The Character of Cricket Read online

  ‘Velkommen til Northampton,’ said the sign outside the railway station, unexpectedly. On closer examination it turned out to be an advertisement for Carlsberg, who also sponsor the Northants cricketers. They have ‘Carlsberg’ on their sweaters. Everywhere, I reflected, is sponsorship. The committee acknowledge it in the annual report and duly list those companies which took advantage of the ‘Hospitality Lounge’. Carlsberg, of course, and the Northampton Development Corporation and Initial Automatic Services and Terry Wilson Laminates. There is a Betjeman poem waiting to be written here, beginning ‘There’s a breathless hush in the Hospitality Lounge.... ’

  The County Ground is the other side of town from the station, but it is worth the walk. I paused to investigate the 1160 Church of St Peter’s, where the Greek Community of St Neophytos worship at noon every Sunday, and spent a few moments in All Saints’. All Saints’ is a fine galleried seventeenth-century building with an imposing portico. Above it there is a very funny statue of Charles II dressed as a Roman in a sort of smock and thonged sandals. Here John Clare, the poet, who spent some years in the county lunatic asylum, used to come and sit. I have no idea if Clare was keen on cricket, but I like to think that he had the game in mind when he wrote, ‘Summer’s pleasures they are gone/Like to visions every one.’

  There was a market in full swing in the market square with good-looking vegetables and a lot of naughty knickers at a stall marked ‘Doug is here’. An elderly couple loaded down with plastic bags full of carrots and new potatoes gave me detailed and immaculate directions to the cricket, and I walked away from the centre, past the statue of Charles Bradlaugh, who was MP for Northampton, and down the Wellingborough Road. There was a lot of brick down the Wellingborough Road – a stark orange I associate with the Midlands and which I find rather depressing. There seemed to be a great many hairdressers, too. A policeman called me ‘mate’ when I asked if I was still going in the right direction; the cards in a newsagent’s window said ‘Secondhand Laura Ashley wedding dress ten pounds’ and ‘Young budgerigar with cage and accessories free to a good home’.

  Almost at the gates of the ground is Manfield’s shoe factory. I didn’t know about Manfield’s shoes, but the sign said ‘Famous for Shoes’. They were looking for ‘Experienced Closing Room Operatives, full and part time.’ Then comes the Abington Park Hotel, a fine example of Northampton Baronial with an inn sign depicting the architect who designed it. He is M.H. Holding, and he has a look of H.G. Wells. I turned left along a vivid brick terrace of tiny cottages inaptly called Roseholme Road, and there were the gates. Northampton’s gates are The C.J.T. Pool Gates. Pool played from 1905 to 1910, a useful bat who bowled a bit. There is a picture of him in the pavilion wearing a boater. At the gates there is a brief, dignified inscription under which someone had scrawled, ‘Stuff the posers, i.e. Polly.’

  This was by no means the earliest ground in the county. In 1741 the Gentlemen of Northamptonshire took on the Gentlemen of Buckinghamshire for twenty guineas a side on ‘The Cow Meadow’ outside town. It then became customary to fence off an area of the old racecourse but this doesn’t seem to have been very satisfactory. The Freemen of the town complained that it was illegal to fence off the ground and their complaints were upheld by the mayor, with the result that everyone climbed over the barricades and got in free. It all sounds rather chaotic. On one occasion W.G. Grace arrived late for a game and was punched in the face by an anonymous ‘enthusiast’. It is said that the doctor never visited Northampton again.

  Other, more sober ‘enthusiasts’, including the splendidly named Sir Herewald Wake, decided they must have somewhere more satisfactory to play, and in 1885 the Northants County Cricket and Recreation Ground Company Ltd was formed. At the same time it was ‘proposed and carried that the offer of Mr Cockerill to fork, plough and seed the ground be accepted’. This was Alfred Cockerill, a self-made greengrocer of some resources. Over the years he seems to have taken on more and more responsibility for the ground, until in 1923, when the Company was wound up, Cockerill acquired the field and leased it back to the Trustees on a peppercorn rent for a thousand years.

  In the pavilion there is a picture of Mr Cockerill holding a stout stick. He has a three-piece suit, a hat with an upturned brim almost like a stetson, a tie secured with a pin and amused, crinkly eyes. He looks rather pleased with himself, as well he might. The tribute underneath identifies him as the ‘generous donor’ of the grounds which are to be used ‘in perpetuity for cricket and kindred sports’.

  The ‘kindred sports’ rider accounts for some of the ground’s peculiarity. Association Football is one, and bowls the other. This means that one corner, walled off, is a bowling green. No problem here. It also means that the end furthest from the pavilion and indoor school is taken up by Northampton Town’s football club. For a startling, if short-lived period, the Cobblers were in the first division of the Football League, not something which Alfred Cockerill can have envisaged. Now they are back in the fourth, which is a more appropriate place for a club which shares its ground with a cricket club.

  During cricket about two thirds of the football pitch is used as a car park. Behind the cars a grandstand full of new, empty plastic seats extends the full length of the ground. At each end there is old, rather dilapidated terracing. Up at the cricket end there is a new, rather hideous pavilion in yellow brick, a more elegant Victorian one, partly hidden by sightscreens, and between them an indoor school with seats and a press box on top. The press used to be in a very odd little building next to ‘The Mound’. This looks like an Elizabethan signal box.

  The only national newspaper with a correspondent in Northampton for the Derby match was the Daily Telegraph. They had sent the estimable Tony Winlaw, whom I first met in the hospitality tent on a cold foggy day in the Oxford Parks. Mr Winlaw dutifully introduced me to the oldest inhabitant, Fred Speakman, who has been reporting Northampton matches for forty years, mainly for the Press Association. Mr Speakman pointed out various features of the ground giving me the sort of inside information which only long association can produce. The top of the old pavilion, for instance, always used to be known as ‘The Elephants’ Cemetery’ because that was where you went ‘for a last bellyache’ before you died. The West Stand was also famous for its ‘grumblers’, and at one stage there was a sort of revolving stand at the Football Ground end which was reversed at the beginning and end of every season.

  At one point I moved round to sit near the vice-presidents in the bottom of the old pavilion and I was intrigued to hear that the grumbling was still going on.

  ‘That was a bad ball!’

  ‘Shocking!’

  They did rather look as if they had set out that morning to have a jolly good grumble at the cricketers.

  They had a point. Northampton declared at 219 for six, which meant that Derby had got to make 290 to win. They ended the day on 162 for six, and despite Williams’s five for 34 I never thought there was the slightest chance of a result. Nor did the grumblers.

  Over on the mound, however, there was less grumbling and some agreeable nostalgia when the distinctive white thatch of the recently retired D.S. Steele, Northants and England, came and sat down behind me with a friend. He was very appreciative of everything and, of course, knowledgeable as well. Not just about the cricket: ‘Well you’ve got two back foot players, haven’t you?’ but also such essentials as the catering. The food is very good in the pavilion dining-room these days. It’s not so long ago that the players and spectators all trooped over to the County Tavern just outside the football ground end. It was good to see David Steele accepting the respectful greetings of spectators and being awarded the best table in the dining-room. Cricketing prowess induces a very particular sort of hero worship. Like the game itself it is friendly and unfrenzied. At Northampton you sensed the crowd giving itself a collective nudge and a wink as they saw him coming. ‘One of the last, if not the last, of the old-fashioned professionals,’ says the club’s official tribute. He sco
red over 18,000 runs and took more than 450 wickets in first-class cricket for Northants and no one who was watching cricket in 1975 will ever forget the way he performed after being pitched into an ailing Test side. Definitely worth a verse of Henry Newbolt.

  As he left the ground he called out to someone on the mound seating: ‘If Virg turns up, tell him he’s opening.’ The reference was clearly to Roy Virgin of Somerset and Northants, but I couldn’t take it further than that. Odd though how cricket seems so riddled with nicknames.

  You couldn’t call Northampton a beautiful ground. The ugly pavilion, the Tudor signal box, the long plastic slash of football ground stand, red brick houses and their back gardens. But it does have two churches within sight and this always improves a cricket ground. One is moderately nondescript, but the other, St Matthew’s, is a real oddity. Situated over by the old racecourse, it is a large Victorian building with a long cricket tradition of its own. The choir fielded a team before the present church was built. (Its predecessor was a temporary iron structure opened on Palm Sunday 1895 and built at a cost of £603 14s 3d.) The choir won its first match by six runs – outscoring Great Houghton by 48 to 42. The present church was built with money from Phipps the brewers in memory of Pickering Phipps who, like Bradlaugh, was once Northampton’s MP. And the architect was none other than Matthew Holding, the H.G. Wells look-alike who was responsible for the Abington Park Hotel on the other side of the cricket ground.

  But the glory of St Matthew’s really dates from the appointment of Walter Hussey as vicar in 1937. For the fiftieth anniversary of the church’s consecration Hussey staged a festival for which he commissioned a piece by Benjamin Britten, ‘Rejoice in the Lamb’, and a statue, ‘Madonna and Child’, by Henry Moore. It is still there and definitely worth a detour. Opposite it in the south transept there is a Graham Sutherland crucifixion, also specially commissioned. Apart from Britten’s contribution, Tippett, Lennox Berkeley, Malcolm Arnold, Richard Rodney Bennett and others have all written special music for the church and there is a St Matthew’s Day Litany and Anthem by Auden. Even if, when you visit the county ground at Northampton, you do not also go to St Matthew’s, it is refreshing to be able to look at the spire in the distance and reflect on the extraordinary art it has fostered since the 1940s.

  For the most part the ground is a more prosaic affair. There is a 1929 team pictured in the pavilion which sums up the essentially stolid nature of Northampton cricket. Recite this list out loud and see what I mean (especially if you can imitate John Arlott’s voice): Bakewell, Partridge, Clark, L. Bullimer (scorer), Liddell, Thomas, Matthews, Cox, Woolley, V.W.C. Jupp, Bellamy, Timms. That is a list which goes well with the note from the 1891 minutes which says, ‘It was resolved that the application of the lady cricketers be not entertained, which was carried unanimously.’

  Northampton has had its lighter moments too, provided by the likes of Tyson, Milburn, and F.R. Brown. And it was here that Percy Fender scored a century in thirty-five minutes.

  For me, however, its physical presence can never match the memory of those childhood clashes over Subba Row’s batting average or George Tribe’s bowling figures. As I sat in the stand above the cricket school, I watched one of that strange band of statistical cricketing fanatics entering each ball into his scorebook... dot, dot, dot. To him the accurate recording of each moment of the day mattered terribly, just as it used to matter so very much to me and my father that Subba Row scored 7,050 runs in 186 innings at an average of 43.79 precisely.

  I do hope there is a complete set of Wisden in the library wherever he has gone.

  Arundel

  In 1895 Henry Fitzalan-Howard, fifteenth Duke of Norfolk, hired two hundred out–of-work labourers, equipped them with picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, axes and saws, and sent them off into the woods near his castle at Arundel. He wanted a cricket ground. When he asked what was the biggest cricket ground in England he was told that it was the Kennington Oval. ‘Make mine the same size,’ he told his men. And so they did, and the result is an amphitheatre of great beauty, one of the most beautiful cricket grounds anywhere in the world. They told me at Arundel that when C.B. Fry was walking round the ground with Bernard, the fifteenth Duke, C.B., who was a notorious polymath, remarked casually that he had identified thirty-two different varieties of tree. My impression is that C.B. was also a fearful show-off because he then named each variety, in both English and Latin. Duke Bernard wore a little learning lightly and was not, in my experience, one of the world’s great listeners. Being one of the world’s great cricket enthusiasts, however, I suppose he let C.B. bang on about the trees because of his heroic qualities as a cricketer.

  Although the ground was built by the fifteenth Duke, it is the sixteenth Duke’s memory that haunts it. He played there practically all his life, and his widow Lavinia is now the president of the Arundel Castle Cricket Club, ‘thereby’, as she puts it, ‘helping the sport that was so dear to my husband’s heart’. It was he who instituted the tradition whereby the foreign touring teams always begin their season with a game at Arundel. And he who insisted that cricket at Arundel should always be positive. It was not done in his day to draw matches. Ronnie Ford, now chairman of the club, told me that when his son first played at Arundel he batted in a tentative style best described as ‘puddingy’. Coming in at lunch he found Duke Bernard standing in front of the pavilion. ‘Young man,’ he said sternly, ‘if you go on batting like that you will never play at Arundel again.’

  The editor of this book accompanied me to Arundel wearing a straw hat of some distinction. It was in the Panama style but came from the South of France. Real Panama hats, my researches suggest, originally came from Ecuador, so they are not strictly speaking Panama hats at all. Proper Ecuador hats are made from the underdeveloped leaves of the stemless screw pine or jipijapa (Carludovica palmata) and really proper Ecuadors have I Zingari ribbons round them. My editor’s hat had no ribbon but was still a very acceptable cricket-watching hat. When I saw it I mentally promised myself something similar as a reward for finishing the book, though I am not sure about wearing one without an IZ ribbon and I am no more likely to be made a member of the IZ than of the Athenaeum or the Grand Order of Water Rats.

  His was the only straw hat on view that morning. This surprised me. I had imagined a veritable crocodile of elderly chaps in Panamas or Ecuadors striding towards the cricket. The cricket wasn’t even signposted. There was a notice saying, ‘British Doll Artists Exhibition’, and a plethora of shoppe signs in Gothick. Arundel is a little too pretty for its own good and is plainly on the tourist track. I suspected this the minute I saw all the Gothick script, and my suspicions were confirmed when I saw a sign in a shop window printed by the Sussex police. It said, ‘Persons caught stealing will be arrested’ and it was in ten different languages. Bloody foreigners!

  Arundel is very obviously Norfolk-in-Sussex. The main hostelry is the Norfolk Arms and on a wall on the other side of the street is a memorial to Duke Bernard, who was not only Duke but also Mayor of the town in 1935-36. Not many towns can have had a mayor who was also the Earl Marshal of England. It is also very obviously a pocket of Roman Catholicism. The Anglican church (closed and locked) is quite modest, but the Catholic one is a great soaring nonsense. It is a pastiche of a French cathedral of around 1400 commissioned by the fifteenth Duke in 1868 and designed by Joseph Hansom, the man who invented the cab. He also did Birmingham Town Hall. In 1965 it was elevated from being a mere church to a fully fledged cathedral, and in 1971 the remains of the family saint, St Philip Howard, were transferred to a custom-built shrine in the north transept. St Philip, not to be confused with his namesake the Literary Editor of The Times, a forceful if myopic bat and occasional Eton Rambler, was sentenced to death by Elizabeth I and died under mysterious circumstances (poison?) at the age of thirty-nine after eleven years’ imprisonment.

  There was a flower festival going on: beautiful arrangements all round the church and a quartered banner made entirely of petals
laid out on the floor at the foot of St Philip’s shrine. I particularly liked the notice which said: ‘Visitors are requested to speak quietly and behave reverently.’ An even better text, thought my editor, for a cricket ground than a church.

  The cathedral is the only building visible from the cricket ground, though that is not the view you usually see in the postcards. The cricket ground, being high up, is not visible from the cathedral, so we had to ask the way from one of the flower ladies. She replied, surprisingly, ‘Which ground?’. Apparently there is a town ground which, she seemed to be implying, was just as famous in Arundel as the la-de-da ground up by the castle. Still there were no signs to the cricket, indeed what signs there were deterred rather than encouraged. ‘No dogs, motor cars or motor cycles are allowed,’ said the one at the park entrance; and further on we found ‘Caution Rifle Range: Keep out of Danger Area shown by notice boards when red flags are flown.’ Then, when at last there was a sign saying simply, ‘Cricket’, there was a sister sign saying ‘Caution racehorses’. What is more, a dangerously skittish racehorse hove in sight at just that moment and seemed on the point of bolting when a car, driven by an elderly ‘Friend of Arundel Cricket Club’ rounded the bend.

  Then suddenly it was there: a great green amphitheatre with stumps already in place. One or two cars were parked around the boundary, and four hundred scarlet plastic seats were stacked at intervals, though most were in front of the pavilion. ‘I know a cafeteria in the Forest of Dean just like that,’ said my editor, lugubriously, and I saw what he meant. Until 1965 the pavilion was a tent. The Duke’s guests changed up at the big house. A tent was all you needed at the ground. Not until the sixties did they think there was any need for a permanent building actually at the site of the cricket. The sixties was not a very inspired period in cricket pavilion architecture. No thatch, no veranda, no baroque belfry nor gilded weathervane, just a functional brown timber building with a high tiled roof.