The Summer Field

91 by Woodfull, who denied it). Few were frank enough to point out the main reason for playing; and why bodyline would never have led to a break in tours: they made too much money. * As early as 1898, counties askedMCC to regulate the Testmatch gatemoney. Half went to the visitors, and after expenses (such as paying the pros’, who earned £20 each per Test, several thousand pounds in 21 st century money) a tenth went to the minor counties and Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Of the other 40 per cent, half was divided between the Test- hosting counties, and the other half to the other first-class counties. In the first of a significant pair of articles in the Bournemouth Southern Daily Echo in late 1951, an anonymous ‘former amateur first-class cricketer’ claimed that between the World Wars ‘very few counties would have survived except from profits of overseas tours’. By overseas, he meant Australia. As early as August 1920, during Derbyshire’s wretched season on and off the field, the Derby Daily Telegraph did not despair, claiming to see promising young players, and more practically that ‘the finances should be aided materially by a share in the profits of next year’s tour of the Australians in England’. Likewise in July 1972 the Nottingham Evening Post hailed the tour as an ‘opportunity to help swell the ailing finances of the first-class counties’. The tourists did more than draw crowds. Counties saw membership rise for the years the Australians visited and, in the words of Hampshire club committee chairman W.J.Arnold in the county’s 1955 handbook, ‘an appreciable drop’ afterwards. To take only a couple of examples, from a southern shire first. Gloucestershire too had a ‘disastrous’ and unprofitable 1920 season, according to its 1921 yearbook, whereas 1921 was a ‘financial success’. Australia’s tour games at Cheltenham (£1766) and Bristol (£1666) each brought in far more money than Gloucestershire’s best-attended county game (with neighbours Somerset at Bristol, £914). Losses followed in 1922 and 1923 and, the club stopped publishing a yearbook, for four years, presumably Australia Jack Hobbs in butter in the Australian pavilion at the British Empire exhibition, Wembley.