The Summer Field

181 the traditional last days, when few chose to pay full price for a fraction of a day’s play. Officials knew something was wrong. In a December 1951 speech to county secretaries at Lord’s, the MCC secretary Colonel R.S.Rait-Kerr aired the question: is all well with English cricket? He offered nothing new, only the fuzzy appeal to captains and players to be ‘dynamic’, and aim for victory. His practical details were so petty – such as a batsman not taking up the whole two minutes when walking in – he only showed how bankrupt of ideas authority was. Such an appeal would no more work than pleas to housewives, still having to use ration books for food, not to buy on the black market; to car drivers to take more care; or trade unionists not to strike for better wages. Appeals to morals got nowhere, as they did not address why people acted selfishly. As the cricket writer S.Canynge Caple put it in Somerset’s 1957/58 yearbook, ‘It is only common sense that a youngster, whose livelihood depends on his keeping his place in the first team, is not going to jeopardise his career by taking unnecessary risks’. Caple called final days of county games ‘boring and farcical’; the county game took its lead from Test matches, ‘a grim war of attrition’. Even some pros’ admitted it. The young Michael Turner wrote in Leicestershire’s 1958 yearbook: ‘Due to the difficulties of [winter] employment there is a certain amount of insecurity attached to the game which of course has an adverse psychological effect on a young professional’s cricket – such as an “I won’t get out” attitude which subconsciously stops a player from playing his natural game.’ Renewal would not come from county clubs; or their players; it had to come from the leaders at the centre. * ‘Whether we like it or not,’ wrote The Times cricket correspondent John Woodcock in April 1963, previewing the season, ‘spectator sports must change. They always have and those which shrink from doing so will go to the wall, unrescued by tradition.’ Still, Woodcock warned against change for the sake of it; the game at its best in his opinion required only ‘fine weather, firm wickets and the readiness to take a calculated risk’. This official view was valid. While those in authority would hardly admit that they were ruling over steep decline, they believed, as the Hampshire president Harry Altham hinted in his county’s 1959 yearbook, that the game was part of ‘what we call the English way of life’ and had ‘a heritage which each generation must foster and hand on to those who come after’. Northerners were more canny; Jim Kilburn began his History of Yorkshire 1924-1949 by defining his county’s cricket as ‘a private enterprise with a public responsibility’. Kilburn, too, wrote of a sense of ‘stewardship’; that men of the present had to be true to those of the past and future, besides themselves. Even the fictional Fleet Street journalist Tony Hinton of Maiden Over , who risked his career to champion Bobbie Spencer, felt something similar when he watched Bill Edrich and Denis Compton together at Lord’s. The novelist Charles Hatton laid on an ideal, ‘golden afternoon’ scene: Edrich cutting, Compton glancing off his toes, ‘two elderly members in panama hats … drinking beer from silver tankards’, a newsboy ‘shouting the latest edition of the evening papers’, even the woman-friend beside Renewal