The Summer Field

149 The scorer, however, refused to put the run down and would not let his book be compared with his brother scorer’s, but walking out of the pavilion went down to the wickets, showed Horsley, the Riddings captain, the book, whereupon they all left the field and refused to continue the game further. As a result of what the Mercury called ‘ungentlemanly conduct’, the crowd ‘expressed their disgust in loud terms’. For good measure, the Riddings umpire had allegedly given a Wirksworth man out unfairly leg before although he had hit the ball. At least the episode showed that scorers, like umpires, had a place. Without a tally of runs, a match was merely one batsman after another indulging himself. An incorrect tally might overturn a match result, as in August 1851 when Coleorton of Leicestershire thought they had passed the 141 of the visitors, Melbourne of Derbyshire. Coleorton’s batsmen then played carelessly and were out for 148. According to the Mercury someone found that each scorer had forgotten to include the eleven scored by a Melbourne batsman, meaning that Coleorton lost. What may be the score book for Ham Hill club in Somerset around 1830 was simply five folded sheets of paper, kept together with a metal pin in the middle. At 11cm by 18cm, the self-made booklet was presumably small enough to fit inside a pocket. For an innings each batsman was listed on the left of a page, whether ‘Mr Knowles’ or ‘B Webb’ or surname only. Runs were marked like Roman numerals beside the name – IIIIII, for example – and the total, six in this case, written at the end of the batsman’s line. As in a child’s sum, a line was drawn beneath the final batsman’s total and the team total added up. Ham Hill seemed not to record anything of the bowling. By contrast the far larger Burton club scorebook for the years 1859 to 1865 – a copy of the 13 th edition of Lillywhite’s Improved Registered Cricket Scoring Book – would look familiar to a modern scorer. It had enough boxes for 280 overs in an innings, and allowed you to record the fall of wickets, n-balls and wides against each bowler; and byes, leg byes, wides and n-balls to the batting side. That the London-based suppliers left room for capturing the details of batting and bowling did not mean scorers recorded everything. For some matches, Burton never recorded bowling at all. Even when the club did, it seldom totted up the runs to make bowling figures, which explains why newspapers of the day only carried batting cards. Scorers, as holders of the latest news, were ‘close allies of the journalists’ as Bruce Harris wrote in his tour diary of 1936/37. ‘If the many correspondents all manage to get their facts into line, the achievement is due to the scorers, rather than their own recording and timing,’ Harris admitted. He described how the MCC scorer, the Australian Bill Ferguson, used to make four entries ‘in various books’ after each ball. We have ever more ways to measure, electronically now, elite batting – time of innings in minutes, balls faced, scoring rate, and ‘wagon wheels’ Umpiring and Scoring