The Summer Field

82 Journalism reportable gossip would arise, that the cricketers wanted to keep private — in case they lost face, or suddenly became ex-cricketers. Journalists were not, in fact, free agents. The very intimacy that they wanted with cricketers, and above all with the captain, so as to glean the best news, forced journalists to compromise. They could make headlines for a while if they printed every piece of gossip; only, the players would fall out with them. Allen called it ‘a searching test of friendship’; and while a journalist and a player could become friends, it was more like a test of trust . Journalists agreed to keep some newsworthy things quiet, in return for an agreed diet of stories. The journalists had to agree as a group, else the one that did report something intimate would show up the rest. This usually unadmitted pact between cricketers and the journalists that followed them became clearest when other journalists butted in on cricket for an extraordinary piece of news, such as at Taunton in August 1925 when Hobbs matched W.G.Grace’s record number of first-class centuries. In the Somerset yearbook for 1962/63 the journalist Morley Richards recalled how a ‘horde of pressmen’ came from London, interested only in ‘the Master’. Once Hobbs made the century (with Jardine batting at the other end) the visiting journalists, ‘in their anxiety to get away,’ left Richards to ’phone the London papers with the stories. In the second innings, when Hobbs beat the record, Richards and one other local reporter ‘had the journalistic field to ourselves’ and sent the news to the national papers, ‘at suitable fees’. As Richards showed, the smart journalist looked after himself, besides his newspaper and his contacts. It suited Richards and other specialist cricket reporters to stress the difference between themselves and the sort of reporter who dashed from aeroplane and car crashes to murders, and never stayed anywhere long enough to have to build trust. Cardus called them ‘stunt journalists’. This was more snobbery, as newspapers needed news reporters with the story- gathering skills to fill front pages. Harris acted as a news reporter when he made the Woodfull-Warner row public; to Cardus, that was a ‘stunt’. To Cardus, only the play was the proper business of a cricket writer. Was that because gathering off the field news, at speed, was beyond his abilities?! Whatever, Cardus’ view did have powerful backers. At Staffordshire’s annual meeting in May 1938, the club president, the Earl of Dartmouth, made a stand against ‘sensationalism’ in cricket, the play and reporting. That a newspaper gave a headline to a boy bowling Bradman in the nets was, according to Dartmouth, ‘the limit of sensational futility’. Newspapers needed readers to keep buying papers; which was not the same as saying the papers had to print news agreeable to earls, or anybody. Dartmouth, after all, presumably had to read something to deplore it. The Derbyshire columnist Plaindealer in August 1929 pointed out that the public was in the end to blame for whatever was in the papers, after something in Larwood’s name in the papers offended Yorkshire. Plaindealer did not blame the professional, ‘a hard-working decent fellow who is not over- paid’. In return for money the pro’ gave a few ideas to a journalist, maybe ignorant of the game; and the public swallowed these ‘faked articles’.