The Summer Field

34 What Was Cricket Like? Coke’s ground at Longford in the Derbyshire Dales, before 1914. Despite the legwork for the batsmen, they could make big gains from single hits, in an age of typically two-figure team scores. Walter Boden for Derby, hosts of Rugby School second eleven in July 1868, for instance, made a hit for eight; in June 1896, at the Shropshire village of Astley Abbotts, one Bridgnorth batsman made a ‘splendid hit into the long field’ for an all-run six. According to W.G. Grace – who recalled having to run everything at Lord’s and the Oval, unless the ball went inside the pavilion – boundaries saved the crowd, ‘for I have seen a fieldsman knock down four or five spectators when going after a ball’, he told The Strand Magazine in 1895. As a clue to Grace’s competitiveness, and the sheer toughness of Victorian life, he added: “We used to go right in, and let everybody take care of himself.” Far from London in distance and customs, the Somerset diarist W.P. Hayter ‘began fencing out the cricket field’ in Compton for the 1894 season on Thursday, April 26, having hauled it from North Cadbury with his father the previous Sunday — which presumably did not count as work on the sabbath. The fence might not have worked, as on May 17 he recorded ‘digging up cow dung and cutting grass by the cricket field’. When Woolavington club was starting in Somerset in 1947, the three pressing questions in club records were how to raise money, what gear to buy, and how to keep farm animals off the pitch. They put up a battery-powered electric fence. Even county grounds did not waste their grazing land. The sports goods seller who sold Woolavington their kit, the retired Somerset bowler Bill Andrews, reminisced in the county’s 1963-4 yearbook how as a young player before each season he ‘rolled the wicket and picked up the sheep’s droppings from the outfield’. Spectators were used to standing around the field, making a ‘ring’. The wealthy could pull up their coaches. It gave them a better view and some privacy, and allowed them to give hospitality to others of their kind and ignore common people. Henry Vane-Tempest, the second son of the Marquess of Londonderry and a diarist, was a fairly regular watcher of Eton and Harrow at Lord’s. In 1878 for example, he wrote merely that ‘our coach was there and I sat on it most of the time’. If you could not afford a carriage, or indeed if you wanted a change from your carriage, you could hire a tent, as Ham Hill did in 1831; as late as 1947 the Somerset county club was spending £493 a year on ‘tentage’ and another £455 on ‘transport and porterage’, a fair sum compared with the main expense of £4719 on ‘professionals, scorer and umpires’. You could not expect county-standard covered seating at out-grounds such as Frome and Weston-Super-Mare. The city-based county clubs, by contrast, kept building and renewing. In 1911 J.W. Hearne hailed his home ground of Lord’s: ‘Look at the splendid array of seats, the raised stands, the covered galleries for even the humblest spectators.’ Clubs were quick to put food and drink on sale; ‘several publicans had booths’ reported the Derby Mercury , when the All- England Eleven lost to 22 of Derbyshire in August 1849. By July 1859, when the All-England eleven returned, the Mercury reported ‘seats backed