The Summer Field

177 entertainment. Some players agreed, if only to defend themselves, as after the drawn fourth Victory Test in August 1945. The Australian Services, wanting to stay ahead in the series, batted long and carefully after winning the toss. England’s captain Wally Hammond admitted afterwards it did not make for ‘pretty’ cricket: … to have provided this would probably have meant lowering the standard of the game. I am sure the public would be the first to disagree if this policy was adopted. I am not of the opinion it was slow cricket. On the contrary I think the game whether in its slower or brighter modes was always in an interesting state. So much can happen in cricket which seems unaccountable. There the argument stood, unresolved after a generation, when cricket began again after the 1939/45 war. * Little came of the Findlay Commission; as with so many official reviews and inquiries, that was the idea all along. The MCC appointed it in March 1937 ‘with a view to assuring the future of the County Championship’; in other words, it ruled out changes to the traditional three-day matches, such as a cup competition. If county club officials ever had a commercial idea - and any committee is hardly a hive of novelty - some members were sure to squash it. For instance, in autumn 1928 Leicestershire club proposed a speedway track on their ground. Enough members opposed it to call a special meeting in January 1929. Several club committee men from the president Henry Howe down did not attend, whether to stay out of trouble or because they did not want speedway either. Colonel C.F. Oliver in the chair had to admit the pitch would be 15 yards further from the pavilion; he claimed that ‘bumper fencing’ would not spoil views. The club plainly was doing it for the money. Why else would a club share with a motorcycle dirt track? What neighbours would put up with the noise, and electric lights (which the club assured members they could remove on match days — floodlit cricket evidently being beyond the imagination in 1929)? Speedway would bring £2000 a year — £1000 in rent and £1000 from a bank holiday meeting, a colossal and welcome sum for a club that had lost money and cut its second eleven in the previous two years. Even so, the plan lost on a show of hands. ‘We want our cricket clean and pure,’ one member said, blind to the fact that without enough money he would have no cricket at all. If we go by the numbers in the press reports of the time — 400 attended the meeting and a motion for the speedway lost by about 225 to 175 – perhaps barely a tenth of the membership blocked the change. Not that members ever had any better ideas; the Leicestershire committee resigned at the annual meeting days later, only to be voted in again. Leagues, without quite such dead weight, were bringing in cup competitions by the 1930s. Thanks to shorter working hours and motor transport, men could reach a ground in time for a short weekday match before dark. At its very start in 1931 the Burton Hunt League in Lincolnshire agreed a knock- Renewal