The Summer Field

18 Clubbing Together no way of knowing how often whole teams never arrived; wronged clubs seem to have treated it as normal, and made their own ‘odds and ends’ or scratch teams. For Torquay’s ‘week’ in August 1869, the club hoped for a team from Shropshire on the two most popular days, the Wednesday and Thursday. Instead ‘several gentlemen from Bath’ proposed to bring a Somerset team to play Devon, only to cry off the day before. That said, ‘a great deal of vexation’ was natural, as felt by Retford when Sheffield Brewers Association did not turn up in July 1875. If there was a late hitch or a misunderstanding all along, the only quick way to send a message, by telegram, was too dear for all except the rich – such as the Honourable G.Harris, of the Anomalies, due to play South Derbyshire at Derby in June 1871, who ‘telegraphed in the morning his inability to play’. Clubs that knew how it felt to be wronged did try to be good neighbours. In June 1920, when Derby Midland should have sent a third team to Burbage outside Buxton – a hilly 30-mile journey, presumably arranged as a day out – the hosts sent a telegram calling the match off because of heavy rain. Telephones made it easier for players or teams to cry off, as on Thursday, September 12, 1940 when PC Maurice Cowling, the East Riding police team secretary, rang his inspector that he could not make the match against West Yorkshire Regiment in York because of a road accident near his house at Burton Agnes. Even in that Battle of Britain summer, RAF Driffield had the good manners to tell PC Cowling to call off the game arranged for September 4 because they could not ‘gather 11 men together’. By then, cricketers had a century or more of knowledge, taken for granted, not easily ignored, like car driving by the 21 st century. Contrast that with a revealing remark from the Derby Mercury of June 1840. Burton beat hosts Atherstone in a two-day game. ‘We observed several times,’ an anonymous witness wrote: when the batters were at their wickets and the bowler prepared to start that he was stopped whilst alterations were made in the position of the Burton fielders. This did not look very cricket-like; the wicket- keeper should make his arrangement of the field sooner, either by consultation before the commencement of the over or by signal before the batter is at his wicket and the eye of every fielder should be on the wicket-keeper until the bowler is about to deliver his ball. Leaving aside that the wicket-keeper was placing the field, plainly some men had a sense of cricket etiquette – what was ‘cricket-like’ – that others did not match. Intriguingly the reporter added that the game was ‘spirited … and conducted in the genuine social spirit of cricket without a wrangle or a quibble’; which suggested some games did have wrangles. Is it reading too much into early Victorian newspapers, that if they reported players parted ‘on the most friendly terms’, sometimes the players did not? Plenty could go sour in a Victorian club. Judging from the printed rules, subscriptions needed chasing and some went unpaid, as every club from MCC down began by spelling out what to pay, and when. Some subs were,