The Character of Cricket

by Tim Heald

  Tim Heald

  The Character of Cricket

  During one long summer during the mid-1980’s, Tim Heald toured England, absorbing the flavour of at least one cricket ground in every first-class county, and a good many more besides. He wanted to discover the true character of the English game, among those who ate, slept and dreamt cricket in all corners of the country.

  The results are charming, heart-warmingly funny, and often surprising. In conversation with the kind of people who give the game its backbone – a gateman at Leicester, the groundsman at Swansea, a programme-seller at Bristol, a quintessential cricket-mad parson at Chelmsford – the author evokes some colourful ghosts, from the ubiquitous W.G. Grace (once punched in the face in Northampton) to Prebendary Wickham of Martock, and hears some strange stories – the Derbyshire captain absconding with the cash (and ending up as a tailor for the King of Spain); the Nottinghamshire team fielding in lounge suits; the match in which the schoolboy Douglas Jardine was reduced to tears by Gubby Allen’s gamesmanship.

  The Character of Cricket is both a celebration of the national game and an evocation of a particular way of life – happily one still pursued in the England of today.

  ‘Cricket books should meet one or more of these necessary requirements, being either literate and amusing to read, or meticulously researched, or original in concept. Tim Heald’s The Character of Cricket triumphantly meets all three.’ Benny Green, Sunday Times

  ‘First-rate stuff, in the great and... timeless tradition of English cricket writing.’ Punch

  INTRODUCTION

  I once met a man who saw Bradman batting at Moose Jaw. He remembered little about it except that it was a great event in the life of that small Saskatchewan prairie town and also an incongruous one. Bradman sparkled briefly and got himself out. There was a large crowd. End of story.

  The idea of cricket in Moose Jaw is so very odd. Could it be a place where the Don would be appreciated? Could there be a pavilion and flags and a wrought iron weathervane incorporating stumps and a figure of Father Time... umpires in long white coats... scorers with sharpened HB4s and mystic erasers... a pub... a church with a tower and a clock stuck not at ten to three but nearer four... and not Rupert Brooke’s epideictic honey but cucumber or sandwich spread for tea... and a tree, spreading or weeping about the long-on boundary... and deck chairs... and old vicars sleeping therein? Surely not in Moose Jaw? It is the ground as much as the game which makes cricket, and Moose Jaw, I think, is a place for a baseball diamond and popcorn and old men who spit tobacco. Cricket needs an appropriate setting as much as worship needs a good church.

  I was never much of a cricketer, though I enjoyed it at prep school. That was a lovely ground: thatched pavilion and the Quantocks in the background. At public school somehow the fun seemed to go out of it. If you dropped catches it was early morning fielding practice and being shouted at. Winning mattered too much, and laughing on the field of play would have been a beatable offence if anyone had even contemplated it. After school I think I only played once, for my college social side against Great Tew, one of the most beautiful of English villages, though the ground was dull. I opened the innings and was bowled first ball. The humiliation was too much and I hung up my boots for good.

  But I have always liked the idea of cricket. A day sitting in a deck chair in the sun, preferably with at least one similarly inclined companion to while away the longueurs between overs, seems to me a very civilised way of spending one’s time. If the game becomes exciting, so much the better, though anyone who thinks that cricket can or should be consistently exciting fails, I think, to understand the game’s appeal. It’s like, to return to Moose Jaw and Canada for a moment, the train journey to Vancouver. You have to spend all that time trundling across the featureless prairies in order to appreciate fully the true excitement of the Rockies. By the same token, you don’t really appreciate Botham’s batting if you haven’t had to sit through a fifty from Roebuck first. Whoever dreamed up the Sunday tip-and-run they call the John Player League did not understand this.

  Much as I like the idea of such days in the sun, I had not, till the summer of ’85, experienced nearly enough of them. As a child, Lord’s with my mother and younger brother, getting a last glimpse of Denis Compton and a first of Fred Titmus; Taunton, but only once; village cricket on the recreation ground opposite Holly Cottage, Fulmer, Bucks; school cricket; very occasionally a match in which my father took part, though he was not designed for cricket, being, temperamentally at least, one of nature’s baseball players.

  As an undergraduate I lazed around the Parks in Oxford from time to time, watching the incomparable Pataudi and wondering how I could get out of writing that week’s essay on Diggers and Levellers for Christopher Hill. And as an adult I have been a regular attender at Lord’s as well as a compulsive pauser whenever I pass a game at Putney or at Kew or even further afield. I once watched Barbados at home and sat opposite Clyde Walcott at lunch.

  Entering my fifth decade, I suddenly realised that when I turned to the cricket scores at the back of the daily paper, I was reading about far away places of which I knew nothing. I had never been to Trent Bridge; Old Trafford was little more than a name; Edgbaston was hardly even that. I had a picture in my mind’s eye of Hove and Canterbury, of Headingley and St Helen’s, but I had never been, never seen for myself. I relied for my knowledge on the writings of men like Alan Gibson or the talking of such as Brian Johnston. Professional cricket writing and talking is better than that devoted to any other game, but even so I felt I was missing out. I therefore decided that I would at least visit a championship ground in each of the first-class counties and a few others besides. I wanted to put faces to a few names.

  I chose Harrow not Eton, Oxford not Cambridge, and only one perfect English village to stand for hundreds.

  No one will agree with my selection, straightforward though much of it is. The genial A.S.R. ‘Tony’ Winlaw was a fervent advocate of two old country club grounds, one in Northamptonshire and the other in Northumberland; Dicky Rutnagur, another Telegraph writer, was fervent in praise of Wellingborough; my taxi driver in Swansea equally so on behalf of the Gnoll at Neath. I have disappointed them all. The same Winlaw was adamant that I should not go to Derby and he was fairly horrified to see me at Northampton. Sorry about that. I was curious. And I enjoyed both.

  Statisticians and the seekers after objective truth will not approve either. This is not the sort of definitive work which lists ground capacity to the nearest buttock or tells you exactly how much Surrey loam goes into the wicket every year. It is a much more prejudiced and personal volume than that. In each case I wrote to someone connected with the ground – usually the county secretary. If he replied we agreed on a day that I might visit. Sometimes I was given a reading list. Sometimes some material written by the secretary himself. Most were helpful and hospitable. Only two did not answer my letters, but I went to their grounds just the same. Some days it rained; some it shone; sometimes I saw Zimbabwe; sometimes Australia; once or twice I ran into the oldest inhabitant; occasionally I came across prep school boys seeking autographs who reminded me of myself thirty years ago and more. I took against some grounds and I warmed to others. Sometimes I could identify reasons for this; as often as not, I couldn’t.

  More than any other game cricket is an experience. It takes so long that it could hardly be otherwise. I have tried here to capture some experiences garnered in the often damp summer of 1985, a summer which, despite the weather, contained some marvellous cricket and some close results. But I wasn’t really interested in the play except as an excuse and a backdrop. This is not an anatomy of a cricket season. I was more interested in the sense of place.

  Most
of my grounds began their active life about a hundred years ago, and many of those charming Victorian and Edwardian stands and pavilions are crumbling away now. I cannot say that their replacements are often an improvement. I do not like plate glass or dried blood brick in a pavilion, and I do like flagpoles and belfries and wrought iron weathervanes. I am not a fan of ‘the executive box’, which is the single most obvious innovation on the county cricket ground, with the possible exception of its blood brother, the advertisement hoarding. I am fogeyish about ‘Four ’n’ Twenty Pies’ and ‘Castlemaine XXXX’ and would prefer plain white wooden railings around the boundary. Modern first-class cricket, and some second-class cricket too, is not made possible by the paying spectators but by TV and commercial sponsors. The modern grounds reflect this.

  And yet as I traipsed about the Kingdom from cricket match to cricket match I became increasingly aware that there are few better places to be on a summer’s day; that the natives are friendly and the beer well kept; that the entertainment on the field is matched by the entertainment off it; and that, from Taunton to Tyneside and from Lord’s to Leeds, there is still a character to cricket which is unique.

  Chelmsford

  You can tell the way to the county ground by the bags. Sometimes they are canvas, sometimes plastic, occasionally leather, seldom string. They tend to have longish handles and are carried at the trail with the shoulder hunched so that the bottom of the bag is only a foot or so from the pavement. The bags bulge. This is hardly surprising for they contain an ample picnic lunch of sliced white bread sandwiches filled with Shippams paste or processed cheese; apples and/or chocolate bars – usually Kit-Kat – for filling in gaps; at least one extra sweater; a plastic raincoat; binoculars; a scorebook; pencils plus sharpener; and some form of statistical reference book.

  The bags were much in evidence when I just caught the 10.10 from Liverpool Street one Tuesday in August. For Londoners aiming to get to Essex’s county headquarters in Chelmsford for the first ball of the day, the 10.10 is the train to catch. It gets into Chelmsford, BR willing, at around twenty to eleven, which gives one ample time to follow the bag owners across the road past the Chelmer Institute of Education, right past the TA Centre (Royal Anglian Regt and Essex Yeomanry), left along the main road, then dip underneath it using the footpath which takes you over the narrow river and into the ground by the Britvic Picnic Area. Britvic, the soft drink makers, are a Chelmsford company and they have provided a rather dinky corner overlooking the river where one can sit at a picnic table and eat one’s own food or the fast stuff – burgers, scampi, gammon or chicken – from the new Riverside Restaurant. Unfortunately you don’t get a proper view of play from the picnic area but it’s still quite appealing, and it makes up for the lack of a pub at the corner of the ground. Ideally a county ground has a pub at the corner, but Chelmsford does not.

  This is probably because Chelmsford is so spanking new. For fifty years Essex played at Leyton. I love the idea of Leyton not least because it was the scene of the game’s most famous batting record – the 555 that Holmes and Sutcliffe put on for the first wicket for Yorkshire against Essex in 1932. Sutcliffe made 313 and Holmes 224 not out.

  Just a year later they sold Leyton. The reasons given were financial though maybe they were depressed at playing on a ground where the opponents scored 555 for the first wicket. For the next thirty years the county went walkabout. They continued to play occasional matches at Leyton and they also performed at Southend and Westcliff-on-Sea, at Ilford and Clacton and Chelmsford. In 1967 they decided they must have a permanent HQ and settled on Chelmsford where the club was originally founded at the Shire Hall in 1876.

  The Chelmsford ground was played on by the Chelmsford club who have since moved on to a neighbouring park. It was quite small and had virtually no amenities. Everything at the modern ground – pavilion, T.N. Pearce Stand, terracing, executive boxes and committee room, even the much vaunted hospitality room for players’ wives, girlfriends and other guests – has been added since 1967. In the last few years the club has spent more than seven hundred thousand pounds on improvements of one kind and another. For a county cricket club it is stunningly prosperous. The most recent treasurer’s report says, ‘A really excellent year on the playing field was more than reflected in the substantial increase of income over expenditure of 83,215 pounds.’ Peter Edwards, the secretary/manager, says that their most persistent financial problem is fending off the more unreasonable demands of the Inland Revenue.

  It was the last day of a championship match against Middlesex. Middlesex were leading the table and anxious for a win, but the match had been ruined by rain. Now at last the sun was shining and the sky was blue but to give anyone a chance there had to be some artificial ‘sporting declarations’. The Middlesex first innings had realised 234. Essex then went in and declared at 33, whereupon Middlesex swatted around briefly before coming in with their score at 70. This left the home side to score 272 to win off 83 overs. In the top of the Pearce Stand a man in a blue sun hat pencilled the bowling figures into his scorebook and said, ‘That’s only 3.5 an over. I call that a very sporting declaration. Especially for Middlesex.’ Then he paused. ‘Well, it would be a sporting declaration if we could get Gooch back from Old Trafford. We’re not biased, are we?’

  The glum news from Old Trafford was that bad light and rain had prevented any play so far. Emburey and Edmonds had been slowly teasing the Australians out and, since they had a great deal of leeway to make up on the first innings, optimists had been hoping for an England win.

  The pavilion at Chelmsford is an odd asymmetrical building with a mainly wooden top deck. It is at right angles to the wicket. The dressing-rooms are on the top floor, and players enter the field of play by coming down outside steps on the left of the building. I get the impression that as a general rule professional cricketers don’t much like having to walk through a long room full of spectators, as they do at Lord’s, especially if they have been out for nothing. At Lord’s they nearly always avoid any eye contact with anyone when they pass through the pavilion. I guess that an arrangement like that at Chelmsford suits them better.

  You can sense the club is thriving. Just inside the door of the pavilion they display the scorecards of the Second XI and the Under-25s, along with notices from the Essex Cricket Society and the Institute of Groundsmanship. ‘Have you ever wished that the cricket season could last forever?’ asked the Essex Cricket Society, advertising its annual dinner, with Graham Wiltshire and Don Oslear as guest speakers, and a December party with free mince pies. The Institute offered professional assistance for anyone with a dodgy cricket ground: ‘Does the ball either hit you on the brain, box or boots? Is the outfield a marsh or a rocky desert? Do you suffer from fusarium, thatch or moles?’ If so your friendly neighbourhood groundsman would be round at once.

  Most of the ground floor of the building is taken up with a long room or ‘Long Room’, with a bar at one end, full length windows looking out on to the pitch and rather horrible red, blue and gold overhead lights. These are the county colours, but even so... The glass cases and pictures are here. The official line that I was given was that these are less impressive than the county would wish. This is ascribed to the newness of the ground, the disappearance of Leyton as cricket HQ and those peripatetic years wandering to and from the seaside. In fact, though the Chelmsford history section is a bit spotty and eclectic, it is a great deal more impressive than that at several more historic grounds.

  Quite a lot is devoted to Morris Nichols, a right-arm fast bowler and forcing left-hand bat who played fourteen times for England between the wars. Nichols did the double eight times and had some stunning all-round performances. Against Gloucester in 1938 he scored 159 and took nine for 37 in the first innings and six for 128 in the second. Hammond fell to him twice. Better still was the Yorkshire match at Huddersfield in 1935. Yorkshire were champions twelve times between 1918 and 1939 and only lost forty-nine matches in all that time. The memory of that 5
55 opening partnership at Leyton was still fresh in the mind, but Nichols and Essex annihilated the home team. Nichols made 146 out of Essex’s 334. Yorkshire scored 31 in the first innings and 99 in the second, Nichols taking four for 17 in the first and seven for 37 in the second. No wonder his blazer is in the Chelmsford pavilion.

  Johnny Douglas, the county captain from 1911 to 1928, is the other most memorialised player in the Long Room, but Essex are keen to add to their collection and anxious to hear from anyone who might have interesting items to loan or bequeath. Not everything has to do with Essex. There is a photo of the sparrow killed by a ball bowled by Jehangir Khan at T. N. Pearce at Lord’s and the menu for the dinner to wish Sir Julien Cahn’s XI bon voyage before they embarked on a tour of Jamaica.

  The team photograph of 1896 includes the scorer, Mr Armour, wearing a bowler hat; the 1979 one shows a team which won the Benson and Hedges and the Championship. Lurking in the early ones you can find C.J. Kortright, reputed to be the fastest bowler of all time. And in another print you can see another demon Essex fast bowler, poor Kenneth Farnes. Farnes is not in flannels but in RAF gear, having a uniform pinned to his chest. He was killed in action in 1941 and apart from Yorkshire’s Hedley Verity was probably the best cricketer killed in the second war.

  I love these cricket museums for their quirkiness and lack of logic. Here, as in other grounds, I felt like a man suddenly let loose on a grandmother’s attic. Who was the first Englishman to score two separate hundreds in a Test? Why, Jack Russell – 140 and 111 against South Africa at Durban in 1923. And who is this distinguished clerical gentleman portrayed by ‘Spy’? It is the Reverend F. H. Gillingham, who scored nineteen hundreds for Essex and took 201 off Middlesex at Lord’s in 1904.

  And talking of clergymen, I found a real live cricket-watching parson, almost the last of the breed, sitting at a table in the Long Room watching intently as McEwan savaged the Middlesex bowling. Yet more improbably, he was wearing a straw boater. ‘You can raise it to the ladies,’ he explained, when I questioned him on the hat, ‘and it’s a wonderful shade, because I’ve only got the sight in one eye.’ This turned out to be Major the Reverend Philip Wright, a lifelong Essex supporter, twenty-two years with the Army as a chaplain, sometime parson of Roxwell and of Woodford, whence he would bicycle to see the county play at Leyton and at Ilford. A country boy from Suffolk, he is an author too: Traction Engines, Old Farm Implements, Old Farm Tractors, Salute the Carthorse, Country Padre, Day after Day, Rustic Rhymes... For years he has been the commentator at the annual parade of shire horses in London. A year before this day at Chelmsford he had gone down with cancer and pneumonia. The doctor told him he’d have to have major surgery and Major the Reverend Wright said that he’d had a pretty good life so far and he didn’t know that he could be bothered with major surgery and he’d rather just shuffle off if it was all the same to the doctor. Whereupon a young sister, Sister Sumner, formed up at his bed side and said that he hoped he wouldn’t mind her being ever so presumptuous but he was old enough to be her father and if he were her father she’d want him to have the operation so he would be around for a few more years yet. So the Reverend Major thought some more and told the doctor he would have the operation after all. ‘I was prayed for by the Anglicans,’ he says, ‘and by the Roman Catholics and by the good old Salvation Army. And here I am, and I thank God for being alive.’