The Summer Field

41 Why Cricket? As two of our schoolboys watchedme score it, my reputation (supposed reputation) will be greatly enhanced amongst the boys. The news soon spread through the school and I was asked numerous questions, do you feel stiff for it sir, how long did it take you. One lad who hadn’t heard of it was almost looked down on. I heard young King remark that the score was in the Pos t, never mind the Guardian . Those were Nottingham’s two daily papers. As Richards’ father, a failed businessman, once put it, ‘the best player gets the most success, including in love’. You might play, or arrange, cricket to raise your social standing, keep it high, or to announce yourself if you were young or new. In June 1846 the Butterley and Riddings clubs outside Ripley in Derbyshire played on a piece of ground ‘laid out at the expense of James Oakes Esq’, ‘a gentleman who is always ready to lend his aid in promoting the amusement of the people’, said the Derby Mercury . And in September 1846 at Sudbury Hall, when Uttoxeter played Needwood at Lord Vernon’s ground at Sudbury, the Mercury hailed his lordship’s 17-year-old son as ‘a great supporter of the game and who we should judge from his steady and good play will some day become a first-rate cricketer,’ even though he batted at ten. A match put you on public show; excel there and people could believe you were excellent all-round. That mattered at Sudbury where the Vernon family owned the village. When a team had to travel to a match, besides the off- putting time and expense, players had less motive to impress an audience of strangers. Does that explain why, as the Bridgnorth Journal reported in July 1896, the village of Chetton had to include two boys and their driver, when playing Astley Abbotts, only five miles away? Some at least saw a link between the economy, a line of work and leisure. In May 1936 the anonymous farming columnist of the Dursley Gazette in Gloucestershire noted that, despite the Somerset farmer-cricketers, Jack A detail from a postcard of Edwardian spectators of three matches on one part of ‘the Forest’ in Nottingham; Will Richards may be one of the fielders.