The Summer Field

7 and Don Bradman bat together for the Press. An anonymous reporter hailed the ‘pure cricket, which is restful and delightful cricket’. Perhaps he merely sought to contrast this ‘picnic cricket’ with still-raw bodyline. He and his Australian readers plainly could believe in cricket as something English, and rural: ‘people sheltered from the sun under shady jacarandas and oaks’, and lunched on the grass; an Australian Navy band played ‘old English airs that brought to mind the maypole’. Why did they, and we, watch cricket — for pleasure, or to see someone win? What do we mean by ‘pure’ or good cricket? If we want above all to enjoy ‘great’ players such as Hobbs and Bradman (‘the crowd applauded every stroke they made’), what do we know or care of the hard work that put them there? Or do we want only to boast the next day (and the rest of our lives) that we saw them? What of the Press whom we rely on for so much that we cannot see with our own eyes? Are women, whose ‘gay dresses’ at Rushcutter Bay ‘relieved the dull brown of the tiny stand’, only there to add colour for the men? And what binds England and Australia? First, as so many keep harking back to the English village, let us ask if it was ever so wonderful. * Mr Pips, a Nottingham gentleman, for a change went to lodge in the village of Leenwood cum Poplington. The parish clerk, who was also ‘Postmaster, Sexton, Barber, Toothdrawer, Cow Doctor and most likely others beside’, invited him to play in the singles versus married match: and as I like on all occasions of social joy to attire myself in a becoming manner … I did bestow a little more than minor care to my Toilette, so I did put on my Nankeen Pantaloons together with a bright Blue Coat with Gilt Buttons and Swallow Tails also a Canary Coloured Waistcoat which had once done Suit and Service at a wedding party. My throat being encased with a Black Satin neckerchief whilst the upper portion of my Person was adorned with a Straw Hat rather capacious in the brim and bound with a Ribbon of a bright scarlet colour. As such a laughable outfit and his full name – Semuel Pips, a play on the real diarist Samuel Pepys – suggest, this was a satire, one of several in the weekly Nottingham Free Press newspaper in 1860. Precisely because it did not have to keep to facts, this story – funnier than the more famous match in Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers – does tell us about the early Victorian game, on and off the field. Mr Pips found ‘a great concourse of persons’, from ‘several carriages’ belonging to ‘the Great People in the neighbourhood’ to labourers and their children ‘looking healthy and contented’. The Bachelors invited Pips to join them, ‘which after a little Natural coyness I consented to’. Mr Pips then described the game ‘only so far as it concerned myself’, a neat dig at every self-centred cricketer: …. I did take Bat and did so with a full determination to do something Great for I thought it was very easy work: they did call Play, I did raise my bat, the ball did strike the ground and then did bound on to my Chimneys and Fields