The Summer Field

93 Australia after he returned from the 1936/37 tour. Concrete played fast and true and let a lad learn to bat properly and safely on public parks. Or, staying with 1936/37, was it the Australian ‘mania for games’, and their ‘deep and theoretical study’, to quote Bruce Harris? If, as he said, so many young Australians ate, drank and slept cricket, didn’t that contradict Cardus and those who pointed to grade cricket’s quality over quantity? Perhaps the Australian climate, meteorological and social, was better than England’s for bringing on, and keeping fit, fast bowlers, besides sound, stroke- playing batsmen. In Country Life in April 1979 Colin Cowdrey praised the fast bowler Rodney Hogg after his sudden outstanding winter against England: ‘It would be good to believe we have a Hogg perched in English club cricket but the English system unlike that of Australia does not seem to make this possible.’ It did look as if the ‘system’, everything, was at fault for persistent English shortcomings, which implied that reform was impossible short of towing England to Australia. As early as July 1921, the Dean of Durham, Bishop James Welldon, told the Durham County Advertiser : ‘…. it is difficult to help seeing that the Australians do enjoy a superiority.’ He was speaking after the tourists thrashed Durham in two days at Sunderland (though the organisers took £1000 at the gate from 12,000 spectators each day, enormous totals for a minor county). Welldon could speak with some authority as he had visited Australia in 1902-3 when Pelham Warner was captain. Welldon too scorned English pros’. More Australian players got a chance to prove themselves; their fields were placed ‘more scientifically’; fielders picked up and threw quicker and cleaner. Even those watching were of a higher calibre: ‘I have observed on the cricket fields at Melbourne Punch in August 1884 points to how cricket binds the colonies (from left, Cape, New Zealand and Australia) to ‘John Bull’, their captain, who tells them: ‘Ah my boys, with such a team, we’ll hold our own against the world!’.