The Summer Field

39 Chapter Five Why Cricket? ‘A cricketer’s hopes and fears are the same as those affecting people in every other walk of life.’ Cyril Washbrook, Cricket – The Silver Lining (1950) In August 1835, after Eleven of Chesterfield beat eleven of Worksop by an innings, the Derby Mercury wrote: ‘We are glad to perceive that this purely national and truly manly game is on the increase in all parts of the country.’ It was typical of the time, and telling, that the newspaper complimented as manly the men that chose cricket, because the game was good in itself (‘wholly free from all sordid consideration’) and it united the country. In June 1895, when Edward, Prince of Wales, congratulated W.G. Grace by letter after WG’s thousand runs in May and century of first- class centuries, the future Edward VII wrote of ‘our great national game’. In between, newspapers regularly told men that cricket was ‘healthy and hearty’ – something they ought to do. One much-copied article in the Daily News in June 1852 declared that if Louis Napoleon and his army arrived on an English common, faced by cricketers ‘with their bats and in their shirt sleeves’, the Daily News would ‘almost back the cricketers’. This was twaddle, yet a sign of a deep fear of France in a land that had seen off one Napoleon well within living memory, and now faced another. Why such praise for cricket? Wouldn’t rifle drill be more useful? The Rev G.T. Warner, Torquay vicar and club member, went into more detail in a letter read to the club’s annual dinner in September 1857: It is not merely as a healthy and innocent amusement that Cricket deserves the patronage of all who wish well to the rising generation. It is a noble physical exercise conducing to swiftness, readiness and strength. As an intellectual exercise it demands observation, calculation, vigilance and presence of mind. But its chief value is as a moral discipline. As it cannot be learned without labour, attention and practice, so no game can bring out more largely the qualities of courage, decision, patience, self-restraint, modesty and brotherly kindness . In case that was not enough, by doing something so good you were showing yourself better than others, such as the ‘blackguards’ who in July 1852 were reportedly ‘disorderly’ on the Tor Abbey fields of the town in the evening. Cricket was like archery, singing, speaking Italian, painting and fishing: a gentleman’s accomplishment, judging by the diary of John Yonge of Yealmpton near Plymouth in July 1842.