The Summer Field

202 were in 1936 (the club’s whist drive organiser, J.S.Brown, told the annual meeting ‘it was time the police or some authority took some steps’). Human nature and weakness will never change. In March 1938 a court fined Frank Woolley ten shillings for leaving his car parked on High Street, Kensington, while shopping. Perhaps Woolley was taking a chance like most car drivers have; or perhaps, as a famed cricketer he felt that the rules were for other people. While fortune can turn anyone, famous sportsmen are at more risk because even otherwise famous people defer to them. Keith Miller wrote in old age to his wartime air force comrade in England, Derek ‘Whitey’ Whitehead: ‘Oddly enough a good mate is your PM John MAJOR [Miller had the military or journalistic habit of writing surnames in capitals]. He is one of the nicest chaps I have met. He told me, “my dad used to take me to see you play cricket, you and Denis Compton were my idols”.’ In his 1958 memoir Along the Road to Frome , another Conservative MP, Christopher Hollis, captured as well as anyone a boy’s view of cricketers. In 1910, aged eight, he sent a shilling to Taunton towards Somerset’s ‘shilling fund’: ... I had then no ambition nor indeed did it occur to me that a reasonable person could have any ambition except to play cricket for the county if possible even to play in a Test match. I considered that the human race was divided clearly into those who had succeeded in becoming county cricketers, those who had failed to become county cricketers, and women … I lived day in day out a second life in my imagination in which I was a triumphant county cricketer going from century to century, and I fancy that most of my companions did much the same ... but the notion that a prime minister or a poet laureate, a musician or a manufacturer or anybody else of such a sort could possibly be of comparable importance with a county cricketer was a notion that at the time could never have entered my head. Another man with a sense of his home county, John Arlott, put it as neatly as anyone, in the 1951 Hampshire handbook: ‘The real romance of cricket is in the cricket we knew as boys, and the real giants of cricket are the players who were the gods of our schooldays.’ Even regular county players could feel such awe. As Reg Sinfield only played in one Test, at Nottingham in 1938, Hedley Verity’s compliment understandably stuck in his mind: ‘Congratulations Reg, an honour long overdue.’ Note how Verity thought of playing for England in terms of a reward for merit, rather than a job of work. Luke Sutton in 2013 recalled looking around the Lancashire dressing room on arriving in 2006, and thinking, ‘What am I doing here?!’. ‘I was now really playing with the big boys. I was star-struck,’ by Andrew Flintoff, a hero of the 2005 Ashes win. ‘I remember the first time he walked into the dressing room: ‘Bloody hell, it’s Freddie Flintoff, just like on the TV.’ With refreshing honesty Sutton showed cricket and sport’s obsession with ranking. It happens in life. As a lad on the Lord’s ground staff around 1950, Tom To The Present and Beyond