Dimming of the Day

17 Chapter Two The Making of the Myth of a Golden Age Before we look at what happened, perhaps we should turn to what was lost, as traditional accounts have seen it as the time when cricket was most truly cricket. Golden Ages, by definition, are in the past, and they represent something from which we have fallen away. Plato, basing himself on Hesiod, saw it that way, setting off all kinds of attempts to find the lost city of Atlantis by people who could not tell fact from fiction: the myth of the Garden of Eden is another of the same sort. There is a general myth about the years before the Great War. George Dangerfield, having more or less decisively demolished the myth of pre- war tranquillity (before Downton Abbey and its like brought it back) put it well in 1935 Standing beside Rupert Brooke’s moonlit grave, one looks back. All the violence of the pre-war world has vanished, and in its place there glow, year into backward year, the diminishing vistas of that other England, the England where the Grantchester church clock stood at ten to three, where there was Beauty, Certainty and Quiet, and where nothing was real. Today we know it for what it was: but there are moments, very human moments, when we could almost find it in our hearts to envy those who saw it, and never lived to see the new world. 1 Looking back from even further away, we have the added obstruction to our vision of the Second World War and the natural tendency to reflect the values of that war back to the First. Cricketers are terribly prone to this worship of the past. Whether it was John Nyren in The Cricketers of My Time or James Pycroft in The Cricket Field in 1851 bemoaning the way the game had gone downhill, or any of a swathe of writers complaining that no wicketkeepers in the 1950s stood up to fast bowling any more, or today’s commentators wondering where the fast bowlers have gone, yesterday always looks better. Surely, though, the golden age of cricket deserves its name? The age of Ranji and Fry, of MacLaren and Jessop, of the late Indian summer of WG? The Edwardian age – in cricket as well as in popular imagining of the past - acquired its gilt finish because of what came after it. Writing in History of Cricket (published in 1926) H.S. Altham subscribes strongly to the myth and all its fictional appearances are the same (look at L.P.Hartley in The Go-Between , even though it was not published until 1953). In these accounts the sun shines and nobody sits morosely in the pavilion (except 1 George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England , 1935