The Summer Field

63 Private Life on the outskirts of Bristol, for a cup. By then, Freemasons were largely avoiding the public domain, in contrast with their Victorian boom, which mirrored cricket’s. Some did see in county cricket players a closed world, a freemasonry with a small F; TomDollery, for instance, the first professional captain of a champion county, in his 1952 memoir, titled, with telling novelty, Professional Captain . Peter Walker, the Glamorgan all-rounder turned television broadcaster, in his 1978 book Cricket Conversations , likewise spoke of ‘the free-wheeling loosely constructed freemasonry life of the professional county cricketer’. Or you could take a wider view; any lover of the game, whatever their background, belonged. For the arch- amateur Sir Pelham Warner, according to the journalist E.W.Swanton in the 1971 jubilee issue of The Cricketer magazine, ‘cricket was a freemasonry almost totally inclusive’. Cricketers and Freemasons indeed have much in common; most obviously, they are men not in the company of women. Freemasons speak of ‘the craft’ and slow bowlers of the craft, of flight and spin. Once a man masters his craft, he belongs to a group, as John Arlott, for one, pointed out. In Hampshire Magazine in September 1963 he summed up Derek Shackleton as ‘the perfect craftsman-bowler’; and introducing the 1950 collection Cricket in the Counties, said pros were ‘as closely bound in their unchartered fellowship as the medieval craftsmen in their trade-guilds’. In Freemasonry as in cricket (and golf), by applying yourself to learning the rituals from your elders you became more admired among whoever cared about such things. In the middle of the field, players can talk among themselves as good as in secret; if anyone else is within earshot, it is the cricketer’s own fault – as in August 2013 at Taunton when Ben Stokes, while bowling for England Lions against Bangladesh A, shouted ‘FUCK!’ for all the ground to hear. The dressing room and the tour motor-bus, but not the restaurant, hotel or plane, are the pro’ cricketers’ equivalents of the Freemasons’ lodge. None of this is to suggest that Freemason-cricketers after a knowing word or handshake did each other favours. Did Jardine do Oldfield any?! If one Mason favoured another, was that because they were Masons, or because they were the kind of men to get on by doing deals with the like-minded? Did Oldfield offer hospitality to Jardine – and told the papers the day after his injury, ‘I don’t blame Larwood or the English team for my mishap’ – because he was a Freemason, or a clubbable and forgiving sort? Were Masons a secret society or, like pro’ cricketers, orchestras, or any number of groups, a society with secrets? We need more truth about Freemasonry; we need more truth about many things. * As a Mason, or a member of a club, you were allowed private thoughts, perhaps even speech, if you accepted authority. Aidan Crawley, the Kent batsman, gave a vivid example in The Field in May 1936. When he remembered Essex at Southend, in August 1930, he was too modest to say he made 175: … the ground was practically empty, but in the middle of a long row of