a false impression, conned into thinking that at Bristol the canvas always billows and it is forever carnival time. Foot and Gibson would know better than that. Perhaps, however, the Lord Mayor of Bristol would be there as it was a special occasion. I had travelled to Venice with the Lord Mayor a few months before on the Orient Express, no less. And I had been much impressed with the gold chain of office which he wore for dinner parked outside Paris. Some flunkey or other had tol
d me that not only were there more Georgian houses in Bristol than in Bath (I am still sceptical about this) but that Bristol still had a coach and horses – Lord Mayor, for the use of. Perhaps there would be a Lord Mayor’s procession to the cricket week and I would see him sitting on a throne in front of the billowing canvas acknowledging the plaudits of the crowd.

  Alas no. The billowing canvas belonged to Barclays Bank and Harrison Cowley Advertising and British Telecom and Laing. And there was no sign of the Lord Mayor. Nothing but ‘clients’ in ‘business suits’.

  It was a special occasion because Gloucester were leading the championship table and their young fast bowler David ‘Syd’ Lawrence was the leading English wicket-taker. The England side was badly in need of a genuine fast bowler and there was a growing buzz of popular opinion which said that Lawrence should be picked for the Old Trafford Test. The selectors were said to be coming westwards.

  I had a lady taxi driver from Temple Meads and I knew I was in the West Country because when she dropped me at the gates she said, ‘That’ll be two pounds sixty, my love.’ They don’t call you ‘my love’ anywhere but in the west.

  The Gloucester gates are inevitable and there is a plaque to celebrate the greatest of them all – or at least the most famous. ‘To commemorate Dr. W.G. Grace, the great cricketer. Born 1848. Died 1915. This tablet was erected outside his county ground at the centenary of his birth. 18th July. 1948.’ They don’t put his vital statistics underneath but they are in the county yearbook. For the best part of thirty years at the end of the nineteenth century he captained the county. He scored 22,921 runs for Gloucestershire at an average of 40.64. His highest score was 318 not out against Yorkshire at Cheltenham in 1876; the same ground where, a year later, he took seventeen Nottinghamshire wickets for 89. He hit 51 hundreds and 108 fifties and took 1,349 wickets for an average of 18.43 each. He caught 374 catches and made four stumpings. So he was more than just a pretty face.

  My taxi drive from Temple Meads had left me slightly disoriented so I set off on what was meant to be a quick perambulation of the streets around the ground. The centre of Bristol has been Birminghammed into office blocks divided from one another by motorways, but the cricket ground is way up the Gloucester road in Victorian villa country. Seldom have I seen so many villas: Saltford Villa, Gerard Villa, Apsley Villa, Cecil Villa. All of them with bow windows and privet hedges. Here and there a lodge. A lodge is one up from a villa, bigger and more ornate. Colston Lodge. Sefton Lodge. The roads are named after cricket opponents. Nottingham Road and Kent Road and Derby Road. In the grocer’s shop there was an advertisement for a ‘Very very old lady’s bicycle’. Whether it was the bike or the lady who was so very very old is not important. It caught the spirit of the area although here and there I spotted CND signs which suggested an influx of trendier, younger people. The butcher wore a boater but next door in the greengrocer’s a black man in a Rastafarian cap peered suspiciously at the nectarines. Sandringham, Chatsworth, Cabot House. Who did they think they were fooling, the men of 1890? Did the first inhabitants cause those grandiose names to be chiselled into the stone above the door? Or were they foisted on them by the builders? Behind the net curtains at eleven o’clock in the morning the present inhabitants could be seen sitting in their bow windows with the Daily Mirror open in front of them.

  Actually the villas are rather jolly. The most dispiriting part of the neighbourhood is what used to be Muller’s orphanage, great grey buildings in military monumental. They could easily pass for the old naval dockyard in somewhere like Malta. The end opposite the pavilion is still designated the Muller’s orphanage end, but the buildings have now been taken over by the Brunel Technical College and Bristol Polytechnic’s Department of Engineering.

  By the time I had entered the ground the Australians were batting and had already lost a wicket. I walked slowly past the hospitality tents and the hard tennis courts, some of which were in use, past the press enclosure and the Jessop Tavern at the Orphanage End and found a seat on the mound. The ground, if not bursting, was quite full.

  ‘Who got the first wicket?’ I enquired of my neighbour, a luminous veined pensioner clutching a can of lager. He looked at me as if I were daft.

  ‘No idea,’ he said. He was obviously only there for the beer.

  ‘Lawrence,’ said a black man in a cap just in front of us. ‘Clean bowled.’

  Lawrence was bowling from the Orphanage End, a hulking great black man, with a lot of shoulder in his action. A moment or so later he had Wellham well caught by the wicket-keeper. The crowd shouted, a lovely exultant sound, but my neighbour scarcely noticed what had happened.

  I had seen the Australian flag before. Curious how they still have that old imperial anachronism with its union flag in the corner. But I had never seen Gloucester’s. It is almost as multi-coloured as Zimbabwe’s – a blue square bordered by alternating stripes of yellow and chocolate, green and white and red. The county tie is on similar lines. The two fluttered from the pavilion which at least had a wrought iron balcony, a clock tower and a weathervane but was unhappily built in the same style and material as Muller’s orphanage.

  Outside the pavilion I met Barrie Meyer’s brother, up from Bournemouth for the day to see the Australians being umpired by his brother and David Shepherd, and called briefly on David Collier, who seemed extraordinarily harassed, as well he might. Not just a full house but also a grand dinner at the Dragonara that evening with Gloucester’s new patron, the Princess of Wales, as guest of honour.

  There is no museum at Bristol. Indeed one staff member told me there could be no question of displaying old bats and balls because people would only steal them. They don’t elsewhere. I should have thought Phoenix Assurance, who own the ground, might invest a little cash in a museum. Even in Mr Collier’s office the photographs were somewhat faded though I liked the one of W.G. and a young Prince of Wales looking bored and dandified with a boater and cane. Alongside there is a signature of the Doctor’s, presumably cut from a letter because it says, simply, ‘Yours in haste, W.G. Grace.’ In a corner cupboard away from public scrutiny is the ball with which Gilbert Jessop completed his highest score of 286 against Sussex at Brighton and another with which Dennett took the last six Kent wickets for no runs in 1912. Also a gilded version of the scorecard from the Australian match of 1930, which ended in a tie after Goddard and Parker spun Ponsford, Bradman and Co. out for 117 in the final innings.

  Outside on the pitch the home side were hustling out the Australian batsmen in fine old style. Graveney had three quick bowlers to play with: Lawrence, a lithe tall West Indian named Courtney Walsh and a very handy Zimbabwe all-rounder, Kevin Curran. I went to the members’ enclosure to the right of the pavilion and sat behind a middle-aged chap with five children aged around eight or nine. He could have been a father or a prep school master – probably the former as term was over. Father was explaining the picnic lunch like Rat in The Wind in the Willows.

  ‘There are five marmite rolls,’ he said, ‘and five egg rolls. And five peanut butter sandwiches. And some sausages. And four pork pies.’

  ‘I’m going to have a peanut butter,’ said one little boy.

  ‘I’m going to have one of everything,’ said another.

  There was a loud communal shout. Walsh had bowled O’Donnell. Comprehensively. He walked back to the pavilion looking sulky, and the little boys charged off to get his autograph.

  A minute or so later the boys were back.

  ‘He told me to fuck off!’ exclaimed one, feverishly.

  ‘Peter thought he said “monks off”,’ said another.

  ‘He was calling everybody “bastards”,’ said a third.

  There was an interesting postscript later when Australia fielded. Jeff Thomson was positioned at third man quite near the small boys. In between balls of Lawson’s over he was signing quite happily, one leg against the advertising board for support. He turned round and walked in every time Lawson ran up, then went back to signing. Next o
ver Border moved him to long leg and put O’Donnell at third man. O’Donnell didn’t even look at the boys.

  During the lunch interval the clients all went under billowing canvas from which many did not emerge until three o’clock, by which time the Australian innings had been wrapped up. As Alan Gibson remarked in the next day’s Times, ‘They must have had quite a shock as, reluctantly, digesting the last mouthful of anchoie suprême and the last sip of Cointreau, they turned round to find Australia all out.’

  I must not be unkind to sponsors – lifeblood of the game and all that. Their tents were very pretty, too, though I did hear a couple of older members remonstrating with Mr Collier in the nicest possible way about – essentially – the sponsors getting better treatment than the members. And it was noticeable that a third of the ground was taken up by some eight hundred men (scarcely any women) in the tents, while several thousand were crammed into the remaining two-thirds.

  Still, the hoi polloi had a good lunch too. A dozen or so cricket games started up around the boundary and about a hundred of us had a long peer at the wicket to see what it was doing. It looked quite ordinary to me, and when I asked David Bridle, the head groundsman, he said only, ‘It’s still quite wet out there because it’s got so much clay in it. It’s obviously doing a bit now and again but it’s not so much the wicket as the humidity. You notice that whenever the sun comes out the ball starts hitting the middle of the bat.’ I hadn’t, but concentrated harder and had to concede he had a point.

  The band of the Gloucestershire Regiment, the Glorious Glosters, gave us a reedy selection from The Sound of Music and heralded the return of the umpires with a spirited post-horn gallop. I talked to one steward, a young man with a limp moustache who said he wasn’t much of a cricketer and that ‘skittles is really my game’; and to a programme seller called Doug Knowlson, who used to be a supervisor with Associated British Foods and first watched the county fifty-four years ago. ‘Hammond was a treat to watch,’ he said. ‘He used to walk half-way down the wicket and use his wrists.’ He thought Lawrence wasn’t ready for England yet. He hadn’t even got his county cap. Had anyone ever been capped by England before being capped by their county? I couldn’t answer that, and should have asked Henry Blofeld, whom I accosted on the roof by the press box, but instead I asked him about the time he faced the bowling of Keith Miller while a Cambridge undergraduate. He did not seem to have any very clear recollection of the occasion, but perhaps my question triggered some process in his memory, because a few days later he was writing in the Guardian about the time he dropped an easy catch from Miller in front of the Ladies’ Pavilion at Trent Bridge.