The Summer Field

69 The Myth of the ‘Golden Age’ strangers; air travel, for the rich, might be an equivalent. Such conversation, maddeningly cut short for the later reader, prompted Dain to compare his own experience with the past; though in his hurry to be home for dinner, Dain did not make that good a historian. Even if he had stayed with the old man, the pair would have faced a problem common to mankind: how to compare what you have seen with what you only hear about. Times change. Once you go beyond your senses, even if you can make sense of past statistics, the views of respected elders, photographs and moving pictures, how can you judge the living against the dead? And that assumed a good memory. Dain’s neighbour on the bus, like many of us, only remembered the good. The Daily Mail cricket correspondent Alex Bannister, recalling in the 1959 Hampshire yearbook his first visit to Lord’s, wondered aloud, ‘Was the age so golden?’ The seats were hard, the ginger beer dear, and Frank Woolley was out first ball. In a word, men could be guilty of nostalgia, as Neville Cardus admitted sometimes. In The Field in May 1937, for instance, while deploring ‘second-class cricket’ by some first-class counties, he wrote: ‘Cricket never was as good as it used to be.’ Our memories trick us. Or; we want to be tricked, into believing life was better, or best, when we too were at our best: young, fit and hopeful. Hence claims, and believers, that many things once had a ‘golden age’: Broadway theatre, travel, comedy on television, even bank robbery. Thus Cardus, in a short but influential book English Cricket (1945), called 1890 to 1914 a ‘Golden Age’. Historians of the game, and the journalists that have lazily copied the phrase ever since, have taken the ‘age’ for granted. Yet the evidence for it is remarkably thin. * Before we ask, like Bannister, if the age was so golden, it’s worth pointing out how meaningless the phrase is. To be consistent, should you not call other ages silver, or copper or iron? Significantly in his English Cricket , Cardus gave the common names for periods of English history to cricket – the Middle Ages for the 18 th century men of Hambledon, and modern for after the 1914-18 war. Even assuming those names are a good fit for English history, they made little sense for cricket. To say ‘golden age’ was merely another way, admittedly snappy, of calling a time outstanding. Cardus made two more detailed assertions. The 20 or so years before 1914 were ‘a Golden Age of batsmanship’. While Cardus did hail slow, fast and googly bowlers of the age alike, it looked like an afterthought (‘There were bowlers too.’). And Cardus drew on general history again to make the conservative claim that ‘like most ages of gold’, the great batting was based ‘on an aristocracy’. Cardus did not spell out whether he meant actual aristocrats or merely amateur players rather than pros’, or both. Anything that is great or beautiful or skilful – all words of Cardus’ – only half-qualifies as a ‘golden age’. It has to be greater than ages before or since; assuming always that your labels, or any labels, of the past