The Summer Field

31 What Was Cricket Like? ‘tools’ – and that was the word used repeatedly in the minutes book of Renishaw club near Chesterfield before 1914 – mattered, the same as in the ironworks where many Renishaw villagers worked. The club ‘inventory of tools’ of April 1914 listed one pair of stump gloves; four pairs of batting gloves (‘good’) and seven odd ones; five bats; seven and a half pairs of ‘leg pads’; eleven new balls; two practice balls; ten pegs; six bails; two tape measures (‘good’); three cricket bags; leather horse shoes, two rollers, and two turf cutting spades. This was enough – and no more – for the club’s two elevens. Whereas Renishaw spent five shillings and sixpence on four pairs of batting gloves in 1908 – the same ones in use six years later? – the gentlemanly Ham Hill club in August 1830 paid five shillings simply for a ‘box and lock and key’. All too often in the past, common people left no trace. For once, it’s the other way around; while we can never know what was inside the Ham Hill box, or indeed how large it was, we know enough about the scraps of kit that some made do with. Woolavington club in Somerset began after the 1939-45 war with three bats, the least you needed to look decent in public. If you only had two, the outgoing batsman would have to pass his bat to the incoming man. Dr Robert Holman described in Wisden Cricket Monthly in January 1982 the even more basic team he was running on the Southdown council estate outside Bath: Nobody wears flannels, a new ball comes once a season, batsmen wear only one pad and at times they exchange bats in the middle so that the striker has the good one. You could cheat on kit. The MCC Company of Bedford – rather a cheating name, as it stood in fact for Midland Counties Cricket Bat Works – offered ‘blemished bats’ at half price (‘in fact blemished bats often last longer than unblemished ones’, its 1930s brochures reckoned). If you had the money, you could equip yourself as fully and finely as Len Hutton or Jack Hobbs, whose names advertised Gunn and Moore stock in 1939. You could armour yourself with thigh padding (made of crepe rubber, or cheaper felt); gloves (full or open palms); a ‘shield’ of hedgehog-like rubber pieces that you tied around yourself with a belt; or ‘special body pad’; besides the aluminium ‘protection’ for your genitals ‘covered with white leather’. All this could go inside a bag (in order of rising cost, made of canvas, leather or cow-hide). Famous cricketers had long given testimonials to kit- makers, or had makes named after them. Just as Gunn and Moore sold a Larwood ball in 1939, so in 1914 – to give only one batting and bowling example – E.J.Riley of Accrington advertised the ‘George Hirst Autograph bat’ (‘every bat personally selected by Geo H Hirst’), and Duke’s the ball- makers printed a letter from England captain C.B.Fry about their balls used in the 1912 Tests (which ‘gave every satisfaction’). While not doubting that the great Yorkshire all-rounder went into Lancashire to run his eye over every bat with his name on, we can wonder if such cricketers praised a company, or urged a piece of kit on weekend players, that in truth men could do without. Certainly many cricketers ignored or never saw the adverts. As late as 1982 Robert Holman told of