The Summer Field

119 Selection and Recruitment Selectors were the same as any recruiters in business. At counties, they had to predict whether unproven youths would meet what the Derby Daily Telegraph in September 1920 termed the ‘exacting standard’. Or, selectors anywhere had to judge a proven man on his reputation, on the field and off. In either case, we are assuming that a man wanted to keep being picked and to keep progressing, until he faded. Some gave up because, as Surrey club cricketer Tony Brown recalled: ‘Quite honestly, I didn’t think I was really good enough, and, with a family to consider, the financial side was nowhere near what I could get outside the game – unless of course you really made the top grade.’ He batted well enough to earn a Surrey second eleven cap in the 1950s and to make 62,000 runs in club cricket. Major Stanyforth admitted in July 1937 that only half of a school eleven would still be playing, a few years after leaving school. A man became tied down every weekend: ‘Golf, tennis, motor cars and wives gradually take their toll.’ The amateurs – the very men that the authorities so wanted – made their own selections. Freeman Barnardo, for example, in his 1930s university summers travelled on the Continent, to practise languages with an eye on a career in the Indian Army or imperial administration. An undated letter to Barnardo on Eton College notepaper summed up the part – but only a part – that cricket played in the carefree lives of the privileged. The unknown friend described mid-July 1939 matches. First, Eton had lost to Harrow for the first time since 1908: Lord’s was a sorry display, I am glad in a way you were not there to watch it. All the people we thought would make runs did not and those that made a few (except Nat) were off every part of the bat except the middle ... There were terrific scenes at the end; I believe one man was debagged as he was seen to be wearing pale blue braces! Nat threw the mascot into the crowd at the end of two days – I don’t know what word to use instead of struggle. ‘Nat’ was the Eton captain Nathaniel Fiennes. Barnardo’s friend began his holidays at Maidstone, ‘to see the last day of the Kent and Gloucestershire match. We stayed Sunday night in the same hotel as most of the Glos side and met young [Arthur] Brodhurst’, later the son-in-law of H.S.Altham; it’s a small world. ‘We liked him enormously and he had quite a lot to say about you. It seems he is thinking of becoming a beak …’ The letter closed with more about Eton, plainly still of interest to Barnardo, whose 62 not out had won the 1937 match against Harrow. ‘I am sure you will be interested to know that the side that went to Lord’s was Fiennes’ own choice … The captain of the XI had not had enough licence for years and as the first choice are carefully considered one can rest assured they are not half witted. Don’t you agree?’ As Leicestershire’s new captain Charles Palmer put it in the county’s 1951 yearbook, while captain and selectors had ‘an ideal in mind’, they had to make the most of the ‘talent available’. Let us look at what captains did with their selected men.