The Summer Field

72 by various men each showing some sense of perspective? Private diaries and memoirs confirm: cricket was unsatisfactory, certainly not golden. On Friday, 3 June 1910, having watched Yorkshire at Trent Bridge, the Nottingham teacher Will Richards wrote: ‘Awful dull cricket with Notts on the losing side as usual.’ Other diary entries suggest he went at least partly to learn, as he played more cricket than he watched. The Brighton estate agent Walter Feilde Ingram, born in Sussex in 1851, belonged to the county club and went to ‘a good many county matches’ until, before 1914, he ‘got bored with the dullness’, so he reminisced in 1925. He blamed the batsmen and bowlers, stone-wallers and nothing but the ‘off theory’. ‘Men played with their legs instead of their bats and cricket to my mind became very dull.’ You might dismiss Ingram as an ageing grumbler. He could only arrive at the county ground during or just before tea; why did county teams want tea? he asked. Ingram turned to golf instead. Yet he witnessed one of Cardus’ golden greats: ‘Ranji was a delight to watch. It was wonderful how he could twist his body like an eel and glide a ball to leg.’ Perhaps such spectators did not appreciate what was in front of them; though they had a right to their opinion, and cricket, like any other business taking the public’s coins at the gate, ignored public opinion at its peril. Public critics must have at least had a point. The Mayor of Walsall, Councillor Millership, told a town hall audience in April 1909 he was annoyed by what he saw at Edgbaston the season before, ‘for it took about three hours to get 20 runs’. Cardus’ 32, while outstanding, evidently could not lift the average county game. In Gloucestershire’s 1922 yearbook, committee member H.E.Roslyn wrote an obituary of Edgar Barnett (1885- 1922), an amateur batsman for the county from 1903. Roslyn admitted: ‘In his young days we badly needed a man to go in first and keep his end up.’ Barnett obeyed instructions not to play his natural game, though it ‘helped to kill his zeal for the game because he realised that he was unattractive to watch’. His county captain was Gilbert Jessop, one of Cardus’ golden 32. Even the top tables admitted all was not well. ‘Much has been written and much has been said about cricket today and that it is losing its hold upon the public. I do not believe it,’ Lord Hawke told a June 1914 dinner in London to mark the centenary of Lord’s. Though diners cheered, Hawke went on to admit that golf and tennis were rivals. In truth men with spare cash had as many other sports and pastimes to choose before 1914 as in the 1950s, when cricket fretted anew about lost spectators (and income). Will Richards from 1911 went to the ‘Kinemacolor’ some evenings. He went roller-skating and dancing, and did photography: all good for winning women. He went rowing on the Trent, swam in public baths, watched Nottingham Forest; and in the summer of 1909, after Bleriot flew the English Channel, tried making model gliders. The authorities blamed anybody except themselves. Slow cricket? That was the players’ fault, whether accurate bowlers, fielders set too well, or selfish batsmen (‘How I hate those averages!’ Hawke exclaimed, to cheers and laughter). Why were so many counties barely making ends meet? The Myth of the ‘Golden Age’