The Summer Field

165 the boundary running towards the players, who ran towards the pavilion, as members did not rush onto the field. To have hundreds of people charging at you, even if meaning you no harm, is to feel uncomfortably as if you are in the middle of a medieval battle. The Surrey member Michael Loosley who sought (in vain) at the 1970 annual meeting to make the club withdraw its invitation to the touring South Africans, deplored barbed wire around the boundary, but not in front of the members’ stand, as ‘an insult to its patrons’. While the club indeed acted crassly – in an already multi-racial part of south London – it had reason to trust its members more than the paying public; if a member did storm the field, the club could take the membership card away. Travelling supporters, as in football, had a long history. Given that entrance to a league game at Durham City in July 1912 was sixpence, takings of £15 for the top of the league match against Sunderland would suggest 600 paid. The Durham Advertiser reported that ‘many’ came from Sunderland, about 15 miles away, who after their win were ‘full of jubilation as they wended their way to the pavilion and cheered …. lustily’. Cricket, like rugby, has long prided itself that its spectators behave better than the hooligans following football. That is not the same as saying cricket crowds always behaved well, as behaviour excusable or even normal for some may disgust the old and prudish. On Whit Monday in 1910 Will Richards took his favourite girl, Doris Raynor, ‘to the Surrey match’ at Trent Bridge, ‘sitting in the tanner [sixpence] places for six hours. These seats at holiday times are crowded with a noisy crew of men using plenty of language. She naturally resented it, any decent girl would have done so.’ While Richards did not say if he shared Doris’ feelings, he was a well-brought up young man who avoided pubs, and lower-class theatres. We have no way of knowing if the rough-speakers were playing up because they were on holiday, or if they were speaking naturally. Even if such men tried to be hospitable, the respectable might find it threatening. In June 1926 Plaindealer recalled a custom at Somercotes in Derbyshire of spectators who ‘sat each with their pint of beer handy, and if a player whether a visitor or not pleased the onlookers he was sure of an invitation to drink, the form of words being I am sure, ‘“Soop laad”’. Bad crowd behaviour, or what cricketers took to be bad, had as long a history. W.G.Grace raised it in The Strand Magazine in 1895: ‘If a batsman is unfortunate, there is always a section of the public who starts jeering as soon as he may come in.’ Bodyline famously provoked what the Sydney Morning Herald called, during a match at Ballarat after the Adelaide Test, ‘sustained barracking of some of the English players’ by ‘the hooligan element’. A letter in The Times signed only ‘Austranglian’ blamed some of the controversy on barrackers, ‘in large part larrikins, habitual loafers and dead beats, or grass chewers as they are called in Australia’. The writer recalled such ‘pests’ threw bottles when Plum Warner, as captain on the 1903/04 tour, did not take the field soon enough after rain. Less reported about bodyline is that, as the Sydney Morning Herald reported, the Nawab of Pataudi had ‘suffered deeply from jibes by ill-mannered persons’, presumably to do with his race, as he was a batsman, not a Watching