The Summer Field

76 The Myth of the ‘Golden Age’ War people believed in individuality. This is the inhibited age.’ Had Cardus not noticed how some worshipped Bradman and Hammond? (Or Hitler?!) Cardus suited the reactionary Field , which in a June 1937 editorial deplored ever larger and thicker pads which allowed ‘the batsman to take even fast bowling with impunity’. Why hadn’t the batsmen that Larwood hit thought of that?! Likewise Cardus that month complained: ‘In the hands of many fine players a cricket bat is just an implement which is picked up to do a job of work, the same as a trowel is picked up by a bricklayer.’ Such vague sentiment led Cardus into odd judgements, in this case praising D.J.Knight of Surrey – an amateur who played twice without success for England in 1921 – over Hammond, who allegedly did not show an ‘intimate touch’. In old age – in the first, 1972 Cricket World magazine – Cardus named Hammond in his favourite eleven and called him ‘our greatest “classical” batman’. Anyone is allowed to change his mind. Cardus, like any journalist that wants to stay in work, was changing his tune as his readership changed. Yet even in the 1930s Cardus was showing himself blind to the possibility (let alone the inevitability) that cricket could ever progress, or even that something new was valid. In June 1936 he argued that the age of C.B.Fry and the Lancashire fast bowler Walter Brearley, roughly from 1895 to 1914, ‘saw the development to mastery of every department [his italics] of cricket’. As with Karl Marx, Cardus proved himself so badly wrong in his predictions, you had to wonder if he got the past wrong, too. Near the end of Australian Summer , his book of the 1936-7 tour of Australia, he suggested that fast bowling was ‘dying out’; in English Cricket , that someone would soon surpass Bradman’s records. While you could hardly blame Cardus and Marx for not guessing the future, why were they so arrogant to try? * While Cardus and others in the closed world of cricket argued about eras, ‘to the non-understanding the whole thing is of much waste of time’, A.P. ‘Tich’ Freeman pointed out in a June 1936 article. To some, any cricket was sheer boredom. As Freeman went on, non-cricketers missed the ‘scientific and tactical sides’ below the surface. Yet even if Cardus doubted (as he said in May 1936) that techniques would advance, other influences on the game would force change. Others could see what Cardus could not. Also in May 1936 in The Field , Aidan Crawley estimated that only 300 saw the Indian tourists bat at Lord’s. He wondered if ‘the players cut off from the rest of the world were playing to an unseen audience like artists in a broadcasting studio. To the thousands who read about first-class cricket without ever seeing it, television must surely have tremendous possibilities.’ Crawley’s far-sightedness was also personally intriguing, as he went on to a career in commercial television. TV, and the money from advertising, changed every sport, as it altered all it screened; and everyone watching. Yet in truth most people had always learned from journalists — first in newspapers, then on radio and TV - about most of the matches they could not attend. Likewise readers picked up from newspapers all they needed to know about Parliament and parish meetings. In an ever more specialised society, most people could not look after their family’s teeth, nor teach their children full time; so by fees or taxes they paid