The Summer Field

26 six’ of the county championship. Add an early front-runner, W.G.Grace’s Gloucestershire, and all the first-class counties (until Glamorgan in 1921 and Durham in 1992) fitted roughly inside the boundary made by those seven, inside the trunk of England. Victorian Devon held more people than Somerset. Why then – just as Britain was the first country to ‘take off’ industrially, and not someone else — did Somerset ‘take off’ (eventually) as a first-class county and not Devon? Life was speeding up in Victorian England: the railways let the various all-England and then county elevens tour the country, and the penny post let club secretaries arrange matches with each other. Again thanks to the railways, and the telegraph, local weekly and even regional daily papers could keep readers informed. Devon was too far west; many counties found the train journey simply too long and dear. Perhaps Torquay was too successful; when Torquay and Devon held their annual meetings at the same time and place in April 1869, Devon had £36 in club subscriptions, and Torquay £112. By comparison the sixth annual meeting of the Somerset club in 1881 heard it had £145 in subscriptions and one professional; which made that county barely better off than large town clubs such as Torquay (and ‘considerably in debt’, the secretary told members at Taunton). * Why did the county championship arise? Generations of players turned commentators have belittled counties, and demanded mergers, or regions, or franchises, whether out of love for the international game or some grievance after counties underpaid and overworked them. It is a fact lost on the critics that counties were an obvious and valid unit to the Victorians and, as Sir Home Gordon put it in The Windsor Magazine in 1909, ‘despite the tremendous interest excited by Test Matches it may be confidently asserted that what the public loves best is county cricket’. The county town was home to the local regiment and bishop, and justice once a quarter. Government in London worked through each county’s lord lieutenant, usually the local nobleman, and later county councils. Few clubs could resist sending a begging letter to their local big landowners or titled residents. An undated set of accounts, presumably from before 1914, by Staveley works club in north Derbyshire showed the Duke of Devonshire regularly gave two guineas a year and an Admiral Egerton one guinea, a fair chunk of the club’s £25 a year that (like any club’s income) went on kit, repairs to kit, and the secretary’s travelling and other expenses. Likewise the east Yorkshire MP, Sir Christopher Sykes, gave £2 a year to Beverley Town club as an honorary member, according to the club’s 1876 accounts. Many such big noises took more interest in their estates, or race horses or other pleasures; such gifts were merely part of the cost of leading a district in a country traditionally based on the crown, owners of land, and the church. Likewise, lords and squires lent their names as presidents of county clubs, without giving much time – or thought, judging by a 1966 letter of Sir Harold Nutting to the Leicestershire club historian, Eric Snow. Nutting wrote that he did have a ‘very vague idea that the late Lord Hazelrigg [lord lieutenant and former county captain] did ask me to become president of the Leicestershire County Cricket Club for one year. I remember telling him as I knew him very well that it was a farce making Making The Grades