The Summer Field

24 Making The Grades souvenir brochure in 1929, an advert for the club claimed: ‘Watching good cricket in comfort is one of the finest rest cures known for tired brain and body.’ Competitive cricket did not magically have ‘snap’; league matches and friendlies alike had ‘the problem of the sterile draw … the only serious flaw in the enjoyment of our game’, as F.I.C. Monro, chairman of Surrey Cricket Clubs’ Championship Association, put it in SCCCA’s 1974 yearbook. What leagues did offer was an occupational pyramid for players, where everyone knew his place; where to look if you strove to better yourself; and who to look up to and down on. At root was casual cricket as played by the south Somerset farming lad and diarist W.P.Hayter; on Friday, May 18, 1894, ‘John Mackie brought over a team to play a cricket match against a team we got up.’ Afterwards Hayter had time for a walk around South Cadbury castle, and some ploughing. Clubs roughly alike competed in leagues or, if they felt too good or not good enough for their local leagues, played each other. The grander the club, the further they travelled, especially if a main railway station was to hand, or if they were from railway companies and could claim cheap or free travel; hence Londoners of Kentish Town Midlands Railway club played colleagues at Derby in June 1873. Few clubs played more, or more widely, than MCC which most days from later May to mid-August had at least one team playing across southern England and as far north as Liverpool, Catterick and the Isle of Man (to take 1936 as an example). A club committee selected ‘managers’ for ‘out-matches’ beyond Lord’s; according to the 1961 club rules, a manager organised up to four matches a season, ‘and is expected to make it a success’ without using non-members. Other clubs did the same; Burton-on-Trent as early as the 1880s. Above the clubs came the counties, which gradually settled on first- or second-class rankings. Mere geography might make the difference. Take Devon, which in the 1860s looked better placed than, say, Derbyshire. As Sir Lawrence Pack MP, who gave Torquay its ground, told a dinner at the resort in August 1864, it was ‘difficult to find a piece of ground [in Devonshire] capable of being transformed into a cricket ground’. Yet Derbyshire was hilly too. The Torquay club, like the town, was businesslike; it went into debt to put up a pavilion with an ‘American bowling alley’, 60 feet long. Torquay modelled its cricket ‘week’ on Canterbury’s, including amateur theatricals. Derbyshire meanwhile used its very backwardness as a spur; the Derby Mercury in September 1869 called for a county eleven ‘able to hold their own against several cricketing counties of note’. And a Mercury editorial in July 1870 admitted its county cricket so far was ‘as the Yankees say, small potatoes’. Significantly, the newspaper went on to stress the ‘considerable expense’ of county matches, and urged ‘cricketing friends’ to make a fund. Passing over these early American influences on English culture, and how even the beginning of county cricket needed propping up by well-wishers, the ‘great names’ of cricketing counties that the Mercury listed were telling: Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, Surrey and Kent. Add Lancashire and Middlesex, and you had the long-time ‘big