The Summer Field

87 Chapter Ten Australia ‘During the last match of the 1934 series I was walking in some wild northern country, but I was never at any loss for hourly knowledge of the great event. As I passed remote cottages I was met, almost without asking, with the news from the Oval that Bradman and Ponsford were still in.’ Ivor Brown, The Heart of England (second edition, 1939) The journalist Ivor Brown’s book was one of many travelling surveys of 1930s England; as if men, having fought for their country once and fearing they would have to again, felt uneasily that they ought to know it better. Few of the surveyors ignored cricket. As Brown said, Test matches against Australia were ‘at the heart of England’. And as the Wolverhampton Express and Star newspaper put it in April 1938: ‘Whenever the Australians are here, interest in the game undergoes a transformation.’ We might ask why England, a proud nation, that had reason to feel smugly supreme, took such notice of cricketers from a small (in numbers) colony. As early as 1895 The Strand Magazine hailed the 47-year-old W.G.Grace as ‘the man who is considered the most dangerous of any side, not alone of our English teams, but by visitors from the Antipodes’. When The Strand asked him to name the best ground in England, WG unprompted went on to describe Australian wickets as better, ‘as a rule, than ours’. The country plainly made an impression on Grace when he lost two Tests to one as captain there in 1891/2, even before the ‘Colonial’ game became the equal of England’s (‘Why, here, at home, we ought to beat Australia every time’). After 1914/18, England seldom beat Australia easily, or for long. Australia demanded interest because it called into question England’s status as special. Even some senior figures seemed to believe, like Brian Sellers speaking at Barnoldswick in January 1933, that because ‘we taught them the game’, whatever England did was right and best. Sir Lawrence Pack, presiding over the dinner during Torquay Week in August 1864, said he could, but would not, go into why Englishmen were so superior to all others in athletic games. That’s a shame for the historian, yet suggests the English took their superiority for granted. Hence the shock to national pride, when England lost to Australia in London in 1882, famously symbolised as ‘the Ashes’. Was it rational to treat the whole English game as dead and cremated? As so often, in a crisis men went into print with what they usually only thought, and thought through what they usually only assumed. At the annual meeting of St Budeaux Unionist and Conservative Association, a political event, in Devon in January 1933, Major J.C.Tozer said: ‘Nothing rejoiced my heart more than when I read that reply,’ namely,