The Summer Field

66 Private Life said no again. Somerset were out for 44 and lost by an innings; Albert Trott took eleven wickets for 31. While Foley recalled the scores correctly in his memoir, Stoddart was not playing. Leaving that aside, plainly some men felt comfortable about pitting their guess about the near future against another man’s. Foley did not say whether Stoddart kept refusing on principle – if he did, why did Foley ask him twice? – or because Stoddart, correctly as it turned out, thought better. Was Foley superstitious and behaving irrationally – the dream was not even his – or, by his effort to use what evidence he had to predict the score, was Foley the more rational of the two? Or did Foley (and, he was implying, Stoddart) simply have more money than sense? Just as soldiers in battle may give up hope of surviving – as the only way they can keep going - so cricketers might give up trying to fathom the game, and give in to fate. They might give up on life itself, as Albert Trott did – or rather, ‘poor Albert Trott,’ as everyone called him after he shot himself. ‘A cricket tragedy, and not the first,’ said The World of Cricket in August 1914. His local north London weekly the Willesden Chronicle reported from the inquest that Trott had suffered from the biblical- sounding ‘dropsy’. After his years of success as an athlete, did nothing seem worth living for? Did he fear poverty? He was not that short of money – he took a taxicab home from the hospital. Did he lack family? He was living in a rented room, and no relative was at the inquest. In short, was cricket to blame for his depression, or did unhappiness only begin after his career? Would he have killed himself, whatever his occupation? English cricket had given Trott all it could: money (a Middlesex benefit) and honour (a Wisden Cricketer of the Year). Once he was no longer of use, did cricket want to know him any longer? Trott took the answers with him. So did a much less famous cricketer that summer, going through his own crisis, though we know he survived, because in February 1915 he was applying for a job (on the railways). The story began in Janaury 1914 when Beverley cricket club advertised in the Yorkshire Post for a professional and assistant groundsman. ‘Scholey’ first made the club records on June 2, when the secretary A.A.Plimpton told him to attend the next committee meeting. Events then moved fast. On Friday, June 10 the club committee heard that Scholey had ‘declined to play for the second eleven’ the next day. It sounded as if the pro’ was on strike. Told to think it over, ‘he still flatly refused to play’. Worse, ‘he himself subsequently crossed his name off the team list in the pavilion,’ and ‘a quantity of practice material was next morning found lying on the ground, having been left out all night’. Scholey asked for his wages for the week. The committee agreed Scholey had broken the terms of his agreement, and sacked him. That Beverley never bothered to record their professional’s first name said it all about how they treated their employee, whom they paid about £54 for the summer, roughly between what a farm labourer and a postman earned in a year. Scholey may not have taken to the market and minster town, may have fallen out with someone, or simply stood up for himself. Here was the side to the cricketer as ‘loyal servant’ that the authorities