The Summer Field

56 game? It had a place for the light-hearted, and were not such scenes even healthy, to help everyone through the working day? Who knew what words passed between such men, who might know each other well, when they met on the field? During Torquay’s cricket week in 1894, when Captain Strachan walked to the wicket ‘with a businesslike air’, it ‘called forth some friendly badinage’. Watchers could only see the new man take his place at the wicket; the ‘badinage’ or banter was out of earshot. The arrival of a new bat invited words; fielders felt pleased for the moment, even if the rest of the day was not going their way, and they could guess the batsman felt at his most unsure, even if he did not look it. In Leicestershire’s 1951 annual, the veteran Les Berry recalled his Championship debut against Lancashire at Ashby in 1924: ‘Was I nervous? Of course, and the butterflies that chased around my tummy when I went out to bat in the game still visit me!’ In the Sports Mercury at the time the regular Leicestershire watcher Reynard praised the then 18-year-old Berry’s ‘complete absence of “nerves’’’: ‘His advantage in this respect over some aspirants to fame is considerable.’ Was Berry truly less nervous than other beginners, or merely better at hiding weakness and applying the Shakespearean lesson that ‘the world’s a stage’? Batsmen could take heart from any bickering between fielders. Charles Stone wrote in old age of Leicestershire at Manchester in 1884. John Crossland was bowling for Lancashire on a hot, sunny day; his captain, A.N.Hornby, shouted from second slip: “Crossland, take that sweater off.” Crossland took no notice. “He shouted again, but no answer. He made a step forward. ‘Crossland, if you don’t take that sweater off, you will leave the field.’ ‘All right, sir.’ He took it off and had another underneath. I have never heard such a roar from the huge crowd in my life.” Stone did not need to explain that the captain,who cared only for appearances, had been made a fool of by the defiant bowler, and by the home crowd that evidently took the bowler’s side. Whenever batting, the two batsmen only had each other to jolly one another along, however they did it. In June 1956, when Maurice Hallam of Leicestershire was nearing that all-important first century for his county, his fellow opening bat Gerry Lester (as Hallam told it later) ‘walked down the pitch and told me that he would bash me on the head if I flopped again’. Fielders had their say with batsmen, to enforce customs, even a sense of shame. As late as 1895 William Brockwell was admitting in The Windsor Magazine that ‘whether it is fair for the batsman to defend his wicket with his pads is open to doubt’. Brockwell recalled batting for Surrey when he once ‘guarded’ his wicket with his pads, ‘and Dr Grace said to me as he passed by at the over, “Oh, play them with your bat! Don’t play with your legs.”’ As Brockwell added, the ‘Doctor’ could say this, as he never defended with his legs. Usually the fielders and bowler sought to put the batsman off, whether speaking at him or loud enough to be overheard, as Yorkshire did in Harmison’s last game, shouting, ‘There’s more wickets here tonight’, or ‘50 for three’, when Leicestershire were 49 for one. The journalist J.A.H. Private Life