The Summer Field

42 Why Cricket? White and Harold Gimblett, it was ‘not easy for farmers to take a day off for cricket … if farming is so terribly exacting that it will not afford a bright, athletic son of the soil his afternoon off for a game of tennis, cricket or football, then there is little wonder that the plough, the cow and the sow are threatened with unpopularity.’ That a job allowed time for cricket was not necessarily to its credit. ‘Every regiment welcomes a cricketer’, wrote a former England captain, Major R.T.Stanyforth, in The Field in July 1937. Might the British Army have done better in France in 1940 if regiments had welcomed hard-working and studious soldiers?! In fairness, civilians too gave jobs to talented cricketers, even before they became famous, from Don Bradman down, because they offered extra value to their employer. The club professional George Wakerley – a friend of Will Richards – by autumn 1920 was one of many applying for the professional-coach job at Durham City. In 1919 he joined Army Records as a civilian, ‘but to be candid cricket abilities keep me engaged by them’, he said in his second letter, and ‘if my heads hear that I am seeking a professional engagement they would no doubt sack me’, he said in his first. Wakerley had to juggle his cricket with his paid work (‘having a wife and children to provide for’) more than most. The wealthy young and sporty more usually used cricket – the clubbing together and the showing yourself in public – as one more way to get on. One of the slim and elegant- looking 1937 Eton first eleven pictured in the same edition of The Field as Stanyforth’s article, was Freeman Barnardo. Before he joined the Army in 1939 he played for the old boys’ team Eton Ramblers, and joined the Butterflies, a club open only to men from leading fee-paying schools — Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Westminster or Winchester. Members included 1930s England captains Douglas Jardine and Gubby Allen, journalist R.C.Robertson-Glasgow and the Hollywood actor C.Aubrey Smith. The best club of all to join so that you moved among the powerful and useful, was Marylebone Cricket Club. Simply to join, to wear the tie and enter the Lord’s pavilion, showed you had more influence than most. An undated and unsigned postcard to Freeman’s father Frederick told him: ‘Sir Pelham [Warner, former England captain; the left-off surname showed first-name terms] told me yesterday that Freeman is as good as elected already being so well known for his cricket! Of course I will do what is necessary for Freeman and MCC, I see Warner and president’s family frequently and I think everything is in order.’ It will never do to be too cynical. Early in his 1906 memoir Cricket in North Hants, Lietenant Colonel John May wrote: ‘there are many who like the writer can count amongst their oldest and dearest friends men whose acquaintance they first made on the cricket field’. When Yorkshire Gentlemen, like much else in England, were starting anew after the 1914- 18 war, Lord Hawke said he would regard the end of the club as ‘a serious disaster to Amateur Cricket in the North of England’, ‘standing as it does for all that is best in our National Game’. In that circular of September 1919, Hawke did not have to spell out to club members what he meant,