The Summer Field

61 – over the season, by definition, you did it half the time – it did allow such pranks, because family and selection committee were far away. The hotelier Sir Harry Preston, in his memoir Leaves from my Unwritten Diary, recalled the ‘extremely rough fun’ W.G.Grace once had at his Grand Hotel, Bournemouth. Towards 1am ‘the Old Man’ had the idea of racing from the dining room to the very top of the stairs and down again, and the last man stood drinks all round (‘you may be sure the last man was not WG’): I need hardly say that when the first rush happened, a number of alarmed guests tumbled out of bed as the human tide thundered past, and rushed to their doors. Most of them thought the hotel must be on fire. The disturbed sleepers were ‘reassured’, as Preston put it, that Grace, his players and friends were taking exercise (twice). Club cricketers with spare energy, who maybe had to save all year for their trip away, had even more motive to be merry. Or, as one clubman reminisced in the Burton Observer in September 1946, about a Stapenhill Ramblers tour of the Derbyshire Peak in July 1907: ‘A party of 15 cricketers could hardly be expected to spend a week under the same roof together without a certain amount of innocent fun.’ After ‘musical evenings’ at their Cromford hotel – and fines of drinks all round if you were not musical enough – some ‘irresponsible and unruly members’ did a ‘ramble about the corridors and stairs’; two even tried a wrestling move (‘the Hackenschmidt drop’) on each other. Others, kept awake, had revenge by hiding alarm clocks in and around the culprits’ beds, set to go off every hour; and hung the culprits’ underwear from a flag pole through an upstairs window. For even more freedom, if you were rich enough, you could go overseas. As early as 1887, Newton Blues of south Devon were playing in Holland; as did Leicester Ivanhoe in 1895, besides Dublin in 1897 and the Channel Islands in 1898. Contrast all the fun with the story of Philip Legge, invited to play ‘country house’ cricket in the mid-1920s as a member of Major Hubert Martineau’s eleven: During the week there were always 22 men sitting in the house, 11 of the home side and 11 visitors. Many of us used to assemble in the billiard room after dinner and from there we went down to a nightclub in Maidenhead, escaping through the French windows. The return to the house was always a little hazardous as Mrs Martineau had Alsatian dogs patrolling the grounds and we had to creep in very quietly not only because of the dogs but also because she didn’t approve of her guests leaving the house. Legge’s roommate crept along an upstairs corridor in the dark with his shoes off, only to fall down a flight of stairs, ‘waking the whole household and much to the embarrassment of all concerned’. Even such shared mishaps made good stories a lifetime later, and a better team spirit. On a tour you learned deeply about your fellow players. As Dennis Lillee said of his first tour of England in 1972, How could you feel for somebody if you didn’t know them? Men with the same sense of Private Life