The Summer Field

212 Thanks One of the pleasures of having my book The Victory Tests: England v Australia 1945 published in 2010 was that I could feel part of cricket. Other pleasures were the meetings with other authors, Daniel Lightman ( Cricket Grounds from the Air ) and John Shawcroft ( Local Heroes ), to name two; and my talks to winter cricket societies. My thanks to Professor Joshua Bamfield for arranging for us to meet Sir Garfield Sobers at Nottingham on Wednesday, June 8, 2011; and to the historian of Cambridgeshire cricket, Willie Sugg, for a conversation at Derby in March 2014. Further thanks are due to Roger Moulton (editor), Jenny Moulton and Chris Overson (proofreaders) and all at City Press for their hard work. As in my Victory book, rather than tell the same old stories from the same old sources, I have gone to county record offices, for original material; and newspapers. And as in my previous book August 1914 , I have been careful to cover parts of England seldom given a thought by mainly metropolitan writers: Devon, Durham, the Midlands. Hence my story – and I called it ‘a history’ not ‘the history’, on purpose – has Hutton, Jardine and the like; and Freeman Barnardo, Will Richards and George Wakerley. See my articles in The Cricket Statistician: The short happy life of Freeman Barnardo , issue 161 (spring 2013), Billy Richards, Century Maker , issue 164 (winter 2013) and ‘I am open to accept an engagement’: picking the Durham city professional in 1920-1 (winter 2014). In The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II the French historian Fernand Braudel famously divided the past into three. He wrote of the ‘almost timeless’ history of man as he relates to the land and sea; then the deep-seated forces of civilisations and economies; and lastly events, the mere froth of waves on the surface of the sea. To Braudel, the reigns of kings and battles are like Hutton’s 364 or the career of W.G.Grace; ‘the intermittent flare of events’. Cricket (so far) lacks enough centuries of source material to write about the unchanging rhythms of the natural world; and the great feats and careers have been done to death. That left in between, how men did the things in 1840 that will need doing in 2040: such as preparing a pitch, recruiting, selecting and captaining a team; coaching the young. For a reading list see my Wordpress site.