The Summer Field

96 Chapter Eleven Schooling ‘It was like the longest school trip you would ever go on.’ Ricky Ponting in The Australian , July 7, 2009, recalling his first tour of England in 1997 If cricket education was never complete, as Len Hopwood once wrote, it started for many in schools. In December 1910 the Nottingham teacher Will Richards’ ‘new boss’, the headmaster Mr Turner, told boys: ‘He had come from a school fond of sports and he hoped we should continue to have our cricket and football, as the games were very helpful in brightening school life.’ That gave the game away; sports made the working day lighter for staff and pupils. On Monday, September 20, 1909, Will admitted: ‘Scripture, little work was done. The boys simply repeated some psalms while Billy [another young teacher?] and I were talking about cricket.’ Sport was an excuse to leave the classroom. Another teacher-diarist with a grander background – Eton and Oxford – was Arthur Lloyd-Baker, at the fee-paying Cheltenham College, who wrote on Thursday, June 25, 1914: I took Ford and Lysaght to Gloucester to see the county play. Before lunch we had 80 for one but after that we did poorly, were all out for 220 [in fact, 155]. Jessop made 0, Sewell and Nason played well, especially the former. We saw Lancashire bat for a bit. The boys enjoyed themselves, behaved very well and were agreeable companions. The 31-year-old teacher was treating himself as much as the boys, towards the end of the school year when everyone had little to do except think of holidays and play games. As early as the 1850s the new and booming public schools paid the best cricketers around to coach boys, evidently well. In 1858, when the Burton- on-Trent club lost by an innings at Rugby School, the Burton press noted the boys ‘had been well drilled by Diver of the All-England Eleven’. John Brown, the Victorian stalwart of Walsall club, as a young man around this time was second coach under John Lillywhite, Rugby’s first recorded professional in 1850. As an example of how English cricket is so often a small world, Brown had played against the All-England Eleven when captain William Clarke took it to Rugby School. Brown also coached for one season at the Oxford colleges of Oriel and Pembroke; then a former Rugby pupil, Swinton Isaacs, invited him to Worcestershire, where Isaacs was captain and Brown the first professional. In those pioneering days of the game, how to find staff was the old story; it was not only what you knew, but who you knew.