The Summer Field

29 Chapter Four What Was Cricket Like? ‘No game expresses character more than cricket does.’ Herbert Sutcliffe, For England and Yorkshire (1935) The very things that would best tell us how men once watched and played cricket are what men took for granted and did not put on paper. In his diary for Saturday, June 9, 1894, W.P.Hayter described playing against nearby Yarlington: ‘We made 45 and 56. They made 22 and 10. We won by 69 runs, I caught three out, made 11 and five and got three wickets.’ Naturally, in the few lines he gave to any day, Hayter thought only of recording what mattered to him, not the routines and oddities that speak to us. He and his fellow Somerset villagers, in cricket as in life, were self- sufficient. Hayter learned how to bat and bowl from his elders, the same as he learned to make cheese and cider, for sale. Not only labourers had rough hands from outdoor work; the farmer’s son Hayter fished and caught eels on lines and hooks. Compare that physical labour with John Shields, reminiscing at his manor house in 1946 about keeping wicket for Leicestershire in the 1900s. Shields, an estate agent and quarry owner, recalled Albert Knight fielding at cover, ‘and his throwing in to the poor wicketkeeper often made the latter’s hands very tender’. The ball was hard; and some men’s hands were softer than others. Anyone’s skin – lord’s or labourer’s — could bruise if hit by the ball. Shields went on: ‘I have seen A.T.Sharp (I regarded him as one of the best six amateur bats in the country of his day) – put a bath towel round him under his shirt when going out to face Walter Brearley, the Lancashire fast bowler.’ The bodyline affair in January 1933 prompted a rash of stories by suffering English batsmen. Lionel Tennyson wrote in the London Evening Standard of the ‘excruciating pain’ when the Australian fast bowler Ted McDonald hit him over the heart in the fifth Test in 1921. ‘My doctor assured me that if I had not been so well covered I would for a certainty have been killed.’ Tom Austin, batting against Fred Trueman in a 1950s game between Royal Air Force commands, likewise had a towel on his front leg, ‘but there were relatively few injuries … if you weighed yourself down with equipment, you can’t move’. In an article in July 1911, the Lancashire batsman J.T.Tyldesley told men to bat with a glove on each hand (‘a blow on an unprotected hand lasts a long time’). Tyldesley batted for a living, all day if he could, unlike his readers, yet he was giving wise advice to Saturday afternoon batsmen; if you hurt your hand so that you could not hold your pen or shovel on a Monday, you might soon not have a job, or anything to eat. The batsman’s