The Summer Field

40 Why Cricket? Common Victorians did show signs of widespread ability, or at least willingness to join in. On one Saturday afternoon in July 1875 bricklayers working at Sudbury Hall in southern Derbyshire beat the carpenters. However, as only five bowlers took the 35 wickets, perhaps a few more experienced players carried the rest. It sounded that way in the Burton Hunt league. Speaking at Branston club’s annual dinner in Lincoln in 1963, club president S.Cleugh recalled the start in the 1930s: ‘The village teams were content with a good batsman and one very fast bowler who could intimidate any batsman, and the rest were made up from others who had a keenness and a love of cricket.’ You could pick up the game. Also in July 1875, masons beat carpenters working at the mansion of Earl Fitzwilliam; according to the Sheffield Evening Star , some had not ‘handled the willow’ since the Earl’s son had come of age, 16 years before. To be blunt, cricket was easy to play badly: when the single men of St Mary’s Church club in Torquay beat the married in a two-innings match in 1851, four men scored zero in each innings. What then if you wanted to play the game well, and often? Just as Christ suggested that to be a disciple you had to ‘hate’ your family (‘love less’ might have been kinder than the King James translation), so disciples of cricket put the game before family and work. On Tuesday afternoon, July 30, 1940 the Brough divisional police team was late setting off for Pocklington because of a ‘yellow’ air raid warning. The policemen waited just long enough to be sure their district did not have an air raid, then travelled the 15 miles. Would the police rather have protected their families, or did they welcome the change of scenery? Their chief constable insisted that each division played each other, and sent him the scores (typed) and brief match details – not so good for wartime national defence, but good for the historian. Players and followers stayed interested, even fanatical, because unlike work or the routine of a sleepy Sunday, you could not tell what a game would bring. As early as August 1875 a Western Daily Press reporter suggested that the ‘glorious uncertainty’ of cricket was already ‘abominably stereotyped’, ‘yet it can never be more fairly applied’, he admitted, than to the first half-hour of the second day’s play, when Gloucestershire took the last five Nottinghamshire wickets in 12 overs for three runs. Extraordinary batting or bowling - good or bad - were not the only causes of the unexpected; that two-word cliché cropped up again after rain at Gloucester in July 1875 made the ground unfit for the hosts and visitors from Cirencester alike, and ‘only small scores were made’. To make every piece of ‘glorious uncertainty’, usually someone had to bat or bowl well. Men liked to stand out, for the pleasure on the field, and the respect shown them afterwards. Will Richards was a 22-year-old teacher when he scored 105 for St Stephen’s on The Forest, the big park in his native Nottingham, on Saturday, May 7, 1910. On the Monday he felt ‘frightfully stiff just as though I had rheumatism. Of course it was that century.’ The ‘boss’ – William Cotterill, his headmaster at St Mark’s School – and others congratulated him. Will normally left the man and the place out of his diary: