The Summer Field

46 ‘too much second-class cricket passes itself off as first-class’. Cardus did not understand, or did not want to, that professional cricketers naturally responded to overwork by doing only what they had to. As for ‘spirit’, bowlers taking a wicket might feel as the Australian G.E.Palmer did, according to Herbert Strudwick in 1911: ‘That’s one less to bat.’ With each wicket to fall, bowlers and fielders were nearer a rest in the pavilion. The English authorities worked Australian visitors as hard. In July 1930, their manager complained that if the Lord’s Test had not ended early they would have had to travel all night to reach Bradford for their next match, against Yorkshire, starting the next morning. The Cricketer –Pelham Warner’s magazine – unsympathetically argued that the Australians could have caught a 9.50 pm ‘modern’ train and arrived in Bradford at 2.20 am. ‘It would have taken them 20 minutes to get to bed in their hotel which adjoins the platform. They could easily have slept until 10.30am and been at Park Avenue in time for play.’ How would the anonymous writer have liked such a journey – to bed in the middle of the night, before you play Yorkshire?! Such was the attitude towards workers. As for England abroad, Plaindealer in August 1929 noted that many of the players who won in Australia the winter before were out of form, ‘only another instance of how much these Australian tours take out of a man’. The commentator claimed that nothing would tempt one, unnamed, player to make the tour again. England’s bowlers were stale, and always would be, ‘until some millionaire can be found who will make it worth a man’s while to rest during the winter’. Just as it never crossed anyone’s mind that the 1937 challenge players might deserve a bonus, it never occurred to Plaindealer that one day English cricket would be rich enough to give its best players time off. Years after the English county game did away with amateurs in 1963, professional England captains such as Raymond Illingworth and Sir Len Hutton argued that the game was poorer without them. The amateur bat, or a sole amateur as captain, could be relaxed, which could refresh the professionals: (‘he gave the boys confidence,’ Illingworth said of 1950s Yorkshire captain Ronnie Burnet; ‘you knew who was the skipper,’ said Hutton, who began under Brian Sellers). This idea that amateurs had a place in the professional game had a hitch; it was, as Robertson- Glasgow put it in Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack in 1943, ‘humbug’. By then amateurs only played regularly for counties if it was worth their while. The New Zealander and supposed amateur C.S.Dempster, who captained Leicestershire from 1936 to 1938, had a verbal agreement with the club in 1935, cut short in August. In the July of that summer he started a ‘century club’ and had promises from ‘40 gentlemen’, according to the club finance committee minutes. In short, Dempster was raising his own salary from members. One committee member, Alderman John Loseby, had guaranteed Dempster’s salary. Neither the club’s agreement with Dempster, nor Loseby’s guarantee, were in writing. They were ‘binding in honour’ as the committee put it; or rather, their deal with Dempster was their little secret, one more piece of the humbug that cricket was a game best played for the love of it. Why Cricket?