The Summer Field

74 in wartime. The outbreak of European war in August 1914 made for an awkward end to the season as cricket players and followers, like the rest of the country, had to adjust from peace to war and ask themselves why; how essential were the things they did here? Answers were mixed. Before The World of Cricket magazine stopped publication, the editor, former England captain Archie MacLaren, asked how they could go on playing, watching or writing about the game while ‘they [‘our gallant allies’] are in the death grapple’. Yet Saturday afternoon cricket need not stop, he added, because ‘why should not the man who works during the week get his half day’s cricket at the end?’ As MacLaren rightly summed up, ‘public sentiment will settle the matter’, just as the public decided always whether any leisure pastime flourished or not. * Cardus’ idea of a golden age, though without evidence, flourished after the 1914/18 war left so many dead, and the living in mourning for lost limbs, friends, and the four lost summers. The Sussex gentleman cricketer Herbert Curteis, born in 1849, whose family let Windmill Hill club near Hailsham play on their lawn, wrote in old age: ‘Will it ever be again what it was? I do not think it will ever be quite the same, at least not for a couple of generations.’ As after the 1939/45 war, cricket, and other sports and the arts, did boom as veterans made up for lost time and enjoyed life, as war-dodgers such as Cardus had been able to all along. The Beverley Town club, that had 250 members for the 1919 season, had 350 the next season and more than 400 by 1923. While some were there for other sport, such as bowls and tennis, the cricketers were playing a record number of matches. Amateurs could still fill their summers as before 1914 with country house games and ‘weeks’. As late as July 1937 Major Stanyforth in The Field was telling the university student to make the most of his freedom: He will be seen on county grounds and village greens, he will sit in baronial mansions and indifferent pubs, he will bowl out county batsmen, get hit out of the ground by the gardener, score 100 against a professional and get bowled for a duck by a schoolboy. The easy amateur game had revived. Yet even if you went through 1914/18 and could forget it, or if you came after, you could at best only pretend the war never happened. H.S.Altham (1888-1965) as a Repton School, Oxford University and Surrey capped player had his cricket and life interrupted by war as much as anyone. In the Hampshire 1951 handbook he made the profound point that thanks to the world wars men no longer saw progress as inevitable: ‘Today we are not quite so sure even about our games.’ Just as civilised mankind went wrong in 1914, so Cardus could claim plausibly that the cricketers of the 1920s and 1930s had gone wrong. His ‘golden age’ was partly a stick to beat the young with, partly to flatter the old. Many agreed. The Ashbourne commentator Plaindealer in August 1933 regretted the retirements of Percy Holmes of Yorkshire and Garnet Lee of Derbyshire, who each began county cricket before 1914. By comparison ‘the modern type of batsman is about as good to watch The Myth of the ‘Golden Age’