The Summer Field

28 Making The Grades the secretary of the Stapenhill club, A.H. Aspinall, hinted that rival brewery teams in the town took several of his ‘best bats’ (meaning men, not willow). He drafted several juniors into his team. Cricket clubs, like nature, could not allow a vacuum. For higher stakes – their living – professional players and their employers did much the same. A man seldom stood still; either he was rising or falling. Even the greatest players could only put off their fall. Sydney Barnes, aged 65, headed Bridgnorth’s bowling averages in 1938, taking 126 wickets at 6.94; he was evidently still too good for small- town Shropshire cricket. Tellingly, however, when Bridgnorth visited the Birmingham League club, Mitchells and Butlers, in August, though Barnes took four for 46, Harold Kirton — ‘who is regarded as the best batsman in the Birmingham League’ according to the Bridgnorth Journal — made 105 not out of a winning 151 for four. Barnes had met his match. As poignant, and offering us more detail, were letters from nine men applying for the job of professional – and, unusually, coach part-paid by the county club — at Durham City in autumn 1920. For every Sydney Barnes who rose from leagues to counties, and the Players and England, and (eventually) back again, many more were never quite so successful. Frank Pestell, for instance, wrote of ‘a long and varied experience in all kinds of cricket, county, club and league’, ‘gaining my county cap for Bedfordshire at the age of 17’ and playing for Darlington, ‘one of the best sides in the North Yorkshire and South Durham League’. After four years in the Army in the 1914-18 war he had to settle for Slaithwaite in the Huddersfield League in the 1920 season – even though Durham City offered him a job. Their letter, however, came weeks after he signed for Slaithwaite, ‘although as I remarked at the time I would much have preferred the Durham City berth’, he reminded the ‘Citizens’. For all the grading of clubs and leagues, professionals like anyone seeking work had to weigh the imperfect yet definite offer from a lesser club with the unknown; a better offer, or nothing else, might turn up. Clubs seeking a professional had the mirror-image problem. As a York solicitor Benjamin Dodsworth wrote to Claude Thompson of an applicant in January 1920, when the Yorkshire Gentlemen were seeking a professional: ‘the man sounds exactly what we want but I fear he is too good to be true’; if a man wanted to play for you but appeared to be out of your league, you suspected his motive – was he desperate, or not as good as he said he was? Clubs, and players, on the whole got the deal they deserved. Life in cricket, like anywhere else, was not as smooth as the stories in boys’ magazines or great men’s memoirs pretended. Was cricket a mirror on the world, or something special, a half-day different from the rest of the week? What was cricket truly like?