The Summer Field

55 Chapter Seven Private Life ‘Appearances are deceptive as we all know.’ From Will Richards’ diary. In his diary for a couple of years around 1910 – he may have kept it much longer, but only that period survives from peacetime – Will Richards wrote mainly of his Saturday afternoon cricket, football in winter, and the evenings he chased after ‘skirt’. He tried to make sense of it all in words because it mattered to him, as politics and current affairs rarely did. His work as a teacher mattered, yet seldom featured in the diary, unless he took the children for sport. He had to do paid work, to afford to play sport and enjoy women’s company. For professional cricketers it was the opposite. Cricket was their work. They had to study it, and master it, and the only way was to do it; ‘nothing is like practical experience’ wrote J.W.Hearne in July 1936. In the same serialised set of articles in June 1936, Len Hopwood agreed, giving a story about Bobby Abel. After making a triple century, a friend found Abel in the pavilion, bat in hand, in front of a mirror, trying to find out where he went wrong in playing the ball that bowled him. Never mind that Hopwood’s story was not from experience, as Abel made his only triple century in 1899 and Hopwood was born in 1903. Hopwood offered readers a lesson: ‘Cricket education is never complete.’ Here were hints of the character of a successful cricketer. Even in triumph you ought never to be satisfied. And as with composers of music and, writers, the work that went into success was essentially private. * Anyone could learn from successful cricketers in public, even other successful cricketers, just as those men, as boys, had once learned from adult players on the field. As J.W.Hearne put it, ‘try to visualise the inside happenings and work out all the points that arise and the reasons for failures’. To see the ‘inside happenings’ would take more than casual watching. Some ‘happenings’ were easier to spot and understand than others. Frank Sugg in July 1928 recalled Tom Emmett of Yorkshire: He used to walk to the wicket with his hand over his nose as though to hide it and when he had broken his duck he used to run about 20 yards past the wicket, turn around in a big half circle and come back waving his bat in sheer delight. Besides a bowler’s delight at making a run, and a sign that Victorian England was not all solemn in sepia, was there a deeper truth about the