The Summer Field

14 three-day game at Sheffield against Dalton began on an ‘extremely cold’ Tuesday 21 September. The Sheffield Independent reported that ‘the wind disturbed the bails repeatedly’; a comfort, perhaps, to 21 st century spectators shivering at England’s one-day internationals ever later in September. An early September 1851 match for £25 a side between Chatsworth and Staveley in north Derbyshire prompted two Chesterfield gentlemen to arrange a single-wicket match afterwards. Despite lanterns and candlelight neither man made a run. Some clubs such as Torquay fixed as late as mid-September what the local press billed as a ‘grand finale’, including ladies’ and gentlemen’s archery. Such sprawling seasons did not last. By 1909, ‘The Waffler’ in the weekly Walsall Observer asked why cricket could not overlap with football, which already had two-thirds of the year. Likewise the start of a season by 1913 was set in what ‘Corvus Cornix’ in the Herts and Cambs Reporter insisted on calling the ‘merry month of May’; again, after football. Clubs played less often by later standards because arranging matches, usually by letter, took time. Likewise clubs might ask their chosen eleven to play by postcard, maybe partly-printed to save time: (‘kindly let me know as early as possible if you cannot play’, said the cards PC Maurice Cowling sent as secretary of the East Riding Constabulary team around 1940.) The secretary of Burton-on-Trent club, the solicitor Frank Evershed, was from about 1905 using a telephone (or at least charging the club for using one). His notebook had about 130 other secretaries’ addresses; only two had telephone numbers. Having to trust clubs you knew little about invited disputes; some made the press. In September 1845 W.A.Spencer, Derby club secretary, wrote to the Derby Mercury , ‘having been repeatedly asked why Hunt, the celebrated cricket player from Sheffield, was allowed to appear in the return match’ with Chesterfield. Spencer’s story showed Clubbing Together Stained glass in Brighton town hall, which points to the part cricket and the railways played in the resort’s growth, like many seaside places in Victorian England.