The Summer Field

163 evidently never crossed his mind that not everyone wanted to serve the handful of elite players; that county cricket was valid, in Chelmsford or Taunton; or that league cricket was valid in Stoke-on-Trent or Bradford. Someone - coaches, parents and lovers of the game generally - in such places brought on (perhaps without pay) the very elite cricketers Buckland so wanted. To Buckland and his kind everything belonged in the market. The time had long passed when you could do cricket, or sport, or art or anything, for its own sake. * Buckland was only an extreme case of cricket’s businesslike yet equivocal view of its audience. Even if you paid, you had to behave – and even then you might not be welcome. While hailing the 150 th anniversary of the MCC in May 1937 in The Field , Plum Warner admitted that until the 1870s the club made ‘very little provision’ for the public. An estimated 3000 watched W.G.Grace at Derby in August 1874, ‘completely lining the ground half a dozen deep’, the Derby Mercury reported; that is, they had to stand. Only the idle rich were supposed to watch sport, such as Henry Vane- Tempest, the younger son of a lord who usually went to Lord’s for the Eton-Harrow match because boys in his family traditionally went to Eton. In his diary cricket cropped up like horse racing, the theatre, dinners and balls, things the elite did to pass the time, as on Saturday, July 9, 1892: ‘Eton made a sorry display – the match was over by 1.30. We all went down to Buffalo Bill, 16 on the coach. Dined with 18 including Prince Edward of Saxe-Weimar.’ To stay fit, physically and morally, you took part. Vane-Tempest, like his brothers, was an occasional cricketer, when staying on family estates. In the Sheffield Green Un in June 1911 the columnist Athleo praised the newly-crowned George V as ‘a sportsman in the truest sense of the word’; playing tennis, enjoying cycling and shooting. Athleo drew the moral that ‘a man who does not fulfil his obligation to his own body has not the fullest title to that honourable description’. Plaindealer in May 1930 wrote that cricket was to be played as long as you were young enough; and then watched. Spectators could be seen but not heard. For example, in August 1977 Geoffrey Boycott, Herbert Sutcliffe (in a wheelchair, and wearing a white rose in his jacket) and Sir Len Hutton were photographed together on the field at Headingley, as three Yorkshiremen to make a century of first-class centuries. Usually the image has been closely cropped; in the Sheffield Telegraph , the wider picture showed hundreds of people in a bunch on the field, as if behind an invisible boundary. The public wanted to be in the presence of the great men, yet kept a respectful, literal and symbolic, distance. Such a scene probably could not happen in the 21 st century; the public, fooled by television into an intimate relationship with players, would jostle to be close, and doubtless to take their own pictures; stewards would keep the public off the grass anyway. The authorities had reason to regard spectators as dangerous. At least as early as 1930, a Test in England or Australia might end with those beside Watching