The Summer Field

143 He had a catch hit to him in the long field and the crowd tried to put him off by jeering or shouting or something like that. Mr Webbe made the catch all right but redder even than usual he plugged the ball right at a looker-on whom he judged to be the ring-leader. And that was after a catch well taken. How many times has a crowd succeeded – or had reason to think it has – as at Pickering in June 1893? Driffield won, though one of the visiting fielders dropped a catch, and according to the East Riding Chronicle ‘… no doubt wished himself six feet under the turf when he heard the spectators vent their feelings in a triumphant cheer’. Whether or not this pleasure in the misfortune of another was ‘good-humoured chaff from the ring-side’, as Leicester Sports Mercury writer Reynard called it in July 1919, he was right to add that ‘anyhow spectators who have paid their money feel they have a moral right to express their feelings’. No matter that mockers in any crowd are hypocrites, as if they could do any better. A bowler had more reason to feel a ‘moral right’ to judge a missed catch or a ‘muffed’ return, in the words of W.G.Grace in The Strand Magazine . Any mistake let off the batsman, gave away more runs, and made life harder and longer for the bowler. Sydney Barnes did fairly badly in July 1938 when he took only four for 33 out of Leominster’s 56; as the Bridgnorth Journal explained delicately, ‘he did not have the best of support from the field’. If a pro’ bowler at an amateur club needed to take wickets to impress an employer, and to take five or more to earn a collection at the ground, we can understand why bowlers lost their cool as the Durham City pro’ did on August Bank Holiday Monday in 1908. At a committee meeting on the Thursday, the club discussed ‘the conduct of Milam’ and agreed to write to him: ‘You showed considerable feeling through certain catches being missed and the committee expect that you will refrain from a repetition of such conduct.’ Tellingly, the amateur committee took the side of the guilty amateur fielders rather than the wronged pro’. As Durham signed a new professional six weeks later, Charlie Milam may have felt unusually free to let off steam. A bowler might have simply disliked one of his fielders, and shown it. A 1947 letter to the Leicestershire historian E.E.Snow recalled a village match when the Victorian player William Finney was bowling slow to ‘a Leicester solicitor who fancied himself as a wicketkeeper’ and who stood close to the stumps. ‘Suddenly Finney sent one of his fast ones down and the keeper’s bowler hat went flying down. The keeper said, “don’t do that again, you will knock my brains out, give me a sign when you are going to bowl another like that”. You can imagine the result when about every other ball Finney gave him the sign and the keeper stood 20 yards back then crept up for the next ball, and so on.’ Presumably Finney lost respect for the wicketkeeper who made him signal – which the batsman could see too. In revenge, was Finney having some fun? Cricketers who took winning seriously had no time for slack fielders because they knew, as Sydney Santall wrote in the Sheffield Green Un in June 1911, ‘the champion counties of the past score years have without Fielding and Wicketkeeping