Cricket 1894

28 CKICKET j a w e e k l y k e u o r d op t h e g a m e . FEB. 22, 1894 CRICKET THEN AND NOW. A F if t y Y e a rs ’ R etro spect . B i t h e R e v . W . K. E. B e d f o r d . i i . If Lords and the Oval were primitive in their arrangements for the maintenance of the ground, the commisariat, and in the accom­ modation for members and the public gener­ ally ; what can I say about the country grounds of the early forties. I remember an old gentleman who had a quiet vein of criticism at which it was almost impossible to take offence, who once went to stay at a beautifully situated bat imperfectly kept up country place. Wa'king with his friend, the owner, round the ground, he stopped and observed, “ Ah, I hava seldom seen a place for which nature has done so much and art so little !” The splendid commons which in those days presented the softest and most elastic turf, nibbled by flocks of sheep so closely as to be a beautiful velvet c irpet for the ball, have either yielded to the law of enclosure, or are so over-run by that class of the com ­ munity whose rights seem to be everybody else’ s wrongs that they are no longer avail­ able for the noble game, and I am afraid that the love of the picturesque which endeared them to so many of their frequenters would have little weight in these gatemoney days. And perhaps it may he acknowledged that the mathematical exactitude of the crease, even in the humblest cricket club’s ground of the present day, was a matter upon which some of the more important places of rendezvous for cricketers themselves would have been pronounced wanting had they remained in the state in which I can remember them, to the season of 1894. There were degrees of antediluvian rudeness of course. I do recollect one wicket where a bowler, more truthful than polite, said to his host, who asked him which end ha would bowl from, “ I think I had better take the one farthest away from the house, for if I stave one of those long fellow's ribs in, which I’m very likely to do, he won’t have so far to go ;’’ but in almost every case the out-fielding was not made easier by bushes, nettles, open drains or ridge and furrow ; a playful dog would occasionally annex a ball hit to long le g ; an old dame coming from market who pulled up from that instinct for sport which even the old dames cannot altogether get rid of, would field a hard hit with the ribs of her Dobbin or in a basket of grocery, to her scant contentment and the momentary demoralisa­ tion of the field ; such unscientific accidents were matters of every day occurrence in the days when cricket in the country was a pastime much more than a study, played in the spirit of the old lines :— “ Come on, lads ! come on—come on, one and all. Now shoulder the bat, and spin up the ball. Take the field like young Trojans; your prowess essay, While the batsman orie3 ‘ R ead y!’ the bowler says ‘ Play ! ’ Then ran like wild deer pursued by the hounds, And ground your bat proudly just over the bounds.” If rusticity pervaded the cricket fields, it equally characterised the cricket players: I have seen a fine o'd apple faced veteran go in to bat, having removed his broad skirted blue coat with brass buttons, in a red waistcoat, nankeen shorts and gaiters, to whom pads and gloves were effeminate novelties; who notwithstanding would stop a shooter or cut a dangerous ball just off his bails as deftly as any of our modern cracks. This precise type of cricketer is gone for ever, gone with the extinction of the class of yeomen to which he belonged, who defended their wickets or circumvented their opponents as gallantly and skilfully as in days past they had twanged the pliant yew from which they derived their n ane on the fields of Agincourt or Towton. Here is a notice of one of them,the bsarer of a famous name, from the obituary of 1820— “ Died at West Stoke, aged 62, Mr. Mark Cobden, gamekeeper to the Duke of Richmond, in which family ha had spent the whole of his life. He was at one lime esteem­ ed according to the cricketers’ phrase the longest arm in England. In 1792 he was matched to throw a five and a quarter ball in Goodw ool Park for a considerable wager with the Earl of Winchelsea, whom he beat by five yards, pitching his ball the first thro v 119 yards. His Lorlship had never b fora been beaten.” The tradition which united the vocations of gamekeeper and cricketer still lingered on for some decades after Mark Cobden’ s day. The Notts county gentleman had a bowler named Mills on their ground in 1849,who was keeper to Sir Henry Bromley, and if I mistake not, H. H. Stephenson was huntsman to the Duo d’Aumala’ s bsagles : another great c ’ icketer of those days I first saw attired in a stained “ pink” and old hunting cap, with bare feet, running with the Rufford bounds. He was then addressed as Jim Crow, not having blossomed into h :s proper name of Jackson, or attained the position of bowling for the A.E.E. I do not think it would have been easy to find a better set of men than the Nottingham­ shire players of that period, manlv, steady, civil fellows without bumptiousness or servility, and as honest as the day. Prank Tinley of Southwell, for instance, a tallow cha idler by trade, but a gentleman by instinct, who went on tour with Free Foresters as umpire often and often, whose aquaintance I prized for many years, my only regret being that I never knew that be was the inmate of a Birmingham Hospital, where he had gone for the benefit of skilled surgery, until I read of his decease. Of course there were sheep of other colours, down I fear to real black, among the cricket crowd. Speckled, like Jacob’s flock, at any rate. One of the most diverting of the '• scallywags ” was Charley Brown, a born Bohemian, with a ready tongue and a great capacity for liquor. Dean Hole has told, in verse as well as in his reminis­ cences, of his great exploit. “ The trembling pack, Whom Charley Brown, At CalaisTowr. Bowled out behind his bsck.” But the late Major Gem, with whom we lost a harvest of humorous cricketana, had a story, si non vero, e ben trovatn , how a Midland Club, in sad straits for a bowler, equipped Mr. B. in a black coat, and took him out with them as the Revd. Mr. Brown, with strict injunctions not to open his mouth except for the purpose of eating and drinking. Possibly the latter may have been the cause of his opening his mouth too often— at any rate after luncheon he was drawn into an argument in which he clinched his assertions with such very anti- parsonic language, that both the culprit him ­ self and the equally guilty accessories before the fact were found guilty, and put to con- d'gn shame. This kind of substitution is not a very new offence. Mr. Jesse gives a humorous descrip­ tion of Fennex being made up as a country­ man to be taken in as a substitute in an eleven which purposely came one man short, in the very early decades of the century, but I hops the consensus of cricket opinion con­ demns it as part of the obnoxious desire to degrade the noble game, as the author of “ Our Village” puts it, to an “ affair of bettings and hedgings, and mavbe of cheatings.” For this as well as for other reasons I have always entertained a strong distaste to a practice, too common among gentlemen who play cricket, of assuming a fancy name, by which on the old sill v principle of the ostrich they suppose their identity to be concealed. W e may question whether they are m >re successful than the bird to whose supposed habit I have alluded, for if always known by the sam«, pseudonym, their real identity is soon merged in the fictitious, and the world knows Mr. Felix, as the schoolmaster at Blackhe<ith, just as it knew Paracelsus the analyst and Melancthon the preacher: and the actual fact that the one was legitimately called Wanostrochf, and the others Bombast and Schuarzerde is a detail of no moment whateve-. But though many of the best cricketers, my own friends and men of the highest honour, have chosen to adopt this practice, I confass I disl ke it. I always think of Southey’s picture of the ghost of Junius. “ Masked had he been in his life—and now a visor of iron Riveted round his features obsc ired.” If ashamed to pity under your own name, is it not a proof tha*. yoa ought not to play at all? I own also that the habit of taking a fancy name is to me objectionable because of its liability to misuse by stupid and vulgar would-be wits. I re nember on a of these who, in allusion I suppose to his duties else­ where, always entered his name as R. U. Truant! There is, too. a temptation not un- frequently occurring to take the name of some real andunlikfly personage, in ihe same spirit which makes little boys sign patitions in the streets as Snooks or Mr. Gladstone. I can call to mind the outlines of one s’lch case which ended better for the waggish masquerader than he deserved. He went to play in a college ma‘ ch when he was “ con­ fined to gates ” for some delinquency, and being a man of no very rigid moral fibre, he calmly appropriated the name of a wealthy gentleman commoner, the very last man likely to distinguish himself on such an occasion. The authorities never detected his evasion, hut a short time afterwards he met the real Simon Pure, who accosted him with the words— “ I owe you a fiver.” The cricketer was astonished, but (being habitually im ­ pecunious) not unpleasantly so, still he could not help hazarding the query, “ What for ?” “ You played in my name in a match last week,” replied Croesus ju' io", “ and g ota lot of runs. My father’s as pleased as possible, an ! has sent me a swinging cheque: here's your fiver, but don't do it again.” If ever a man had an excuse for taking a cricket name, it was one whom I heard of at one of the Universities s 'me years ago, wbose patronymic was Balls, about as grotesquely cacophanoos a monosyllable as t* e English language could produce. He was t>'ied in the Freshmen’s match, and the official scorer when he went in asked the Captain what his name was. On being told, he gave a short grunt, and entered it Mr.------ By-and-bye the Captain looked round again, and seeing the blank, with by this time several runs attached to it, repeated rather testily “ I told you that was Mr. B alls; ” still no reply, but on a repetition of the announcement the scorer laid down his pan, and facing his interrogator said, deliberately “ No, sir, I ain’t agoing to