The Summer Field

107 Other counties copied. Sussex secretary W.L.Knowles in a 1927 letter called the nursery ‘the cornerstone’ of the club: ‘… in fact the county team cannot do without it as a reserve.’ Derbyshire began its nursery before 1914 and brought on local youths well enough to win the county’s first championship in 1936. In a well-timed little book, The Rise of Derbyshire Cricket 1919-35 , the county’s treasurer Major Llewellyn Eardley-Simpson wrote in April 1936: “The Nursery has been the finest investment ever made by the County Committee, and one trembles to think where we should have been by now without it.” Likewise the ambitious minor county Durham part-paid for four player-coaches, part-paid by league clubs, ‘so that the younger players would be ultimately fitted to take their place in the county team’, as Durham secretary T.A.Bulmer told the club’s annual meeting in 1921. While the club did not become first-class, as Bulmer hoped, until 1992, the club did have success between the wars. Why then didn’t every county have a nursery? Knowles put the cost at £400 a year, as much as an outstanding player. A return on the money was hard to prove; coach and club could fall out. Derbyshire had various coaches before settling on the newly-retired Sam Cadman in 1925. Even in 1936 Eardley-Simpson had to admit that ‘Cadman has not satisfied everyone’. At least Derbyshire stuck by their nursery. As early as 1921 the Leicestershire club’s finance committee was putting off a ‘nursery fund’. The club always had other priorities: a motor mower, a house for the groundsman, better lavatories. In 1923 the club hired the former Surrey and England man Ernest Hayes as coach, who was ‘not re-engaged’ after the 1929 season. As the depression bit around 1930, and the club gave professionals a ten per cent pay cut, Hayes’ wage - £250 in 1929, as much as a pro’ – was, once more, not a priority. In any business, training was an easy department to cut in hard times. Coaching took faith besides money. * In January 1924, Colonel Hugo Meynell sent from Hoar Cross Hall in Staffordshire a cheque for £4 to MCC. That paid for his two privately- educated sons, Mark, about to turn ten and Hugo, aged 14 and at Eton, to attend two-week batting classes at Lord’s at Easter. The typed notes from MCC secretary Sir Francis Eden Lacey, offer an important source, and a welcome change from comment by coaches, the coached or onlookers; Marylebone, the guardian of the game, was telling parents what they could expect for their money. As £4 was then a good week’s wage – and non-members had to pay half as much again - anyone taking guard in the Lord’s nets was well off. MCC told professionals bowling at the nets not to take tips. ‘This is taken into consideration in fixing their salary. Tips are a tax on some parents and are degrading to all who receive them.’ Lacey did not go into why a boy might tip; to reward good work, make the bowler try harder, or show who was boss? Lacey stressed repeatedly that ‘all coaches coach on the same lines’. That might have justified the rule — ‘it is impossible to allow pupils to select their coaches’. You could imagine, for instance, that Meynell’s Coaching