The Summer Field

52 grown men as ‘boys’, players seemed to embrace it: when Nottinghamshire captain Arthur Carr led England at Trent Bridge in 1926, one of his old professionals, Wilfred Payton (aged 44), sent a telegram wishing him success, ‘from the boys’. Maybe doing as a job what others did for leisure made players childlike or carefree; or the wandering freedom of the pro’s season – never bound by the tutting and gossip of a small town or village – allowed a man to lark about. He could easily cross the line into criminal misbehaviour. On Wednesday, June 30, 1909, for instance, after defeat at Sheffield, Surrey arrived at Chesterfield in the evening before playing Derbyshire. From the train several players kicked a rubber ball through the streets. A crowd gathered, and someone complained to the police, who asked for the names and addresses of someone taking part. When he refused, police arrested him and took him to the police station, followed by Surrey and much of the crowd. Eight players gave their names, including Wisden cricketers of the year Bert Strudwick, Andy Ducat (so respectable he died at the wicket at Lord’s) and Walter Lees, one of the applicants for the Durham City job in 1920. Surrey did beat Derbyshire by an innings. Even W.G.Grace, so H.S.Altham recalled in the 1951 Hampshire handbook, ‘never lost a certain boyishness’. Another sign of how powerfully the label of ‘boys’ stuck was that cricketers and their observers could not agree on another. Were cricketers professionals, like lawyers, with a skill that gave them a value (and a wage) in society; artists, as Albert Knight hinted in his book The Complete Cricketer ; or, as Knight also suggested, mere servants, which in Knight’s day put them on a par with cleaners and cooks? It suited clubs as employers to liken their players to servants, with as small a stake in the workplace as a boy polishing the cutlery had in a mansion. Thus the label stuck long after servants went out of fashion; Surrey in their 1968 year book, for instance, claimed ‘the average contracted player is only happy when playing, is a fine sportsman and a loyal and dependable servant’. Cricket as work, like any work, gave an identity; and status and money — not always linked. Work demanded constant negotiation; within the occupation between employer and employed, and how each job ranked with others. Whatever anybody said, amateurs were a standing reproach to the pro’ for taking money for doing what others would love to do for nothing. The Ashbourne commentator Plaindealer in July 1932 wondered when an ‘official readjustment of the discrimination between amateur and professional cricketers’ would come. He prayed for an end to the ‘hundred ways’ the two were classed as different. As he cleverly spotted, the differences had ‘gradually and steadily declined’, because, as in all workplaces, change came through many small niggles, conversations, and silent re-thinks, before officials with their ‘readjustment’ caught up with everyone else. Just as cricketers and other sportsmen mingled as paid and unpaid, despite the risk of envy or clash of pride, so did actors and musicians; policemen; and soldiers. Less remembered is that, as a Derbyshire Advertiser columnist recalled in June 1926, in the early days of Who Was A Cricketer?