Dimming of the Day

16 The Structure of Cricket in 1914 played a total of 25 matches. The Times published school scores and wrote long commentaries, but other newspapers produced full scores as well. Many pages of Wisden were devoted to their performances. The Times feels as if its cricket pages were written by and for a small coterie of the upper classes looking for the scores of the younger generation. The other scores for the London Press would be those of various military teams (the Household Brigade seemed to spend most of its time playing cricket) and public school Old Boys’ sides. Then, of course, there was country house cricket, nostalgically presented as the game where the upper classes and their social inferiors mixed. Even now it may be impossible to rescue recreational cricket – country house and village – from that golden haze. They were the days when the visiting team still arrived for matches in a two-horse brake (uncomfortable but romantic as described by Siegfried Sassoon). His chapter The Flower Show Match (there may be an indication here that the toffs did not join the village team every week) and Hugh de Selincourt’s The Cricket Match (published in 1924) look back. If the cricket match in England, their England is set in the early twenties, it harks back to the traditional model (one could, of course, follow the account all the way back to Mary Mitford). What Flora Thompson (writing from the lower strata), however, said in Lark Rise to Candleford suggests that this might not have been entirely true, A few of the young men played cricket in the summer. One young man was considered a good bowler locally and he would sometimes get up a team to play one of the neighbouring villages. This once led to a curious little conversation on his doorstep. A lady had alighted from her carriage to ask, or rather, command him to get up a team to play ”the young men”, meaning her sons on holiday from school, and a few of their friends. Naturally, Frank wanted to know the strength of the team he was to be up against.” You’d want me to bring a good team, I suppose, ma’am, he asked respectfully. “Well, yes,” said the lady. “The young gentlemen would enjoy a good game. But don’t bring too good a team. They wouldn’t want to be beaten.” “That’s what she calls cricket,” said Frank, grinning broadly at her retreating figure. There was no organised women’s cricket at this time. There had been efforts in the past to manufacture a commercial product, but by this time women who might have played at school if they had been expensively educated tended to play odd games as part of village celebrations or against the gentlemen of the club playing left-handed or with broomsticks. Far more than now, both men and boys played some sort of cricket at a time when it shared the year with football so that it was perfectly possible to play both at any level.