The Summer Field

10 Chimneys and Fields simpler pleasures; for the Diamond Jubilee celebrations of July 1897, Hayter noted races, a tug of war, and ‘a lot of men tipsy’; no cricket. New games, tennis and croquet, that women could play, appealed to the well- off with large gardens such as Hayter’s family and friends. Only one threat – the emptying of the countryside thanks to the pull of better-paid work in towns – seems not to have applied to cricket. In August 1894 Hayter ‘drove’ (by horse and cart) the five and a half miles into Castle Cary, for a return match: ‘I did not play because we had 12 men besides.’ Even without the pastimes of towns and the seaside, polite and common country folk alike had more than cricket to amuse them. In any case, country people could take the train to town; in July 1897 Hayter and a friend lodged a couple of days in Bath to see Somerset and the Philadelphians, ruined by rain. Towns were coming to the country, too, for good; in old age in Basingstoke in 1906 Lieutenant-Colonel John May recalled that he had learned to play 60 years before on his uncle’s meadow, ‘which has now been absorbed by the London and South-Western Railway’. * We play cricket on a field; fields are in the countryside. Naturally we assume cricket’s origins were in the country. Before bank holidays, when the only holidays were ‘feasts’, fairs running a few days every year, working Victorians who could live for the game were frame knitters, also known as stockingers, making textiles in cottages across the Midlands. As the Derbyshire cricket journalist ‘Plaindealer’ recalled in the Ashbourne Telegraph in August 1933: ‘…. they worked when they chose. If it was a nice day, if there was a chance of cricket they played and made up for lost time when rain fell. The work strengthened a man’s wrists and suppled them. It strengthened his fingers and made them pliant. It trained his eye for he must be ever on the watch for a broken thread …’ Articles in the Loughborough Echo in 1934 about district clubs within living memory are important evidence for the knitters’ place (needless to say, forgotten) in Victorian cricket history. The writer, named only as ‘Heywood’, had passed a cricket match the summer before ‘on a genuine old village green’ in the village of Car Colston, east of Nottingham. He recalled how different cricket was 50 years earlier, in look (‘all manner of different costumes were in order … firmly secured by a pair of vivid red braces’) and style. He, too, harped on about village cricket (‘always …. cradle and nursery to our county teams’). He was wistful; other sports now appealed, and ‘cricket perhaps can never wholly regain the unchallengeable position which it once held.’ Men from such Leicestershire villages as Shepshed and Hathern became cricket professionals around the country in the 1870s and 1880s. Clubmen would walk up to ten miles one way to play other villages, Heywood wrote. ‘After a strenuous match they would rest awhile, partake of what refreshment they could afford and in due course set off on their return journey along the rough stony roads. Much they would endure for their beloved game. How many modern sportsmen would be prepared to undergo the same trials and labours for an afternoon’s cricket?’ Life could be as hard, and free time as hard to find, in a town as the village.