Lives in Cricket No 24 - Edgar Willsher

47 The legislative impasse may have lasted even longer if the MCC’s new secretary, R.A.Fitzgerald, had not been appointed. A man of reforming zeal, the Cambridge-educated Fitzgerald took over in 1863with the best of intentions, but, just like the art establishment, the cricketing hierarchy proved to be a tough nut to crack. Around the time of Fitzgerald’s accession to the secretary’s post, Edouard Manet’s provocative Déjeuner sur l’herbe was being exhibited at the Salon des Refusés in Paris, and it was many years before its undoubted merits were accepted, paving the way for a whole series of modern artistic movements. In the same way, Fitzgerald found continued resistance to issues like the improvement of the Lord’s playing surface, but in the matter of Law 10 at least, he could not be refused. At a meeting of 29 April 1864, Charles Marsham, a near contemporary of Fitzgerald’s, brought before the MCC committee an amendment that said simply that ‘the ball must bowled; if thrown or jerked the umpire shall call ‘no ball.’ Even at this stage, Robert Broughton, a Cambridge Blue in the 1830s, proposed yet another subtle variant of the existing Law, but enough was enough. On 10 June, part way through the season, and nearly two years after Willsher’s no-balling, Marsham’s amendment was passed 27 to 20, a majority of seven, after a debate in which about ten members spoke. Cricket’s own modern age had begun, and perhaps the MCC recovered some of its authority within the game. 13 There was a sense that at last the game had been allowed to evolve to its natural limits, and whether this was a good thing or not, there was a general feeling of relief that all the wrangling and uncertainty was over. Round-arm had been an unnatural state of affairs, as admitted by arch-traditionalist James Pycroft, one of the most eminent of Victorian cricket historians. Writing in Cricketana in 1865, he said: Keep your hand low and near your side as in the old style and your muscles play true and easily. Raise your hand above your head as Willsher does and as old Lilly used to do when he was deadly accurate and the muscles here also have some degree of satisfaction: but try to use the arm between these two points of elevation and you feel your disadvantage at once. Although Pycroft still preferred the gentle rhythms of under-arm, he could at least see the advantages of over-arm, but one man at least was not prepared to budge. In the same year as Cricketana , 13 A subsequent MCC secretary, R.S.Rait Kerr, wrote in 1950 that the years ‘1840 to 1864 represent the very worst period of MCC control of the game’. Overarm at Last