The Summer Field

45 Bat’ for a raffle. The role of professional, of taking pay to play, did not sour the game; the sheer hard work of having to bowl at club members did. The workload of Tom Gould, pro’ at Burton club from 1896 to the 1914-18 war, was typical. Besides doing much of the bowling on a Saturday afternoon and a weekday match, he tended the field, and daily (except match days) had to be at the nets from 2.30 pm to 4.30 pm, and from 6 pm to 8 pm, to bowl at any members who wanted to practise, ten minutes each. Young county pros were hired hands likewise. In Leicester in December 1907, the 17-year-old Fred Root signed a 20-week contract for Leicestershire’s 1908 season, earning 25 shillings a week, about the same as Will Richards earned as an unqualified teacher. Root’s hours were much longer: he had to be ready at the ground from 9 am to 8 pm (and arrive by 8.30 am on match days); put up and take down practice nets; roll and prepare wickets; and do ‘general ground work when required’. He sounded like a dogsbody; as did the ‘professional cricket coach and instructor’, Frederick Daft, in his 1900 agreement with Leicestershire. For 30 shillings a week he had to umpire and coach (‘when required’); keep an eye on the ground staff, and ‘immediately report in writing to the secretary any misconduct, inattention or irregularities’; and see that two or more professionals accompanied members to the practice nets. Daft had neither set hours nor - like Root, and indeed any Edwardian workers – rights; the club could dismiss him ‘for any misconduct’. Given all that extra, unseen work, besides actual playing, small wonder that the old pro’ Alfred Shaw, in interview in 1900, did not think a man could be a batsman and a bowler: not if he is a professional. If he is an amateur he can do as he likes – he does not have to bowl except in matches. But a professional who has also to bowl a good deal at the nets cannot in my opinion succeed both as a batsman and a bowler – not for long. He left his crucial words to last; like any worker, you had to look after your strength, to keep earning for as long as you could. If you wore yourself out by batting and bowling all you could, the club would find someone fresher. Worse still, a pro’ could injure himself in the nets, as Dick Pougher hurt his right ankle in 1897 while bowling to the Leicestershire amateur captain C.E.de Trafford. He did not bowl that season ‘and never had the same confidence in his bowling’, as one obituary put it in 1926. Neville Cardus had the insight, writing in The Field in July 1937, ‘that many of our players have come to regard a county match as a job of work, a mere part of the summer’s routine.’ With characteristic lack of empathy Cardus did not ask if pro’s had a point; instead he deplored their ‘low standards’, ‘poor and only half-studied technique’ and ‘a wrong spirit towards the game’. This was cricket’s equivalent of employers complaining that servants showed no loyalty and waitresses never smiled. Cardus, we can now see, was developing his myth of a ‘golden age’ before 1914, so damaging to English cricket history ever since, moaning that Why Cricket?