The Summer Field

35 What Was Cricket Like? by canvas placed all round the ground’. What the proud local newspaper called ‘everything in the shape of cricketer comforts’ were signs of progress, besides something for your sixpence, the cost of entry for the All-England match in 1853. That a horseman had to pay a shilling, and a carriage cost two shillings and sixpence, makes 21 st century car parking cheap by comparison. Meanwhile, however, other sports, and the country generally, progressed too; and grounds could become ‘outdated’, as the new Surrey secretary Lieutenant-Colonel W.H. Sillitoe admitted in the county’s 1975 yearbook: he lamented ‘tired seats, inadequate catering points and old-fashioned toilets’. Long before, the leading English grounds were competing with their Australian counterparts. J.W.Hearne in 1911 told of how ‘a smile came over’ an Australian at Lord’s, who took in the ‘great scoring board’, the ‘famous pavilion’, the ‘splendid green turf’, and so on. ‘By Jove Mary, it’s A1!’ the visitor told his wife. ‘It even beats Sydney!’ Even the grandest cricket grounds ran in some ways roughly, however. If clubs counted people at the gate, they did not say so; newspapers reported crowds to the nearest hundred, or thousand; or, as when the Australians and the Players met at the Oval in August 1882, simply wrote of ‘an immense crowd of spectators’. If Victorians agreed on anything, it was the roughness of the fields, and pitches. Fred Bickerton, an Oxford University servant born in 1879, played cricket at Wigginton, in Hertfordshire, where his wife came from. In his 1953 memoir he reminisced: Lovely cricket it was, with rare old ‘bodyline’ bowling that would make a professional cricketer run for his life nowadays. The wicket was perfectly mountainous, and the best rule I found was to hit the ball before it hit me or broke the stumps. Lord Buckmaster, who went to Oxford, was another who had memories stirred by bodyline. He wrote to the Times in January 1933 that fast bowlers 50 years before, including himself, were ‘erratic’: ‘I have often seen a ball pitch once and then bounce straight into the back stop’s hands.’ One of the most important Victorian professional bowlers, Alfred Shaw, still playing club cricket aged 57 in 1900, more usefully tied the state of pitches to playing technique, saying in an interview: Very few men nowadays seem to know how to manage their feet properly, but there isn’t much occasion for them to bother themselves as long as the wickets keep perfect: in a wet season they would find out their mistake. Victorians could tell when a pitch was ‘a very bad one’, as at Chatsworth in May 1874, ‘the players’ heads being in much more danger than the wickets’, so a witness told the Derby Mercury . Village pitches did not always put visiting batsmen off. The Burton-upon-Trent brewery, Worthington, after winning at Elford in August 1871, boasted of hitting to ‘all corners of the field’: ‘A rustic became nervous about the abbey and remarked, “doona break the habbey winders”.’ The question was, rather: how often could you hit hard, before you missed or mis-hit? As so often in life, you got