The Summer Field

70 The Myth of the ‘Golden Age’ are accurate. By publishing a book on cricket from 1919 to 1939 as the ‘second golden age’, Gerald Howat was unconsciously ridiculing Cardus and the very idea of ‘golden ages’. How many golden ages can we take before we are dazzled?! Cardus was not original. H.S.Altham called a chapter of his A History of Cricket (1926) ‘The Golden Age of Batting: Ranji, Fry, Jessop’. Although Altham did not date his ‘golden age’, the latest innings he quoted was in 1907. Cardus’ evidence, once you set aside his airy talk of genius and grandeur and ‘in excelsis’, rested on many more men, though still a relative handful when spread over 16 pre-war counties: he listed 32 Englishmen (including Altham’s three, and Woolley, also named in Dain’s conversation) and 16 Australians. We can make such lists of most 20-year periods, including our own. What made the years before 1914 extraordinary, never seen before or since? Whatever it was, would you not expect somebody to notice at the time , and not years later, when Cardus was trying to make his name? As we cannot survey every newspaper, after-dinner speech and private letter, even if they survive, we cannot prove that no-one before 1914 said, ‘we are living in a golden age of cricket’. People seldom think so grandly, and even if they do, they can only compare with the past, not the future. A ‘golden age’ implies a nostalgic judgement, unless you are saying it about the present. Oxford University, 1895. Plum Warner is sitting left, Charles Fry has a hat on his lap.