The Summer Field

115 was urged.’ After bad weather in the 1929 season caused a heavy financial loss and a dangerously heavy debt at the bank, the club tried to make do with as few professionals as it could. That might explain why, in late April 1930, and again in 1931, the selection committee canvassed amateurs about their availability for the season. Of eleven asked in 1930 Edward Dawson, who had resigned as captain, was ‘uncertain’; the other ten were more helpful, ranging from 20-year-old Charles Packe (‘nearly all season’) and E.A.Broughton (‘any match’ – he made 22 runs in four innings all season) to Claude Taylor (‘declines’). Amateurs, mostly batsmen, were more to the selectors’ taste socially – in every eleven picked, the captain’s name always went in the minutes book first, then the amateurs, then the professionals in order of experience. Amateurs did take the place of professionals. The record gives no clues whether selectors ever disagreed. An answer of sorts is that often by midsummer the team stayed nearly the same, week after week. Selectors met only once, for instance, between June 4 and July 2, 1925. In between, the county played (in order) at Leicester, Blackheath, Leicester again twice, Hull, Old Trafford and Ashby. After a month or two into the season, the first team was nearly picking itself. When selectors did meet, in July 1926 they agreed ‘any changes necessary at option of Major Fowke’, the then 45-year-old captain. Whether to please the stand-in captain G.B.F.Rudd, or to give him more power to help him control his men, the selectors the same month gave him 13 names at Nottingham and 15 against Sussex at Leicester, ‘captain to have final choice’. Fewer meetings were a sign of a settled, not a careless club; at the other extreme, Major Eardley-Simpson at Derbyshire recalled in 1920 ‘that the selection committee had about as many meetings as there were matches’. Leicesterhire selectors did turn up, usually between four and six, in the pavilion, perhaps after tea on the second day of a championship match. They took less trouble over the lesser club elevens. Also in July 1926, selectors named only ten second teamers for a home game against Lincolnshire, ‘and captain to fill any vacancy’. For two club and ground matches, selectors agreed ‘to leave to Hayes [the coach] and secretary from staff and complete with trialists’ (ever including F.H. Brewin?). The selectors may have had little work because the first team, though typically losing more games than it won, was, according to president Henry Howe at the club’s annual meeting in March 1927, ‘a fine lot of players’. While a committee man could always find excuses to see off unsatisfied members, in that 1927 season Leicestershire won seven and lost only three, finishing seventh, which Edward Holmes in the chair at the next annual meeting described as ‘epic’. As any club only had so much money to spend on players, the real work was in spotting talent rather than selecting between known players. Ignoramuses always knew better, usually making most noise whenever Australia beat England. The big scores of Don Bradman, for instance, prompted E.Roffe Thompson in Tit-Bits magazine in August 1930: ‘We have a good many Bradmans hidden away in club cricket if only someone would make it his business to pick them out and give them a chance.’ Such foghorns never made it their business. In truth newcomers could find Selection and Recruitment