The Summer Field

157 reported. Players were not lazy but sensible to avoid treacherous net pitches. Philip Mead, the Hampshire batsman, in a May 1936 article admitted the groundsman often had more than enough to keep the match wickets in trim, ‘but net practice is really of very little use if the wickets are not good … much as I believe in the value of net practice, I advise no nets rather than bad nets’. Even as the country prospered in the 1960s, the game muddled along. In the Surrey year book of 1970, the newly retired Ken Barrington suggested artificial wickets, in parks, at schools and on the edge of club squares. ‘It is better to learn your cricket as a boy on a true, articifical wicket than on a bumpy grass pitch which you cannot trust.’ Australians had known too; the difference was that they had done something about it, generations before, by laying concrete pitches. * Clubs never learned: the penny-pinching never paid, because untrue pitches did not allow carefree batsmen, or the skilled spin or seam bowler, to flourish. Answering his own question in the 1956 Leicestershire year book, how to make the game more interesting, the county captain Charles Palmer wrote that the obvious way would be to have wickets ‘with equality between bat and ball’, so that four innings would fit in three days’ play: ‘But this sort of wicket has been demanded for 30 years or more, and they are difficult for any groundsman to guarantee.’ Or, clubs had learned only too well; they could stay in business by patching up the ground; playing on the goodwill of their ununionised workers, and trusting that members and paying spectators would turn up, however tatty the seats, or the cricket. Yet as Palmer admitted, like anyone else who could count, attendances were falling after ‘a natural postwar boom’ (that was not special to cricket, or sport; people flocked to art galleries and museums). Like coastal resorts, churches, and the Co-operative movement, it dawned on professional cricket that as life offered more choice, some preferred to holiday in Spain, or take the new car for a Sunday drive, or to do the shopping weekly at the supermarket. Or they merely watched television. All those hours of TV watched meant fewer hours to do whatever they once did. Some would go to church, the Co-op, and the county ground no matter what. They were old and their habits were set. They were men such as Brigadier G.H.C.‘Penny’ Pennycook CBE, one of the more remarkable men of the century. Wounded in France in 1917; chemical warfare buff between the wars; commander of T Force at the end of the 1939-45 war, hunting for German industrial secrets; civil defence chief training officer in the 1950s. When he finally retired, aged 70, he knew where to retire — Hove — and why. ‘It’s five minutes from the shops, less than ten minutes from the sea, five minutes from the Sussex cricket ground and a bus ride from the Brighton and Hove Albion football ground,’ he said in 1967. ‘What more can a man want?’ Even men as lively as ‘Penny’ Pennycook died eventually. Like any institution, cricket needed young blood. Would enough blood – men and women – keep flowing? Pitches