The Summer Field

27 Making The Grades me president of the cricket club, a game I never played, but he might have put me down and not complied with my request not to be president.’ Snow’s 1949 history of the county has Nutting as president in 1931. Rivals were rising, in cricket and more generally, to these county identities. Hull club, a limited company, with directors, was running five elevens in 1914, four on Saturday and one on Thursday. It hosted two of Yorkshire’s championship matches, yet only two of the 13 on Hull’s cricket committee were Yorkshire members. Hull townsmen did not watch Yorkshire elsewhere in the county, whether because the cricket at Hull satisfied most, or out of local pride, or because they could not afford to travel. Yorkshire and most county clubs outside the largest cities were wise to take matches around their county, to please as many members and to make as much money as they could. From the bumpiest village field to the Manchester and London arenas that hosted the first Test matches, Victorian clubs graded themselves. Larger clubs graded within; Hull’s first team in the Yorkshire Cricket Council was travelling up to 60 miles to matches, at Sheffield and Dewsbury; the next eleven might visit wolds clubs such as Beverley and Londesborough Park; the lesser elevens made do with more local teams, while the Thursday eleven played whoever was free on a weekday, such as the Co-operative, Tramways, and licensed victuallers. The higher-ranked the eleven, the more it would cost to play for it or follow it. If professional players judged their rank by money, so did clubs. The two were tangled; the grander the club, the more it spent on its pavilion and field, and the more it could afford to pay a professional (or two; a promising lad might start his professional life as an ‘assistant’). Walsall in 1909 moved out of town from the Chuckery to its present home at Gorway, then on the outskirts. For £2500 the club had a larger ground, which they drained, levelled and turfed, and larger dressing rooms including ‘fitted lavatories’ and (for the home side only) ‘a shower bath’, ‘the cooling influence of this latter convenience should be much appreciated by members who happen to be given out lbw’, the Walsall Observer joked. Few county clubs could have done as much. Even if a club like the Yorkshire Gentlemen had a ground and a house for the groundsman, bills added up. To take the 1920s, repairs and painting of the pavilion and house cost £85, the laying down of two concrete practice pitches £14, and at tender a two-speed motor roller was £223 (compared with a horse mower of £53, though not including the horse). Favours were as useful as money for well-off clubs; brewers lent their horses and men to Burton’s club for rolling and mowing. Like most things in life, you could pay as much or as little as you liked for a pavilion: Burton’s new one in 1898 cost £1000 (it too had bathroom and shower bath for the home side only); Burton Grammar School’s in 1926, with verandah and ‘asbestos tiled roof’, £250; and nearby suburban Stapenhill’s, also in 1898, £37 and ten shillings, ‘inclusive of painting’. Even if you did not have ambitions to change and take tea in finer pavilions and play on prettier fields, other clubs might have ambitions for you, if you were talented, or simply available. In the Burton Observer in May 1898,