The Summer Field

188 create no precedent’. Between the world wars, while Sunday remained a ‘rest day’ for the pro’ game, some clubs played on Sundays if the morals of ground owners, private or municipal, allowed. As a rule, the city was more free-thinking than the countryside. According to the 1938 annual of the Club Cricket Conference, very much a London and home counties body, a majority of Middlesex-based clubs, 219 of 408, would play on a Sunday, and only 31 in midweek; whereas of 22 member clubs in Berkshire and Bedfordshire, only seven would play on Sunday and three in midweek. Sussex, perhaps more of a pull for wandering clubs, had seven of 21 available in midweek; only two on a Sunday. Some working men only had Sundays free, as in August 1938 when sports writers, including Douglas Jardine (captain, naturally), George Duckworth and the 65-year-old Sydney Barnes (who took six wickets in 22 overs) played a news agency team in London. In the 1939/45 war it again made sense to allow fighting men pleasure even on the customary day of rest. Gradually each league and club had its own little argument; the Burton Hunt League’s in Lincolnshire came in January 1962. After ‘considerable discussion’, according to the minutes, the league allowed clubs to arrange Sunday fixtures, ‘but no club be compelled to’. As in other ways, the pro’ game was changing sooner than the start of the John Player in 1969 would suggest. Counties were allowed to fix first-class matches on a Sunday from 1966, even though by law they could not charge entry and had to resort to collections. Surrey was among counties that took Sunday matches to out-grounds, to revive somewhat the illusion – seized by critics and supporters alike – of rural nostalgia. The teacher, rambler and Gloucestershire Echo columnist Gordon Ottewell, for example, described the game ‘as a symbol of a way of life rather than as a battle for league points and table places’ after Gloucestershire lost to Northamptonshire at Moreton-in-Marsh in August 1986. While he noted cooing woodpigeons and darting swallows, he understood that he was watching a league match, ‘with every run fought for and every wicket earned’. The setting, or the size and nearness of the crowd – or merely the beer drunk – did seem to create light-heartedness, ‘such as the friendly bantering between a well- known Test player [Allan Lamb?] and a section of the crowd whenever he moved to a fielding position within earshot. He even sat briefly with a few spectators at the fall of a wicket …’ Matches after dark and under lights were another sign of organisers and players seeking answers to the two basic questions posed as early as 1956 by the Leicestershire captain Charles Palmer: how to bring in the ‘marginal customer’ and ‘how to adjust the hours of play so that more people can watch after work’. In yet another example of England taking ideas from Australia, England beat Australia in one-day internationals under lights in the southern summer of 1979/80. One tourist, the Essex bowler John Lever, wrote afterwards that many had asked him on his return if ‘night cricket’ would be possible in England: ‘I don’t know the answer, but I am sure the public would enjoy it.’ As he added, it would need a white ball. Even more practically, Australian cities had cricket stadia already lit for other sports; English cricket had to run its trials at football clubs, for Modern Changes