The Summer Field

187 What worker would like to give up their free Sundays, and face a potential seven-day week? Nor did the short innings appeal: ‘When you have been brought up on the three-day game with time to think and play yourself in, you do not relish the idea of a 40-over “slog”.’ Turner recalled that Essex finished third that first Sunday season and he and his team had an appetite for more, because they did well (‘we might win something at last’) and the players fed off the excited crowds: ‘The atmosphere which only a few Test players had tasted was now part of everybody’s life.’ That life included foreigners. Like much in life, ‘foreign’ depended on your definition. In a 1927 exchange of letters with the Sussex secretary W.L. Knowles, committee member Thomas Baden-Powell pushed for a chance for a local lad, John Langridge – younger brother of all-rounder James, already in the county eleven. Powell wanted ‘native talent’ instead of ‘imported material’ from Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, and even a 1900s bowler from Sydney, John Dwyer. The talented from urban counties that could not find a place in their local eleven had indeed long sought a job in the shires. Even the metropolitan club Lancashire had given a home to the Australian fast bowler Ted McDonald; and MCC to the South African Aubrey Faulkner. Only new after the 1939-45 war was the skin colour of West Indians, Indians and Pakistanis, east and south Africans. They were seeking a living, the same as immigrants of the former British Empire generally, and pioneer West Indians of the 1930s such as Learie Constantine, Manny Martindale and Bertie Clarke. Maiden Over included a friendly portrait of ‘Martineau, the famous West Indian’, a ‘Pennine League’ professional who batted and bowled against the heroine Bobbie Spencer. In the pro’ game as in society generally, some complained that immigrants took Englishmen’s jobs. Economics trumped local pride. Yorkshire only chose county-born men, until 1992, when it hired a teenage Sachin Tendulkar. As late as 1978, Colin Cowdrey could tell East Riding umpires in an after-dinner speech that ‘England is the only cricket market in the world’. Though as traditionalist as his initials MCC implied, Cowdrey had seen enough of the world thanks to the game (and his family background) to feel internationalist. Cowdrey also welcomed incomers out of self- interest: ‘In a lot of counties such as Gloucestershire and Hampshire it is the overseas players who have kept them alive. Next season the game will be wholly sponsored and the overseas players have played a big part in helping this sponsorship,’ of the county championship, by the drinks business Schweppes. When taking companies’ money, the game’s administrators had to convince anyone who cared that (to recall the Surrey yearbook) they were keeping to ‘best traditions’. In truth once something of the sport was sold, to Gillette, anything could be. So it was with Sunday play. Like much other change in English life, the breach in the quiet and uncommercial sabbath came in the 1914/18 war. In August 1917, for instance, the committee of Beverley Town regretted that the military had played a match on their borrowed ground on a Sunday, ‘and believing it against the interests of cricket in general and the club in particular this committee trust it will Modern Changes