Lives in Cricket No 38 - Lionel Robinson

111 Appendix two What’s in a name? It is irritating that teams raised by Robinson from his rural base did not always appear bearing his name; many of his elevens are referred to in the Norfolk press as ‘Old Buckenham’ or ‘Old Buckenham Hall’. Nearly all of the teams whose matches were awarded first-class status went by the name of ‘L Robinson’s XI’ but the nomenclature of other elevens with which Robinson was involved seems at times to be devoid of rhyme and reason. The village club that existed prior to the arrival of Robinson and turned out for routine Saturday games against local opposition was referred to in the press as ‘Old Buckenham’ and the first variation appears in the final fixture of 1909, when the side who played in the only two- day match of that year was labelled by the papers as ‘L Robinson’s XI’. In the following year, the majority of the games were village affairs and continued to be played under the title of ‘Old Buckenham’ whilst the label of ‘L Robinson’s XI’ tended to be reserved for the two-day matches and the more important one-day matches. 73 If this would tend to suggest a simple picture in which the label of ‘Old Buckenham’ was for less important games, with the sponsor’s name reserved for the prestigious matches then the nomenclature seen in 1911 properly queers the pitch. Whilst seven games were played as ‘Old Buckenham’ and five as ‘L Robinson’s XI’, six were played under the new label of ‘Old Buckenham Hall’. Inspection of the lists of players involved reveals that plain ‘Old Buckenham’ no longer automatically denoted a team made up largely of cricketers with a strong connection to the old village side – conversely humble locals often appeared for the theoretically senior ‘L Robinson’s XI’. The matches played by elevens with the novel title were seemingly inseparable in status from those played by ‘L Robinson’s XI’; for instance, the team representing ‘Hall’ (to which the new name was frequently abbreviated) against A Norfolk XI that year featured no less than eight players with first-class experience and was as powerful a side as any that Robinson had so far fielded. Mercifully, some sort of logic appears to have been employed in 1912, in that the most important matches were contested by ‘L Robinson’s XI’ and the minor Saturday friendlies were played by ‘Hall’. (The village side of ‘Old Buckenham’, as such, had vanished by this point.). Unfortunately, this scheme fails to allow for the significant number of two-day fixtures which fall between two stools in that they are undoubtedly important but are certainly not of first-class status; as one might have feared there has been 73 One highly notable departure has been referred to in chapter two when the Yarmouth Conservative Club turned up to play Old Buckenham and found themselves playing against a team containing no fewer than six players with first-class experience. Unsurprisingly, they subsided by a little matter of 300 runs. Lionel, who was playing, would have loved every minute.