The Summer Field

154 the ground rolled, mown, swept and mended. To have charge of the club property and attend at the ground on all practising evenings and match days to do whatever the members of the club may require of him.’ If clubs would not help themselves, or could not afford to, might the ever more powerful state do the work? In the Burton Chronicle in March 1950 the league official D.A.Hughes said that ‘the Corporation pitches are slowly solving the problem’, though he admitted the town hall provided too few pitches that were played on too often. Municipal parks proved no more of an answer locally than state ownership of houses, telephones or railways did nationally. In the Burton Hunt League in Lincolnshire, Ruddocks Club in 1969 asked for permission to play all its matches away as its ‘atrocious’ King George’s playing field was ‘not fair to the other clubs’. In 1948 the league gave Glentworth club permission to play on a matting wicket. Even if turf played well, rain could make it worse; and covering was not sure to keep the ground dry. In June 1920 heavy rain fell at Derby the day before Monday play. A tarpaulin kept the ends dry where the batsmen stood, ‘but in the middle of the pitch it was very wet’. In September 1907, when the South African tourists played an England eleven at Uttoxeter, a large tarpaulin covered the pitch for at least three days, ‘but unhappily the rain had got under in places and there the ground was very damp’ and the pitch played ‘rather queerly’. Players long understood the difference between good and bad pitches, though we can only guess what they meant by ‘good’or ‘bad’. An unknown hand in the Corfe club score book in Somerset wrote of an 1860s game against Dunster: ‘Ground fairly good between wickets, rough elsewhere.’ Nature sometimes did not need improving, as the cleric and musicologist Edmund Fellowes recalled in his 1946 Memoirs of an Amateur Musician . On a holiday in his later schooldays in the mid-1880s he played for local teams at Cerne Abbas in Dorset: ‘These games were played on the top of the Black Hill where a beautiful pitch could be rolled out on the natural down turf,’ as indeed could a picnic lunch. Usually, someone had to prepare a field. The Torquay Directory in August 1887 reported that during the resort’s cricket week ‘owing to the long drought the ground was dry and hard, notwithstanding the exertions made by Rigby, the ground- keeper to get it into order’. Good work was appreciated; the Directory in August 1880 praised the town club’s wicket ‘in excellent condition’, Rigby ‘receiving many thanks from the visiting team’. You wonder how many bowlers thanked him, as Torquay that month made 450 to beat Old Brucians (134 and 42) by an innings. * It has suited pro’ cricket to hold up groundsmen as happy in their work. It excused employers for exploiting workmen and paying them a pittance for long hours, like stable lads in horse racing. The county game had enough selfless, long-serving groundsmen to make the myth credible. Ernie Knights, after 50 years as groundsman at Southampton, told the Hampshire club handbook in 1975: ‘It’s a full-time job and a spare-time hobby all wrapped in one.’ Groundsmen fathered many cricketers: Ted Pitches